When I was born at 10:00 p.m. on the 20th of March, 1980 in Traralgon, a town not far from Melbourne in Australia, I was given the name Benjamin Gerard van Poppel. The van Poppel bit is my last name, and comes from a rather cold place called Holland, known by lesser beings as the Netherlands. Actually, Poppel is a town which was once in Holland, but suddenly became Belgian given to a change in borders a certain number of centuries ago. My Dad emigrated from Amsterdam with his family in 1957 at age five. My Mum is of primarily Anglo-Celtic stock, with a bit of Italian thrown in when one married another of her ancestors.
Back to the blessed day, one-and-twenty years ago. Not long had I been in the world when it was ascertained that I was blind. How blind I was nobody knew for sure. In fact, as a young child I had both colour and light perception (although not enough to read or write print of any description). This gradually waned until I was probably about ten or eleven when it quit altogether. Click here for a one-stop wealth on info about blindness and blind people.
I was first educated at Glengarry Primary School from 1986-1992, and Traralgon Secondary College from 1993-99. I spread the workload of the final year over two years, since I was studying subjects like Maths and Chemistry which are time-consuming to replicate in Braille.
Along the way I had cultivated various interests. My interest in languages was nurchered from a young age. I still remember being intrigued at how my grandparents spoke and still remember the day I realised that different groups of people spoke different languages.
Music was also a passtime I enjoyed. I took up the violin at five. When I was twelve I discovered Metal and its various offsets. When I was thirteen, wanting to persue a more "cool" kind of music and full of a teenager's resentment at being told what to do, I quit playing the violin and took up drums. I picked it up again at the end of 1996, when there was no longer the parental pressure to do one thing or the other.
My musical tastes continue to be quite broad. Baroque (Bach, Corelli and Vivaldi), classical (Mozart), Jazz/fusion (Weather Report, John McLaughlin, Miles Davis), Heavy/Progressive metal (iRON mAIDEN, tESTAMENT, dREAM tHEATER, jUDAS pRIEST) AND dEATH/bLACK mETAL (cRADLE OF fILTH, dIMMU bORGIR, dEICIDE, mORBID aNGEL) ARE THE MORE PROMINENT GENDRES. cOUNTRY i WILL NOT TOUCH. dITTO FOR SO-CALLED "EASY-LISTENING MUSIC". As far as playing music goes, I dabble in most of the styles I'm interested in, with varying degrees of success. I play sundry small instruments like the recorder and the humble tin whistle, and I pretend to sing on the side. I also played in a local Black Metal Band, Vahrzaw, between 1994 and 1996. We played a couple of local shows and released a demo that I believe got fairly widely distributed. I may put some of our material on the web in mp3 format, rough and amateurish as it is; we thought it was pretty good at the time.
I also try to tinker with computers. I use Linux/Emacs as my preferred platform. I'm no great hacker by any stretch of the imagination. I'm relatively well versed in Emacs Lisp but have until now bawked at learning C (although it's definitely on the agenda). I'm caught between wanting to know what I'm doing and wanting to not have to stuff around to do it.
Now for the self-praise garbage that is manditory on most personal webpages. I've had several awards over the last few years, most of them school-oriented. Chief among them are Dux for 1999 at Traralgon Secondary College, various Academic Excellence awards in Languages Other than English, Latrobe Valley Citizen of the Year in 1999 and Cardinal Nox scholarships in both semesters of 2000. I was also awarded a scholarship in 1999 in memmory of Rebecca Ryan, a budding blind musician who sadly lost a long battle with cancer in 1992.