Jez's Page

What's another word for Thesaurus?

Click here to refresh. Welcome to my home page. I'm not exactly sure what you're looking for or indeed what you are expecting to find, but I'll start with some vague personal information.

I'm 37, 6'6" tall and somewhere between 10 and 20 stone. I'm hoping the latter statistic will shortly become inversely proportional to the former, rather than having a seemingly square (round?) relationship as it currently appears to. I'm married to Diane and between us we have five children, Samantha, Craig, Rhiannon and Imogen. Freya. I can claim genetic responsibility for the latter three only and play the role of wicked step-father to Samantha and Craig. I've lived in Bognor Regis, (somebody has to) since August 1997. Prior to that I lived in Hull, North Humberside for 13 years, having gone there originally to read electronic engineering at the then sole University. I managed after three years to be ejected with a few letters after my name and several sentences before. Prior to that, I lived in, wait for it.... Bognor Regis.

Not having a particularly wonderful qualification, I got a job with a local computer firm installing the things. This was back in the mid eighties when you could get away with charging two grand for a 286 clone. My how times change. I spent several years working for a succession of computer maintenance companies until it dawned on me that hardware was most definitely not the right area to be in. It's becoming increasingly difficult to service modern electronic equipment other than by swapping a board or module. Software,on the other hand, is maintainable and requires people with at least half a brain to do it. So here I am, programming in COBOL to earn a crust. I'd be the first to admit that it's not the most modern of languages, but it pays the bills and has allowed me to migrate from the lowest priced housing area in the country to one of the most expensive.

Why did I move? Since getting married and starting/inheriting a family, I'd become more concerned about the children's future and less about having such a fun time. Life oop north can be fun when you're single/dinky but it's pretty grim if you've got children. The predominant attitude to children is to let them run riot and to stand on their own feet from an early age. The school of hard knocks proliferates. This makes school life very hard and our experience of the local junior school was not favourable. The kids seemed to spend more time getting picked on and getting into trouble for standing up to it that actually learning anything. We were very concerned that they would end up leaving high school with little or no qualifications and with the general level of unemployment in that area, job prospects didn't look good. So with that in mind and Samantha about to move up to senior school, we moved in the summer holiday. The local accent is also one of the most unpleasant you're likely to find without visiting Birmingham, which kind of put the lid on the whole issue.

What do I get up to when I'm not reworking COBOL programs to cope with the millennium? That's a good question and I'm sure that Diane would be grateful to have your thoughts on it. My brother Richard and I have been known to sample the occasional lemonade in the Waterloo Inn on a Friday evening and them proceed to fall into Pizza-Roma next door, where Maureen will usually give us both a good slap if we misbehave.

I like riding motorcycles whenever I can pluck up the courage to get on one. I've several stashed in the shed, and one of them actually works. I have come to the conclusion however, that I'm probably past it and ought to pack them in. It is by nature a solitary pursuit and not suited to my status as a family man.

I have, for my sins, got myself appointed as a local education authority governor at the Michael Ayres county junior school in Bognor, where Craig is in the final year. Recently I've been elected chairman of the finance sub-committee and vice chairman of the governing body, largely as a result of being unable to say no quickly enough. However I'm enjoying the role and it's a convenient excuse to get out of washing up!

The school has recently purchased a Windoze NT :-( network from Research Machines and is online, but they've yet to put a website together. In the meantime, you can look at the Michael Ayres Governors Webpage.

As I mentioned on the homepage, I've been dabbling in perl for a while now, COBOL having lost some of the mystery after several years continuous use. The slightly dubious quotation at the top of the page serves as an example of what you shouldn't do with perl. It selects at random 1 of 400ish quotes to display.

Note that your perl environment may not have the necessary modules to perform the decoding. If this is the case then you shouldn't have much trouble throwing away that part of the code, or you can download the modules from CPAN

More recently, I've dabbled with php and qmail. I found myself in need of a web application to configure .qmail files, so I knocked one up in php.

Configuring .qmail files can be fun, so this may help.

If you, as I have recently, found yourself Penguin Powered, you may be interested in the fun and games I had installing Red Hat Linux on a Compaq ProSignia 300. You may also find my notes on recovering Linux from tape of some use. They don't teach this stuff on the RHCE course.

If you've got this far without dropping asleep, you might want to take a look at a caricature of me drawn by John Roberts. It made Diane and me laugh.

Me, endeavouring to look nonchalant, whilst
Rhiannon barfs on my shoulder

This page was last updated 06/06/01