About me
Career
Photography
Music
Bands
Websites
Computers
About me
My name is Joris van den Heuvel, I'm from the Netherlands. I was born in 1975. I'm 1.87m (6'2") tall, have dark blond hair and dark brown eyes. I live with my girlfriend Bianca in our own home in a small town in the South of the Netherlands. We have a dog, Bailey, and 3 cats: Gizmo, Fudge and Jezebel.
I'm a creative person. I live to make things that weren't there before, in the broadest sense of the phrase. This website is my home craft department. Other departments are photography (Fuzzphoto) and music. I'm also developing my skills building websites, and am also starting to write Windows applications.
Why's everything so fuzzy around here? Trivial as it is, it does have an origin. In my rocker days (see bands tab), I used the fuzz effect on my bass guitar extensively. Hence Fuzzbass. That, and the fact that I have very thick facial hair, and no matter how I shave, I always look fuzzy. Years ago I simply gave up, and besides the fuzz I now also wear a doorknocker beard. But there's more. For Fuzzphoto I shoot a lot of long-haired headbangers; the motion blur causes fuzzy photos. I've also built and have been using a fiber optic ring light. The thin hair-like fibers look fuzzy. So there you have it.
Use the tabs at the top of the page or the PREV/NEXT tags at the bottom to read more.
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Career
After I quit college in 1997 I took a job at Dinaf Traffic Control BV. I worked there for 6 years as an all-round technician, and apart from production, maintenance and service in the field, did some development work as well. In 2003 I switched to LMS Instruments BV, part of LMS International, to work as a test engineer at the production department assembling, testing and repairing SCADAS data acquisition systems. That didn't work out all too well, and I left in 2007. To my surprise, Dinaf were very eager to have me back after I applied for my old job, with some modifications in the job description (development and web design) and a healthy salary boost as well. So that's where I am today. I'm a field technician, hardware and firmware developer, programmer, and web developer.
Look here for more specific info on my projects for Dinaf.
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Photography
My main interest is in photography. The number of photography related projects is growing steadily and that will probably stay that way, unless I turn pro, which won't happen in the foreseeable future.
I started shooting pictures when I was a little kid. I had my own Instamatic 110 cassette camera with which I made my own holiday pictures, and later started using my parents' Praktica TL1000 and MTL3 single lens reflex cameras, using generic 100 ISO negative and slide color film. I then devoted quite some years of my life to making music, and completely abandoned photography. Until 2005, when I bought a digital compact camera capable of more than just snapshots. This marked my rediscovery of photography, and not soon after, I invested in a digital SLR camera, that was later accompanied by a Sony Alpha 700, lenses and lighting equipment to get a long lost passion going again. Nowadays, I have so much stuff it's starting to get unhealthy...
- 1987ish - Praktica MTL3 and TL1000
- 1999 - Fujifilm DX-10
- 2004 - Canon Powershot S1IS
- 2006 - Konica Minolta Dynax 5D
- 2008 - Ricoh Caplio R7
- 2009 - Sony Alpha 700
- 2010 - Sony Alpha NEX-5
- And, currently, a line-up of 10 A-mount interchangeable lenses.
For more info on the equipment, check my equipment page.
At this moment, my work focuses mainly on concerts in small venues. I'm also doing some studio shots with a dual strobe setup, and I'm dabbling around with macro shots. All product shots on the dinaf.nl website (my work place) were done by me. The website itself too, by the way 
My portfolio, as well as concert photos and many snapshots can be viewed at:
- Fuzzphoto.eu home page
- Fuzzphoto.eu concerts
- Fuzzphoto.eu studio
- Fuzzphoto.eu snapshots
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Music
My secondary interest is in music. Many of my Fuzzcraft projects are about musicians' amplification equipment. Bass guitar in particular, though I have built guitar amps too. Commercial equipment is both expensive and, in my opinion, poorly constructed. As for the latter, only top-of-the-line brands can convince me otherwise, but of course they are even more expensive. By building cabinets myself, I can choose high quality materials, and end up with a price comparable to the mid range commercial stuff. Moreover, I can make the cabinet sound exactly (well, to a certain extent) like I want to.
