Author Archives: admin

The backdrop to Household Finances

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Before exploring digital support for household finances, it is important to understand the environment in which today’s household finances are managed. First, the vast majority of households in the UK have access to some sort of bank account according to the University of Birmingham’s Financial Inclusion Annual Monitoring Report 2015. Second, the monies that flow in and out of households today are generally digital monies; pay is delivered by electronic funds transfer; regular bills are paid by direct debits; and much expenditure is made using debit or credit card. Thirdly, people manage their money using on-line bank accounts and bank account apps on their mobile phones. In essence, most households are already brushing up against digital technology in some form or another when managing their money.

The final key aspect that critically affects household money management has nothing to do with digital technology, and everything to do with the relationship between the householders. When a couple set up a household, one of the most significant choices that they make is to decide which account(s) their income is to be banked. This simple decision not only reflects their attitude towards money but also has significant ramifications for the way they will communicate and work together to deal with the day-to-day practicalities of household living. This was item a) of six household management activities that were listed In the previous entry, and the decision impacts all the other five activities – b) checking the monies coming in; c) deciding what to spend the money on; d) deciding who is responsible for what element of spending; e) checking what has been spent; f) assessing future levels of cash and deciding on any actions required to change those future levels.

The broad options for deciding where income is to be banked are straightforward:

  • each individual’s income goes into that individuals bank account and stays there;
  • each individual’s income goes into that individuals bank account and a portion of it is automatically transferred to a joint bank account;
  • each individual’s income goes directly into a joint bank account.

In the first case, when the monies go into an individual’s account, the other person may have no visibility of the amounts going in nor how it is spent; and this can make discussions about household spending a little less open and free-ranging. At the other extreme, if both individual’s income goes into a joint account, both parties are likely to have much more knowledge about income levels and to have a greater sense of ownership of the combined monies. The middle option, when part of an individual’s income goes into a joint account, is a half way house whereby individuals will have knowledge and ownership for part of the monies.

These three approaches are huge simplifications of what actually goes on. I haven’t been able to come across research data on this, but conversations with family, friends and colleagues over the years, and things I’ve read in books and articles and have seen on TV, indicate that there are many different ways in which each of these options can be performed in practice. For example, just because income goes into an individual’s account doesn’t necessarily mean that the other partner doesn’t know how much it is, or can’t access the account. There are also many different reasons why a couple may choose one of the three options; for example, they may decide to put income into an individual’s account because the other partner may have a poor credit history. Despite these uncertainties, however, the three different options will usually have some impact of the sort described; and will almost certainly affect what digital tools are chosen to assist the management of household finances .

Households and Money

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Most households have some amount of income and/or expenditure which has to be managed. The way these monies are looked after can vary from minimally to intensively, and will probably involve one or more of the following activities: a) deciding where the income should be placed; b) checking the monies coming in; c) deciding what to spend the money on; d) deciding who is responsible for what element of spending; e) checking what has been spent; f) assessing future levels of cash and deciding on any actions required to change those future levels. In today’s environment of on-line bank accounts, freely available credit cards, and a consumer oriented society, these activities can be demanding for a household of a single individual. However, they become even more complicated when the household comprises more than one person, since some sort of communication and coordination will also have to occur in order for the money to be  managed. Different couples deal with this challenge in different ways: however, this journey is not attempting to explore the many different approaches that can be taken. Instead, it documents just one single approach – the way that my wife and I have learnt to manage our own household finances in this new digital era.

Breakthrough! – Streamlined Version

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Well, it’s taken me 23 years, but at last I think I have a Roundsheet specification which is simple enough to understand and use.  I’ve stripped away as many extraneous concepts as I could so that all that remains is the idea of a Round which can be divided into Slices (segments), each of which can be transformed into, and worked upon, as a Round. This simple recursive structure is much easier to work with and to illustrate than some of the earlier specifications. Consequently, I’ve been able to provide prototype screen graphics for most of the functions described in the latest Roundsheet specification document (which I’m now referring to as the Streamlined Version).

Given that this is about my best shot at defining a Roundsheet application, I guess this is the version upon which a final judgement has to be made as to whether there is any merit in the idea. That judgement will have to be made by others, so I think I’ll assemble a list of people I know and see what they say. If the answer is less than enthusiastic, at least I’ll know that I’ve explored my original idea to the full, and will be able to lay it to rest in the archives.

