About the editor

Please note: This entire system is written by individuals in their spare time and without any official or commercial support. Having said that we will continue to do our best on this collection of pages, just don't mail me and demand something to be included like I'm some bureau :)

Name Gudmundur Helgason Nationality Icelandic
Age 53 years Residency Iceland
Sex Male


Occupation
Business process (BPM) expert, last two stints have been for a large insurance company and a large bank. Very fun and useful projects. Have held a few presentations on the topic.

Why did you start uboat.net?
I'm not sure honestly. I think it's just something from my youth seeing at 5 years of age footage from the cod-wars between Iceland and Britain. The U-boats have always fascinated me and I'm not sure why. Seeing no U-boat related pages online back in 1995 I started this site and it has really snowballed since.

How do you develop the pages?
I work at home with my dual monitor Intel Core 2 machine using various software such as Photoshop, Illustrator and various custom tools.

The programming environment is Visual Studio 2005 and SourceSafe to edit my PHP, SQL and XHTML/CSS code on top of my MySQL database server. My mailbox is something I have to look into at least once every day just to keep up with the flow.

Lot of material is submitted to the site and I have to check it the best I can of course. That's why some things might be slow to appear on the site. The uboat.net to-do list (rarely written down, more of a mental list) is also something that has a high priority as we still have lots of things to do and one needs to have a plan.

Do you correspond with former U-boat men?
Yes, and their relatives from time to time. I do not wish to bother them and the info I have now will do for a long time. I'd love to chat with some of them of course should the chance arise.

The life story so far ...

I am a 53-year old male residing in Reykjavík. I was born on Nov. 28 1970 at 2150hrs in Siglufjörður (northern tip of the country) and there I stayed until I was 17 when I moved south along with my family.

I've studied computers for a few years, including some programming and some graphics but mostly management and effective usage.

I spent roughly 2 years working at sea (including 2 patrols in the Barents Sea).

University Studies

Starting during the fall of 2005 I've been studying Business Administration at the Reykjavik University. I graduated on Jan 17 2009 as BSc. This is done alongside my work and uboat.net and our new son born on 22 Dec 2008 (flickr page).

Hobbies include

Digital photography

This is a small Flickr site the only one I am really doing, see "University studies" above.

Former hobbies include
Techno fiction (Tom Clancy, Greg Iles, Payne Harrison), fantasy books (Douglas Adams, Pratchett, Dean Koontz), History, WWII, military history, various technological items, bicycling, sailing, roller coasters (which I travel to ride on, slight addiction).

I used to play lead guitar for some years, but that is over now. Music interests include Metallica (I used to have Iceland's biggest collection of their recordings), Queensrÿche (their older work, not the crap of today), Mike Oldfield, Nigel Kennedy, and various others. The German band Rammstein is something I love to listen to (and watch) :)


Where is the photo?
People have been bugging me for a photo and I will get one very soon. (I have only been saying this for a few years or so so that must be true! :)


Getting in touch with me
You can e-mail me of course, just please read this page first in order to make your letter more efficient, or possibly I'm not the best person to mail your request / comments.