User:Runarbe

About me
My name is (Stein) Runar Bergheim and I am from the fjord region of Western Norway. For all practical purposes, I answer only to the name "Runar"; however, following a near arrest for an incomplete signature on a travellers cheque in Africa, "(Stein)" came to be included albeit in parenthesis.

I grew up near the village of Sandane in Gloppen municipality where I lived happily for 18 years until one cold winter's morning I was squeezed into a Hercules aircraft and flown off to Harstad and Åsegarden for a stint in the army. After Northern Norway, I spent a year in Valdres studying at (what in broken English is called) "Valdres Folk High School" before moving on to Sogn og Fjordane University College in Sogndal where I studied Landscape Management and Spatial Planning including GIS.

What I do
As sad as it may sound, I live off sitting. Sitting as a stand-alone activity is generally not profitable; therefore I am generally simultaneously either (1) talking, (2) writing, (3) programming or (4) making maps.

My first job was for Sogn og Fjordane County Council as a GIS, mapping and spatial planning expert. In 2001 I co-founded the IT-company Asplan Viak Internet (AVINET) where I was managing director from 2002 to 2008 and presently act as senior advisor. In 2008 I moved to the Middle East, where I first spent four years in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates before I moved to Muscat in the Sultanate of Oman in 2011.

Life is an interesting journey and I have never been able to predict where it would take me; but one of the things that I never, ever in a million years suspected would consume much time in my life was street addressing. The Gulf countries have developed at remarkable speed, however, in the pursuit of progress, it is inevitable to miss out on a couple of things that might otherwise have been there. Street addressing is one of those things.

For the past five years I have spent much of my time developing new addressing systems for Abu Dhabi and Muscat. In the process, I have come to invest more time in this topic than any curriculum in urban planning would provide. Luckily, street addressing is a professional domain that exploits all the things that I am good at: sitting, talking, writing, programming and making maps.

What makes me happy

 * making a very expensive computer do a very simple thing
 * automating things that would have been much faster to do manually
 * travelling to (or rather arriving at) new and unfamiliar places
 * any form of map
 * mountains, desert, lakes
 * playing the tin whistle
 * capturing a good motive

--(Stein) Runar Bergheim (talk) 04:05, 3 December 2012 (UTC)