• Date of Birth: 10-Jan-1980
• Nationality: Belgian
• Home Town: Cavan & Maynooth in Ireland, Duffel in Belgium (and yes that is where the coats were invented!)
• Height: 1m72cm
• Hair: Brown, Short and sligtly Wavey
• Eyes: Greeny greyey brown or so I'm reliably (!?!?) informed by Siobhan

My Most Prized Possesions (In Order): My Laptops, My Digital Camera, My Mountain Bikes, My Telescope, My Badminton Racket & My Snooker Cue.

My Favourite Things: My favourite colour is Blue (as you should be able to guess from this site!). When it comes to food I like pretty much anything but I love Chinese and mediteranian foods. Also a glass of good red wine never goes astray!

Music: I can appreciate almost any type of music from Mozart to Creadence Clear Water Revival to U2 even to Placibo. I usually describe my taste in music as "Everything from Mozart to Moby"! About the only thing I cant stand is Britney Spears and the others like her. My favourite Band/Artist is always changing but at the moment it's REM.

Sport: I'm not really a sporty type of person. I hate GAA and tolerate Soccer in small doses. I HATE Man U and would consider myself a supporter of The Irish and Belgian National teams and Newcastle United in the Premiership. My favourite sport however is Badminton with snooker coming a close Second folowed by pool. I'm a good badminton player and an OK snooker and pool player. I also enjoy all cycling but especially cross country mountain biking.

My Hobbies: My favourite hobby and the one I spend by far the most time at is programming and especially Web Design. I'm also a very keen amateur astronomer. I'm very involved with the Students Union here in NUI Maynooth. I am also vvery involved with various clubs and Societies on Campus.

You might think that having a short name like Bart would mean there's no need to abreviate it or to give you nick names. How wrong you'd be! I have lots of nick names but the funniest thing is that they are not abbreviations of my name but are actually LONGER than my name!

• Bartificer - This one I got from the Students Union Executive of 200-2001. We were on our training weekend in Glendalough Co. Wiclow. On one of the days we had a work shop on team building which included character profiling. My profile came out as "artificer", Shane Arowsmith shouted out "Bartificer" and it stuck!
• Barticus - Two people actually came up with this one independantly of each other The first is Jimmy (my Bike Mechanic) and the other is Colin a great freind of mine from Cavan. Why?? I have no idea, I guess they came up with it because it rymes with Bart or something like that!
• Bartificus - This is a more recent one which I picked up in the Computer Science Department. One of the Other Postgrads, Vincent Timoney, came up with it. Again I have no idea why!
• el Barto - This is another recent one and is really only used by the first years I demonstrated Java to in 2001-2. Mark Whale came up with it and it just stuck!

I had many more nick names in primary and secondary scholl but they really aren't worth repeating!

I was born in a village called Duffel in the Province of Antwerp in Flanders, Belgium on the 10th of January 1980. And yes, Duffel is the place where those coats were invented. I was an only child untill the 7th of May 1982 when my first brother Koen was born.

When I was four my family moved to Cavan, Ireland. Why? I hear you ask, well at that time my father worked for a Belgian multi national, Pauwels Trafo who have a factory in Cavan and he got moved there.

I started my Education proper in Killygary NS about 3 miles outside Cavan town (I had done preschool in Duffel). Two years later we moved to a new house near Butlersbridge, a small village 4 miles north of Cavan. Here I started first class in Butlersbridge NS.
Just 2 weeks before the start of term my youngest brother Steven was born.

In 1991 I started my secondary education in the Cavan Vocational School where I did my leaving in 1997 and got 440 points.

Those 440 points were more than enough to get me into my first choice of University NUI Maynooth (then St. Patricks College). I graduated with a double honours degree in Computer Science and Experimental Physics on September 12^th 2001 and have now started on my PhD in Computer Science.

In a nutshell that's my life story so far, there are many great experiences I've had in life which I havn't included here, the best of them is my trip to Noyon France to see the total Solar eclipse of August 12th 1999. I'll put up some more details soon but at the moment this'll give you some idea of the kind of life I've had so far.