Work Underway

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Digital preservation work on the PAW/DOC collection has now started in earnest. The first couple of months were spent getting participants up to speed with a common understanding of what the collection consists of and what process we are going to follow in the work. This was achieved with the following reading list:

PawdocDP-N1 – Ergonomic aspects of computer supported personal filing systems, April1990

PawdocDP-N2 – 20 years in the life of a long term personal electronic filing system, Sep2001

PawdocDP-N3 – Checking PAW-DOC, v1.0, 31May2016

PawdocDP-N4 – Preservation Planning for a Personal Digital Archive – DPC Webinar with presenter notes, 29Jun2016, v1.1

PawdocDP-N5 – Preservation Planning for Personal Digital Collections – DPC Case Note, Apr2016

PawdocDP-N6 – Preservation Planning SCOPING Document Template – v1.1, 11Sep2015

PawdocDP-N7 – Preservation Project Plan DESCRIPTION Template, v1.2 – 10Apr2016

PawdocDP-N8 – Preservation Project Plan CHART Template, v1.1 – 11Sep2015

PawdocDP-N9 – Preservation MAINTENANCE PLAN Template – v1.0, 11Sep2015

On Sunday 2nd April we held our first conference call during which I gave a demo of the collection’s Index and Document Management System; and in which we went through the first draft of the Scoping paper and allocated some of the activities that need to be completed before we will be in a position to create a project plan. These include the following:

  1. Document the FISH supplier’s recommended replacement route – Paul – End April
  2. Document possible alternative Document Management systems/Database Systems and their costs – Ross/Jan to advise on how to redefine tasks 2&3
  3. Document any alternative solutions to using a Document Management System for storing and retrieving the collection’s electronic documents – Jan/Ross to advise on how to redefine tasks 2&3
  4. Perform a DROID analysis of the current version of the PAWDOC collection and send out to the team – Paul – End April
  5. List the documents that can’t currently be opened and categorise them – Paul – End April
  6. Decide what should be done for each category of document that can’t currently be opened – Ross/Jan
  7. Identify what categories of document may not be able to be opened in future – Matt
  8. Decide what should be done for each category of document that may not be able to be opened in future – Ross/Jan
  9. List the CDs and DVDs that may become unreadable and categorise them – Paul – End April
  10. Decide what should be done for each of the categories of CD and DVD that may become unreadable – Matt to decide if he can do this after seeing the list
  11. Document possible solutions to the possibility of the electronic documents becoming separated from the physical documents, and recommend a course of action – Paul – End June

Work is now proceeding on these tasks, though timescales are uncertain since all team members other myself have full time jobs. Our next conference call is scheduled for Sunday 21st May.

Disks and DMS

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As part of the digital preservation work (documented elsewhere) that I’m doing on my document collection, I’ve just completed an exercise to organise and index all the associated physical disks.  It turns out that there are 156 disks of which 16 are actually contained in the collection, and the remaining 140 are backup disks (which have been accumulating over the years) of the collection’s computer system and digitised contents. Old backup disks may not be useful to restore a system crash, but I have kept them to provide an audit trail over the 20+ years that the digital system has been in operation.  Over that period documents have been lost, the index has had fields deleted by mistake, files have been corrupted, and no doubt other errors have occurred. Although the number of such occurrences is low, when such problems are identified it is very useful to have the ability to trace back through previous states of the system.

Another activity that has been prompted by the digital preservation work is to establish what future plans the current supplier of FISH (the document management system I use) has for the system. Last time I asked the question in February 2016, I was told that there are no plans to upgrade the product and that current customers who wanted to look at alternatives were being advised to consider a product called File Stream supplied by Filestream Ltd which is based in Berkshire in the UK. I spoke to the Fish supplier, m-hance, again earlier today and was told there had been no change – it is unlikely that Fish will be upgraded and Filestream is still the recommended replacement product. When I contacted Filestream last year I was told that the product would cost £750 to purchase and £250 a year for support including upgrades.

When I was investigating Filestream last year, I also took a quick look at Open Source document management systems and found several – some of them being free to use. However, further investigation would be required to establish what other components (such as the back-end database) would have to be acquired and whether they would also be free.

These and other options to future proof the collection will all be considered in the digital preservation project currently underway.

