Profile for Gerph

Contact	About me
Email: gerph@gerph.org ICQ: AOL: Yahoo:	Username: Gerph Realname: Justin Fletcher About me: In 1986 I was recruited into an elite force of commandos. In daring, and sometimes fatal, missions to ensure world security my team worked along side such well known figures as Abdul Hassim Smith (during his time as President of the National Stamp Collectors Union [Perth]), Pope John Paul (in his capacity as keeper of the papal tea fund), and Elizabeth Jones (who lived down the road and needed help with moving her wardrobe). After a particularly unfortunate incident in liberating hostages from a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet in which my best friend had to be admitted to casualty with third degree papers cuts, I retired from the service and began my valued work as part of the Kingston Boys Underwater Choir. As organist and driving buddy for Chuck (The Yoeman) Terrence (who later went on to have string of top ten hits in Azerbaijan), I found a kind of peace in their work. This did not last, however. The competitive world of underwarter choiristry was not for me, and I returned home to decide what to do with my life. It was there that I found my wife Katya, hiding behind the fruit and veg counter at Sainsbury's. Having been chased there by the Russian mafia and with a 25 million USD price on her head she was only too happy to marry me and change her name to Claire. Claire and our two daughters now live in Paris, where she makes a respectable living as a clothes designer. The tragedy of our divorce and the security pressures of being spiritual advisor to Clinton left me, in 1997 with a terrible decision - either to return to my childhood ambitions of being an international hitman, to start my own Martian Real Estate business, or to wallow in self pity and finally die of an overdose. I decided on the middle of these options and began retailing prime land in the Martian deserts. After making millions from damage claims brought against NASA for trespass and damage to properties (3 million year old antique rocks being desecrated is a crime, whatever planet it's on), I retired to a small island in the Florida Keys from where I now post pointless and irrelevant notes to little known news sites and usenet groups. Homepage: http://gerph.org/ Face/Logo: Comments posted: 70 (show all)

All comments

On Blogging helped me code says developer:

JSScript type &F81. Gerph on 20/7/06 10:45PM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

On RISC OS greets Windows clipboard:

Yay! I'm going to win the lotto! Happy happy joy joy! Gerph on 13/07/04 3:02PM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

On New RISC OS news site opens:

[Posting only in order to be fair] TIB's RSS feed has popped up a few little articles in the time since I posted my comments. Whilst it's true that there were times last year where I was expecting to go a whole month without hearing anything from IconBar, maybe this year will show a turn around. That said, ISTR that there was a similar situation at the beginning of last year. Regardless, Drobe and Iconbar are still in the list, and maybe I'd add AcornEvolution if it had such a feed as well. Gerph on 04/01/04 11:33PM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

On New RISC OS news site opens:

In response to Jess about an RSS site merging the news from others... If you're bored, look at the Moreover science news aggregators. They produce the top 15 stories on particular topics, every 15 minutes (for free - if you want more, you have to pay). Now, set your RSS reader up to fetch these every 15 minutes. What you'll see is that 'real' stories are buried because every bloody news site under the sun is regurgitating the same story again and again, usually word for word from a press release or Associated Press article (or press conference, or space.com, or whatever happens to be the predominant source for that subject area). After the 8th article with exactly the same summary and (when viewed) identical content, you begin to wonder why you're bothering with automatic syndication. Sometimes it works. For 'important' events such as the Columbia disaster, or 9/11 the articles are usually varied because people want to make themselves read, but for small stories - Beagle 2 is a good example - you just get the same thing thrown back at you. Within such a small subject area as RISC OS there's only so much you can say. And it's very obvious from Iconbar's RSS feed that you might as well just ignore them and make sure you read Drobe and csa.announce irregularly. Whilst RSS is intended for syndication, it's a whole lot easier to manage it yourself than to have someone else determine the stories and the relevance. Remember, it's not just 'news' sites that produce RSS feeds. There are RSS feeds for projects (q.v. SourceForce) and other sources of RSS that are important (to some) but not to others. Gerph on 03/01/04 00:05AM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

Search the archives

Today's featured article

Manchester RISC OS Jaunt
Martin Hansen does Northern dealers
 21 comments, latest by Anon on 3/1/04 9:06PM. Published: 21 Dec 2003

Random article

From BBC BASIC to virtual railways
EvntShell author Paul Hobbs interviewed about Trainz simulations
 Discuss this. Published: 10 Feb 2008

Useful links