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PPK: the real story

Now that Andy Clarke has shown the courage to throw his true biography out into the open, I've decided that I can't keep silent any more. I know that some people will not believe my real story, and that others will ridicule me for it, but Andy's set a noble example that should be emulated.

So without more ado, here's my official, authorized, unadulterated biography:

PPK (Peter-Paul Koch) was born in 970 as the first son of a moderately prosperous farmer who grew brittleberries for the Count of Holland's court. He was assumed to inherit his father's farm one day, but for the disturbing set of visions and prophecies that started to plague him from about his fifteenth birthday onward.

In these visions, he saw a brave new world where everybody would be connected to everybody else and live (and die) happily ever after, except that hitherto unknown entities named "browsers" would try their best to separate this new world into several subsections and rule them with an iron hand.

Initially nobody was really worried by these visions; such things had happened before to other villagers, and they'd turned into competent brittleberry cultivators afterwards.

However, when, on St. Brendan's day, 989, he went into a propethic fit on the village square in plain view of visiting officials from the Count of Holland's court, and started to scream details on "DOM compatibility", "event handler registration", and "cross-browser issues" that nobody understood but everybody assumed to have Satanic connotations, it became clear that he really belonged in the clergy.

Hence his father sent him off to the monastery at Egmond, where, after several exorcism sessions, he joined as a monk. His propethic visions didn't leave him, though; in fact, they inspired him to write the "Book of Browsers", which in 994 he offered to the Bishop of Utrecht, claiming it was a lost canonical book of the Bible—a claim that was finally refuted by the Council of Duivendrecht, 1027.

From that moment on his brother monks started to distrust him. When he claimed his scribbles and notes could be read by anyone in the world who owned an "Internet connection", and another exorcism had no apparent result, he appeared before an ecclesiastical court, was tried, condemned, and turned over to the worldly authorities for execution. He was burned as a heretic on St. Timothy's day, 997.

When he appeared before St. Peter, it turned out that an angel had made a major administrative error and had accidentally allowed PPK to be born exactly 1,000 years too early. After several eternities of wrangling between branches of the Heavenly bureaucracy, he was put 1997, where he immediately became a Web developer and his life took the boring turn detailed on his CV page. (Pre-1997 entries in this CV are a polite fiction for the benefit of those who won't believe the real story.)

Nonetheless, he occasionally longs back to the time, now more than a millennium ago, where he was the only one to know the truth, even though he couldn't do much with it.

(Incidentally, the angel who'd made the mistake was sentenced to life as an American televangelist.)

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