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Personal
My name is Christian Hennecke. I was born on March, 18th in 1971, and grew up in Witten, a city in the east of the "Ruhrgebiet" in Germany with a population of just above 100.000 people.
In 1991, I began studying electronic engineering at the University of Bochum. If you have some knowledge about Germany, you will know that Bochum is a direct neighbor of Witten but its university was one of the few in Germany that offered electro-acoustics while not being out in the hinterland and with rents in an acceptable range. Anyway, after a while the extremely theoretical orientation started to go on my nerves.
I switched to geography in 1994 and since Bochum had a very good reputation in the field that I was especially interested in (ecology), the costs of living were relatively low, and I liked it here, I stayed in Bochum.
From 1997 to 2004, I also worked at the university. Until winter semester 2001/02 I lead tutorials for beginners in statistics at the Geographical Institute. I maintained the website and network of the Weiterbildungszentrum (Center for further training) of the University of Bochum from 2002 to the summer of 2004.
In July 2004 I founded an IT consulting and service company called point blank edv-beratung und service with my partner Frank Berke.
In the computerized part of my spare time, I use to assemble and edit information for OS/2 users, roughly speaking, as well as translate OS/2 software to German:
- Publisher and editor-in-chief of the VOICE Newsletter, an online magazine for OS/2 end-users, since August 2000 (German edition only) and January 2004 (English and German editions), respectively.
- Member of the organization team of the fair/conference Warpstock Europe 2000 and 2001.
- Maintainer of the web site of Team OS/2 Ruhr e.V., a German OS/2 user group, from 2000 to 2003.
- Coordinator and translator for the German national langugage support package for XWorkplace, a very feature-rich Open Source extension for the OS/2 user interface Workplace Shell. A "light version" of XWorkplace has been integrated into the operating system eComStation.
- Translation team member of the German national language version of the operating system eComStation 1.1 (manual, installation GUI, assorted help documents).
- Translation team member of the German national language version of the DTP program Maul Publisher.
- Translation of the German national language version of NewView, a viewer for OS/2 and eComStation help files.
- Translation of the German national language version of MajorMajor, a mailing list manager for OS/2.
- Translation of the German national language version of Shisen-sho, a Shisen-sho board game software for OS/2 and Windows.
- Translation team member of the German national language version of Koha, an Open Source library management software for Unix and Windows.
When I am not busying myself with computers, the passions I indulge in are movies (especially things like 2001 - A Space Odyssey or The Accidental Tourist), music (e.g., by the Legendary Pink Dots and David Sylvian) as well as novels and short stories (e.g., by John Irving or Ray Bradbury). A while ago, when I had more time, I visited Cornwall and Russia, for instance. Below you can look at a few photos from these trips. And yes, the colours did look that way...
Sundown in the Russian stepj (meaning prairie) near Wolgograd
A subway station in Moskow
Short before Lands End in Cornwall
Sundown over the sea at Lands End
Lands End - the most westerly point of the main Britannic island