No, it's not French meaning 'I', it's a greeting in my native tongue and it sounds more like the English 'Oi' with a M put in front of it. We use it when we come and go or meet up. My brand is OalDamster and I'm also known by the name of Kobus Lohaim. By profession I'm a graphical designer and by nature a geek. My home is in the smalltown of Winschoten, municipality Oldambt, somewhere at the north east cost of Netherland. There I live, together with my family.
Oldambt is a water region, so yes you might see some familiar faces...
{About capt'n Jack and his mates, see: Pirates 4 Kids foundation}
My first computer experiences came from long ago. If you know what a TimeX1000 is, then you and I are probably about the same age. That little Sinclair ZX81 clone inspired me at age 14. Looking at a TV screen with huge moving pixels, only in black or white, it was amazing to play a flight sim that way. Default system had a wooping 1(!) KiloByte of RAM memory, but I had a big block of 16 KB plugged in also. Loading software took ages with the connected tape recorder. In my current GNU Linux based system a lot of those little computers could be emulated. Yes, we only use Linux over here since 2014, mostly Ubuntu. Allthough my offspring complaint at first. At age 14 there is allready a young Admin rising here.
Image TIMEX sinclair 1000 courtesy of Wikipedia, public domain
Whenever my personal challeges let me, I enjoy moving healthy outdoors. Being it walking, biking and moving forward on skeelers, or ice-skates, in the right season. No, not sports, the only competition I experience in moving healthy is the one against myself. Here in Oldambt we have a lot of variation in landscapes, with a healthy climate to match. Nature, woods, polders, fields, Dollard bay, lake Oldambt and the only thing missing seems to be mountains. All bound together by a good infrastructure. You can get all over Europe through Oldambt, on foot, by bike, by car, by boot and plane.
Scheemda, Oldambt, nearby Winschoten
Sometimes I hit my guitar and make some kind of throat noises, singing I leave to professionals. And allthough I do not 'C' that well, I do some programming now and then. Mostly hobby stuff in PureBasic, but also did some blockchain community project, a soft fork of Slothcoin. The most relaxed Crypto Fiat Valuta known to man kind. The design, creating a site and writing is the most fun part of it. Coding is mostly cursing and debugging, specially in 'C', which is cryptography in it self. Luckily there were a lot of cool community members that helped out. One thing I love about GNU Linux by the way is the easy way to make a software build.
Open Source proves that co-operation and sharing is very efficient for innovation. Even the biggest contra company moved towards Open Source and embrased it. And it seems that there is a hopefull shift towards another kind of thinking and doing. A new exciting path for humanity, our beautifull planet and everything on it. And it all starts in a dream, not being an limitless optimist, nor a borderless pessimist, but a sober realist. Sometimes surprised in pure awe by the beauty of another creature in nature.
As if miss deer was posing
Another interest of mine is the region where my family roots are: Oldambt. The language we speak, that has much in common with our German neighbours in the east and the history connected to the water. And we had a lot of that here. Many villages and smalltowns came to into excistence because there where dams build a long time ago in many of the rivers. One of the oldest and biggest diversed one was known as the Oal Aa, meaning the old water stream. Names like Termunten, Muntendam, Veendam and more are reminders of that time. And no, nobody has put a finger in a hole in any of our three dikes. If you might spot water sipping through a dike, you'd better run...
Oldambt as a region could well be connected to the Oal Aa (also written as Ae, Ee and pronounced as Ai/Oi). Meaning the major dam in the Oal, important for a lot of prosparity in the surrounding area. But this historical view is not shared by all inhabitants overhere. It is the one I'm convinced being the closest to the real story.
At lake Oldambt there is a lot to enjoy, like the Expedition Festival, in juli.
Camping, tiny-houses, sand sculptures, music, art performances and more.
Well, that is it for now. But dear fellow Steemer, one thing, about the so called 'Dutch' misunderstanding. Here in Netherland, yes it is just one, we are Netherlanders, or Netherish. Just like in England, they are English and they speak English, we are Netherish and speak Netherish, or Netherlands, if you must.
So where did that 'Dutch' come from? Well that was from a time where Nieuw Amsterdam was about to become New York. There were a lot of immigrants there, not only from Great Britain the Kingdom of Netherland, but also from Germany. And Germans call themselves: "Deutsch" in their own language. The British back then thought that they, the Germans, were Netherish, and so we became wrongly known as 'Dutch'.
And yes, we do want to buy everything cheap and sell it with a lot of profit, so maybe this baldly behaviour better be called Netherishy in the future. :-p
Kind regards from beautifull Oldambt,
Kobus
PS You can find a blog of mine in Netherish and Oaldamster dialect too.