I both manage the Unix team and do the technical stuff as well, and have
traditionally done this on the larger and nationally funded systems.
Genealogy
An interest that has now taken over a large amount of my free time is Family History and
Genealogy. I first became interested in it, in 1994 and I've since become quite involved
as I wanted to use a computer to store and present my research. I use Lifelines, the
Unix genealogy program to do this.
At the end of 1994 Steve Wood published details of his WWW page in the newsgroups, and as nothing existed for the UK, and because it seemed an interesting thing to do, I produced a page of links to all the UK information that I could find on various FTP sites. That was my downfall as I was persuaded by Brian Randell, John Woodgate and others to expand what I'd done and host the bulk of the pages for what has become the GENUKI WWW information service.
My interests are in Lancashire, and so I approached my local society, The Manchester & Lancs FHS, of which I am a member, for help in expanding the Lancashire pages. That was another major mistake as I was immediately co-opted onto their Council to deal with computer matters, and I am now organising monthly meetings of the society's Computer Group, and still haven't got more Lancs information.
As a result of all this I am still a relative newcomer to genealogy, and now have no time to do my own research, of which I still have plenty to do. Therefore please no NOT send me any genealogy queries!!! I don't have the information or the time to reply to you. So if I don't reply its not because I'm trying to be rude, its because I get a large number of people asking me questions that I can't answer anyway. I'm happy to answer questions about the maintenance of the GENUKI service, but if its a standard genealogical query, then the place to ask is in the soc.genealogy.britain newsgroup.
Lytham Land Registry Rambling Club and pictures of some walks.
For those of you with a reasonable need to e-mail me, then my address is Phil.Stringer@man.ac.uk