As said before, I mainly build bass guitar equipment. Obviously, that's because I play bass. At the moment I own 4 bass guitars and a guitar. Meet the family:
My main bass is an Ibanez Soundgear Custom 6 string. I have been playing this bass guitar since 1998, and every time I play it, I find myself humbled by the complexity of the instrument. I will probably never master it in my lifetime.
Recently (as of June 2007) I've been playing this Dean Sledgehammer Ash 5. It's much better suited for extremely fast music than the 6 string. It's good-looking too, and a whole lot cheaper, while I'm amazed by its quality and rich sound.
I also have a Samick XB5639BF 5 string fretless bass, which I never learned how to play properly. I got it as a try-out. I might record with it some time.
Still have my first bass: A Vantage 725B. Nice little 4 string. I believe I would have been able to master this bass, had I not gotten the 6 string.
And to find out guitar licks and riffs, I have a Jackson Kelly Pro guitar with a Perfomer neck. Sounds great. Real Jackson sound. Has been sitting stringless for a long some time, lazy as I am. But I've been working on restoring it to full working order.
(photo coming some day)
I started making music when I was about 8 years old. My father, a former dixieland jazz drummer, was broadening his musical interest at that time by playing the flute and recorder (he owned a tenor, alto, several sopranos and a piccolo recorder, and 2 soprano flutes, of which one made of silver, and a piccolo flute) and he got me playing the recorder too. The alto was too large for my hands (I was 8, go figure), so soprano it was for me. I used to do classical pieces with my father and attended lessons at school. After that I started playing the piano and organ, but unfortunately lost interest because I got bored with the study pieces. Then the computer era started for me when I bought my own home computer. I started composing music with very simple music trackers. First a Commodore VIC-20, later a C-64, and many years later a 486 PC on which I worked with ScreamTracker. It wasn't until I met my first girlfriend at age 16 that I grew into metal music. I started playing the guitar when I was 18. I didn't suit me well. Then I got the crazy idea to get a bass guitar, because I definitely wanted to play metal. At that time I didn't have a lot of money to spend, but I managed to scrape together the 625 guilders for a beginner's bass, a Vantage 725B. I hooked it up to my stereo and learned the basics. Just 2 years later, I started playing in bands. If I recall correctly: (press next)
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Bands I played in
| Band | Period Description |
| Monody | 1995-1997 |
| The year of my second birth was the year I initiated Monody, a doom metal band. Besides bass guitar, I also did grunt vocals. We practised in my parents' garage for some time. Then we moved to the basement of a bar, where we did our first gig about 6 months later. About a year later (and a few gigs, one at Para, where I used to work as a volunteer) the band fell apart. I'm still in touch with one of the guitarists and we've been working very slowly to build a remembrance website, and we're still trying to re-record some of the stuff we wrote back then. | |
| Solace / Ripley | 1996-2002 |
| Starting out as Solace, this band could be characterised as "singer/songwriter with a band". The lead singer/guitarist wrote the music as a singer/songwriter and we, as the band, would fill in the rest. My younger brother played the drums. The music style shifted over the years from pop to rock, and we decided to change the name of the band accordingly to Ripley (as in Lt. Ellen Ripley, the main character in the Alien movies). A handful of demos were recorded, and a few dozen gigs were played. We ran into serious trouble finding a new drummer when my brother quit. We auditioned a few, worked with a talented guy for about a year, but eventually, the band fell apart when hopes weren't met. | |
| Groozle Fuzzgig | 1997-2002 |
| One of the guitar players in Monody and me fired up Groozle Fuzzgig, in which I also did rock vocals. Again, my younger brother played the drums. Groozle Fuzzgig had a stoner/speedrock/groovy metal kinda style. We released a demo "Supercharger 2000" in 2000, but never got around to actually spreading it. The band fell apart in 2002. The 2 guitar players started Daytona Super Six, and in the mean time, one of them has again moved on. | |
| Dark Rivers Flow | 2001-2003 |
| Back to the Monody roots: melodic doom rock. This band had been in existence since 1997, but when the singer quit, the band practically fell apart. The rhythm guitarist couldn't live with this and put a lot of effort in reinstating the band, replacing half the line-up in the process, including the bass player. All went well for a while, we did some gigs, we even auditioned a violinist, but again the band was plagued by setbacks and we decided to call it a day in 2003. | |
| Delain | 2002-2003 |
