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. I was born in Liverpool, which makes me a scouser.

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

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.

Most days, I’ll be writing a small article for my journal, at the top of each entry, I’ll publish one of my photos.

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 (though I’ll be using release 10 as soon as the previews come out), 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, programs that interact with people.

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 programming). CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) was incredibly difficult to learn.

Journal

When I started this website, I decided that it would be a good idea to publish a photo every day.

The feature isn’t working. It’s a bit difficult to keep up with posting one every day, even though I’ve got thousands of them. Also, the winter weather hasn’t been helping with my photography. So, from now on, I won’t be posting one every day, I’ll be trying to post one most days. So, I need a new name, A Photo Most Days doesn’t really work!

On the daily photo pages I have written so far, I sometimes write a commentary. About something that happened in the world, something that happened to me, or a short piece about somewhere I have visited recently.

So, I’ve decided to change the name of the Daily Photo page to Journal.

Hopefully, I’ll be adding a new journal post most days, but life will get in the way. Some days, maybe a whole week or so will go by without one.

I’ll still be posting a photo at the top of each page. If you are only interested in my photos, you can simply ignore the writeup below.

All journal posts will point to the previous and next one, so you can easily view the photos I publish in my Journal.

A lot of the photos will be taken in and around Marsden (West Yorkshire), the village I currently live in. The difficult thing here, is finding lots of different photos of Marsden. I have some ideas; we’ll have to wait and see. All I know, is that if I keep this up, there will be a lot of photos of Marsden on this website!

I’m hoping it will improve my photography.

To see my last journal entry, click the Journal menu item, above or below.

24th January 2025