At the time I was considering a career in informatics, as suggested to me in the context of psychological and career choice testing. Since my only expertise and experience in that field consisted of barely one year of making web pages in hypertext markup language (which I had taught myself from a book) it seemed good to take some courses. I found a private institute called Web College at 18 kilometres from where I lived, and made an appointment for a tour of the school. This was on a Saturday, and a pianist in dinner jacket was playing in the hall throughout the day. Later I understood that this ritual took place every Saturday with prospective students.
Apart from various informatics courses, the school specialized in security courses for bodyguards, and also had a tourism department for aspiring stewardesses and the like. Based on this experience, I ended up taking two courses there; first "Computer programmer" in 2002-2003 (16 Saturdays), then "Web designer and developer" in 2003-2004 (22 Saturdays). After that, I was offered a network administration course at another institute, which took place late 2004 and lasted about three months, several days a week. I got diplomas or certificates for all three courses. Right after the last, which resulted in a 2004 Cisco Certified Network Associate degree, a company from the United States (Boston, Massachusetts) offered me work as a programmer, which I accepted. They had found me through my web location, incidentally, I had not applied to them. Since they could not hire me in salaried employment, it became a freelance construction, and I had to register at the Chamber of Commerce here to do this legally.
For further information, the courses at the Web College cost around € 4200 each, which was astronomical in my perception; however, if you paid within two weeks or so, which I did, you got about € 1000 off, and moreover, they let me do the second course entirely for free. The three-month network administration course at the other school was free, being a government-funded project.
This course consisted of introductory modules in the languages JavaScript, Java, Delphi (Object Pascal), Visual Basic 6, and C++. Most of it was given by one teacher who worked at the institute, but for Visual Basic they hired someone from outside. Surprisingly, the students came from all over the country, having to travel up to over 300 kilometres to the weekly course sessions, which lasted all day. We could use laptops of the school while there but not take them home. Books were provided, as well as extensive printed material such as listings of programming code treated in class, but software was not included. We were supposed to download temporary or student versions of programs like Delphi and JBuilder and use those for the duration of the relevant module. For JavaScript we used Allaire Homesite (later called Macromedia Homesite) and for Visual Basic I believe the external teacher privately gave us a set of compact disks with the needed software. We had to make copies ourselves for each.
The student who first got those disks, bizarrely, tried to e-mail them to the rest of us, not understanding that his message refused to be sent with five gigabytes or so attached. This illustrates that the course participants were not necessarily all die-hard computer nerds. In fact, only one of them, a chain-smoking young man with long hair and shabby clothes who mumbled about a file transfer protocol server he was running at night, could be accurately described as such. For the rest it was people with a business who wanted to do their own programming, people already working in informatics who wanted to expand their knowledge of programming languages, and someone — the one who tried to e-mail six compact disks — who told us he had previously been working as a brothel host, and before that had been exploiting the first telephone sex lines of the country. And as if that was not enough, he was an astrologer. Including myself, there were seven programming students in total.
Right after the course had started, the Netherlandic television program RADAR devoted an episode to this institute, in particular to the security courses. Apparently, students had complaints about the quality of their education, wanted their money back, and things like that. This did place things in a certain perspective, although I was still assuming that the computer courses were probably better than the bodyguard courses; the other programming students were less naive though, and spoke with pity of the unwitting poor souls guided around the school on Saturday by the manageress and her secretary or assistant, lured into spending thousands on a worthless course as the piano music subliminally induced a more receptive state in them. The secretary vanished soon after the negative publicity on national television. The security students were always prominently present; firmly built men, and women, in black suits and shiny black shoes with earbuds in and talking into small microphones were everywhere, protecting hypothetical celebrities and searching cars in the parking lot for the presence of hidden bombs. One could not possibly be safer than in this school. Incidentally, I never parked there myself but in the adjacent street because the parking lot tended to be full.
After the resignation of the secretary, the staff now consisted of the manageress of the Web college (who called herself "commercial engineer" on the school's web location), her husband who ran the security department, a number of girls who worked at the office, and the teachers. Once, the manageress told me to contact Mrs S. of the administration for a certain matter (I abbreviate the name here for reasons of privacy). So I went to the office and asked for Mrs. S. This turned out to be one of the girls, and S. was her first name.
