Hans van der Kamp

Eleven years ago when I started building websites I was laughed at by most of my friends. Born in 1955 – most people of my age saw the computer as an enemy to be feared. I did not mind their laughs too much. What bothered me more was the fact that I had become an outcast overnight.

I have worked as a photographer, a writer, and an editor in chief for several magazines, so my friends came from those same groups of professionals. Suddenly the pleasant discussions we used to have in neighbourhood restaurants were over. They were working on paper and I was working on hard drives, doing almost the same what they were doing at the time, but whenever I tried to join in on discussions, one of them would address me with the following one liner:

‘Stop talking Chinese!’

So I slowly started to withdraw from that scene. There was nothing there for me. After the economical crash in 2002 my job got tougher. I remember a lot of 12/14-hour working days. The few people who did in fact believe in the Internet withdrew their money, support, etc. I kept working on, knowing that if I would quit at least five years of hard work would have been for nothing.

All sites that I considered to be competition for my main project AmeaNet.org started to evaporate, while I moved on in solitude with some occasional help of people who were only half motivated and caused more problems than they solved.

Almost two years ago I finally saw some income being generated by my sites; a year ago it doubled, and even now in summer the number of subscriptions and sales keep growing at an unexpected rate.

One by one my old colleagues try to get in touch with me again, complaining that there is so little money to be made in printed media. Do I care? Yes, I do. Once they were my friends. Do I lose one night of sleep over their misery? No, not at all. Strangely enough, when I listen to their complaints, I have to suppress the urge to stand up and yell:

‘Stop talking Chinese!’

Meanwhile my work gets to be more fun.
I felt immensely satisfied, when I finished my latest project yesterday evening at 11:35 CET.

http://www.theinsanerobot.com/

The title for that site was not randomly chosen. It describes exactly how I felt over the last ten years: an insane robot.

PS: For the few visitors here who speak Dutch, the logo at theinsanerobot.com was designed by my son and it was inspired by a remark of a barkeeper here in Amsterdam who once said: ‘Je bent een aardige man, maar je hebt een bek als een scheermes.’

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The Dutch like to complain about the weather. It is either too hot or too cold. Too dry or too wet. That sounds pretty contradictory, but in fact it is not.

In April a lot of older people lost their lives, because it was incredibly cold, even for the time of the year. In June and July a lot of extra people died due to two heat waves. You never know what to expect here and people like to be prepared..

Time for a new site, I thought. I have been working on it for quite some time and it is nearly finished. However, if you have a wicked sense humor, you will definitely enjoy the ‘animations’ section with a few of my latest attempts to bend the rules of video a bit.

Please visit:

http://www.theinsanerobot.com/

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There are times that I do not like the Internet too much, usually around this time of the year. I do not handle high temperatures very well and the same goes for the machines I work with.
Suddenly routers on the Dutch Internet crash and it takes at least half a day for mechanics to reset them, because most crews are understaffed due to the holidays. The activity on the discussion board on one of my domains ameanet.org drops down, so the people get irritated easily, resulting in very unproductive verbal clashes. In return – being the site admin who does not want to get insulted every other day – I explode an awful lot of times too.

I get nasty, I threaten to disconnect half of the population and call them names I always regret five hours later. The overall atmosphere resembles that of a movie starring trigger-happy gunslingers.

Then suddenly I receive a newsletter on my birthday sent by reference.com, telling me that on my birthday the following events take place:

Iraq: Baath Revolution Day.
Korea: Constitution Day.
Puerto Rico: Munoz-Rivera Day

Historically speaking the 17th of July was no worse than any other day of the year:

1754 – King’s College opened in New York City; the Anglican academy would later become Columbia University.
1821 – Spain ceded Florida to the United States.
1867 – Harvard School of Dental Medicine was established in Boston, Massachusetts — the first dental school in the U.S.
1898 – During the Spanish-American War, Spanish troops in Santiago, Cuba, surrendered to U.S. forces.
1945 – President Harry Truman, Soviet leader Josef Stalin, and British Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill began meeting at Potsdam in the final Allied summit of World War II.
1955 – Disneyland opened in Anaheim, California. (!!)
1975 – The U.S. spacecraft Apollo 18 and the Soviet spacecraft Soyuz 19 docked in space.

Yes, I do like the Internet..

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