I'm René Seindal, a Dane living in Venice for over fifteen years with my Venetian wife Martina and our two dogs, Stella and Giubba.
I do historical walks in Venice as History Walks Venice.
I have an M.A. in History and Italian from the University of Copenhagen and I'm an authorised tour leader (accompagnatore turistico) in English, Italian and Danish.
When at university, I became fascinated by the Sicilian mafia, which lead to a thesis, and later a book, published in Danish and English.
Almost twenty years ago I discovered sea kayaking, which quickly became a large part of my life. By some inscrutable quirks of destiny, I ended up running a kayaking business in Venice for over ten years.
I've had at least ten thousand persons on my kayak tours in Venice, working along a handful of great guides, colleagues and employees.
While it was a great experience it came to an end, and I handed the reins of the business over to other people. It is still around, but I have nothing to do with it any more.
Photography has always been a hobby of mine. In Venice I’ve tried to develop my photography further, by following a series of courses and activities to learn and grow.
One of the results is my personal photographic project Venice Street Photography.
My first line of study at university was Computer Science, and one of my first jobs was as a system administrator of the Unix servers of the CS dept., where I got a thorough knowledge of Unix and later Linux.
During those years at university I wrote GNU m4 — a re-write of the classic Unix v7 macro-processor. I hardly ever used it since, but was important back them for sendmail configurations, and it later found its way into the GNU autotools.
Consequently there are some books -- the printed GNU m4 manual -- circulating with my name on it.
Even though I graduated in History, I still find lots of fun in fooling around with computers. I mostly write my own plugins for my WordPress sites. A few of them have made it into the official registry: Backlinks Taxonomy for keeping track of the internal linking structure on a WordPress site, and Planet Planet for making RSS aggregator sites like Paddling Planet.
You can contact me by email: rene@seindal.dk or on Signal.
If that domain is blocked, as some obnoxious mail providers do at times, you can use the backup mail seindal@posteo.com.