A very warm welcome to my Homepage!

Herbert at Google+

(No, I’m not on Facebook and not active on Twitter)

My Hobbies

My main hobbies are:

• Biking (Road-Bike) Since 2001 I ride quite a lot of bike, since 2002 Race-Bike. I started this in order to loose weight (which worked actually). In the meantime this is my main hobby, when looking at the effort/duration. In Spring/Summer/Autumn I ride between 10-15 hours, in the winter still 4-6 hours (at home on the ergometer or if weather allows with MTB/Crossbike in the forest).
• Reading – Books In the past years I have read quite a lot of books. Most books in the area of Science Fiction, a few Fantasy and some non-fiction. Some of my favourites are:
  • Most books of Douglas Adams
  • Some books of Arthur C. Clarke
  • Some books of Isaac Asimov
  • Frank Herbert: Dune (all 6)
  • Several (the first ones) of William Gibson (my intro to Cyberpunk…)
  • Some of Bruce Sterling
  • Some of Neal Stephenson (fantastic!)
  • Douglas Hofstadter: Metamagicum; Gödel, Escher, Bach; Einsicht ins Ich
  • … and a lot more …
• Reading – General Education / Magazines After my studies, when real work started, I somehow lost time, so I still read a lot, but restricted to my favourite Magazines:
  • GEO, GEO Spezial, GEO Wissen, GEO Epoche, GEO Kompakt, National Geographic
  • Computer-Magazine: c’t
• Computer-Science… For many years (between 1987 and until well after my studies until ~1998) this was my main hobby (News/Usenet, Programming: C/C++ later HTML/PHP/Web…). My Homepage was for a long time developed from scratch (HTML/PHP/CSS/JS, with VI and Komodo). Then with my professional work for a computer company since 1994, my interest to continue sitting at the computer in the evenings and weekends got less and less. I’m still interested in computers (and work with computers professionally today), but at home … not much anymore.
• Spanish Since 2001 I learn Spanish. I started because I planned to go to South America on vacation and wanted to be able to speak to people there, other than English. But in the meantime this is a hobby in itself, it’s fun. Once in a while a short city-trip to Spain, of course vacation in South America and once a week a class in a local evening school.

Vacation

During most years (have done this now since about 1995), I have a short break only once or twice a year (about 1-2 weeks) and 2 weeks over Christmas. Then I have a “real vacation” about every 3-4 years, meaning further away for at least 4 weeks.

• 1993: 3 (almost 4) months internship at HP in the US, Palo Alto, near San Francisco
• 1995: two week in England (houseboat on the channels) and two weeks in Egypt
• 1998 (June/July): 5 weeks Alaska, hiking in real(!) wilderness
• 2000 (June/July): 4 weeks in Iceland, lots of hiking
• 2001 (November): 5 weeks in New Zealand, lots of hiking and some adventures
• 2005 (September): 5 weeks in Peru, fascinating culture and nature
• 2008 (February): 2 weeks in Cuba, fascinating culture, people and music
• 2010 (23.12.2010 – 22.1.2011): 4 weeks in Patagonia
• 2012 (February): 2 weeks in Cuba, this time the eastern part
• 2015 (28.3. – 14.4.): 2,5 weeks with an organized tour to Costa-Rica
• 2016 (mid December to mid January 2017): 4 weeks in Patagonia
• … trip to Colombia is currently in planning stage …