Machiel Vincent van Mechelen is a native of the Netherlands who also lived and worked in Canada as a landed immigrant. While still being taught Dutch, French, English and German, 'Machiel' –as Vincent was called then– received a science-oriented secondary education. The formative influence of the exact sciences continued at the academic level, but the arts, pure or applied, life and social sciences and ethics later played a significant role as well or started to receive a greater emphasis. Eventually, Vincent graduated from three different universities, in landscape architecture, in philosophy and in English language and literature (in this order, with diverse jobs in two continents, a one-year trip around the world and a period of studying informatics in between).

In the course of about thirty years, Vincent van Mechelen wrote philosophical, (neutral-inclusive) ideological, literary and linguistic books and papers, short stories, a play and poems, among which songs, all labors of love, one of them a Vocabulary of Alliteration. Most of the author's work is in This Language (what many may consider 'American English'), a part in Deze Taal ('Dutch') and some of it in Zhezhong Yuyan ('Putonghua Chinese'). Since the advent of the Internet Vincent's main mediums of publication have been MVVM-site (mvvm.net), a private site, and TRINPsite (trinp.net), a site owned by a nonreligious denominational foundation. A few books have now been self-published in print and as ebooks.

The first ebook which appeared at Smashwords was The Last Heavenly King, part of Triptych of Times, a trilogy consisting of The Last Heavenly King, Waiting Can Wait and Legends of the Future, all three novellas in themselves. As the beginning describes the final days of the 'Taiping Rebellion' (only 84 years before Machiel first saw the light), it should be of interest that the author visited China (including Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan) several times and still studies Chinese – at an intermediate level, that is.

The Metric Calendar, a Metric Diary is Vincent van Mechelen's second ebook. It is published at the same time as Metric Diary, a printed diary using the Quaternary Metric World Calendar. The ebook contains the Metric Diary (in color) on screen, but unlike the Diary on paper (in greyscale), it explains first the basics of a systematic calendar such as the Metric Calendar. This explanation is a good illustration of a way of thinking which is not bound b...