About me

About me?

Well, that can be a long story if I want to… But I’ll try to keep it short. 😉

I live in the Netherland which is some very small country somewhere in the north-west of Europe.

Work
After finishing my bachelor in IT, I startd working as a programmer in 2000. I quickly evolved from junior programmer to IT Architect, before switching to databases somewhere around 2008. Since then I’ve worked mainly with Open Source databases and am a renown expert on this field.

Cars
I’ve been a Japan fan for almost my entire life I think. It all happened in kindergarten when a friend of mine, who is half Japanese, had me over to play with his (Japanese) toys. I loaned a lot of books about Japan in the local library and in my late teens I got into Anime and Manga because of this and started collecting everything I could.

At the late 90s I really got into Japanese games, so of course I started playing a lot of Japanese race games. Most of those featured mostly Japanese cars and that’s how I got hooked on Japanese cars! I loved the outrageous cars like the Skylines and the GT3000, but also the smaller lancers, mx5s and Corollas.

In 2000 I got the first fansubbed Initial D episodes and since then I was quite determined to own a hachi-roku (Toyota Corolla AE86) myself! I instantly replayed most Japanese racegames and tried to allocate all AE86s in there. Most of them actually had them! I also registered some domain names (trueno.org hachi-roku.org) and got one of my best friends to buy an AE86. Together we founded AEU86.org, a European community for AE86 owners.

Anyway, I bought my 1985 USDM AE86 in 2005 and owned it up till 2007. It was a converted SR5 (to GT-S spec) and I rebadged it as Trueno with the stickers we were already started selling replicas through the shop.

I sold the AE86 in favor of a mint Toyota Carina TA60 automatic because my girlfriend Emoke was expecting our son Olivér and she couldn’t get into the AE86 too well and a child seat wasn’t fitting in the AE86. So I swapped the 2 door AE86 in favor of a 4 door Carina.

My father did also own a Toyota Carina TA60 van in the 80s (I think it was 1985-1989) so it was quite natural for me to start looking for a 4 door Carina. The Carina TA60 itself is quite identical to the AE86: it even got the same rear axle!

Anyway, plans are to convert the Carina to manual shifter in the future and then swap the 2T engine for a (more economical) 4AGE or a (more easy swap) 2T-G.

I currently write a lot on my blog and mainly about cars and Japanese subculture. I surely would love to visit Japan once, but with the current life it will not be anytime soon. Besides that: I really need to visit Indonesia before that to see where my roots are!

Anyway, I could write about my personal life, my wife and two kids but I chose not to. Why? Well, because my personal life is something I’d like to keep for myself and my hobby (blogging) is something I do for fun. So you don’t have to expect any food postings and run in the park pictures either. Isn’t that a relief? 😉