During the long Saturday there were three breaks, which we programming students mostly spent in the canteen or on the terrace outside, eating sandwiches brought from home. Since a few of us were heavy smokers, we were forced to sit outside even when it was cold; out of solidarity, we stuck together and the non-smokers sat outside too. I seem to remember that smoking in the canteen was still allowed initially, but became forbidden soon. The regular piano player was a frequent topic of conversation, as most students hated the constant Muzak that penetrated the walls, even up to the second floor where our classes were, and many a plot was made to assassinate the reproached musician. I had no problem with the music myself, having been used to studying in a conservatory building where the sound of heavy brass instruments came from all around while trying to tune my classical guitar.
Once when we were having an afternoon break, the manageress walked by, and a programming student remarked, "Wow, she must have been on a trip to Barbados!" For proper understanding, one should know that a popular television commercial in those days featured a girl who went to Barbados for some plastic surgery, and boarded the return flight with two gigantic breasts. Then while the plane was high in the sky one heard two popping sounds, and upon arrival the girl was flat again. This gave us some idea of where the money from all those courses went.
These classes were my first acquaintance with laptops, and I resented the keyboards. The keys were in the wrong place so I was constantly mistyping things, having learnt to type with ten fingers blind on a conventional keyboard when I was nineteen years old. I remember that one of the school's laptops got stolen by a student once (not by one of us) and the thief's father was summoned for a meeting with the manageress. Apart from the two informatics courses I would take, the Web College also offered "Internet programmer" and "Cyber marshal", but I am not certain if anyone was doing those in this period. There was an instance of "Web designer and developer" going while I was doing "Computer programmer" if I am correct, and one girl taking part in it would later redo that course in 2003-2004 when I took it.
As the programming course progressed, the astrologer/brothel host expressed his plan to develop a matchmaking system based on astrology that would send a message to the user's mobile telephone whenever a "match" was found — a "dating app" it would be called now, but since he was a decade or more ahead of his time there was no such word then. Toward the end of the course he teamed up with the Visual Basic teacher, and I and one or two other students joined in to help program the thing. We had two meetings about it, one in a highway restaurant called "De Lucht" and one in the astrologer's house; on the latter occasion, his twenty years younger girlfriend cooked a meal (she was a cooking teacher) and we ate bell peppers filled with minced meat. Based on his own life experience, he was planning to allow an age gap up to twenty years between "matches" in his program. I was given a pile of papers with astrological data and tables that needed to be incorporated in the system. We were using the Delphi programming environment for the purpose. It was the opinion of the few experienced programmers among us that the Pascal (or Object Pascal) language (as used in Delphi) had the most beautiful and clean syntax of all programming languages.
I myself had a preference for Java at the time because I found it an attractive idea to write programs that would work on any system or platform, which was intended to be the case with Java. For this reason I kept self-studying Java for months after the course had ended, mainly from the book Thinking in Java by Bruce Eckel and using a student version of Borland JBuilder I had bought for € 10 (I still have that compact disk). Eventually I got frustrated with things like the layout managers, the deep tree structure of Java's built-in classes, the ugly syntax, and more. I only actually used Java briefly for one or two small projects, and then went with JavaScript and very occasionally P.H.P. for the things I wanted to do. What I retained from Java is an understanding of the principles of object orientation. Similarly, I also had a period when I was attracted to using X.M.L. for storing and transferring data, but before long I decided that JavaScript was better for that purpose.
When we ended the course with an examination, the astrologer turned out to have higher grades than I; the Visual Basic teacher expressed his amazement over this, saying that I was a much better programmer. Well, such were the ways of the Web College. I did collect my diploma at a proper official ceremony, where students of the various departments were called forward one by one. Around that time I withdrew from the matchmaking project, mainly because I did not believe in astrology. While writing this in 2025, I looked him up on the Internet and found he has a Netherlandic web site for astrological matchmaking. It is free, so hesitate not to register I would say.
