(Rambling post warning!)
For around eight years I’ve been procrastinating, something us blokes do well (so I’ve been told).
The old Tilman ‘Anecdotes and Photographs’ website which I put together in 1998 had been pioneering stuff in the days when dial up modems whistled and whirred and images bigger than a postage stamp took an age to download. Ten years later, in 2008, it had become such an embarrassment that I hid it from Google and effectively took it offline, waiting for the time when I could dedicate enough time to do justice to its subject.
Then in 2008 I was distracted again, persuaded to put my questionable Powerpoint skills to a more productive use, not in an IT services sales pitch but in telling the story of the hero of Barmouth and Belluno. Eight years later, and more than a few talks down the line, I’m in the happy position where our hero’s marvellous books are all coming back into print. Terrific reads and excellent gift ideas for the discerning traveller, sailor, navigator, climber and lover of English wit and literature.
So now, kicked gently into action by my partner who has noted that my virtually dormant Twitter stream has now been given unexpected visibility, and shamed into action by my daughter’s highly professional adoption of Wordpress as a tool of choice, I’ve set to work myself. The result (this site) is not pretty and it’s not yet finished, but the effort over the past three evenings has demonstrated to me that Open Source software has come of age. Sixteen years ago, working on pioneering (that word again) ‘New World’ client/server pilot applications in an esoteric selection of tools, we struggled to do what WordPress and its community of plugin builders have made easy enough for ‘everyman’.
‘Tempus fugit’, as my late father was frequently heard to remark. Almost as frequently as he was heard to say that ‘the only person who ever went to parliament with good intentions was Guy Fawkes’. Talking of which, has the importing of the Simpsons’ variant of Halloween completely sunk that wondrous English tradition in which an effigy of the Pope is carried through the town and burned on a bonfire in a small town in Sussex?
Penny for the Guy anyone?
