Guy Voets

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When I was 15 or so, I bought an Olympia typewriter with a large carriage, so I could put stencils in lengthwise... I was the 'editor in chief' of the local section of an organisation of young naturalists. Later on I learned the simple offset printing: use an oily marker on the master paper, water will not stay on these places, then ink will, and this ink will get where you want it on the paper. All this was in the 1960's and early 1970's, before the computer revolution.
The first signs of this upheaval in the printing world were the IBM Selectric^✶ typewriter with the golf ball, and after that the electrical Brother with the daisywheel, that could remember and correct one line of text.

Halfway hrough the 1980's, my first computer was an XT^✶, an IBM PC Compatible: one floppy drive and no hard disk, amber letters on a black screen, and a Seikosha SL 130 AI dot matrix printer with continuous paper. Working with WordPerfect 4.2^✶ implied regularly changing those big 5¼" floppies, one with the program, another with utilities and a third to save your work. In those days I tried to tinker a bit with the source code and used all kinds of Norton Utilities. A few years later I started using some of the first telephone modems^✶ (14,4 kbit/s) to exchange documents with people far away, experimenting with the protocols, getting those typical noises when connecting... and lots of broken connections. I became quite an expert in using macros in WP 5 and 6. I worked out a whole set of macros to do the lay-out of a newspaper (A2 format) in WP 5, and did accounting with macros in WP 6. I just did about everything with WordPerfect! The macro language developed for the versions 5 and 6 offered lots of opportunities of automating tedious tasks, modifying the keyboard into a tool that did all you want.
But then I got my first Apple computer, a 500 MHz 'graphite' iMac^✶, in 2000.
After the iMac came a PowerBook^✶ and this was succeeded by a MacBook Pro^✶ . I was always very fond of the Mac GUI, the typical look and feel of this type of computer. But Apple lacks a full fledged office suite. So for the last few years I have been looking into Open Document and Open Source solutions, OpenOffice.org^✶; in the first place. I try to help out fellow OOo users, and learn from them, at the OpenOffice.org users' list. In 2009, we got a newer version (9.1) of the iMac*.

From 2000 onward I was linked to the internet. The idea came to life to put some of all those travel photos that I made together in a website. I started composing webpages about my trips to Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Malta, but they were never published on the web. But I gathered know-how about scanning photos for use on the web, about scripting in html, trying to stick to the rules established by the W3C group^✶ .

The first photo pages that really made it to the web were about the Belgian Autumn^✶ (November 2003) and the beach of Jericoacoara in Ceará/Brasil (November 2004). They were published on Yahoo's Geocities pages. Later pages were located at our homepage at iDisk. Still later (2012), Apple stopped the possibility to post on iDisk, so we moved everything to another server (webcreating.be) with our own domain: toucheguy.dk. You can find all of them here:
http://www.toucheguy.dk/index.html

The internet now has become an important means of communication. Skype^✶ ; is now the channel we use more than any other to get in touch with our family and friends all over the world. The integrated webcam, speakers and microphone make our Mac the ideal tool for this.

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