About Me Thomas Prückler? Who is that? I was born 1968 in Linz, which is the capitol of Oberösterreich. Oberösterreich is one of the nine counties of Österreich. For the last few years I worked as a lecturer for the department of Data and Knowledge Engineering at the Johannes Kepler Universität in Linz. In 1998 I finishing my doctoral thesis, which deals with the architecture of a hypermedia database management system. Currently I work for a local computer consulting company and mostly do database applications. And for those who wonder what I look like, there are now some photos available. My Interests I am interested in quite a few things, listed below are my most "stable" interests. And there are a lot of other things that I would like to do ... Books Books. I just love reading. And books. Tons of books. I just dont get to read them as much as I would want to. I read a lot of nonfiction books about a great variety of subjects, austrian history and the celts being the recent favorites. When I read fiction, I usually read Science Fiction (and related eras, though I am not that big on fantasy really). My favorite authors are Tolkien and Cordwainer Smith. And I usually go for the bigger books. Music "Music was my first love, and it will be my last ...". I like music. Again in great variety. But please no rap and hiphop and that stuff. I do like my music with a little melody in it. And nice voices singing. Preferrably female voices. I like classical music, especially from the classic and romantic areas. I am not too fond of sung classical music, though I do enjoy some operas. Especially in the Arena di Verona. From the more recent times I like Cat Stevens, Enya, Suzanne Vega, good old (hard) rock (too bad they dont do that anymore), Dire Straits, The Bangles and much much more. Linux One of my biggest hobbies is my computer. Being brought up on command line interfaces (good old MS-DOS) I dont care too much about Windoze. My big love is unix. And at home I of course use Linux - the best unix around. I use the Debian distribution and right now I plan to upgrade from 1.3 to 2.1 (it isnt really that much fun with that old libc anymore). Palm Pilot I am also the proud owner of one of these ingenious little devices. I have a Palm Pilot III which has very completely replaced my filofax and makes carrying information around very easy. And I might have installed one or two games as well. The Palm works well together with Linux and there is lots of software available for it, quite a lot is free too. One of my favorite sources is PalmCentral. Interactive Fiction This is something I accidentally stumbled across. Interactive Fiction is a very nice name for those good old text adventure games. Some well known games were made by Infocom and had names like Zork or Enchanter. Those games are still around, can be played on nearly every computer, and many of them are free or shareware! Online Interactive Fiction contains a short introduction and links to other sites. Be sure to have a look at the IF-Archive which contains a lot of games. And those games can even be played on the pilot ...   © 1997-99 Thomas Prückler