I'm just me, myself and I...

I'm born in Torhout, West-Vlaanderen, Belgium on February 23rd, 1962 as the 7th child of a 9-children big family.  I grew up in Wijnendale, a small rural village near Torhout (now it is completely part of Torhout).  

I lived there for 23 years.  During my youth, it was a cosy and quiet place to live where farming was still widely present.  Nowadays it has entered the "modern times" and totally lost its traditional and pittoresk feeling.  A pity...

After I married, I lived for about 20 years in Torhout.  Since the end of 2015, I'm living in Hertsberge, near Oostkamp.  

Hertsberge is a small village (not even 2000 inhabitants) in a forest-rich environment with quite a bit of wildlife.   Hertsberge is relatively close to Brugge (approx. 15 km away from this nicest city of Belgium).

Professionally wise, I've been working for 33 years for Philips.  First in production, responsible for a team of 25 people assembling televisions.  Later on, I moved to the quality engineering department, where I've worked for about 7 years.

In October 1994, I joined the software development group where I first wrote software for the remote control on the television.  Later on, I wrote software for the tuning system, TXT, factory, audio, video,...

In march 1997 I went to Eindhoven - the centre of all Philips development at that time - with quite some colleagues to start up a complete new model.  We've been there for about 14 months.

In march 1999, I've been assigned to a project in Singapore to start up a low-cost small television called A-10, where I mainly did the video and PIP-features (Picture-In-Picture).  I've been there for about 11 months.

In 2004 I've been for about 5 months in Silicon Valley to do the FireWire integration (a.k.a. IEEE1394) for our televisions.  This was in cooperation with a company called VividLogic which was located in Fremont (as of this writing, the company doesn't exist anymore).

Later on, in 2006, we started to use Linux in our TV's, replacing the proprietary OS that we used until then.  I did mainly video drivers and all related accessories to that (ambient light, auto-contrast,...).

In 2007 I've been again in Silicon Valley, California, for about one month to do the USB - Wifi integration.  This time, the company we were working with was called Atheros.  At that time, a big player in the upcoming WiFi market.  Atheros is later taken over by QualComm, another chip manufacturer

Based upon Linux, we made the switch to Android TV in 2012.  I was initially working in the Android framework, later on moving to pre-development to try out new features of all kinds.

I've been working for 31 years for Philips in Brugge, Pathoekeweg 11.  In June 2014 we moved to Gent (Technology Park in Zwijnaarde) where I worked for another 2 years.  So, 33 years in total.

Beginning of 2016 a big restructuring was announced and our department that was specialised in writing High-End TV software for televisions, ceased to exist.  June 30, 2016 was my last day at Philips, where I started on September 1st, 1983.  A sad day it was...

Next, I worked for about 9 months for a German company, CGM, which had an affiliate in Nevele (previously, that company was called WinDOC). CGM is selling different software packages for the health care and I was part of a team writing a desktop application software for patient follow-up used by doctors.  The language used was Delphi (Embarcadero).

In the beginning of 2017 I got the opportunity to join a small team of software developers in CNHi - Zedelgem to write Java for Android.  CNHi is a global world player in agriculture and several other type of machines.  See the CNHi website for a full overview of their portfolio.  More specific, in Zedelgem they develop and produce combines, forage harvesters and balers.  Our flagship combine is the CR 10.90 which you can see here.  It has state-of-the-art features resulting in perfect harvesting results!

I'm part of the software combine team, writing an Android UI application for the display used in the combines (and in the future, also for the forage harvesters).

I hope I can be part of the software team until my retirement, I really like the job, the atmosphere, colleagues, working environment,...  As they say and to quote James Brown: "I feel good"... 

Everyone has hobbies, so do I

As a hobby, I like to play around with the Raspberry Pi and Arduino to extend my home automation system.  I really like the combination of hardware and software.  Nothing else can beat this...

Next to this, I like walking in the forest, observing all kinds of animals: birds of prey, deer, marter,...  I also have quite a few pets: 5 cats and two ducks.

My favourite animal, however, is the tiger.  To me, this is the most majestic creature on earth.  I like all animals, but this one is my "top" one...  I'm supporting lots of organisations worldwide that help endangered species of all kinds.

In the past, I liked cycling a lot (did thousands and thousands of km with my bicycle, mostly to go to the office from Torhout to Brugge, approx. 30 km one way).  However, due to medical problems that's not possible anymore.  Unfortunately...