User:Phil Boswell

About me
I used to be a Law Costs Draftsman (from 2000 to 2013): now I work for the company writing the software that I used for most of that time, and provide aid and succor to my ex-colleagues over the phone! 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 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 newsgroups a long while back.

Cats
We are a cat-friendly family. We currently have two (NB: they were already named!):

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 also went to school with Stephen Mangan, now internationally famous for acting and stuff.
 * 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 (see Clan Boswell) 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…
 * I also worked for Thames Water for a while, giving me an unenviable knowledge of the Thames Valley by way of the various Sewage treatmentworks and pumping stations…
 * 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.

ang:User:Phil Boswell cy:Defnyddiwr:Phil Boswell gd:User:Phil Boswell sco:User:Phil Boswell simple:User:Phil Boswell