Holger Knublauch - Personal

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While I have always been privileged to turn my passion into my profession, I am also backed by a wonderful family and enjoy a lot of time outdoors and in sporting events. After my childhood and student time in Germany, I have lived in several countries, including the USA, New Zealand, and the UK. In 2010 I moved with my family to tropical Far North Queensland (Australia) to find the best possible work-life balance.

Children

Darwin was born on . Here is a video of him from the time when he went to pre-school in Cupertino.

Ruby was born on . This video shows her "reading" a book in "German".

Additional family & house pictures can be found in my Flickr Stream.


Hobbies

Life in the tropics allows me to spend a lot of time outdoors. I am trying to find enough time to go out on my mountain bike and do hikes in the forests around my home. My favorite hiking trails are in Barron Gorge NP, to Saddle Mountain (Kewarra Beach), the Blue Arrow in Cairns and good old Earl Hill (Trinity Beach). I regularly go mountain biking in Smithfield, Davies Creek and Atherton MTB parks.

I am maintaining a small YouTube channel First-Person Trails with recordings of some of my favorite hiking trails.

I also enjoyed playing table tennis, and played for various clubs in Germany and until 2014 in Cairns (see club mailing list). While my style of playing is not very esthetic, I used to play reasonably successful when I was younger (Verbandsliga level in Germany). There are a couple of videos of me in action: playing Paul Uttley in 2010 and playing Thomas Woltmann in 2013. I was briefly a top-ten player in Queensland in 2012 and my current ranking is somewhere here. I stopped playing in 2014 due to the risk of increasing elbow and lower back issues.

Traveling

Before we had kids, I did a lot of longish bike/hike/camping tours through several countries around the world. Here are some of my trips:

Here is a random collection of images from those trips

Kepler Track, New Zealand (1997)

Cycling along Lake Hawea, New Zealand (1997)

Mountain Biking along Poison Spider Mesa Trail, Moab, Utah (1999)

On the rim of Crater Lake, Oregon (2003)

Near Taylor Point, Trinity Beach, Queensland (2005)

Music

I enjoy listening to wide variety of music. I literally grew up listening to ELO on vinyl and started a lengthy spell of listening to electronic ambient music in my later teenage years. I still listen a lot to artists such as Klaus Schulze and Steve Roach, at work or even as a sleep playlist. In the last few years I got addicted to Steven Wilson's various projects. Fully aware that such lists are entirely personal taste and likely of little interest to anyone else, here is selection of my all-time favorites, across genres, in alphabetical order, if only to appreciate the artists.