About
Me
My name is Markus Mayer. I am a Software Developer and Unix geek in my early thirties. I hold a master’s degree in Computer Science from the Vienna University of Technology.
Born and raised in Austria, near Vienna, I moved to Canada in February 2003 on a SWAP work permit. I wanted to gain foreign work experience and live in an English speaking country for a while to improve my language skills. It was an experiment based on the opportunity I had and because I wanted to go on a little adventure. And I also wanted to see if I would be able “to make it”.
Why Canada? Another European country (the UK or Ireland) wouldn’t have been nearly exciting enough. 
The US was out, because, well, it’s the US. – I have no issues going to the States for business or vacation trips, but I wouldn’t want to live there. — That left me with Australia and Canada. The three things I liked better about Canada were: I had heard great things about Vancouver (they are all true, by the way), I had the opportunity to participate in the SWAP programme and Canada is not quite as far away from Europe as Australia is.
It turned out that I liked Vancouver a lot. I enjoyed living and working in this wonderful city (who wouldn’t) and extended my stay past the original one year work permit.
As life sometimes goes, I met a girl…THE girl. We got engaged in February 2005 and married in August 2006. And here I am. Still enjoying the city and its surroundings as much as I did when I first got here. In addition I have a lovely wife to share my days with.
The site
The site is best viewed with Firefox or another browser from the Mozilla family. Opera is doing a pretty good job as well. It also looks quite nice in a text only browser like Lynx or Links. It doesn’t look quite right in Internet Explorer, because of the way it interprets the style sheet.
Sorry, folks. This is not because I am mean. I am a Unix enthusiast and don’t have a Windows installation handy (and don’t want to have one handy, either) to try and tweak the looks of the site under IE. There is Firefox for Windows, after all. It’s the better and more secure browser anyways.
