Hi, I am Sigi.

April 25, 1975 I was born in Oss, a medium size town in the south of the Netherlands.

My father likes epics, legends and sagas very much, so when my parents had to give me a name, they named me Sigurd. Sigurd is the hero of the Nibelungenlied.

In the United States you have a first and a second name, in Holland you can have more names. My other names are Indra , Gilgamesh and Iwar . They all killed a mythological animal.

As you may have noticed, the initials of my names together make the word 'Sigi', which is my nickname.

If you want to know about my professional skills, please see my resume.

Like most people I went to kindergarten, elementary school and high school. In my final year of high school, I had to decide what college I wanted to attend after my graduation and which degree I wanted to pursue. I decided that business economics would be my major because in the Netherlands it is easy to find a job in this field and I thought that I might be able to combine software development and business economics after completing the study. I have always had a passion for computers, therefore I wanted to become a software developer, but at that time it was difficult to find a job in software engineering in the Netherlands.

I have worked with computers since I was 10 years old. The first computer I had was an Atari 800 XL and when I was 12 years old I started writing programs in Basic and Assembly. Two years later I had the opportunity to take a class in programming Turbo Pascal (later called Borland Pascal). Six months later my uncle gave me his personal computer with an 8086 processor with the knowledge that I was studying Turbo Pascal. This gave me the opportunity to practice using this language. One year later the computer malfunctioned so I bought a personal computer with an 80386 processor. Since that time I have upgraded the computer myself every time I could afford to do so, until it had a Pentium 90 processor and 32 Mb of RAM. During this time I have learned to use many different kinds of software and I have developed the ability to learn new software and languages very quickly.

In February, I bought a modem and started using the Internet. When a friend introduced me to Italia Online Web Chat, I liked it very much. The next months I made a lot of new friends from all over the world and we exchanged a many e-mails.

In the beginning of the year a friend (Ronald) and I decided to make a bike trip -- a regular bike without a motor ;-) -- in the summer. We planned a route that would traverse Germany and Switzerland on the way to Milan in Italy. We would meet one of Ronald's friends there. After a few days in Milan we would bike back to the Netherlands.

In the spring I spent a lot of time training for the bike trip. I made numerous bike trips of more than 40 miles. After three big bike trips in one week in June my knee started hurting. It ended up hurting so badly that I could not bike or walk stairs anymore. Because of this I had to cancel my bike trip, because I did not want this to happen when I was in the middle of the Alps (it's a long walk home from there...).

Because I had to cancel the bike trip and I really wanted to have a great vacation (this was my first vacation in nine years -- the other summers I always worked full-time at a grocery store), I decided I wanted to spend my vacation in the United States. I asked four of my e-mail friends that I met at Italia Online if I could stay with them for a few weeks in July or August. One told me she would not be home in those months because she went on a holiday herself, and another girl told me she did not have room for me to sleep. The other two girls told me they thought it was great if I would visit them. I stayed four weeks with Amy in Midlothian in Virginia (near Richmond, VA), and I stayed three weeks with Beth in DeBary, Florida (near Orlando, FL).

During that vacation I learned a lot about the American way of living. In the Netherlands you only see the things that happen in movies and television series. As a result a lot of people have the impression that Americans eat only junk food and never cook their own food. Dutch people also have the impression that Americans are either very rich or very poor. My grandmother thought that at every stoplight people would ambush you with guns and steal your car.

When I stayed with Beth's family, I fell in love with Beth. Lucky for me, she felt the same way. After I went back to the Netherlands to finish my degree, we stayed in love with each other, and our feelings became even stronger. In October we became engaged, and in November we applied for a fiancé-visa for me.

During her Christmas holiday, Beth came to the Netherlands to visit me. In those two weeks I introduced her to my family, and showed her the Netherlands and the Dutch way of living.

In February, I graduated in Business Economics at the four year Business College of 's-Hertogenbosch and started to look for a temporary job in the Netherlands, until I was able to move to the United States. In February I worked for one month at my dad's company building a website for them.

I was still waiting for the visa when I finished the website, so I applied for a job at a temporary work agency. They found me a job delivering products that people bought at a furniture store. Until I received my visa I delivered kitchens, beds and closets.

In March 20, I finally received my visa to enter the United States. I booked the first flight available and March 22 I flew to Orlando.

