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piece of a cake? .... (November 2002)

From left to right: Cocky, Arie, Anne-Bente (then 24) and Karen (then 27). This picture was taken with my very first digital camera, during my birthday (53). My shirt reads in French: "Merde! Un an de plus" (shit, another year). I got it from my younger brother Martin on my 50th birthday.

Cocky is an assistant chemist (so I rather be kind to her - she could poison me). Karen is a clinical psychologist. She now lives together with Joris in Leuth near Nijmegen.

Anne-Bente studied social work. She works now with the municipal government of Eindhoven and lives together with Paul in Eindhoven.

In English Cocky has a number of meanings, not fitting her. It is derived from Cornelia. How and why? Don't ask me .... may be, because she is a wonderful cook. She is involved in yet another WWW, i.e. Women Welcome Women, a worldwide network of women of all kinds, young and old. Just inspect her web site.

We live at the red dot ........ We live since 1971 at the red hot spot in Western Europe (the Netherlands, also called Holland), 140 km south of Amsterdam. London and Paris are a couple of hundred km's away. The language we speak is Dutch, a Teutonic language. It should be distinguished from Deutsch, the German word for German. Dutch is also not a German dialect as some German seem to believe. Flemish (the Dutch which one speaks in Northern Belgium), Luxemburgian, German, Yiddish, Frisian, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Faeroese, English and even Afrikaans (Dutch spoken in South-Africa and quite unchanged since the Dutch came to this country) are also in this same Teutonic language group. Holland is a small and highly populated country. In the 17th century it was the mightiest country in the world, but it seems this is no longer true today. We still earn a great deal of our money to trade and agriculture (e.g. flowers), but also now to logistics and industry. And we are very fortunate to have our natural gas reserves!

Arie ..... teaches Technology Management. He is, well I am, also a management consultant. Per 2006 I am involved in:

2006, ISPIM conference in Athens

Over the years I travelled a lot for my work. It brought me to many parts of the world, except South-America. The country that fascinated me most was India. All in all I spent there half a year of my life, in six visits. If you want to read some of my travel stories (in Dutch) of my voyages to India, just send me an e-mail (no spam version): deepsky [at] hetnet.nl

Why then astronomy, many people ask me. At the age of 13, I had seen a starmap in the newspaper, verified it at night at the sky and became fascinated. I decided to become an astronomer, but that dream never came true. Built that year my first telescope, some ten followed. At 15, the head of the highschool forced me into a technical college, which I really hated. But after four years I was a mechanical engineer! Still very practical when it comes to home-built astronomical equipment and tools. When I finished school I decided to avert myself from anything that was technical. I became interested in statistics and operations research, the beginning of my interest in management science. Some ten years later I did my masters in organisation theory and in 1992 I did my Ph.D. in technology management: Increasing the Product Innovation Potential of a Firm, nominated for the first Igor Ansoff award. Over the years I worked with Hoogovens (steel mills), Ahold (grocery chain), Shell, Philips and at the Universities of Eindhoven and Ljubljana.