Welcome to my little place online!
Who am I?
Well, my "name" is uncle sjohie, and this is my homepage, hahaha. Recently I was elected mayor of sjohietown, a nice and cozy town, where you can hear Bruce Springsteen music all day. :-) I work for an engineering company in the Netherlands, and there I make maps with GIS systems, amongst other things. My hobbies include listening to Bruce Springsteen and to his concerts, collecting bootlegs of those concerts, tracking euro bills and going on holiday. One of my more recent hobbies is photographing, the results of that can be found all over my website. :-) In the right menu you'll find some links to sites and programs I like to use, and on the left side is the navigation menu for this site. Feel free to with questions or suggestions for the site.
Bruce Springsteen
As you have probably guessed by now, I really like the music of Bruce Springsteen, be it alone, or together with the E Street Band. I've been to 5 concerts so far, the rising concert on 08-05-03 at "de kuip" in Rotterdam, the devils and dust concert on 16-06-05 in Dusseldorf, the Seeger Sessions concert on 13-10-06 at the Ahoy in Rotterdam, and most recently, 2 Magic tour concerts on 01-12-07 in Arnhem, and 13-12-07 in Cologne. For Cologne red granny and myself decided to get floor tickets, just to see the man up close again. We got lucky again, but we didn't quite make it into the pit, we were right against the barrier, so that was almost as good. The sound was superb, and Bruce and the E Street Band were on fire that night! In the left side menu you can find some links to more detailed Bruce Springsteen information.
Bootleg trading
This is a new hobby of mine, I started trading and collecting Bruce Springsteen bootlegs about 3 years ago, but I've started collecting boots from other artists too. Feel free to take a look at my Bruce Springsteen trade list, and contact me if you want to do a trade. At the moment I have around 425 'legs in my collection, so there's plenty to choose from. There is one small thing, I only do 1 on 1 trades, no B&P (Blanc discs & Postage), I just don't have time for all of the requests anymore. Needless to say, they're not for sale, they are collected by (and for) Bruce Springsteen fans worldwide, just to share his wonderfull music and are meant to capture a little of the energy and passion of his live concerts. This started when I discovered some Bruce Springsteen forums like the Cadillac Ranch forum, and the now sadly defunct joosse forum. There I met fans from all over the world, and it all kinda took off from there :-).
Eurobill tracking
This is one of the more low tech and fun applications of GIS technology, here you can track euro bills all over the world. On the EuroBillTracker website users register the notes from their pockets, and if a note is already registered the user gets notified immediately and sees where this note has already been. If at some point in the future your note is found again you get an email notification. A note that has been registered by more than one EBT member is called a "hit". I've only entered a few notes so far, but some people have entered more than 400.000 notes (!)..
Holidays
Like most people I like to go on holiday, and the pictures of these trips can also be found on this site. Most of them have been taken across Europe, but I'm expanding my horizon and went to the middle east last year. My collection includes pictures of Corfu (more about that in a while), Bulgaria (sunny beach), Germany (Cologne), Belgium (Waulsort), Greece (Chersonissos), Sweden and more, but some locations have more pictures then others, since I am still scanning some of my older pictures. 
The latest addition in this section are the pictures of Egypt and Jordan, taken during my last summer holiday. This was a great 3 week "expedition" during which I traveled more than 2000 km trough both countries by bus, plane, train, felukka and regular ferry. I didn't go all by myself, I went with a group of almost 20 people, with professional guides and transportation. I booked this holiday through the shoestring travel organization, and they had it pretty well organized, with no real problems to speak of. Although the ferry ride from Egypt to Aquaba was somewhat chaotic, with deplorable sanitary conditions on board.. (But that's not something shoestring can help, it's just the country and people). Some of highlights were: the sfinx, pyramids, abu-simbel temple and snorkeling at Dahab in Egypt, and the Wadi Rum desert and Petra temple complex in Jordan. Highly recommended, especially Jordan. It's completely safe, even more so than Egypt where you have to travel with an armed escort a lot, especially in the southern part.
