About MarkSchenk.com

About The Author

Mark is a 26 year old mechanical engineer, hailing from The Netherlands but currently living in Cambridge (UK). He is studying for a PhD in structural engineering at Cambridge University, and is a member of Clare College.

Curriculum Vitae

For more detailed information, read my Curriculum Vitae. The required username/password is provided in the dialog box. Additional information and references are available upon request.

Interests

My main online interests relate to webdesign and the fabric of the web (webstandards such as CSS, XHTML) which also brings me to another big hobby of mine, the Opera Browser. For the rest I enjoy being outdoors, listening to music, reading an occasional book and generally anything interesting that crosses my path. And that is quite a diverse range of topics, ranging from typography and linguistics to geometry, mathematics and mapmaking... and anything else I find interesting. :-)

Snapshot

Incomplete by definition and outdated the second it was written, but nevertheless an attempt....here's a snapshot of my likes, listening, watching and reading:

I like (in random order): three dimensions, reflections, perspective, old railway stations, impressionism, dictionaries, British English, balance, (strong) coffee, latin, travelling, London, watching people, the night, Cambridge, science, words, mathematics, port, cheese, freedom, gigs, Mondriaan, maps, the Tube, cuneiform, hiking, books, epilogues, British detective series, Islay whisky, flying, Amsterdamse grachten, autumn colours, badminton, narrators, polyhedra, words, hyperboloids, snow, YouTube, educational toys, lacrosse.

Listening: Josh Ritter, Tom Waits, Josh Rouse, The Jayhawks, Bright Eyes, Deelder Draait, Bruce Springsteen.

Watching (TV): Scrubs, Coupling, M*A*S*H, Ray Mears, Doc Martin, House M.D., The Inspector Lynley Mysteries, Spooks, Louis Theroux.

Watching (Film) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Magnolia, Lost in Translation, Pride & Prejudice.

Reading: Hornblower (by C.S. Forester), John Fowles, John Irving, Sherlock Holmes (by A. Conan Doyle), Simon Singh.

Picture

For the curious among ye, here is me in the fall of 2005, relaxing at several meters up in the JOTA tower.

Contact

Wish to contact me? Well, that can be arranged. Use the below e-mail address, obfuscated with powerful CSS3 techniques, to contact me.

NB: give your message a meaningful subject, or otherwise it might get lost among the truckloads of spam I receive every day...

About The Site

I have had this domain since the summer of 2002, although I already maintained a personal homepage prior to that. My website is a public extension of my personal interests, and although this mostly implies hobbies, there are also sections devoted to my studies (and in the future possibly my job). The website itself is also a hobby of mine, although the updating process tends to suffer when I'm busy with other work.

Under the bonnet

Some technical details about my website:

Editor

I write all my webpages and scripts in plain vanilla text editors such as SciTe, although my current favourite editor changes from day to day.

Browser testing

My preferred browser is Opera and I always run the latest available (beta) version. If a design works in Opera I check it in the latest stable release of Firefox and Internet Explorer 6, and make sure that the result looks acceptable. Not all features of my site are available in all browsers, but within limits I am willing to accomodate older browsers and versions. If you want to have the best internet experience, simply upgrade.

XHTML

I choose to serve the XHTML 1.0 pages as text/html instead of application/xhtml+xml, although strictly by standards it is wrong to do so. However, it makes life a whole lot easier as I don't need to add workarounds for Internet Explorer, and my scripts can become simpler as I need not bother with namespaces.

CSS

My site uses CSS 2.1 for layout (not tables, tables are only meant for presenting data, not layout), with the occasional bit of CSS3 supported by Opera. I am not much of a designer, so visually I keep it simple, but I generally I demand a lot of the browser's CSS support to obtain the desired effect.

JavaScript

When using JavaScript I try to separate behaviour from structure and try to abide by the modern JavaScript paradigms (within the contraints of my skills). In general, when a user has JavaScript turned on, this provides a better experience of my website, but it is not necessary to read the content.