what’s all this then?

trying to figure out what track7 is all about? the short answer is it’s my personal website, and i am misterhaan. as it’s a personal site, i put whatever i want on it. you’re likely to come across various things i’m interested in or have created.

track7

track7 has been on the internet since 1996, though back then it was “the site of cool stuffs” since i hadn’t come up with a real name. since most good names have at least two meanings, you can bet track7 has just that: the album fathom by mortal has 7 seconds of silence for its 7th track, then the hidden track at the end starts with “welcome to track seven,” which for a time i had actually play when you first visited track7. the other meaning is that at the time i chose the name i had noticed that on most albums i listened to, the seventh track was at least a very good song if not the best on the album. i guess i wanted to be the best site on the internet, or at least a very good one :).

track7 started out on free hosting and spent many years costing me nothing at all to keep up. for a long time track7 was a subdomain of various free hosts, with a redirection service pointing track7.vze.com pointing to the latest one as i had to move due to free service ending or me wanting more features. eventually i started to have money and so started paying for hosting and also bought the domain track7.org (at the time both track7.com and track7.net, the one i really wanted, were taken). i’ve had track7.org for long enough now though that if i did get one of the others i’d just redirect it here.

track7 is a large site with varied and somewhat unrelated contents while most of the internet is more focused sites. parts of track7 would probably do better on their own, but since it’s a personal site it doesn’t matter how popular it gets. if people find it and something is interesting or useful that’s great, but the point of the site is for me to practice web development and have a place to keep all my stuff.

misterhaan

the name misterhaan starts with mister for a reason similar to why mr. t has the mr in front — so people have to call me mister. during high school i worked at a dairy queen and at first my nametag said “trainee” under my name, which i thought was a nice excuse for being a little slow and not knowing much. once i did know things though (even after my nametag no longer said “trainee”) i noticed people sometimes didn’t believe me when i told them we weren’t allowed to put certain toppings in blizzards. one slow day i got out the labeler and made a new label for my nametag which had “mr.” in front of my name. after that people believed whatever i told them. so the first part of the name misterhaan is for credibility and respect. the second part is a name i made up for a druid character in some old rpg i don’t play anymore. i just liked how it looks with the double a and how it sounds (it’s like han solo from star wars). i don’t like to use my real name on parts of the internet anyone can see since i’m not into the idea of some crazy person tracking me down, so you shouldn’t see much indication of who i am or where i live. if you don’t already know that stuff, you can just know me as misterhaan, or shorten it to haan if you prefer.

i have a degree in electrical engineering and work as a developer at a software company, so i’m what people typically think of when they picture a geek (though hopefully a little better looking). i know both the hardware and software sides of a computer pretty well, which is why track7 uses mostly code i personally wrote and i have been building my own computers for longer than i’ve had a website. you can download some of my software in the analag underground section. you’ll also see i sometimes post in my blog about web and desktop development. i also sometimes write up more formal guides (some sites call them tutorials) to help other people figure out how to do things that may have taken me a while to figure out.

when i do something or go somewhere interesting, i sometimes take pictures and add my favorites to the photo album. each photo has a description and / or story with it. though i don’t find the motivation to do it much anymore, i used to write short stories and have also drawn a few things. i still have my lego collection from growing up, and i started putting the stuff i’ve built on my own into ldraw to generate instructions so you can build my lego models too.

now that you know a little bit about me, why not sign in and tell me a little about yourself?