I was given the name Rehuël (read: Ray you el) Lobato de Mesquita at birth on Januari 1st, 1974 in Paramaribo, Suriname. I grew up in several parts of the country. I am second of 8 children, the oldest son.

After quitting school at about the 9th level of primary education, I went to work in the ICT. From 1990 till 2000 I learned networking (installation and administration of primarily Novell and Microsoft networks), hardware repair and assembly, software analysis, customer support, graphic design, to mention a few. In 1996 I got the chance to get my High School Diploma when I was in San Fransisco, California in the USA.

In 2000 I started working for a local ISP as web designer. But soon I would be assisting the system administrator in switching from a NT server to a Windows 2000 Server. While taking in as much of PHP and MySQL as possible, I was asked to assist the research and development department, where mainly Linux servers were used for ISP services.

In 2004 I started my own company, Stretsh Web & Graphics (a name which was later changed to Stretsh Web Solutions). With this company I offered the locals affordable hosting and domain name services. In my continuing fight to deliver the best quality I learned to use web standards and was one of the first designers in Suriname to use XHTML/CSS to build standard compliant websites.

Last year I got married to Barbara Adams, a very beautiful and smart woman. She has been my strength for the last 3 years, especially in times when the company was not doing too well.

Here I am now, a man with a lot of experience. I hope that I can use this blog to share my thoughts and experiences, so others may benefit from them.