About me

Remon Pel - A mug shot
Hi there.

It’s time I told you something about myself.

My name? Well, you can guess that one :P What I do for a living? Oh, well, that’s quite difficult to explain. I could just be done with it by saying, “I’m a web developer”. But who other than fellow web developers would understand? This is what I do on a daily basis;

  • Create WordPress plugins
  • Create WordPress themes
  • Create jQuery plugins
  • Do maintenance on our two dedicated web servers
  • Maintain our business LAN, two hands full of Macs, a few windows machines (necessary evil) and our in-house server.
  • Maintaining the software on all those
  • Debugging and maintaining our legacy websites which includes
    • Drupal 5 (fully patched and made PHP 7.4 compatible)
    • Symfony 1.4 (also fully patched and PHP 7.4 compatible)
    • Joomla
    • Social Engine
    • Vitamine-W (I doubt you will know this :P )
    • Bare PHP/MySQL
  • System-maintenance for a few external companies

I guess you could say, I do it all :)

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

It’s so true. In my spare time, sparse however it is, I play some World of Warcraft, Starcraft II and Diablo III :) I used to play SpaceChem, you might have seen some of my solutions.

To conclude this ever more boring growing tale, I am a hardened Apple fan. I turned my back on windows in 2008 and I haven’t regretted it for a single nanosecond. Two things I cannot live without; my iPhone and my Macbook Pro. They never leave my side :)

My old one, “Maggie”, has recently been replaced with a new, shiny Unibody MacBook Pro (i7, 2.5 GHz, 16 GB RAM, in case you were wondering), called it “Katie”. Katie grew old and developed the well-known GPU-solder-breaking problem. Disabled the GPU on hardware level and now happily runs Ubuntu Linux. Katie was replaced with Tasha, a 15″ i9, 32 GB 2019 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar… Yikes… That machine is baaaaaaddddd… WiFi dropouts, Bluetooth dropouts, fans go “To the moon!!!!!” whenever I point at it. Not a fan. Out with Tasha, in with Emily. A brand new 16″ M1 MAX (10/24), 32 GB … What a magnificent device that is…

How the names got started?? Oh, you should definitely read the end of this page :)

First computer we had in the house; A Sony MSX. We had it for about 3 hours. It didn’t work properly. Wouldn’t load any software. We traded it in for a Commodore 64.

My father would keep a record of his car-milage on it. My mother would play Solitaire and other card games. Myself, I was programming software on it. Not very impressive back then and certainly no mentionable software either :). I was 8.

A few years later I purchased, from two years of saving, my very own computer. A Commodore PC 10 – III. switchable between 4,77 , 7,14 and 9,54 MHz . Amazing feature from a press of a few keys on the keyboard. Anytime, in any piece of software. The goal of this machine was to prepare me for University programming, however, I was misinformed; the machine was ok, but it had the wrong OS. Years later I would be programming on Unix. The bliss of owning a computer overshadowed it’s original goal and that very same goal was lost until actually getting on University.

I fastly grew out of my twin-floppy machine, being only 8 bits, no hard disk. My uncle presented me with a machine for my birthday; a quarter the size, roughly 8 times as powerful; an Amstrad PC7386-SX80. OH MY. 25 MHz, 80 MB hard disk. ‘Pure bliss’ was redefined. It had VGA screen (about 10 inches of it, in color). No sound though. With the help of my dad I created a Disney Sound Source, for hooking up to the parallel port and playing music with a ModTracker. Didn’t work in games though. So one year – on a quite large event (HCC Dagen, for the Dutchies) – I purchased a Creative Sound Blaster 2.0. Mono, but great clarity of sound. Playing Prince of Persia gave me the goosebumps again :) The great thing of this machine was; it fit in my backpack :) It’s footprint was smaller than any other (desktop/tower) computer I owned after that.

Next up; a Laser 486 sx25. Can’t remember the model but it was flat, as wide as my HiFi components, a little more depth, but it stacked nicely. Upgraded it myself to 486DX66. Took some soldering on the mainboard to replace the 25 MHz crystal with a 33 one. Running Windows 3.11 for Workgroups and later Windows 95.

And then I discovered music (on computers, that is). I had loads of equipment coming and going. Not chronologically; two Pentium 133 computers, AV digitizers, iomega ZIP drives, then two Pentium II 233 machines overclocked to 266, more video editing hardware and much, much more.

It all ended.

I reached age to get to university and I got into programming. At home, no more programming. I was done with it; 6 hours a day was enough, so home time was about games. My 233 MHz machines quickly grew old. A PIII machine was never in sight and I stepped into the realm of Pentium4. Two machines; one was a Linux server, and one was a Windows 98 machine.

Years later, about 4 computers later, I saw Macintosh OSX for the first time. I was not impressed. Unfortunately that was only because of my years-of-windows-indoctrination. I had dealt with os8 and os9 machines on the University but that was a rare occasion. IBM OS/2 Warp also didn’t cut it. Ran great, but what to do with an OS without software. Running Win/Dos software had to be emulated, quickly negating the performance gain of OS/2.

I continued to enjoy the realm of Microsoft/IBM compatibles, until I started to work at Clearsite. In an all-Mac environment I was quickly converted. No more Linux, no more Windows, just OSX. I can do anything with it. I use it for development, server, workstation, gaming, blogging. Me happy. Never going back to Windows.

All these computers had names, they had to, because, how else to find the right one in a network? Well, the server was called Yamato. Workstations called Dauntless, Enterprise, and so on. Yes, it was the Star Trek period. After the Windows period, entering the Mac scene, I thought it time for a new genre of names. Since our web servers had girls names, I thought I’d keep that tradition and because Maggie and MacBook sounded like they fit together, my Macbook Pro was called Maggie. I always associated the name Lizzy with Maggie, I just don’t know why, but that is why my iMac was called Lizzy. With the new MacBook Pro replacing Maggie, I had chosen the name Katie. Beats me why. I like it :) Katie was replaced with Tasha and now Tasha has been replaced as well.
But what name fits an M1… Maggie was already used, something else with M… M… Em…. Ah, Em! Emma? no! Emily!. There ya go. Mystery of naming convention explained.

Thank you for reading and don’t hesitate to comment.

[Edited on Nov 27, 2021 to reflect changes that happened over the past 9 years… Oh. my. 9 years since I last updated this page… Good Lord, time flies…]

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