Beth and I married Saturday, May 3rd at the memorial park in Sanford. After the wedding we had a reception at Don Pablo's in Sanford. For our honeymoon, Beth and I went to the Plantation Inn in Crystal River, on the west coast of Florida. It was a nice hotel and it was located in a beautiful area. Our windows were facing the river. We relaxed a lot, went shopping in the Crystal River Mall, canoeing and swimming. Tuesday we went back home and continued living our normal life.

After looking for a job for three months, I finally found a job. June 23, I started working as a programmer for the Internet Access Group in Altamonte Springs. IAG is an Internet Service Provider that also provides web development, networking services, and technical support. I worked in the creative services department, where they create web sites for IAG and other companies.

In August Elizabeth's company transferred her to a division in Charlotte, NC. On August 10, Elizabeth and I moved to a townhouse in Charlotte. That meant that I had to quit my job, and had to start looking for new job. This time, looking for a job did not take three months, but just 10 days. August 20, I started working for CC Communications, a web design company in Charlotte. My responsibilities were building web sites for CC Communications and their customers.

At the end of September Elizabeth did complete her training and graduated from college. In the beginning of October, she started working for Siemens Business Communications in Baltimore, Maryland. Initially her boss told us he did not care where we found a place to live, so we found an apartment in White Marsh (north of Baltimore). Right before we moved into the apartment, he changed his mind and told Beth he wanted us to find something in Easton (on the eastern shore, across the Chesapeake bay). We moved to Baltimore and lived in a hotel for few weeks while we were looking for an apartment near Easton. While we were searching, he changed his mind again, and wanted us to live between Baltimore and Annapolis. At this time we completely ran out of money, and moved into the first apartment we found that did not require a down payment. This apartment was located in Glen Burnie.

I continued to work remotely for CC Communications until I found a new job. December 29 I started as a junior preascertainment in Java at TYC Associates in Rockville, Maryland.

My mother and I made an agreement that each year we would visit each other. Every other year I would go to the Netherlands, and the other years she would visit us in the Unites States. In March my mother and father came to visit us at our apartment in Glen Burnie.

During the early months of the spring the temperature in the apartment reached above 90 degrees (with the air conditioning turned on). We dreaded summer so in May we moved to an apartment in Columbia, Maryland. It is a planned city, with a lot of sidewalks, bike trails, and parks. In the weekends Beth and I went biking, walking, and sometimes rollerblading.

In July I was promoted to senior programmer and started working on a new Java project for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).

In October Elizabeth quit her job with Siemens Business Communications, and started working for TYC Associates as a technical writer.

In the beginning of May we went to the Netherlands for one week. We stayed with my mother and visited my family and friends. We also went to a theme part called Efteling.

To full fill our urges to the American dream, in May we bought a townhouse in Laurel, MD. It is in a community called Bowling Brook, which has many sidewalks, and is located in the northern part of Laurel, just south of Savage. From our house we can take a short walk to a trail that runs along the Middle Patuxent river to Savage Mill. From there we can traverse another trail that runs along the Little Patuxent to Columbia.

In the early months of 1999 I started to get very tired of all the overtime I had to make at TYC (usual week was 60 hours) while the president of the company kept complaining. In June I left and started working for Sylvan Prometric as a Programmer II. My initial responsibility was to maintain their website which was written in ASP, but soon after I started I was assigned to a new project called SRS (Scheduling and Registration System) because of my experience in Java and Enterprise JavaBeans. Sylvan Prometric is a division of Sylvan Learning Centers and is the global leader in computer-based testing for academic assessment, professional licensure, and certification.

My step-mother and step-father-in-law came for a visit at Christmas. As a surprise we flew my sister-in-law, her husband and her kids over.

In the beginning of May, Beth and I drove to Maine for a one week vacation.

In May my sister-in-law and her kids came over for a visit.

In June we repainted our basement. It was painted in dark red and beige. We painted it dark purple and light purple with a border that shows fairy tale houses.

My mother and aunt Marij came for a two and a half week vacation in July.

At Prometric I spent less and less of my time writing software. I spent most of my time in meetings, managing projects and people. In July I wrote software only 6 hours a week and some weeks I did not write software at all. In September I left Prometric and started as a lead software developer at Unwired Express (a company that was founded in May 2000). Unwired Express was planning on creating a mobile application server.

