beakandlens.com/about.md

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page	About	About Me	Some more in-depth information about me!	A page with information about me, Marvin Johanning.	true	/assets/images/me.jpg	My taking a photo of a White Wagtail	300	350	Welcome to the about page! Here you will find some more in-depth information about myself and this website. If you are confused as to the design of the website, you will also find some answers here!	/about/

General

Hello there! My name is Marvin, I am 24 years old and live in Germany. My particular interests revolve around technology and language. I am the maintainer of a website dedicated to freely distributing information on the Ancient Greek language called Ancient-Greek.net. I have always found the somewhat dated things more interesting; they have more of a personality than newer things to do me, for some reason. The latter is also why I like studying ancient languages such as Ancient Egyptian and Ancient Greek. Though lately, I have been unable to study much due to my having started a full-time job.

I don’t have any scholarly background, though, and am currently working as an IT-Systemsadministrator (IT system administrator) at a company in Halle (Westf.), Germany. There, I work in customer support, coordinating the deployment of technicians to solve Internet and TV problems, solving customers’ technical issues using remote maintenance of servers and other technical equipment, and I also coordinate the deployment and setup of our new LoRaWAN network. I also responsible for managing and setting up various networks.

<p>Additionally, I am a hobbyist author and have already published various books. I am also somewhat of a minimalist and I prefer things that are more minimalist and simply functional, rather than something overly bloated when it has no right to be. </p>

Languages

Personally, one of the main things I spend my time on in my free-time is learning more about languages and, at present, I am focussing primarily on Attic / Koine Greek. I know a variety of scripts and have learnt a large number of languages over the course of my life; I have not, however, learnt enough of these languages to have an actual conversation and thus, the only languages I can actually speak are German, English and Swedish.

Birding and Photography

I also very much enjoy birding and frequently go outside to take photographs of birds, record their songs and calls and create spectrograms of them and I also write down my sightings in my birding log (usually using an app to record the sightings directly “in the field”). Additionally, I write birding reports from time to time and am a member of the Nordrhein-Westfälische Ornithologengesellschaft e. V. (North Rhine-Westphalian Ornithological Society) where I try to participate in voluntary bird counting programs (currently, I am part of the AG Wasservögel) and various other activites. I am also a member of the Naturschutzbund Bielefeld.

Writing

I also thoroughly like writing things, be it birding reports or books. I have written a variety of books and a handful of them have already been published as well. I mostly write translations of Ancient Greek texts (most notably the Greek New Testament) into either English or German. I have also written and published a book on the Ancient Egyptian language and how to learn it as a beginner who has no linguistic background whatsoever. You can find more information about these two books by clicking the “Books” tab in the menu. I also run a website on Ancient Greek (Ancient-Greek.net) where I publish a lot of translations and other information on the language as well.

Other

I also enjoy travelling very much, even though I have not visited that many countries or places yet because of lack of money. Besides the language and travelling stuff, I also enjoy trying out new types of coffee, tea, wine, whisk(e)y and beer which is often accompanied by my reading a book or just listening to music (Klaus Schulze, Neuronium, Tangerine Dream, Эдуард Артемьев, 冨田 勲 — you get the picture, a lot of perhaps more ambient electronic music — and just a lot of 70s and 80s in general (I especially enjoy Japanese 70s). I also highly enjoy a lot of classical music — Beethoven and Vivaldi being one of my favourites — and I also think a lot of Vapourwave is rather nice. I also do a bit of programming every now and then. The majority of my programming projects can be found on my GitHub page.