About me

My name is Maarten van Gompel, and on the internet I go by the nickname proycon. I am a Dutch guy and I was born on the 15th December 1982. I have lived in the Netherlands all of my life and nowadays live with my boyfriend in Eindhoven, a city in the south of the country.

As you might want to put a face to all this text you are reading, below you will find a small collection of photos of myself:

Some photos of myself proycon

I have a wide range of interests, and my homepage offers me a platform for sharing these interests with the rest of the world. I am first of all a language enthousiast. I love to learn and speak as many languages as possible. Besides Dutch and English, I can manage myself to a reasonable extent in Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Italian and Esperanto, and also a very little bit in Russian, Chinese and Arabic. A second great passion of mine is computer programming and webdesign, and I am a major Linux & open-source advocate. In my work and education, I seek to find a synthesis between my interests in language and technology. I am also greatly interested in Buddhism and philosophy. And like everybody else, I of course also enjoy music, and I myself play the piano. You can read more about my various interests in the section of my homepage dedicated to it.

Since July 2009 I officially ceased being a student. First I obtained my bachelor degree in Cognitive Artificial Intelligence, at Utrecht University. Then I studied Human Aspects of Information Technology at Tilburg University, a study focussing on language technology. I graduated and obtained my master's degree in July 2009. I'm now employed as a scientific programmer in language technology. In addition to this personal homepage, I also have a professional homepage dedicated to language technology. It may be worth checking out if you too have an interest in this field.

As you could already read in my introductory text, I am gay and have a boyfriend. His name is Hans, we met in January 2001 and have been together ever since. Below you can find some photos of him:

My boyfriend Hans proycon

Hans has a homepage about exotic gardening in the Netherlands, which is his number one passion. If you want you can visit his website about palm trees and other exotic plants, including pictures from our own backgarden. The site is only available in Dutch however.

We live together in a nice house in the city of Eindhoven:

Our house proycon

We love our animals. For many years we had a cat, Flekje, who unfortunately passed away of old age in July 2009. In addition, we have birds, fishes, and turtles. Considering that showing pets is a typical function of a personal homepage, here they are:

Flekje proycon

Photos of our pets proycon