I am quite passionate about technology. Someone even calls me a geek. Especially like technology with an LCD displays like computers and various gadgets. Any blinking lights is a big plus. I'm a toss at directions, so you will usually see me with a GPS-enabled gadget, hehe.
I have been programming on computers, mobile gadgets and toys since childhood starting with text adventure games in BASIC, moving to assembler code and AmigaE later, onto Pascal, C, C++, Java, C# and ObjC 2.0 decades later.
Programming is highly rewarding - both as a hobby and professionally. It is puzzle-solving and mysterious in one. I love problems! Geekcorp Software and SmartBee host most of my "active" home projects and experiments.
It so happens that I am lucky to be programming as a day/night job, too. I have been having fun programming cool enterprise search software at Microsoft Corporation. Since 1999, I have been with FAST Search & Transfer, which was acquired by Microsoft Corporation in 2008.
In addition to information retrieval topics, I am fascinated by distributed computing and scalability. Storage technology is also essential and fun (we got to store the indices somewhere). My thesis was on Maintaining and Administrating a Distributed Extensible File System. It was a blast, a few unnecessary reboots perhaps. That file system was "active" in the sense that one could save a plain file in an editor. A file system hook would then zip the file, encrypt it and upload it various nodes. Of course, this was in 1998. Kids today have FUSE and sure fewer reboots :-)
Other hobbies include astronomy, books, movies and radio-controlled cars.
I live near Bergen in Norway with my beautiful wife and two kids, but I travel to Oslo each week for work!
Always have fun and smile,
Sveinar Rasmussen