Living in Luxembourg (Europe) with my wife and my 17 month old daughter.

Hobbies.... well, many. Most commonly practiced: chess, music (sax), music (gospel singing), programming (yes, not only as main job)... of course, they have to share the time I devote to my wife and my daughter...

The very first time was when I was 7 or 8; my neighbor's son got an Atari. Game=Boulder Dash.

A PC 25/50 MHz with DOS 5.0.

Actually, not my own one, but only borrowed, with Turbo Pascal 5 on it, I learned with 1 DATA BECKER book, many sleepless nights...just to implement utils to create windowed applications... to learn 1 year later in windows 3.1 + Delphi how easy it could have been :-)

I have a small desktop computer on my job. At home, I use my wife's laptop; my own computer has crashed... and no money to replace yet. A 10-year-old-win-98-se-box is there as print server...

I am not sure. Must have been some technical programming problem (VB6) I searched a solution for...

In short: practice.

In long: more practice.

Full length: practice every day, with some educational background about the analysis part...

I get up at 6am. During the breakfast, I scan through the ~100 – 400 mails (depends mainly on how many lounge questions I posted in :-)

Drive to my job, 8am start job. In parallel to the work, have QP (Quick Post is a program created by ameba that tracks new posts to Experts Exchange) running and posting "fire-and-forget" comments.

Somewhere between 5 and 7 pm, get back home. During dinner, scan through the emails (see above :-))

If my wife goes out in the evenings, I take care of my daughter. On the other evenings, I do my hobbies. Saturday and Sunday are more or less 100% for my wife and the daughter, doing stuff at home, shopping, visiting people, etc.

See above: more practice.

See above: more practice. Sometimes a bit of recognition of the posters, other experts, and EE itself.

There is no hard part being expert.

Well, I guess the easiest is to invite you to my EE profile ... you should see it there.

Note: There is not a single topic area of interest, so that's one of the main reasons why I am able to accumulate that much "Good Answer" emails :-)

Actually every closed question is important. I guess milestones would be the Genius status in MSSQL zone, and just now I reached the second genius level in the Database Miscellaneous zone. Another remarkable event is earning Rank #2 in the EE Hall of Fame.

That is a paradox on actually. I would refer to my profile, where I wrote a lot of stuff of how to do best.

• Write concise question text and information about the context (versions etc.)
• Avoid the "URGENT", "HELP" and similar "nonsense" titles

I think that IT will not change fundamentally within the next 10 years. Of course, more processing power/speed, bigger/faster storage, more multi-functional devices, more interface improvements, etc. After that, I dream of "Star Trek"-Stuff :-)

I am not after the title, and not after defending the title. Chances to "defend" it? Well, ask me again in 10 months :-)