Sometimes Books Are Sound

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Although this Journey is named Music Management, it deals with all the recorded material in our collection – including spoken word books. I first started listening to books on tape when I was commuting an hour and a half each way to and from work. My local library had a couple of bookshelves of titles which cost about a pound or two to hire for two weeks.  I can’t remember the first time I took a spoken word book out of the library, but I think I was inspired to do so after being given some abridged novels to listen to in my car – I particularly remember a Geoffrey Archer thriller and the amazing ‘Mind Over Matter’ by Ranulph Fiennes. Abridged novels are a fun way of passing a few hours, but it’s not the same as reading a complete book; that is a much more involved, longer, experience in which you become immersed in the world that the author creates.  It is an experience that I found was a perfect way to alleviate the tedium of my long commute. Even traffic jams, accident delays and diversions became less of an irritation with a book being read out in the background.

As I got into the swing of it, I began to realise that listening to a book being read by a professional reader – or, better still, the author – was a different experience from reading it. I was finding that the reader was imparting atmospheres and nuances that perhaps I wouldn’t be generating myself. I found myself hooked – and so embarked on a period of about ten years when I listened to far more novels and non-fiction books than I could ever have read while working a demanding job.

One of the authors I particularly enjoyed in the car was Dirk Bogarde. His fine writing, gentle stories, fascinating autobiographies, and easy voice were very enjoyable; so, when I started collecting first edition books, he was one of the authors I started to acquire. Early this year I completed my set of Dirk Bogarde first editions, but there were still a few of the volumes which I hadn’t actually read, and I started to think that It would be nice to re-experience the joys of being read to in the car (I stopped doing so when I retired). However, to do that I would have to acquire the relevant audio books.  A search on the net, established that, although all of the books had been produced on cassette tapes, only 6 had been subsequently converted to mp3 format on CD. If I was to listen to the books with only cassette tape versions, in my car (which does not have a cassette player – only a CD player),  I would have to buy the cassette versions, convert them to mp3 and put them on CD.

While I was pondering the technological intricacies that would be involved, I was also toying with the notion that perhaps my Dirk Bogarde first edition collection wouldn’t be complete without the spoken word versions; and that that, for completeness, would entail collecting both the cassette versions and the mp3 versions. After all, it was the spoken word versions that I’d enjoyed; and there was something special about having Dirk himself read out some of his books.

After mulling it over for a few weeks, I decided to go for it and to augment my Dirk Bogarde paper book collection with the digital equivalent. I duly set about trawling eBay and Amazon for second hand versions of the cassette volumes, and soon acquired 4 of the titles in very good condition for between £8 and £20 each. They were not ex-library copies of which there are several available on eBay – I knew what state they could be in from my experience of library loans. Two of the titles I bought were also available on CD for £8.99, so I bought those and had a very pleasant couple of weeks listening to the first of Bogarde’s autobiographies (A Postillion Struck By Lightning) in my car. The other two were not available on CD so I retrieved my Panasonic portable CD and Cassette player and my Numark TTSB turntable (which digitises the output from the cassette player and is designed to interface with a computer), from the loft, downloaded the Audacity software from the net and set about digitising the 16 sides of cassettes in each of the two volumes. It took an age – well, as long as it took the cassettes to play – between 8 and 9 hours in each case.  Then it was matter of using the Audacity functions to reduce the background noise levels and to eliminate unwanted material at the start and finish of each digitised tape, and then exporting the data to mp3 files.

I shall continue to collect the cassette versions of the other titles, and to, one way or another, obtain the equivalent mp3 files. I’ve decided I shall listen to all of the titles in the car – even the ones I’ve heard or read already. After all, this won’t impinge on anything else I’m doing – it’s just empty time in which I’ll be doing something I positively enjoy. However, this time I shall read (well, listen to) the autobiographies in the chronological order of the times they deal with (the publication dates of the autobiographies do not always correspond to the order of the events described); and I’ll read the novels in the order they were written.

I’ve taken the time to write about all this for two reasons: first, because I believe the joys and huge potential of listening to spoken word literature is not appreciated widely enough; and second, because I think it’s an interesting question as to whether a collector of an author’s novels also needs to acquire the spoken word versions to have a truly complete collection.  On the former point, I would encourage people who’ve never tried it to give it a go – it could enable you to experience huge amounts of great literature that you might never have the time or inclination to read. As to the latter point – well you’ll have to judge for yourself: but, for me, Dirk Bogarde’s books, and his autobiographies in particular, will always be intricately bound to his words lilting in my ears.

