An editor recently forced me to write a bio. So here it is:

Simone grew up in the Swiss town of Basel, an ancient city famous for its banks, university, pharmaceutical industry and - yes - a very special bike ride. She did not play the alphorn, make precision watches, or tend to small herds of cows, dressed in lederhosen. She did however briefly work in a bank, and today still needs her occasional fix of smooth, creamy chocolate.

During highschool vacations and after college she bummed around Europe for a while, swimming in moon-lit waters in Greece, eating roasted chicken with her bare hands in Rome, and staring up at painted ceilings (at the Dali museum) in Figueres, Spain. There was also some punting going on in Oxford, England, for a couple of months.

After those heavy doses of art and culture, she decided at 21 to flee the cows and come to America to fulfill her dream of ... well, living in America. After a few minor detours involving living on a 1940's lifeboat in Washington State, travelling to and falling in love with Guatemala, getting seasick on a sailboat from San Diego to Cabo, and growing her own lettuce, she landed in California, where she learned that they make cheese here too, and there's a whole valley producing chips (of the silicone variety). She was hooked.

Right away, she dove head-first into the technology industry, only coming up for a short breather in the stock photography business, which made her realize that if all else failed, she could probably always get by as a photographer. The thought of not being able to cover her daily ration of chocolate did however help steer her towards a PR/grassroots marketing job with a top-notch technology book publisher, where she was delighted to find that the skills of reading and writing, learned at age 5, could pay the bills too.

As a bonus, she got to know a bunch of really cool Homo Sapiens in the Open Source community (and yes, Linux geeks are people too), as well as plenty of legends, heroes and movers and shakers in the tech industry. She failed, however, to convince Jeff "Hemos" Bates to dye his hair a pale shade of purple (a pity, really - he would have looked so good).

Now hailing from beautiful Central Oregon, she spends her time chasing the world with a camera for freelance clients and publications such as Time Magazine, is the CEO of a photo stock agency, and dabbles in her free time in writing, programming html, and making her own brand of sumptious truffles.

She reads JWZ, Slashdot.org (at times), Dave Barry and David Pogue, but experienced a brief period of great distress when Mark Mordorf broke his thumb bowling, preventing him temporarily from writing his daily column in the San Francisco Chronicle. More than anything though, she loves her iPod.

Onthebrightside.net has been her online home since October 2001. Here she finds it relaxing to write about her struggles with an unwieldy Windoze machine, why "Shrub" should have never won that crooked Florida poll, and how Burning Man rocked her world.

So go ahead. Peruse.