Like at all companies before I started to spend more and more time managing people and projects, and less time writing software. But unlike other companies, Unwired Express hired a manager to take those tasks from me so that I could spend more time on what I like to do -- writing software.

Unwired Express decided in March to change their focus and instead of writing a mobile application server, we are now writing a platform that makes it easier to write context-enabled applications. A context-enabled application is an application that understands about you. It understands that if your phone says that your are driving on an interstate and your calendar says that it is 15 minutes before a meeting, that most likely you are on the way to the meeting. It may even be able to determine that you will not be able to make it to the meeting in time because of a traffic jam 2 miles in front of you. It then alerts you and allows you to send an e-mail to all attendees of the meeting.

In the beginning of July we went on vacation to Europe for two weeks. The first week we went to the Netherlands and visited family. The second week we went to Llorett Del Mar in Spain (northeast of Barcelona).

My sister-in-law, her husband and kids stayed with us for the last week of July.

In August Pawpaw (the grandfather of Debbie (Beth's stepmother)) died. Beth and I took a few days off from work and drove to Alabama for his funeral (we took Moira with us). Two days after the funeral we drove Sam (Beth's sister) back to Florida and stayed with her for a few days. One evening we went bowling with Sam, David (Sam's husband), Sharon (Beth's mother) and Charlie (Beth's stepfather).

One morning in September our neighbor found a box of kittens that someone put next to a highway. We adopted two kittens, a red with stripes kitten and a gray with stripes kitten. We named the red one Dagda (Irish god of the sun) and the gray one Nuada (Irish god of the sea). Initially the kittens were very scared and did not want to have anything to do with humans. But gradually they became used to us. The vet told us they were approximately 4 months old.

During a stormy evening a tornado touched down in our neighborhood. It took down our tree, and the trees of two neighbors. Besides the tree, nothing was damaged.

We spent Christmas in Florida. The first days of our vacation (including Christmas day) we stayed at Sharon and Charlie's house. Sam, David, their kids, Eric (Beth's step-brother) and Hiromi (Eric's wife) spent their christmas as Sharon and Charlie's house too. After Christmas, we drove to Sam's house, and spent the rest of the vacation there.

In March we went on a camping trip to Alabama. We stayed at a camping on Mt. Cheaha. One night it was pretty cold (the temperature dropped to near 30 degrees), but temperature-wise the other days were fine. For this trip we borrowed Sam's old tent. One thing she forgot to mention to us, was that the tent was not water tight. We found that out the hard way when we had rain for a day and a half. After the rain we had to hang everything on cloth-lines, because everything was soaked. We went hiking a few days, visited John (Beth's fater) and Debbie a few times, went shopping with Debbie, and visited Craig (Beth's step-brother) and Cammy (Craig's wife).

Since our tree was taken down by the tornado, we decided it was time to improve our garden. We spent a week and a half building a raised flower beds in our front yard (all day during the weekends, and in the evening on weekdays). It was hard work, but I think the results are worth it.

For the class that Beth's taking this summer, she had to visit Gettysburg. We decided to make it a camping trip over Memorial weekend (Memorial day is the last Monday of May). We drove to Gettysburg on Friday morning, and stayed there until Monday. During this trip we visited the battlegrounds, the cemetery, downtown Gettysburg and hiked in a state park near Gettysburg.

For some reason, Beth's teacher did not tell her everything before we went on our trip in May, so we had to go back to Gettysburg for a few specific memorials and statues. We did this on a Sunday in June.

On September 13 I was layed off (together with the rest of the employees) by Unwired Express because it went bankrupt. That meant that I had to start looking for a job again.

On September 14 Beth and I volunteered for Bike DC. Bike DC is an annual bike ride in downtown DC. Bikers can choose between a 14 mile and a 34 mile bike ride. BikeDC is organized by the Washington Area Bicylist Association. I was a road marshall and directed bikers at a location where they had to turn. Beth registered children for the Kids Rodeo where kids have to show certain bike skills (like biking straight) and get a certificate when done.

On October 7 I started working as a senior software engineer at I4 Commerce in Timonium, MD. I will be working on an application called Bill Me Later that allows people to purchase items on the Internet without needing a credit card.