Being a net-citizen for more than 20 years, I have profited largely from all the knowledge, tips and tricks provided by the volunteers on the net, so I find it's time to give something back to the community. And Experts Exchange is an excellent place to do so.

Now a few words about myself: I am a Norwegian living in northern Germany, where I have worked in the IT and consulting industry for the last 15 years. Initially a programmer, I have for many years concentrated on project management and executive consultancy. But I still do some leisure time programming and some data manipulation myself. The latter mostly in perl (because of the excellent regex-integration) and excel (as the multi-purpose-fix-it-all consultancy tool). I still haven't made excel do my dish-washing, though, but I'm working on it :-)

Due to a job change by 1. April 2006 I haven't contributed much here in the last months, but I hope to be more (but still irregularly) present in the time to come. You will still find me mostly in the excel and perl TAs.

My alias 'Xanius' is a hommage to my favourite city Oslo, Norway, where I lived and studied for some years. Now, what is the connection between Oslo and Xanius? Oslo was named 'Christiania' until 1924 when it got back its original, viking name. 'Christiania' was usually abbreviated to 'Xania', which is too feminine, so I turned it into the bogus masculine latin form 'Xanius'.

If you want to contact me per email, try arnulv dot rudland at gmx dot net