About Me

Hi. This is a "personal" page, meaning it's about me, hence the name of the page. Although Zander Zoftware and "me" are the same thing, I treat them differently here. Whereas the History page is about the past and present of Zander Zoftware, this page is more like a résumé, but not really. Wow, that sounds confusing. Oh well...
To keep things somewhat interesting, this page contains many links to Wikipedia pages if you care to read more.

So, my name is Sander de Jong. I was born in Groningen, the Netherlands in 1983. I grew up there and went to primary school there. When I was a kid, I followed music lessons. Although I felt it was a bit boring back then (yeah, like I really want to know the difference between an oboe and a clarinet at that age) it probably was the start of my love for music. It's been over 15 years, but I still remember hearing the Hammond organ in "A Whiter Shade of Pale" by Procol Harum there for the first time. Later on, I started playing the piano. I stopped my lessons when I was in highschool and can now no longer read notes easily.

I also got a love for computers in those early days. This started with an old BBC Micro where I learned programming in BASIC and LOGO. The games I had were stored on casette tapes and took ages to load. Later on I moved to PC's and started programming in Turbo Pascal. In those early days, we had an old XT machine at home with a monochrome monitor. The only games I played were DOS text games and SimCity. I remember getting fed up with not having any money, so I hacked the save game to have 16 million dollar. There was no internet back then, so I have no idea anymore how I learned how to do it.

In high school I had a great science teacher. His enthousiasm and way of teaching really made me appreciate chemistry. After I finished that school, I went to a different school at a higher level. While my teacher there could not top my previous teacher, chemistry became more advanced and (therefore) more interesting. At that period in time, the high school education in the Netherlands changed drastically, and people who failed the year before in the old system joined our class. I was amazed by the things they learned last year, which we didn't learn this year. I was also fascinated by why certain compounds had certain colors. For example, why does Copper(II) chloride have such a beautiful blue colour when it's moist?
Also at my first high school, our English course talked about Dutch word in the English language. Before then, I had no idea words like "cookie" and "boss" were of Dutch origin. I started collecting words of Dutch origin, at first only in English, but this soon spread out to other languages.

During my high school period (1995-2002) the internet started to become big. At first, I only used the internet in the library and at an internet cafe/copy shop in the city. In 1998 we got internet at home, the good old 56k6 days. If you don't remember those days, using the internet back then meant your phone line was busy, connecting to your ISP resulted in your modem making horrible noises and you could download at a whopping 7 kilobyte per second! Napster was the hot thing at the moment, and I downloaded my first songs in that period. I remember one of them was Kashmir by Led Zeppelin, which at that time was used in the song Come with Me by Puff Daddy, used in the film Godzilla. The song is over 8 minutes long, so at 128 kbps that makes about an 8 MB file. Downloading a song that size took days to finish. Imagine my disappointment when the final seconds were cut off, I downloaded the song for nothing... And to those who say that downloading is bad: I later bought a compilation cd with this song on it (Early Days & Latter Days) and then went off to buy all Led Zeppelin cd's.

In July of 2002 I teamed up with my cousin Jeroen to start a website. It lasted for about a year and a half. Not longer after we stopped that site, we started a new website which again lasted for about a year and a half. In 2009 we teamed up again to start another website, which we worked on secretly for a year and a half (it's like it was destined that way!) and has been online and active since January 2011.

In September 2002 I started studying Chemistry at the University of Groningen.

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