Binding Sounds – Part 1

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I’m a novice bookbinder with only 7 tuition sessions under my belt, so the following description of the creation of the Sounds for Alexa book may not use the correct terminology or reflect bookbinding best practice. However, this is how I’ve been going about it: there are 7 main stages to the work – create the content; print the pages in sections; sew the sections together; cut the edges and shape the spine; create the hardback cover; attach the sewn sections to the hardback cover; and mark up the cover with the book title.

The book was created in Microsoft Word using a two column format and the ‘Book Fold’ Page Setup. Book Fold produces double sided landscape A4 pages which, when printed, are arranged so that the pages appear consecutively when all the pages are laid flat one on top of another and then the whole set is folded in half. This produces a bookbinding Section. I elected to have sections containing 16 pages i.e four A4 pages each with four half pages – two on the front and two on the back – and I ended up with 10 sections as you can see in the picture below.Sections are sewn together using linen thread and linen or cotton tape. A template is made to match the height of the book. The positions of where the thread will be sewn is marked on the template as shown below.

Excluding the extreme left and right positions on the template above, the space between where the thread is passed through the top of the section to the underside and then passed back up to the top of the section is the width of the tape. Each section is placed in a cradle in turn and, using the template, holes are pricked through the centre of the section at the positions marked on the template – if you expand the image below you’ll be able to see the pinpricks.

The sections are then sewn one after another with the thread being sewn around the tape. As the thread is taken from one section to another, the thread is knotted to bind the sections securely together.  Once all the sections have been sewn, a coating of EVA  glue is applied to the spine. The picture below shows the completed sewn sections.

This is where I got up to in my last bookbinding class. The next term of classes start in May, so I hope I’ll be able to recount how I made the covers, attached them to the sewn sections, and completed the book, towards the end of June.

Self-Thinking

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This is not so much an idea as a commentary on other great ideas…. A couple of weeks ago, my friend, Richard Harper, gave me a book to read – ‘Writing The Self’ by Peter Heehs. I guess it came up in our conversation because of my writings in pwofc.com and because of my questioning about why I keep things. However, it turns out that it informs neither of those endeavours. Instead, it made me realise, first, just how little I ever learned about mankind’s greatest thinkers; and, second, that I’m really not sure all that great thinking would have been any use to me.

The book is essentially a quick run  through of the great philosophers and theologists and their most basic tenets in respect of The Self (they may well have pronounced on other great matters but this book sticks to their ideas about Self); which, so far as I can see, tend to have concentrated on answers to the simple questions of what we are and what we are doing in the universe. The answers seem to have been anything but simple – particularly as religion seems to have provided the excuse for huge amounts of rationalisation and speculation. Thankfully, as the book points out in its last chapter, the consensus among today’s philosophers, social scientists, cultural theorists and neuroscientists is that the self is a construct not a substance; and most people in modern society take selfhood for granted, and don’t bother theorizing about it. I’m not sure where that leaves the huge amount of writings that have been produced in the past on the subject.

The ‘writings’ focus of the book seems to have four aspects; first, the fact that ideas produced by the great thinkers were recorded in writing; second, from about the 16th century onwards, the thinkers started to use their own writings for self examination (the start of the modern diary); third, memoirs and autobiographies started to become commonplace in the eighteenth century; and, fourth, also around the eighteenth century, novelists started to explore the notion of the self – sometimes using the mechanism of diaries and memoirs as a vehicle for their fictional stories. Writings in the age of the internet – the blog and social media – are only given a brief mention in the last 7 pages of the book; and, disappointingly, I found only one half page passage (on page 170 regarding the Goncourt Brothers in the nineteenth century) referring to the survival of the personality through material artefacts, writings etc. –  there must be more of that out there somewhere.

I’m left feeling that I should appreciate more, glad that at least I’m aware there is more, and thankful that I am not driven to find out more. However, It would be interesting to hear from someone who is knowledgeable in these fields as to whether the past thoughts of the great thinkers on the subject of The Self still hold any sort of sway today.

