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.

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

• /Books to add to Wikipedia
• /Music to add to Wikipedia

• 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

• /Harry Potter in Afrikaans

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
• 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.