About This Website

This is the personal website of Paul Chappell. I’m a 69-year-old retired computer programmer, living in Marsden, West Yorkshire, England. My favourite city is Liverpool, England. Mainly because I was born there, which makes me a scouser.

I’ll be writing about anything that interests me, absolutely anything. However, my main interests are as follows:

Photography

I’ve been interested in photography all my life.

It all started when I was at university in the mid-seventies. In those days there were no digital cameras, it was all film. In my study, I have a large box of slides and prints. I’m hoping to digitise some of them, in order to show them on this website (though there are issues doing this, see this post).

My current camera is a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ2000 bridge camera, which I bought in September 2024. My previous digital camera broke earlier that year, it was a Canon EOS400D, which I bought in 2007 (it was getting old, like me!).

For photo editing I use Gimp, it’s open source and free.

I’ll be publishing a lot of my photographs (and some from my friends) on this website. You are not allowed to use any of them without written permission, see my copyright page for further information.

Along time ago, I came across a website where someone was publishing a photo every day (or maybe most days). I’ve decided to nick this idea, see here.

The photograph of me on the right was taken by my friend John Buckley at Edge Hill railway station, in 1977.

Travel

I’ve been lucky to travel abroad a lot in the past, but nowadays its mostly local. Around West Yorkshire and Merseyside. I’ll be writing about my travels.

I’ve been a member of the Campaign for Real Ale for over 50 years! I’ll be writing about some of the more interesting pubs I visit. Like the Ship and Mitre Liverpool, one of my favourites.

Science, Maths and Engineering

I’ve always been interested in these subjects.

Back in the early/mid-seventies I did a civil engineering degree. I never became a civil engineer; I decided computer programming was much more interesting. The one thing I did learn on the course was how buildings are designed and built. For some reason, I’ve always loved big bridges.

The course taught me a lot about maths, most of it I’ve forgotten, but I really liked maths (well, someone must).

Programming

I wrote my first computer program back in 1974 while at university, it changed my life. I decided to become a programmer rather than a civil engineer. I’ve now been programming for over 50 years, and things in the computer world have changed massively during that time. That’s one of the interesting things about being a programmer for so long.

I’m now retired, though I still write code. I use the .Net framework, release 9, programming with the C# language. Some of it is open source.

Websites

This is something I never thought I’d get into, throughout my career I never really programmed user interfaces.

I now write my own HTML, CSS and Java Script, as I am interested in very fast websites, websites that display in a browser very quickly. Html and Java Script where easy enough to learn (given that I’ve had 50 years’ experience of learning to program). CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) was incredibly difficult.

This Website’s Design

This website is still under development, at this point in time I have no idea of what its final form will be. One of the reasons I’m writing it, is to learn more about the design and programming of small websites. As I learn more, the layout of the website will almost certainly change.

This layout is article based. The articles page lists all the articles I have written. Each one has one or more categories, which are listed on the categories page. Clicking a category on the categories page displays a page listing all the articles for that category.

October 2024.