User:Phil Boswell
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I am a Law Costs Draftsman.
Before that I was a Computer Programmer for a couple of decades.
Before that I was at university
(University College London)
and, even before that, school
(Haileybury).
I am married with one daughter. My wife is also a Law Costs Draftsman. We live in Amersham.
My interests include reading (a lot) and listening to music (loud). I also manage to watch a surprising amount of TV.
My birthday is September 4 which turns out to be surprisingly public, since I submitted it to various newgroups a long while back.
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Cats
We are a cat-friendly family. We currently have four:
- Bramble, male, black, laid-back
- Poppy, female, tortoiseshell, not laid-back at all
- Daisy, female, black, bossy
- Mimi, female, black-and-white, settling in nicely
but we're working on getting back to our former, and more proper, state of five. Bramble and Poppy were from Cats Protection. Daisy came from a family up the road who moved to New Zealand. We acquired "Mimi", an RSPCA rescue, on New Year's Eve 2003.
RIP
- Jazpurr died August 2003
- Motley died Christmas Day 2002
Claims to "fame"
Some clutching at straws here, but if I can get an article or two out of it ... :-)
- I used to own a car (a Honda Civic Shuttle) which had previously been owned by Brian Cant and before him by Pauline Quirke.
- I went to school with Quentin Stafford-Fraser, co-inventor of the Trojan room coffee pot.
- I worked for a while with Tim Rowledge who ported Smalltalk to the ARM.
- I am related (quite a few generations back) to James Boswell; my family tree goes back some 27 generations to Robert Sieur de Bossuille who arrived in England in 1066 with William the Conqueror. It is likely that John Boswell is also a distant relative of some sort simply because we share a surname.
- I shared a house for a while with one Phil Rainey, bass player for Christian folk rock group Eve and the Garden (and for their previous incarnation as heavy rock band Ascent).
- I used to work for Codd & Date Ltd, set up by Ted Codd and Chris Date of relational database fame. Of course I never actually got to meet them but some of the stories ...
- Whilst at University, I worked for a summer holiday with the GRiP Project (building a graph reduction machine with Simon Peyton-Jones, Mark Hardie and Chris Clack. I don't imagine for an instant that any of my code survived past the beginning of term but it was fun while it lasted.
User:Phil Boswell/Pages to watch
Favourite Things
- Glengettie tea :-)
- Eskimo Nell: not so much a favourite but it's gotta be worth it :-)
Things that make me cross
LAUNCHcast
I was until recently a big fan of LAUNCHcast, an Internet radio service provided by Yahoo. Unfortunately they've now managed to annoy me sufficiently that if I can find an equivalent service I'm bailing out faster than a cat out of a washing-machine.
Useful Stuff (I hope)
Sub-pages
- User:Phil Boswell/Sandbox
- User:Phil Boswell/Favourite Pages
- User:Phil Boswell/Boilerplate Text
- User:Phil Boswell/Redirect Test 1
- User:Phil Boswell/Redirect Test 2
- User:Phil Boswell/Novel Template
- Harry Potter in Translation works in progress
URLs
- http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/
- http://ploticus.sourceforge.net/doc/welcome.html
- http://members.chello.nl/epzachte/Wikipedia/EasyTimeline/Introduction.htm
- http://www.wincvs.org/
Other Wikipedias
I maintain alternate personas at
- Meta Wikipedia
- WikiBooks
- Wiktionary
- WikiSophia (http://wikisophia.org/wiki/User:Phil_Boswell)
- Test Wikipedia
- Wikisource
- Wikiquote
- Wikimedia Commons
- Wikispecies
- simple:user:Phil BoswellI created an account at the Simple English Wikipedia simply because I hate making anonymous edits
Other languages
I also have accounts on several other wikipedias, just for a laugh since I speak not a word of any of these languages:
- cy:User:Phil Boswell The Welsh Wicipedia
- gd:User:Phil Boswell The Scots Gaelic Wikipedia
- ang:User:Phil Boswell The Anglo Saxon Wicipǽdia
- sco:User:Phil Boswell The Scots language Wikipaedia
Emergency
I have created an emergency persona at OpenFacts (http://openfacts.berlios.de/index-en.phtml?title=User:Phil_Boswell) for those horrible periods when Wikipedia is unavailable.
I have also created an account at Wikinfo (http://www.wikinfo.org/wiki.phtml?title=User:Phil_Boswell) where I was most startled to discover I already had a User Page without knowing it.
Discrepancy in naming
I have no idea why I used a space in my name some places and not others, but there's probably some deep psychological meaning which would scare the crap out of me if I ever found out.