Ishtar's Homepage

Hi people! I'm Ishtar, in real life referred to as Henri Karrenbeld, but to some people I am still known as 'Ishtar'.

In case you already know most of this stuff, the newest info update is here, down at the bottom of the page.

There's also news about Albion MUD.

Upon 'Ishtar'

The name 'Ishtar' might suggest that I'm female, which in fact I am not, as you can see from my picture above. I got myself this net-alias when I needed a good name for an elvish character in an AD&D roleplaying compaign. Thinking that 'Ishtar' sounded nicely Elvish I chose that one. I took the name from a character featuring in several books of the SF writer Robert A. Heinlein. However 'Ishtar' also shows up in the following connotations:

A character in a book by Heinlein (female)
A horrible desert adventure movie
A shoarma bar in Hengelo (a city in the east of the Netherlands close to Enschede which is the city where I lived before I moved to Utrecht in 1999)
An ancient goddess (of fertility and natural decay, one might say: "Sex and Death" (female))
One of the mother goddesses of witchcraft (female)
A band called 'Ishtar Band' which plays Syrian music

Upon me

Until februari 1996 I was a PhD student in Chemical Technology at the University of Twente at the department of Chemical Physics, which has been absorbed later into Computational Chemistry and has recently be renamed into "Computational Dispersion Rheology"

I didn't finish my thesis, but in october 1997 I started on a special study where 4 years of theory of computer science were compressed into 1 year of study. All this was organized by the local (un)employment office and the Hogeschool Enschede. Also, they don't really exist anymore and are called "Saxion Hogescholen" these days.

Then, after having finished the year of study, I was more or less a regular student of the school and achieved my degree in computer science (a BSc) with the CS department in the spring of 1998.

So, after I'd finished my study the Hogeschool Enschede and received my professional degree in software engineering, so now I am entitled to the degree of Bachelor in Information and Communications Technology in addition to my previous degree of a Master Of Science in Chemistry. Consequently, on April 1st 1998 I've started my new job as a software engineer with the company Xirion. Again, they don't exist anymore; They've been taken over and been incorporated in Solidium. You can reach me there at henrikar@xirion.nl or hkarrenbeld@solidium.nl.

We need a much more recent picture.

If you like to do some electronic conversation with me, send me Email on this address (H.Karrenbeld@a1.nl). If you want to be sure only I can read your messages get PGP and use one of my PGP public keys.

One of my hobbies if playing MUD, I can be found as 'Ishtar' on this MUD frequently:

  Albion      ---- A mud in Iceland.

We had a Summer 2000 (S2K) meeting in California in August 2000. And there's some scans of that.

More pictures: Scans of visiting South Eastern Australia (Victoria).

Albion has it's own web page these days.

Pictures of some of the people on Albion Mud, and of some of the people that played on another Icelandic Mud, which is now down unfortunately, called Nameless Mud can be found here (Albion) and here (Nameless). Unfortunately the admins of the site seem to have taken down the Nameless picture archive.

You might want to have a look at some Web pages of other MUDders of Albion. This list has shortened and shortened lately, since MUDs have become less popular in general, in favour of ICQ/MSN and whatever other systems there are to chat on the Internet.

Albion Update (2009)

Unfortunately Albion went down in 2003, but in August 2009 Vanyel and Tazz managed to get Albion back up, running at Tazz' place. Available at telnet://albion.philtanner.com:4000/. We're still working at it. But most of it is functional. We don't have a complete new 'Management' yet.

Update (2003)

I still work for Solidium, that has subcontracted me to KLM for over a year now. I work in one of the groups being responsible for the middleware in the KLM Webfarm, called "WebTools".

More recently, I started a Weblog at LiveJournal. Most of the postings there from me are 'Friends-only', so you'll need an account and have me add you to my friends-list.

Update (2007 2008 2009)

So, Solidium, was bought lock, stock and barrel by Ordina, but I'm still subcontracted to KLM, still with the "Webtools" group. For ~~4.5~~ 5 over 6 years now already I'm doing lots of Aikido, which resulted in me being ~~2nd~~ ~~1st kyu~~ ~~(that's comparable to a "blue belt" "brown belt", for systems that do coloured belts, which we don't)~~ black belt (1st dan) these days.

Monolith

And there's internet BBS'es; They're cool places! Visit some of them if you feel like chatting. You can find me on Monolith BBS sometimes, and often on Global Village BBS. Monolith can be reached using telnet. Further instructions are given at the login prompt. Global Village also gives telnet access

Some of my friends also have homepages on this server: (or at least these days they have their redirects still running *hmpf*)

,,^..^,, Lynx friendly pages! Created by Henri Karrenbeld <H.Karrenbeld@a1.nl>