User:Phil Boswell

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.

Contents

4 Things that make me cross

4.1 LAUNCHcast

5 Useful Stuff (I hope)

5.1 Sub-pages
5.2 URLs

6 Other Wikipedias

6.1 Other languages
6.2 Emergency
6.3 Discrepancy in naming

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.

Phil Boswell owes a lot of his fame to Elfie

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

Harry Potter in Translation works in progress

/Harry Potter in Afrikaans

URLs

Other Wikipedias

I maintain alternate personas at

Meta Wikipedia
WikiBooks
Wiktionary
WikiSophia
Test Wikipedia
Wikisource
Wikiquote
Wikimedia Commons
Wikispecies
I 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:

The Welsh Wicipedia
The Scots Gaelic Wikipedia
The Anglo Saxon Wicipǽdia

Emergency

I have created an emergency persona at OpenFacts for those horrible periods when Wikipedia is unavailable.

I have also created an account at Wikinfo 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.