nico: biography
I'm Nico Petrakis, I was born in Hasselt, Limburg, Belgium and I’m twenty years old. I still live and study in Hasselt. I’m a student Computer Science at PHL in Belgium and I'm in the graduation year of Software Management ( a mixture of Computer Science and Management ). In my spare time I try to broaden my knowledge in computer technologies, I'm especially interested in Apple and in programming (mostly Java).
At this moment I’m studying at the university of New Brunswick in Saint John, NB, Canada. Here I will be broadening my knowledge in Computer Science. With this I hope to have a better background in Computer Science, so I can go to the Netherlands after this to study Artificial Intelligence.
Besides my interest in computers, I’m also very interested in management. I'm now working on a project called “Yapper Design” with three of my closest friends. Yapper Design is an audiovisual project we started in 2008. The name “Yapper Design” originated from the word “yapper”, it is a dialect for mouth, this stands for the communication. We think that communication is the essence of doing a good job in whatever business you’re in. The “design” part of the name stands for our profession: audiovisual art. These projects range from audio recording to intro clips for business websites, music video clips, etc. At Yapper Design I'm in charge of management (financial, resource, HR, ...) and I'm also the assistant director. We started as a community in 2008. We had a website where people could ask us about audiovisual things, if there was a common problem we made a tutorial for it. We now have a collection of roughly 30-40 tutorials posted online on Youtube and Vimeo. Recently we got the “Most Subscribers for Directors In Belgium” award from Youtube. Besides tutorials we also had audio, photo and video bundles like brushes for photoshop, music you could freely use in your video projects, ... After 2 years of being a community we wanted to do some more national work. We wanted more close interaction with our customers so we stopped our community and became more local. We started by doing some music videos and soon we where making a lot of them. The main goal of Yapper Design is to give everyone a little experience before we graduate.
I was also with the Chiro (Belgian Boy scouts) from when I was five years old. When I became 17 I became a Chiro Leader. I did this for two years, and I’ve taken a one year pause from Chiro to focus on school and come to Canada.
When I was 10 years old I practiced Karate for about 6 years. I got too the brown belt. I entered the Belgian national competitions and got to second place in Kata ( It’s a Japanese word used for a detailed pattern of movements in karate ) I also entered a competition in England and I was the captain of our Belgian team. We finished first.