An important principle I learnt from the Visual Basic teacher was to always leave software (programs, operating systems) default as much as possible, to avoid the work of redoing all of one's customizations after every new installation and thus be able to devote more of one's time and attention to actual work. This is something one learns through necessity if one often installs software. Over the years I have arrived at the insight that this should be a design philosophy when creating software or devices. Customizability should be avoided, and programs, systems, and devices should always retain their behaviour, always respond to the same input in the same way, like old pocket calculators, wrist watches, or early digital cameras; those things had embedded software baked into the chips that could never be changed or updated. Possible "updates" should never change behaviour, so should never "break" the "work flow". I know there is a long way to go before producers and consumers of electronics will understand this. Consumers confuse customizability with freedom (they mistake it for a good thing and pride themselves on being able to put the task bar on top of the screen instead of at the bottom) and producers abuse customizability to manipulate the way in which people use their products (by choosing the default settings and deciding the scope of possible settings, for example). The consumers' illusion that the ability to customize one's system constitutes freedom makes them easy victims for the industry that wants to control their behaviour. With good default options, which should in many cases be the only options, "one size fits all" is true for most or almost all people.
I took this course because the institute let me do it for free, possibly to arrive at a certain group size to let it go through plausibly; the manageress urged me not to tell the other students about this arrangement. Web design was not my first choice because visual/graphical work is one of my weaker sides, and in hindsight the first course (programming) was indeed more fitting. This second course was longer and had more modules, such as hypertext markup language, JavaScript again (the same module as the year before), cascading style sheets, Photoshop, Homesite, Dreamweaver, Frontpage, Flash, and some more. The first lesson was quite impressive and given by a knowledgeable teacher who had written some of the course material herself. She lectured about the history of the worldwide web, for instance. Unfortunately, she resigned right after that, apparently in disagreement with how the school was run, and the course was taken over by two regular teachers of the institute: most was done by the main programming teacher of the first course, who had studied informatics and used to watch the Top gear on television I believe, and one or two graphics modules were handled by someone of the security department who was a Photoshop expert and member of the military police, if I am correct.
The girl who had already done this course earlier was also in our group, but was frequently absent and eventually disappeared entirely. I remember her saying things like, "I want everything from Adobe", regarding programs she wanted to use. There was also a Spanish student who was a fan of Britney Spears and worked in a fish store. One Saturday he had a universal serial bus stick of 200 megabytes with him; that was the first time I saw such a thing. We were used to bringing homework on a compact disk. As a final project, we had to make a web site, and I remember the girl asking how she was supposed to show her site in class. The teacher told her to put it on a compact disk, whereupon she responded, "What?! Does a whole web site fit on a compact disk?!" Once again it shows that course participants of this institute were not necessarily die-hard computer nerds. For clarity, the kind of web sites we made then were a few hundred kilobytes at most when done properly in good clean hypertext markup language, so several thousands of them would have fit on a compact disk.
The Spaniard was making a web site for the fish store where he worked, and it contained a page with recipes. Once he wanted to try out the Print button on the page, but saw nothing coming out of any printer in the room. "The printer connected to the network is located in the office", the teacher explained. "They must now be wondering there why we are sharing fish recipes." When December came, a tall Christmas tree was put up in the central hall of the building, which could also be seen from the balustrade of the second floor as the hall had no ceiling. A kind of electric music box uninterruptedly playing Christmas carols was next to it, and it was not turned off while the Web pianist was doing his thing. This led to an almost surreal atmosphere of clashing bi-tonality, which no one but I seemed to appreciate.
My final project was a web site for the Glia Society. When presenting it, the Photoshop teacher made some rather silly comments, such as pointing out that the contact form did not work. Of course it did not, because it was made in P.H.P. so required the site to be on a web server with P.H.P. installed, while he was merely looking at it from the compact disk on a laptop so that server-side programming would not work. He also complained that not enough members were listed as contact persons for additional information. "Just make up a bunch of names, that will make a much better impression", he said; actually he even wrote those historic words in the printed evaluation of my project and final exam. But apart from the unethicality of it, how can made-up people respond to questions from potential members?
While working on the web site in the weeks before, I had also got comments on the colour scheme. Originally I had made it black with gold, but the teachers said it looked like a porn site that way. So I remade everything in yellow, green, and red. Another recurring observation of the teachers was that my programming excelled but my visual or graphic design was bad. While this does fit my ability profile, I have been doing some photography as a hobby since 1978 and am not entirely unskilled in that area. A further project I made during the course was a small quiz dealing with current topics related to the school. "Be careful that Mr K. (the owner of the institute) does not get to see this", the shocked programming teacher warned me. I do not remember any ceremony around the web design diploma, so I suppose it was just handed to me or sent by mail.
