At the age of 15, Tom Geudens' parents gave him a choice. Either become a baker or go into IT. That Christmas Santa brought a MSX homecomputer, the choice was made. At twenty and with a Bachelor in IT under his belt, he joined the IT department of Colruyt, a Belgian retailer specialized in 'Lowest Price' and doing this through automation. Recently he set up his own IT consultancy company, Elephant Bird Consulting. He has worked with technologies from PL/1 through HPUX and Linux, and battled distributed applications development and configuration management issues.