October 50 years ago at Firs Maternity Home, #Leigh, Lancashire. https://mark-whitfield.com/about/firs-maternity-home-leigh/

Firs Maternity Home, Leigh, Lancashire

I was born in Leigh at First Maternity Home in 1968 (13th October – Sunday).

Firs Farm existed in 1828 and was then bought in 1843 by John and William Hall. The Halls built Firs No. 1 Mill and as a result, many houses were built in the immediate area to accommodate the growing number of manual workers needed to work there.

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About 1871, Ralph Tunnicliffe bought the Firs estate and by 1875 had built The Firs as his home. He built Firs No. 2 Mill and formed a joint stock company, Tunnicliffe and Hampson. Ralph died in 1880 and the estate was offered for sale, but it didn’t sell, despite the net income being over £3000.

Read More…

Fifty Years (50) old this month alas – My Top 30 #Movies to celebrate the moment https://mark-whitfield.com/videos/top-30-movies/ #MovieList #IMDb#FilmTwitter #Cinema #TopMovies #IMDbList#MovieBuff #Top10Movies #Film

Fifty (50) years old this month. My Top 30  ‘s to celebrate this moment.  I have selected https://mark-whitfield.com/videos/top-30-movies/     

mark_whitfield_top_100_movies

My  Top 30 Movies  in no particular order…

1. El Cid
2. Song of Bernadette
3. The Matrix
4. Warlock (with Henry Fonda)
5. The Caine Mutiny
6. The Eagle Has Landed
7. Hard Times
8. Aliens
9. The Godfather
10. First Blood
11. Die Hard
12. Zulu
13. Groundhog Day
14. Shawshank Redemption
15. Predator
16. Terminator (1 & 2)
17. Jaws
18. A Matter of Life and Death
19. Forbidden Planet
20. Somewhere in Time
21. Wall Street
22. The Bourne Ultimatum
23. Erin Brockovich
24. Husbands and Wives
25. Pulp Fiction
26. Galaxy Quest
27. Goodfellas
28. Thirteens Days (with Kevin Costner)
29. Casino
30. Scaramouche

Russell Newton – Hole in One at Hart Common, Wigan Road, Westhoughton #holeinone #golf

Player: Russell Newton
Date: 07/10/2018
Time: 4:00pm
Club: PW
Hole: 11 (Old Gilly)
Length: 144 yards par 3
Stroke Index: 14
Other Players: Ian Slack & Mark Whitfield
Course: HART COMMON GOLF CLUB, Wigan Road, Westhoughton, Bolton, BL5 2BX
russell_newton_hole_in_one_golf_hart_common

Winner of the ITL Non-Invitation – Ian Slack with 42 (6’s format)

The Eden Course, St Andrews – 17/09/2018 –
Winner of the ITL Non-Invitation – Ian Slack with 42 (6’s)

Mark Whitfield ITL Non Invitation Trophy

6250 yards, par 70. Only slightly more forgiving than its contemporaries on the seaward side of the Links, the Eden Course was built in 1914 by Harry S. Colt whose use of natural boundaries and severe bunkers provides a course full of character.

https://www.standrews.com/Play/Courses/Eden-Course
Eden Clubhouse (Eden, Strathtyrum & Balgove courses), St Andrews, KY16 9SF

Some HPE NonStop (Tandem) related groups on LinkedIn…

HPE NonStop Tandem | Guardian OSS Performance Monitoring Management Integrity Blade Itanium ServerNet
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/165816/
332 members currently

BASE24 BASE24-eps – HP NonStop Tandem IBM SUN – Open System Services OSS RealTime – Experts Users
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/150095/
1,514 members currently

PCI DSS Compliant Payments Transactions Compliance Monitoring Alerting Querying Archiving Reporting
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/146595/
472 members currently

SATUG Southern African HP NonStop Tandem NSK Server User Group – SATUG
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/81881/
57 members currently

Payment Engine Applications Forum | Retail and Wholesale | HP NonStop NSK Tandem SUN IBM Windows
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/80773/
343 members currently

HPE NonStop Tandem NSK OSS Open System Services Monitoring – Users, Experts and Technical Authorities 
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/80740/
840 members currently

Job Batch Scheduling | HP NonStop Tandem Guardian Open System Services OSS Servernet Integrity Blade  
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/78111/
371 members currently

BASE24 BASE24-eps User Group Forum | HP NonStop Tandem NSK IBM SUN Windows – News Events Discussion
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/51296/
910 members currently

mark_whitfield_linkedin

Golf at St Andrews, Scotland – September 2018

As part of my 50th birthday celebrations and a yearly, informal golf competition amongst friends, I visited St Andrews and played a number of courses including the Eden Golf Course adjacent to the Old Course. We also stopped off at Penrith Gold Course and played 18 just before Storm Helene arrived. Helene travelled across the Atlantic and weakened from a tropical storm to an ex- tropical storm but could be felt on the drive back to Preston.