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Gothic rock, fairytale metal, whatsit called. The former keyboard player of Within Temptation, having overcome Pfeiffer's disease, recruited musicians for his band Delain. We did some rehearsals, recorded a studio track, but it wasn't meant to be. The band leader fired the recruits, and the site was taken off-line for quite a while. Update (07-2005): something seems to be happening. Recordings have been made. None of the original recruits are part of it, and the band has been transformed into a project with a small line-up and a lot of guest musicians. Among them are Within Temptation members and two Orphanage members. Orphanage was one of the bands that shaped my interest in metal. Unfortunately they don't exist anymore, but I'm glad to see these musicians didn't completely quit the music business. Update (09-2006): the CD was released, and it has been received extremely well. | |
| Ravenstorm | 2004-2005 |
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Ravenstorm is a folk/black metal band. Although I have always been a fan of slow, melodic metal, when I met my girlfriend Bianca, I became interested in the more brutal music styles, especially atmospheric and folk-based black metal. Ravenstorm's former bass player quit at just the right moment However, the Ravenstorm guys decided, after about six months, that we didn't really connect. That made perfect sense, because they weren't interested in going on stage at all, which is a driving factor for me.
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| Fenris | 2005-2007 |
| Fenris plays viking black metal. At times blindingly fast, at other times atmospheric, but always melodic. Prior to me entering the band, they had released two albums, both of which received good reviews in both paper and on-line magazines. The Fenris website, which I built, has some of those reviews on it, as well as 5 downloadable album tracks. There's also a web store, where folks can get their hands on all recorded material and some band related merchandise. After 2 years of full blast and 17 shows, they decided to part ways, for reasons still unclear to me. | |
| Project | some day |
| I'm done with making music in bands. I'm forging plans for my first one man project, bearing the preliminary name Anthracite monody. I'll be playing bass guitars, guitars and synthesizers, an advanced drum sequencer will provide the rhythms, and vocals I'm not set on yet, but there will be grunts. It'll have doom elements, there's gonna be a little groove to it, some blast beats as well, a few viking influences, and a bit of bombast. That's all I can say for now. It will happen, some day... |
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Websites
The websites I have been building in the past few years are becoming worthy of an addition to this page. I went from a single Frontpage-built homepage at my ISP to my own domain on a fully equipped webserver, and am now using an offline content management system to generate the HTML pages, and add in some javascript and PHP as well.
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Fuzzcraft.com - This website |
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Fuzzphoto.eu - My photography website |
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Fuzzbass - Bass guitar amplifier knowledge base |
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Dinaf.nl - My employer's website was rebuilt from scratch, which has made a huge improvement in the way we present ourselves to our customers. |
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Monody - A memorial site for my first band. Sitting in the freezer due to a complete lack of time. I did register the Monody.nl domain. |
Credits
- The comments system and mySQL database handler were written by Christiaan Stegeman, a friend of mine.
- The sliding effects in the projects column, and text area on this and some other pages, was done with MooTools.
- The zoom effect on many of the project photos was done with HighSlide, made by Torstein Hønsi.
- The slide show on the Scandisplay page was done with MonoSlideShow, made by Monokai.
- Dean Edwards' incredible javascript libraries make my websites work in the most flawed web browser to date: Microsoft Internet Explorer.
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Computers
OK, the time has come to admit that I'm a computer nerd. Ever since I was 10 years old, I have played and worked with computers. As a kid I spent all my pocket money and savings on a second hand VIC-20, and a few years later, when they were being dumped, I got a C64 and a couple years later ended up with several of those and the accompanying peripherals. It's gotten worse ever since.
| Year | Platform Description |
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| 1985 | Commodore VIC-20 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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I was ten years old, my bother had been playing with it for 2 years, and was moving on to the C-64 himself, so I got his hand-me-down VIC-20, including the Datasette tape unit. I had a nerd friend and we spent whole afternoons developing software that we thought would make the world a better place . My grandparents gave me a huge old black and white TV, that was later replaced with a smaller portable TV of my own. I still have the VIC-20.
