Menno Aartsen 

Welcome. Charley (well, let's be reverent, His Royal Highness Charles, The Prince of Wales) and I have both aged just a tad, since I shot this picture - Diana hadn't even been invented yet. It seems another life, my sojourn into journalism, film production and photography, in the decade between working for IBM in Europe, and coming to America, now more than twenty years ago. Here, Charles receives a basket of Dutch cheese from two girls with the Dutch Dairy Bureau in London. Fun stuff, that, not in the least because the entire Dutch Dairy team lived in a large flat just across the river Thames from Kew, where I lived.... I never lacked cheese, of course, or company. What happened with the cheese as it was being escorted out of the stands to the Royal Rolls you see here... I would assume the gentleman in question has risen sufficiently in rank that my finally publishing this shot won't majorly impact his career. Not a fast bowler, at any rate.

But I am a long way from journalism, writing and photography today, and at least one continent removed from where I grew up. After (as the senior systems engineer) working on operator services call automation for Bell Atlantic (now Verizon) for almost seven years in New York's beautiful Westchester County, about fourty miles north of the Big Apple, interspersed with corporate network builds in places like Monaco and Indonesia, I was moved out into a different realm in 1998. We built our Long Distance operation, in Arlington County, in the Commonwealth of Virginia, and I guess I can count myself lucky being invited to the small crew that started it all up. How many times in your life can you expect to get to build a phone company? Let alone two? Even though it meant I had to leave my research position, the decision wasn't that hard, what else did I come to live in the United States for than to climb mountains, after all - I left a perfectly good but boring career behind in The Netherlands.

Due to Bell Atlantic's merger with GTE, I now have nationwide networking responsibilities - the sheer size of the United States overaws me, after all, you can fit my home country of The Netherlands into the State of Vermont and have space left over - the diagram here shows you how my "old" and "new" stomping grounds compare. It isn't that bigger is better, but I can do things here I wouldn't have even been able to even dream about "back home" - although home, today, is pretty much the US, after sixteen-odd years on these shores.

I had been commuting from the New York area to Arlington, Virginia, for six months, in 1998, and eventually moved there, after a long search for a nice house close to work. If you for a moment forget the weekday traffic in "The District", it is considerably more than bearable - luckily, I normally don't have to brave the infamous Beltway, and its futile attempt to keep the six million inhabitants of te area moving - between the Federal Government and much of the Internet industry, this place is pretty crowded - so much so, that a recruiter from Sacramento, CA, told me the other day house prices in his area are lower than they are in Northern Virginia. At any rate, I have an easy ride to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, especially at 5am, when I often head for the US Air Shuttle to New York's La Guardia Airport.

Career is clearly central to my life. By choice, to be sure, I am lucky enough in that I find the convergence of computer science and telecommunications as fascinating today as it was when I joined IBM's mainframe division, back in 1969, in the Netherlands, and later in the UK. Today, the promises of the '60s and '70s are beginning to come true, with communicating processors embedded in appliances and equipment, and all types of telecommunications embedded in the good old mainstay, Ethernet.

This small collection of web pages is growing slowly, but steadily. I am adding both text and photography. Photography, because I tend to lug some Nikons and a camcorder around with me most places, and text insofar as I have time to write - having spent ten years of my life as a photojournalist, it's kind of logical, old loves never go away... other than the picture pages, here are a few public talks I've given, and documentation on my patents. Unfortunately, most of what I write, stays behind Verizon's firewall, little I can do about that.

What time I have, I try and travel, go here to see some of the images from away and home. This is an image of the Sunda Kelapa timber port in Jakarta, Indonesia, taken in 2004. I do sometimes miss my journalistic days, when one would have the ability to go places and actually see them, when, these days, 95% of my travel is work related, there's just too much of it to be able to take a couple of weeks and visit somewhere.. Apart from that, I hope you will enjoy my musings... I have had to remove my email addresses due to the amount of spam they caused, if you need to get in touch with me please leave me a message in my guest book. Like so many in the engineering world, I live by the credo I.B.M. - I can't recall who first coined the jokes, but we tend to take the acronym to mean "I've Been Married" and "I've Been Moved" - both certainly true, in my case. If you decide to not have children, you take much of the foundation out of a relationship, and if you then move countries and continents three or four times you're not helping matters much. Don't think I am complaining, I love the life I lead, there is always something new and exciting around the corner, but it doesn't do much for one's home life.

Kind of neat, the Internet, but hardly new - I began publishing electronically, using a Radio Shack 100 laptop and the ITT Dialcom distributed internetwork, back in 1983, after getting my first Internet account in 1980. I had to fly from London, where I lived, at the time, to Miami, to buy a computer with a built-in modem - those were illegal, in Europe, then. 300 baud, too, and it came with an acoustic coupler.... And with that, I had my first Internet "laptop". Not too long after that, I moved to Florida, and set up my own small consulting firm, from where the US$ eventually sucked me up to New York, which has not let me go for very many years.

All that has changed, really, is that computers have replaced typewriters, and that those computers now come with some method of connecting them to other computers via some kind of public communications network.  Simple, right? Right.... So if that took twenty-odd years, how much longer will it take before you can access information outside your computer as fast as the stuff inside? While that time is actually not that far off, and I do my part in creating what we now call broadband and new facilities that are embedded in the telecommunications network, we in the telecommunications industry will have to continue to make massive technology investments, and once that's done, you'll all have to buy new peripheral equipment, and new computers, and then.... In the meantime, if you get impatient waiting for my pictures to load, just think of what you were doing a few years ago, when you had to go buy a magazine to read my words, and the words of many others.

So enjoy, let me know what you think if you feel like it, and otherwise, happy surfing.
 

(Oops.... Résumé? What résumé? Oh, allright.....)

Résumé

On September 11, 2001, I was in the air between New York City and Washington, D.C., my regular commute for a number of years. I've written up some of my experiences of that day, and its aftermath, here. You can find a list of all 2996 killed and missing victims of the WTC and Pentagon attacks at the September 11 website.