Testing Alexa and Icon Allocation

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Our Sounds for Alexa book includes 335 albums, of which 43 are self-made recordings, special promotional productions or audio books. The remaining 292 were deemed to have been commercially produced and widely marketed and therefore to have been reasonable candidates for inclusion in Amazon’s Music Unlimited library (which apparently contains some 40 million songs) which we now subscribe to. I successfully requested Alexa to play 189 of these, but the remaining 103 proved more problematic; either Alexa couldn’t understand what I was asking for or the album didn’t exist in the Music Unlimited library.  By searching the Amazon web site I determined that while 62 were not available in the library, 41 were present and should have been accessible via Alexa. I tried requesting these 41 a second time, but could only get 14 of them to play. This leaves 27 albums which Alexa should be able to play but which I have been unable to make a successful request for.

These statistics hide an extensive and sometimes extremely frustrating set of interchanges with our new house lodger. An example at the straightforward end of this spectrum was a request for the album ‘The Carpenters’ by The Carpenters  which consistently resulted in the album ‘Carpenters Gold’ being played. On reporting this foible via the feedback mechanism in the Alexa app, I received a very prompt reply from Amazon Customer Services confirming that this was incorrect and advising that the technical team had been informed.  Perhaps less easy to understand, however, were the 8 albums which Alexa seemed to have understood what I had requested  (she repeated the words back to me correctly), but said she couldn’t find the albums despite the Amazon website saying they were available in Amazon’s streaming service.

For the remaining 18 albums, Alexa just couldn’t seem to understand what I was saying. Sometimes she got close as, for example, with East of Eden’s ‘Mercator Projected’ album, she repeated ‘Mercato Projected; and for the album ‘Fongo’ by Los Chinches, she repeated ‘Fungo by Les Chinchillas’. For other albums, she was just way off as with Peter Sellers’ ‘Fool Britannia’ which she repeated as what sounded like ‘full returning to bratamella’.

For most of the problem items I had at least two or three goes each time, and sometimes Alexa simply got worse and worse rather than better and better. For example, Alexa’s first attempt at Tom Russell’s ‘The Rose of Roscrae’ was ‘rossel rescit’ and the second time around she moved on to ‘the runners of roscrae’. Likewise, her first attempt at the album ‘Let Spin’ by Let Spin was ‘ led span by led spain’; followed up with a second attempt in which she started playing Felice Civitareale’s album ‘Let’s go to Spain’.

Such interactions in the end become rather tiresome because the exchanges are all one-sided. Alexa doesn’t pick up on cues like a hoot of laughter at what she is saying, or the tetchiness in one’s voice as you say the same thing yet again. Of course, in normal day to day use, one wouldn’t be going through a whole list of problem items, so its unlikely that one would experience so many consecutive unsuccessful interactions. After all, Alexa’s overall success of playing 203 of the 230 albums that I believed she should be able to play, seems pretty good. However, this exercise has clearly highlighted the fact that the system has not yet been perfected. Furthermore, as well as the basic voice recognition issues, there are also a couple of other functionality shortcomings which Amazon hasn’t addressed – first, for albums consisting of more than one disc, there appears to be no way of specifying that Alexa should start playing Disc 2 as opposed to Disc 1; and second, there is no way of getting Alexa to move directly to a specific track number.

All the above insights came from my attempt to get Alexa to play every commercially available album in our book. Having completed all that testing, I was now in a position to allocate a colour coded icon to each of the albums. I ended up with the following three icons:

This item is part of the digital collection and can be heard by playing it on the iPhone; or through Alexa’s speakers by setting up a Bluetooth connection between the iPhone and Alexa. It is not available through Amazon’s Streaming Service.

This item is available in Amazons streaming service and can be listened to by requesting Alexa to play it.

 

Even if this album is not available in Amazon Music, it may be possible to get Alexa to play individual tracks from the album because they may be present in other albums which are available in the Streaming Service.

In the book, I have placed these icons directly between the album’s name and it’s cover art – as shown in the example below. Note that an album can have all or none or some of these icons.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I decided that I would allocate a Cloud icon to those 27 problem items which I have been unable to get Alexa to play, on the basis that they are available in the Streaming Service and that one-day Alexa may be able to play them.

With all the allocations complete, it was time to complete the printing of the book and to take it into bookbinding – more of this in my next entry.