IMG_20180915_180352041_HDR

My Aston Martin V8 Vantage Driving Experience

Three Sisters, Wigan – My Aston Martin V8 Vantage Driving Experience

Activity: ASTON MARTIN THRILL @ THREE SISTERS RACE CIRCUIT

Aston Martin V8 Vantage Car: Aston Martin V8 Vantage Max Speed: 180 mph 0-60mph: 4.7 secs BHP: 380 bhp Transmission: 6 Speed Manual Engine: 4.2 litres

MediaCityUK – Photographic Timeline Journal – 2007 to 2010 reprise…

d8_mark_whitfield_mediacityuk18bbc12022008

During my time working in Salford Quays as an IT Project Manager, I took a good number of photos (and movies) of the @MediaCityUK build (literally from the ground up). The pictures were taken from 2007 when the dockland was flat and unused, through to 2010. MediaCity UK is now home to the BBC and ITV in the north west and the University of Salford.

The 200 or so pictures represent an abridged timeline of the build selected from a few thousand starting with the most current picture first…

On Monday, will have been in Professional IT for 28 years…

Deluxe Data International Operations (formally The Software Partnership)

Deluxe Data International Operations, Wingate House, Northway, RUNCORNthesoftwarepartnershipwingatehousenorthwaysmall

I started work at 12pm, September 3rd 1990. The Runcorn office started life as The Software Partnership (first at Wingate Drive in Timperley and then Norton House in Crowngate and subsequently Wingate House in 1992 on Northway) in the mid-eighties (co-founded by Nigel Walsh) but was purchased in 1994 by the American company Deluxe Electronic Payment Systems. This in turn is part of Deluxe Corporation which is one of the largest cheque printers and debit transaction processors in the US, and a major supplier of secure card management systems. The company changed to EFD eFunds in 2000 and is now Fidelity National Information Services (FIS) (at 2007) based in Daresbury, Warrington. The Software Partnership started out developing on-line banking systems for Tandem and UNIX systems.

 

Some great and free Agile Scrum online videos for those looking for good insight…

Some great and free Agile SCRUM online videos for those looking for good insight…

http://scrumtrainingseries.com/

http://www.scrumstudy.com/scrum-free-videos.asp?course=sdc#

August 14th 1995 – 12pm, Arriving at Insider Technologies Limited (ITL)

Exactly 23 years ago, I left Deluxe Data International Operations in August 1995 and then as a Senior Programmer joined a software house in Salford Quays, Manchester called Insider Technologies Limited (ITL). The company was founded in 1989 by Steve Tanham and Jim Chapman. Insider specialised in HPE NonStop software for both monitoring (Reflex) and batch scheduling (MultiBatch) on this this mainframe platform. Insider also provided software (RTLX, Sentra) to enable the monitoring, querying and reporting on the ACI BASE24 Classic ATM / POS application using the transaction log files.

1995 – 2004:

insidertechnologieslimited
Insider Technologies, Spinnaker Court, Chandlers Point, Salford Quays

As a Senior Programmer, I co-developed a number of platform health, diagnostic plug-in modules for Reflex (also known as Reflex 80:20). These included ‘Console’ for HPE NonStop EMS event viewing and filtering, ‘Status Monitor’ for monitoring HPE NonStop platform components (CPU, Disk, Process, File, MQ, XPNET, TCP/IP to name but a few) and ‘Service Monitor’ for building multi-line, rule based analysis of grouped HPE NonStop components to ascertain overall application / service health. Read more…

Project Management Forum | PRINCE2 Agile SCRUM Kanban ITIL Lean | Manchester Liverpool Lancashire UK

A few years ago I set-up a Project Management group on LinkedIn for the North West area of the UK. We now have nearly 2,500 members and growing. Here is the link.

Globally published HP NonStop journal – ‘The Connection’

A HPE NonStop article I wrote in 2013 while I was working for Insider Technologies Limited in Salford Quays. I was working with a bank client in Saudi Arabia at the time who required a browser based solution for querying terabytes of transaction log data downloaded from a HPE NonStop mainframe. I themed the article on sci-fi movies. PDF version – page 12.

Episode IV – A New Hope
(…for both Archived Legacy and Real-Time Transactions and NonStop EMS Alerts)

connection_Logs_on_HP_NonStop_Platform_Fig_1A long time ago (well, 2010) at an EBUG conference far, far away (I guess it depends on where you’re coming from but anyway, Madrid)… Cue anthemic signature music and then, as the strings slowly fade away, pan left to a NonStop hand held aloft on the back row of a technical track presentation and an Insider speaker raising his eyebrows to acknowledge… ‘Yes, at the back’… a qualified voice is heard and a question is raised… ‘Can I store and query on 10 to 15 years’ worth of legacy, tape archived BASE24 TLF and PTLF transaction log data?’… the qualified voice continues… ‘I would also like to query on related EMS messages, POS and ATM administration data’…slight pause… ‘Oh yes, and display appropriate standard and custom tokens for EMS alerts, TLF and PTLF transaction data’… and one last volley of questioning tone ‘with consideration towards on-site directives for PCI DSS compliance?’… read on…

 

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