About Tom
Sooo… this seems to be a page about me or something.
Hmmm.
Well, usually I hate these kind of stupid introductions where you try to look your best to the outside world. I wonder why I would actually try to look my best to the outside world. It’s kind of ironical don’t you think? The world never tries to look her best especially for you, or at least I never noticed the slightest attempt. Oh well, better get it over with…
As you already might have noticed from the posts on the frontpage, my name is Tom Verschooten. I have lived in Belgium for most of my life, except for half a year I lived in France. I’m an electronics-student at the De Nayer Institute in Sint-Katelijne Waver (a really tiny village) and in my last year of my electronics-degree, I took part in the European Erasmus exchange program. During this time I lived in a crappy small room in one of France’s biggest student-cities, Toulouse.
In Toulouse I spent most of my time studying, which is kind of a pity since there’s such a nice nightlife over there. Luckily it wasn’t all bad, I met a lot of nice people over there and I’ll probably get an extra university degree when I graduate. A month ago I have returned to Belgium to complete a final internship before graduating.
Once my internship was finished I returned to Toulouse for the last time. During the week I spent there I visited all kind of places in the city my studies hadn’t allowed me to visit previously. I defended my internship report and was congratulated by the jury. After I returned to Belgium I was informed that I had graduated with honor over all three years of my studies.
My professional interests mainly consist out of embedded electronics subjects. I really like 8051 assembly programming, PCB design and VHDL (although I’m not really an expert). Next year I’ll be continuing my studies at the De Nayer Institute to obtain a Master degree in engineering (with a specialization in electronics ofcourse). I hope I will be able to report some of my experiments here on this blog. Guess we’ll have to see how that turns out though…
Here in Belgium I’m also a member of Utopia, a student’s club at the De Nayer institute. In the academic-year of 2005-2006 I was part of the club’s praesidium (the club’s leading council) where I was responsible for producing a little magazine called “Den Utopist”. Whenever possible I’m present at Utopia’s club-events, once I even took a plane for the weekend to be present at one of those activities (yeah I know, it’s crazy).
Being Belgian it’s quite obvious I like beer, especially trappist-beers like Chimay (which are still brewn by real monks ^^). However, in France beer is incredibly expensive (you pay about the same price in a supermarket as you would pay in a Belgian bar), which led me to the conclusion it was actually cheaper to buy one decent bottle of whiskey a month as opposed to drinking a lot of beer. Since then I’ve been a whiskey fan and my beer consumption has drastically lowered. A few of my favourite whiskeys are
- Aberlour 16y (Double cask matured)
- Talisker (’91) master distiller’s edition, which tastes amazingly although it smells like terpentine
- Blackbush, Busmills liquor whiskey
- Bushmills (blend or 10y single malt), which makes excellent drinking whiskey thanks to it’s relatively cheap price.
- Oban, of which I still have to get myself a bottle
- Blackadder Peat Reek (one of 304 bottles)
I like lots of music styles except jump and hardcore. Because of my broad music-spectrum, I don’t have a lot of favourite bands, but here’s a small list of artists/cd’s I really like:
- Gorki (Flemish alternative rock)
- Boudewijn de Groot (Dutch “kleinkunst”-artist)
- Mira (”kleinkunst”-artist from Antwerp)
- Muse
- “2 meter sessies” by Epica (Dutch gothic-metal)
- “Mother Earth” by Within Temptation (the DVD is really great as well)
- Nightwish
- Theatre of Tragedy (the female singer is superb)
- Indochine, Lousie Attaque, Dionysos and some other weird stuff I encounterd in France
Boredom often led met to fantasy books, and during my stay in France I’ve become a big fan of Raymond E. Feist, the writer behind the all-time fantasy classic “Magician”. Until now I’ve read about 4 books of his. I also like the Shadowmarch trilogy by Tad Williams (still have to get me part 2 though) and the “Age of the Five” trilogy by Trudi Canavan. Some years ago I also read a lot of J.R.R. Tolkiens books, including the Lord of The Rings, the Hobbit and the Silmarillion (of which I still admire the musical creation of middle earth).
I’m also an anime-fan, although I really don’t know that much about it, I usually copy it of people who actually know what’s good (Saves me lots of times looking for the good stuff :p). I’m also a huge movie fan, but I never remember much of movies I saw. One of the last movies I saw was “300“, I remember I cracked up about the “sure we can be civilised” conversation while they were killing of some survivors of the preceding battle ^^.
Spartan King Leonidas: There’s no reason we can’t be civil.
Captain: [stabs a dying Persian] Right Sire.
I also saw the premier of Taxi 4 in France, which was kind of funny because the vilains in the movie are a Belgian and a Columbian (as it happened to be I went to the theater together with Jaime, who is a Columbian :D).
Well, so far this little introduction into the Tom-species. If you have any questions you can reach me through the following e-mail adress : raaf at pandora dot be
