About Jure

Some early pictures for the start... These were taken in 1970ish.


I live in a small town in eastern Slovenia named Konjice. I've lived here for my entire life, with the exception of my student days at the University, when I'd lived in Ljubljana for four years. I also lived there from 1995 to 1997, when a job change required this. Perhaps I should also add my numerous trips abroad, especially to the USA: if I add up all the time I've spent on my nine trips there, it comes up to about a year of living in the States.

This picture is from August 1985. I was 17 at the time, just finished high school and went to the University.
I was born in 1968 and had a pretty straightforward and not too exciting childhood and upbringing. In contrast with now diminishing brain capacity, I used to be quite a smart kid those days, so much that I skipped a grade in primary school. We had 8 years of primary school back then (it's 9 years nowadays), and I went from the 6th grade directly to 8th, bypassing the 7th. I then went on to win a national competition in mathematics for the 8th grade students, even though I was a year younger than other competitors.

The high school and university went by pretty smoothly for me. I got my Bachelor's degree in computer sciences and began working in 1992. By that time, I had been dealing with computers for about ten years already. It all started when I was 14, in 1982, when I got one of the first personal computers available, the Sinclair ZX81. I learned a lot using it and began programming in BASIC and assembler for the Z80. I soon upgraded to a much more powerful machine, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. After that, the next step was the Atari 1040 STF, which was a really powerful beast with excellent M68000 microprocessor, 1MB of RAM, good graphics and great sound. I have learned many other programming languages soon: Pascal, Fortran, PL/1, C and an obscure thing called MOBOL (MOhawk Business Oriented Language). Besides, I did my share of programming in Assembler for Z80, M6800, M68000 and Intel 80x86 processors.


A picture from Hawaii, taken in June 1996.

On the slopes of the mighty Haleakala mountain on Maui, the altitude is around 2000 m. The summit of Haleakala is on 3050 m.
My family didn't travel much when I was a kid. We even spent each summer holiday in exactly the same place on the coast of Croatia, year after year. We also did not do much of the outdoor activities, so it was a bit boring childhood indeed. I spent long hours reading the books about faraway places, dreaming to go there once. So I guess it's understandable that I began travelling extensively as soon as I started earning money. I first visited most of the European countries, and then also went to the USA and to Africa several times.
I also began dealing with the outdoor activities in my teens. First bicycling, which I've taken very seriously for many years. Then I began climbing and hiking in the Alps. Finally, I added jogging, which is what I mostly do now. These physical activities are equally important for the mind, as they are for the lungs, the heart and the muscles. After coming back from a mountain hike or jogging, I feel completely calm, fulfilled and with self-confidence pumped up to extreme levels.

I usually climb in the Alps, but my highest peaks are not from there. The highest I've been is Mt. Kenya (Pt. Lenana), and the next one is Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii (but I've driven a 4WD car to the top of this one, so I suppose it doesn't really count...).


Two pictures from the USA.

Left: In Philadelphia with a good friend Mirza. July 1999. The 2CV is a very unusual sight on the streets of Philadelphia (or any other American city...).

Right: With Susan and Adam in Sierra Nevada foothills, California. April 2001. Taking a ride in a Citroen DS estate.
Even though I did a lot of programming in various languages during my first ten years of dealing with computers, I have completely stopped doing it when my professional career begun. Instead, I focused on Intel-based computers' hardware and network operating systems. First it was Novell NetWare, starting with version 2.20 and then on to 3.11, 3.12 and 4. Next it was OS/2, versions 3 and 4. Finally, Microsoft slowly beat up other competitors, so I began dealing with Windows NT4, 2000 and 2003. Unix/Linux was also there from time to time, but only in the recent time I put a bit more effort into mastering Linux. I also worked with Fibre Storage products quite a lot.


Two climbing pictures.

Left: Climbing Ojstrica in 1997.

Right: Descending from Triglav in 2001.
The nicest job I had so far was being an instructor for technical courses about IBM Intel-based computers, especially the Netfinity and xSeries servers, and how to integrate them with various network operating systems.
I was doing this from 1996 to 2002, and it meant a really great deal of travelling around Europe, and also to Africa and Middle East on occasions. And I regularly flew over to the USA to get trained myself. Unfortunately, in most cases I got my training in Raleigh NC, which I find a very uninteresting place. Good for professional career, but not too interesting for a visitor inclined to the great outdoors.


A picture taken on the west coast of Ireland in August 2001.
I currently deal with the technical support for the Wintel platform and I cover the Central and East Europe region. I like doing it, and the best thing is that I can handle most of the cases remotely, which allows me to work from my home.

I got the chance to work on several interesting projects with international teams of experts, and as a result we wrote technical books about our experiences. I've done four such projects so far, and the books are available on the web:


A few pictures with Mojca follow. These two are from January 2003.
In 2002, we got our first child Mojca. This changed my life considerably and shifted priorities quite a lot. I never was the one to put career above all other things in life: working for living has just been an unavoidable evil for me. Actually quite a distraction from the things and activities I *really* enjoyed doing: hiking, climbing, travelling...
Mind you, this does not mean that I approach my job duties half-hearted - I always try to do my best and don't mind working long hours to get the job done properly.
Now that we have kids, they are of course the priority. Because of this, I took the entire year off in 2004, as our second kid was born on January 22nd, 2004.


These pictures were taken in April 2003. The left one is from the coast of Croatia close to Porec, and the right one from Ljubljana ZOO.

I find Slovenia a great place to live. For an outdoor enthusiast who wants to have an active life, it's a really good place to be. The Alps offer excellent hiking and climbing, the wonderful Adriatic coast is just two hours away from my house (by car), and more than half of the country surface is forested. The country is also very centrally located between some major European points of interest:


Left: Another one from Croatian coast.

Right: Me with our new kid Miha a day after his birth. January 2004 in Postojna hospital.

But some criticism would also be in order: this is not a very cosmopolitan nation, many people virtually only know their own backyard and judge the whole world based on that. Foreign tourists usually don't feel this, because the people here are often very kind and welcoming to visitors from abroad (especially because they are bringing in money). But they are not always equally kind to each other. Our society is becoming more and more competitive, dog-eat-dog manners are becoming the norm.
It is also a country with aggressive driving and a high road fatality rate (the average road fatality rate per capita is almost three times as high as in the Netherlands, which is among the safest European countries in this respect).

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