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Biography of Steven Den Beste
I was born in 1953, went to various and sundry schools and dropped out of college in December of 1975. I had worked a year between high school and college, worked summers, had part time jobs in college, received payments from my dad's pension after he died, went to a state school with subsidized fees, but with all of that, I finally reached the point where I either had to borrow money to stay in college (and I abhor debt) or I could drop out and take a standing offer of an Engineer's position at Tektronix at a salary of $12,900 per year. Wealth beyond my wildest imaginings! These days I pay nearly that much each year in Social Security taxes. I've been employed off and on since then as a software engineer, nearly always doing embedded work. I've been in many industries, but deep down it was all the same: microprocessors controlling custom hardware working in real time. I've worked on test and measurement equipment, factory automation systems, medical equipment, wide area networks, and now on cellular equipment. I was for a long time a heavy gamer, into various board games and computer games, but as time goes on the novelty has dimmed. (But if I was offered a chance to join a GURPS group in San Diego, I wouldn't say no...) I'm fascinated by most aspects of science and spend a lot of time reading about it. The sage says "The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine." And indeed that is so. From the microscopic to the macroscopic, every year brings surprises. We live in an age of wonders. Musically I tend towards light jazz (Pat Metheny, for instance) and late classical (Shostakovich). I was most recently employed by Qualcomm, but I am not currently employed. I've never been married, but they tell me that while there's life, there's hope. I'm heterosexual, and my intentions are honorable. I love children. A lot of people ask me about my surname. There's an interesting story behind it. It doesn't go back very far, actually. Because there's no aristocracy in the US, people like to pretend that they're descended from the nobility in Europe. (In actual practice, for most of them if they actually had an honest crest at all, it would bear the bar sinister!) Not me. My ancestry is Dutch (Frisian) and I come from a long line of farmers and pirates. My ancestry is strictly common, and historically the commoners in Frisia didn't have surnames. Only the nobles had surnames; the rest of us were named things like "Johann with the twisted lip" or "Blue-eyed Hans". Until, that is, the French invaded the place and ran it during the Napoleonic wars for about 7 years. Now Napoleon was really big on taxing the provinces so he could keep the taxes back in France low. The countries he conquered all had to pony up bigtime to pay him for the privilege of having been conquered by him. So the French called everyone in the Netherlands in and required them to pick surnames, I assume so that an accurate census could be made, so that they could tax the place better. Well! Surnames for commoners! What a stupid idea! And it's these silly French invaders making us do this. They've got all the guns, but they can't make us take it seriously, now can they? So a bunch of the people made up facetious or otherwise strange names. What they didn't expect was that after the war, when the French were kicked back out again, that the Dutch government would keep those names for everyone. There are a number of people living in the Netherlands whose surname is Poepjes, which translated into English means "little pieces of shit". My paternal ancestor was also a smartass, but at least he had better taste. My surname means "The Best" in not only Dutch but also in several Scandanavian languages which are in the Germanic group. I kind of like the idea of being descended from a smartass.
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