Personal information

My first name is Jørn Yngve and my last name is Dahl-Stamnes. I come from a small place called Sandnessjøen located on the coast of Helgeland in the nothern part of Norway. I was borned early in the morning on December the 7th, 1962. I got two older brothers.

During my childhood I was interrested in electrical things, chemistry and other technical related stuff. Instead of playing soccer and other games with the other kids in the street, I wanted to know how things worked (maybe that is why I hate soccer?). To find out how a radio worked, I ruined it and collected on the components. Over the years my collection of components got bigger and bigger while the number of working radios around me got smaller and smaller. After I had ruined several radios, I still had not found out how a radio worked.

As a teenager I began to get interrested in photography. On Saturdays and during the summers I worked at Ebbesen Foto (a photo shop) in Sandnessjøen. Most of my money went to buy new photo equipment and to take pictures. I also took a few pictures from sports events for Helgeland Arbeiderblad, a local newspaper. The summer of '81 my parents and I went over to the USA to visit my oldest brother, who studied at the SD School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City, South Dakota. After 2 1/2 week in Rapid City, we went for a 2 1/2 week long car trip around in the USA. During the trip we visited the desert in Arizona, the Grand Canyon, the Hoover Dam, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Fransico, St. Mount Helens (about a year after it had it's last erruption) and more. I took over 1300 (dias) pictures and a lot of black-and-white pictures during the trip.

After finishing high school, I went to Lillehammer (host of the Olympic Winter Games in 1994) to do my one year duty in the army. After three months training I was transfeared to Oslo and the Headquater Defence Command of Norway for 9 months. My work was to give information about millitary issues to the news (newspapers, TV etc.). I worked primary with distributing pictures. During my service I was on a few millitary exercises visiting war ships from UK, Canada and the US Navy. While most of the people had to sleep in cold tents located in deep snow, I had installed myself on a hotel. Nice exercise, don't you think?

After I finnished my duty year in the army, I began to study electronic at the Sør-Trøndelag College (HiST). Finally I should learn how a radio worked (without having to ruin it ). During my years at the Sør-Trøndelag College I began to get more and more interrested in computers. They was far more facinating that electronics. Thing about all those fantastic things you could do with a computer. My first computer was a Texas Instrument TI 99/4A, which I bought while I was in Oslo in the army. This was the first 16-bit home computer on the market. It cost me a fortune. At Sør-Trøndelag College they had larger machines (large in size, not in processing power) available for us. I wrote all my programs in Basic on a Nord-10 machine from Norsk Data. It's operating system was called Sintran. I continued to program on my home computer, the TI-99/4A.

I will always remember that day in the terminal room when I was trying out a bio-rythm program I had written in basic. The code was suppose to print 365 lines, each line with several characters. But after I had ran the program, nothing came out on the line-printer (I did not know much about multi-user system and spooling at that time). "It doesn't work, let's try it again" I thought, and I ran it again! At the same time as my bio-rythm program terminated for the second time, the system manager came in to the terminal room to demonstrate the new and fast line-printer for a group of people (don't ask me who!). Guess what happened? The line-printer began to print out the data from the first time I ran the program. While looking at the program on my terminal, I discovered a bug in my program that cause each 80 character long line to be split into 80 lines. Let see: 365 lines x 80 x 2 (runs), that should be about 58400 lines! For a few seconds everybody except the line-printer was silent! "Ratatatatatatatatatatatatatatatata......" was all you could hear.

When the system manager finally found out what was going on, he desperatly logged into the system and tried to stop the printer, but it took some time before he managed to do so. While he was trying to find out how to stop it, I deleted the program, logged out, silently sneaked out of the room and went home! That day I learned that sometime there is a delay in multi-user system.

After finishing my education, I got a work at the Department of Physical Electronics. My first job was to work with a VAX 11/750 machine. My work was to install software, maintain the machine, add and delete users and to do regular backup of the system. I got the job, the word VAX was only a word for me (which I could read in work adverticment). I had to learn everything about the VAX and it's operating system VMS (4.2 at that time).

I also leared how to program in Fortran, and began to write programs in Fortran. Later I also learned how to program in VAX Macro32. One of my programs use a few functions written in macro that copy itself into the VMS kernel and forced another process to execute the code at the given addresse (no, it was not a virus). It took me a few weeks and a few system crashes to make the program work. A few years later I bought a book about programming in C, borrowed a portable PC and took my Easter vacation home in Sandnessjøen trying to learn how to program in C. My first large program in C was a PC program called Bike Manager. It was a training log program for cyclists.

After a few years working with C, I advanced and began to learn C++. I bought Microsoft Visual C++ 1.0, a book about programming in C++ and began to write a new version of Bike Manager on my PC's. The new program, called Velocipede, should be written in C++ and it should work under Windows 3.1. This was my first program in C++ and my first program under Windows. After nearly one year of programming, I announced version 1.0 of the program on the net as a shareware program. I'm still working on that program and several users around the world has registered theire copy of it.

As you probably understand I'm into cycling (why should I write a program for cyclists if I din't care about cycling?). I took up cycling in 1990 after I got injured in my leg due to too much running on hard roads (mainly asphalt) with cheap shoes. At that time I rode on a heavy 5-speed "water-pipe tubed" bike. On a nice day in June 1990, I was watching the start on The Great Trial of Strength, an annual bicycle tour from Trondheim to Oslo. "I want to do the same" was my first though! Some days later I bought my first racing bike and started cycling. Well, it was a used bike, but for me it was new. And it was a new experience to ride a racing bike, which was very light compared to my old 5-speed bike.

After a few rides on my new used bike I was addicted to cycling. The next year I was one of the riders who stood on the start line ready to do the ride from Trondheim to Oslo. Click here to read the story from my first tour to Oslo. Since I got addicted to cycling I have bought several bikes. A few years later I was hired as a member of the Sør-Trøndelag Bedriftsidrettskrets' cycling commity. Our work is to organize local races/tours where people from different company sports team participate. My job is to maintain the rules and to make result list from each race. To help myself with making the list, I wrote another C++/Windows program that help me with the job.

But cycling and running are not my only sports I practice. I have also trained and played volleyball since 1989. I'm the chairman of the Sør-Trøndelag Bedriftsidrettskrets' volleyball commity. Together with a few other people, we organize the volleyball series where teams from different companies in Trondheim participate. The volleyball activity starts in September and ends in April.

During my time at the NTNU in Trondheim, I was involved with the Company Sport Team. My work is to maintain the member archive, our mailing lists and our web pages.

January 1st, 1998 I began to work at Telenor Novit, which become a part of the EDB Business Partner. I worked there for several years before I left.

... to be updated

Some pictures

• This is me. (30 kbyte jpeg)