Shortly after finishing the web design course, someone asked me to make a web site for him and paid me a fee in advance. Having seen my Glia Society site design, which he admired, he expressly gave me "carte blanche" for his project. I did my best and showed him the result. Suddenly the "carte" was not "blanche" after all; he did not like it and wanted me to change all sorts of things. Of course I refunded the money right away and abandoned the assignment; I do not want games played with me like that, I keep people to their word, and "carte blanche" is "carte blanche".
On the whole I have good memories of this school, and in the years after the courses, I have run, walked, or cycled by it quite often, for instance in 2005 and 2006 when I was training for the Oirschot heath marathon and Cooijmans Canal Run, respectively. Up and down to the Web college along the canal was 35 kilometres, an ideal marathon training distance for a Sunday morning. Some years later, in 2009, television program RADAR again had an episode about the school, this time concerning the "Stewardess academy" that then resided within its doors. A whole flight of stewardesses in full regalia appeared on television with various complaints, and meanwhile a social medium called "Hyves" had come up where they formed a group to further vent their dissatisfaction.
Some months after finishing the web design course, just as I was considering studying informatics at a university, I saw an announcement of a project where people looking for work in informatics could take a free course in network administration. I found out I qualified for that, and got the choice between a Microsoft network certificate and the Cisco Certified Network Associate degree. I chose the latter because it was said to be harder and more technical. This course had two modules: first CompTia Network+ as an introduction (without examination) and then the actual C.C.N.A. with computer-based examination; my first experience with computer-based testing, not counting a few computer-based tests I had already created myself in the past few years (one example is the quiz hyper-referred to above). The classes required almost daily attendance and signing a book to prove one's presence, but I managed to explain that I did not function well in groups and could study much better on my own; thus I was granted permission to attend only two days a week instead of four or five.
The teacher was a (former) Integrated Services Digital Network engineer, and most of the course contents was totally new to me, as was the water cooler in the canteen of this institute; I had not seen such a thing before. On 2 November 2004 when we were having lunch there, one of the students entered saying, "They have murdered Theo". This was the day of the assassination of film maker Theo van Gogh by a Muslim extremist. There were twelve students including me, and most had already been working in informatics and wanted to extend their expertise. In the classroom, everyone had a tower computer standing on the floor next to one's desk (with a Windows operating system) and in the back of the room was a rack of Cisco routers and switches, to which we connected with Ethernet cables. The routers were accessed via a command line, there was no graphical user interface. After the CompTia Network+ introduction, the eventual Cisco matter consisted of designing internet protocol networks and programming the routers. While this was somewhat interesting and also g-loaded, it is one of those narrow learnt skills that, if not applied regularly in practice, are very soon forgotten once one has passed the examination, similar to much of secondary school mathematics, calendar reckoning (mentally computing on which weekday a certain remote date falls), mentally computing the product of two large numbers or the so-manieth root of a so-many-digit number, memorizing large amounts of information quickly, and so on. Any intelligent person can learn those feats, but if they serve no practical purpose for one, they are quickly unlearnt again. It is not intelligent to keep up a completely useless skill, hence the term idiot savant for those who do so.
For information, the course did not include any hardware-related work such as fixing a connector to a cable or opening up a router or computer. The field of hardware maintenance and repair has remained a lacuna in my computer competence until today.
When the examination came, only two of us passed the first time, and I had the highest score. Right thereafter I signed the contract with the Boston-based company that wanted me as a programmer, so I did not get to put the new network knowledge into practice. I did do a lot of programming, so what I learnt in the Web college years was useful, albeit that I had greatly added to it by self-studying from books, in particular from the publisher O'Reilly, which had the best programming books according to the programming teacher of the college. I showed the contract to the people who provided the network course, and they filed this as a success, although they really had nothing to do with it since the company had found me through my web location.
As an aside I should mention that earlier in 2004, in between the web design course and the network course, I had already been in contact with another company that had found me through my web site and was interested in hiring me. This was in the Netherlands, about 60 kilometres away, and I visited them three times to talk about things. In the end it did not go through; it would have been database-related work, or more precisely, creating (programming) a system that would automatically create databases to the specifications and needs of clients of that firm. Notice that I never applied for a job at either of these two firms; they took the initiative. This was a time when personnel was in high demand in informatics, and that probably explains why there was this interest in me, and why I was able to work as a programmer for several companies more in the few years thereafter despite lacking a university degree, and why so much money could be made with offering programming and web design courses as the Web college did.