PawdocDP Participants

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The project to perform digital preservation on the PAW/DOC collection (PawdocDP) started at the beginning of 2017 with myself and four other participants: Matt Fox-Wilson (Ambient Design), Ross Spencer and Jan Hutar (Archives New Zealand ), and Nicolaie Constantinescu (Kosson). We have exchanged introductory emails (see below), and  the team is now reading background material to get up to speed with what the collection is and what state it is in.  We aim to hold a screen sharing conference call in March to demonstrate and explore the digital collection and its supporting systems. The introductory texts sent by each member of the team are shown below.

From: Paul Wilson [mailto:pwilsonofc@btinternet.com] Saturday, 14 January 2017 12:15 a.m.

Hello Ross, Jan, Nicolaie and Matt. Very pleased to have you all on board at the start of this project undertaking Digital Preservation on the pawdoc collection (PawdocDP). To give us all some background on each other, I suggest you reply-to-all to this email with a brief intro about yourself. My intro is below. I’m a retired computer consultant living in Lavendon between Northampton and Bedford in the UK. I got a degree in Ergonomics from Loughborough University in 1972 and got my first job with Kodak where I first started working on the application of computers.  In 1978, I joined the UK’s National Computing Centre where I investigated best practice in Office Automation – that’s when the pawdoc collection came into being. I then spent 28 years with Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) as, first, a computer consultant, and then as a Bid Manager for IT outsourcing deals. During my professional career I’ve been particularly involved in Office Systems, Requirements Analysis, Process Definition, Workflow Technology, HCI, CSCW, and Architecture Definition and Management. I play golf, and collect stamps and first edition books. My study window looks out on a side road with open fields beyond and 7 wind turbines in the far distance.

From: Constantinescu Nicolaie <kosson@gmail.com> 16 Jan at 7:25 AM

Hello! I’m an information architect for a library and information science community online – kosson.ro and a private enterprise manager. I have been involved with building useful content for all parties from my country that are interested in digital practices and resources preservation since over 10 years now. Right now I’m toiling on a JavaScript manual in Romanian needed so much for a solid foundation that will be followed by a series of data management for librarians. My languages is JavaScript and the Web APIs. Part of my time is dedicated now to writing essential learning materials and advocating for Open Access in Romania.

From: Ross Spencer < Ross.Spencer@dia.govt.nz> Monday, 16 January 2017 7:34 a.m.

Hello everyone! Thank you Paul.  I am a digital preservation analyst at Archives New Zealand. My background is in software engineering and digital humanities. I have worked at Archives New Zealand for three years, and before then, The National Archives, UK. My primary interests are developing tools for others to use to analyse and sentence digital records within an archival context. I release open source tools on GitHub. My languages are Python and Golang, with a modern day preference for Golang because of its easy portability across platforms without the need to run an interpreter. Outside of work I’m still a programmer, but, I’m also a cyclist. Interested in movies and music. I’m also attempting to learn French – but I have been attempting that endeavour for a long long time now!

From: Jan Hutar <Jan.Hutar@dia.govt.nz> 17 Jan at 11:33 PM

Hi all, Similarly to Ross I am a digital preservation analyst at Archives New Zealand, same role, different focus as you would expect. My background is classic archival science and then libraries. Before joining Archives NZ in February 2012 I was at the National Library of the Czech Republic in Prague, managing the Digital preservation team there for 5 years. I have got a PhD, my dissertation was about metadata for digitisation and digital preservation, the proposed metadata standard and schema is being used across Czech republic libraries since 2012. My main focus at Archives NZ is keeping our digital preservation system in shape, managing the data in it, getting data in and dealing with all sorts of digital preservation problems. Also digital preservation related policies. Mountain biking is my thing.

From: Matthew Fox-Wilson <ambientmatt@me.com> 22 Jan at 9:52 AM

Hi everyone, Sorry for the slow introduction! My exact job is sort of hard to describe but technically I’m the director/owner of a software development company here in New Zealand specialising in creative software for the consumer / prosumer market. My main focus here is on application architecture and UI design, but I’m also responsible for coding application structure and front end systems for our products. We’ve been in operation since 2001 but before then I’ve worked for a variety of companies in NZ and remotely for the US on consumer and pro-level graphics software, and consulted on a variety of projects relating to data sorting and natural methods for presentation, hence my interest in this project. When I’m coding I’m mainly old-school, focused primarily on C++ with a bit of Objective C, for Windows, MacOS, and iOS. Outside work I enjoy trying to recover from work, which mainly takes the form of gym, running, and a sword based martial art.