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| 1987 | Commodore 64 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| In 1987, Commodore wasn't doing so well, and the C64 was up for grabs at the local discounters. Still, it took all my savings and an empty bank account to get one. I dug deep and did some real advanced programming in those days. I got fluent in machine language and made a few graphic demos, that used every last drop of processor power to wave around bitmaps and draw oscilloscope graphs of music waveforms. I ended up with several C64s and floppy drives. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 1989 | Acorn Electron | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| I really can't remember why I got this mini home computer, but it must've been because it was cheap. My first and only bad bargain I think. This system was so lean on resources, in order for you to do any work on it, you had to spend twice the amount of money of the original purchase to get extensions. It had an apalling amount of RAM, no native connector for a storage device, and the graphic chip was very difficult to work with. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 1992 | 286/12 PC | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| My parents decided they needed a family PC and shelled out quite a lot of cash to get this PC. It had a 20 megabyte hard drive and an amber monochrome text monitor. I got a copy of ScreamTracker and built a DIY printer port D/A converter, which marked the beginning of music production for me. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 1995 | 486/100 PC | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Originally installed with Windows 3.11, but bought for one purpose only: to run ScreamTracker with a RAM stuffed Gravis Ultrasound audio card. The same year I initiated my first band, Monody, and the rest is history (well, at least for me ). This PC had 16 MB of RAM, a 256 kB Trident graphics card, an 850 MB hard drive, to which I later added a 4 GB bigfoot, a huge, cheap but slow 5.25" drive.
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| 2000 | Celeron/566 PC | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Five years later, the 486 had difficulties keeping up with me, so I upgraded to a Celeron 566 MHz machine with a 15 GB hard drive and 128 MB of RAM. It allowed me to enter the Internet, play DivX movies and do a bit of gaming. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 2002 | Compaq iPAQ 3970 Pocket PC | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| I got this nifty hand held PC from a shop clearance, where it had been a demo model. I tried to use it as a carry-around-the-house internet browser, but the bluetooth connection is incredibly slow by design, so I only use it as a photo viewer and E-book reader. Not much harm done, it was dirt cheap. Good as new though. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 2003 | Celeron/2400 PC | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| My previous computer's motherboard had been acting up with frequent and unexpected hard resets, so I upgraded the guts with a new motherboard, a 2.4 GHz Celeron CPU, 512 MB RAM, 80 GB harddrive and Radeon 9200 graphics card. I got an M-audio Delta-66 to replace the Gravis Ultrasound and I thought this would set me up for home studio music production. Unfortunately, the horsepower of this setup maxed out long before I reached the number of audio tracks I had in mind for my project, so I had to go back to the tracker composer, causing me to never get any real work done. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 2006 | Dell Latitude P450 Notebook | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Another hand-me-down, from work this time. I was the only one interested in this six-year-old, battery-less, used-up notebook so it was auctioned at my opening bid of 30 euros. The notebook allowed me to work on this, and other websites during two holidays. Now, it sits in its bag, refusing to boot. It's a hardware problem and I'm not willing to put much effort in it to revive it. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 2008 | Athlon X2 5400 PC | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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This is my current desktop PC:
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| 2008 | Samsung NC10 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| So the Dell notebook died quietly, but I still wanted to be able to sit back on the couch and do some computing, and something to take with me on holidays. Portability had to improve as well, so I got a netbook. Perfect for light duty and no need to plug into the wall so often. Quite useful as a home theatre system, if you don't need 1080p. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 2010 | Neoware CA10 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| A Neoware CA10 thin client running Uniform Server acts as a home and web server. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 2011 | Lenovo Thinkpad Edge 15 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| My girlfriend uses a Lenovo Thinkpad Edge 15 (Intel Core i3 380M, 4 GB RAM, 500 GB HD). |
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