My nephew & niece
Not so little Wouter, my nephew, is usually out causing mischief, helping people in various ways, or building with duplo, together with his dad and uncle. Most of those adventures can be viewed in the photograph section, and I'll put a small video on my site from time to time. Over a year ago I became an uncle again, and this time it was a little girl. Elise is growing rapidly, and is the best niece you can have.. :-)
Audio
I'm somewhat of an audiophile, but since the bootleg trading really took of, it's been on the background a little. And let's face it, going to a concert is always better then a bootleg, right? My current setup consists of an Harman/Kardon AP2500 pre- and PA2200 power amplifier setup, with a Marantz CD17-mkII CD-player as the main source, and a set of KEF reference 101/3 monitor speakers. The cables used are mainly Siltech (MXT London interconnect), QED (Qunex 4S interconnect), MIT (Terminator 4 speaker cable), and some no-name for the tuner etc. This setup sounds very nice with human voices and small groups of musicians, and although rock sounds nice too, it sometimes lacks the "punch" due to the fact that my speakers don't go that low. For this I'm considering adding a subwoofer, but that's not a really big issue for me at the moment. For my portable entertainment I'm currently using a Sony NW-HD5 walkman, that's an harddisk based player with a battery life of about 50hrs and great sound quality, especially with the Sony MDR EX71 in-ear headphones I bought to go with it.
Photographing
Last year I bought a new camera, the fantastic Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ8. This is what's called a "superzoom" camera, and slots in right between the consumer compact camera's like the Ixus etc, and the more professional orientated dSLR camera's like the Nikon D40 and Canon EOS series. This camera features an 7 megapixel sensor, Leica DC vario-elmarit 36-432mm lens (12x optical zoom) and the MEGA O.I.S image stabilization system. There is a perfectly good "auto"setting available for those "quick draw" snapshots, but almost all settings can be altered manually, and it can also save the images in raw format, so you can edit them at home afterwards. This takes some practise, but the results can be better than what the camera does when it generates the jpg files. These can be stored on regular SD cards, or the newer SDHC variant, with a higher capacity. This is especially useful when shooting in raw mode, since those files are ~20Mb each, instead of ~3,5Mb for high quality jpg files.
I use SanDisk Extreme III 2GB cards, since these offer the best price/performance in my opinion. The camera itself looks larger than it really is, and isn't all that heavy too. The build quality is superb, everything works and feels like it will last a long time, and I took it on a 3 week backpacking holiday through Egypt and Jordan, and it never let me down once. The proprietary battery is potent enough for ~350 pictures, but that depends on the amount of use of the flash and screen. The camera now has a newer brother, but reviews suggest that it isn't a really a lot better than the FZ8, so if you're looking for a nice bargain, try getting this one. It takes wonderfull pictures and can be found for around 280,- euro's. I'm experimenting with all of the manual settings, and for that I'm using some online tutorials, one which can be found here. I'll try and put some of the better pictures on my site from time to time, but it takes a lot of practise. :-) My favorite accessory is the gorillapod, with this little stand you can attach your camera to virtually anything, like the branch of a tree, your TFT computer screen, etc etc. Very handy, and easy to carry around in your daypack.
Geographic Information System (GIS)
This is the stuff I use at work (mainly ESRI ArcGIS ), and I'll try and put some nice examples on my site when I have some spare time. There are some nice open source based wepmapping solutions that I'm just dying to try out. For the moment I settled on the free api from googlemaps, you can see some results allready on my holidays and reunion pages. More information about Geographic Information Systems can be found here.
Postcrossing
This is something a friend of mine brought to my attention (thanks margreet!), and at the Postcrossing site you can send and recieve postcards from all over the world! I made a map of the ones I sent and recieved, the link is in the left menu.