Reported by Typhlosion on Mon 19 Jan 2009 20:23:25 UTC
Section: PKMN.NET Meet-Up

24!

This news item is more than 45 days old. Updates are unlikely and newer information may already be available.

It's the 19th of January! And we all know what that means don't we!

That's right! It's the anniversary of Indira Gandhi becoming the first female Prime Minister of India!

Oh. And this dutch bloke who moderates the forums was born as well.

But yes, back to Indira Gandhi. She was born in November 1917 and in 1999, she was voted the greatest woman of the past 1000 years in a poll carried out by BBC News.

What's that? The dutch guy? Oh go on then.

Jeroen te Strake was born on 19th January 1985 in The Netherlands (which should never be called Holland, since that's like telling Scottish people they live in England, or something). Minutes after being born he was already shouting at the midwives "Ik wil sommige kleurpotloden!" (according to Babelfish) and two weeks later he coded his first computer program using VisualBasic (if it existed in those days). At six months he was successfully debating baby food with his mum and by his first birthday he was designing his first computer game. Unfortunately for him, in an amazing coincidence, Nintendo had released an identical game, Super Mario Bros, just months earlier, rendering his work pointless. There was tears involved - mostly coming from Nintendo after Baby Jeroen had finished with them. The experience was damaging though, and Jeroen gave up on designing his Mario games.

Speaking as probably the person who knows Jeroen the best on this site, he's had a bad year. I'd go as far as saying 2008 was a terrible year all round really, for a lot of reasons. But it's wrong to say it was all negative - we had a fantastic week in London (booklet, window) and Manchester United won the Champions League (I care, so he does, whether he likes it or not). He's also continued his astonishing amount of site coding work, continuing to improve Dex, coding the secret Project PorygonZ and Project Doduo, and of course, helping to relaunch the new version of PokéMole. All this while he's asleep as well - you should see his work output when he's awake.

Jeroen, we all feel you're overcome your recent struggles fantastically well, and we hope 2009 is the year that will give you the break you deserve. So much so, we're all now going to say how fantastic you are by posting a comment below, before heading off to the forums to post even more messages. After all, he's behind the forums as well people!

Happy Birthday Jeroen!

Digg this! | del.icio.us | Reddit | Stumble Upon | Facebook

Related news items

• Happy Birthday Peter!
• Happy Birthday Lottie!
• Happy Birthday Webbz!