John Carter - Personal Details

Last changed 23-Feb-07

In September 2000 I moved to Co. Sligo, Ireland and am now working as a lecturer at the Sligo Institute of Technology. Until August 2000 I worked as a Senior Lecturer in the Business Information Systems section of the East London Business School in the University of East London, my main interests there being database design and programming and expert systems. I also worked for six years as a part-time lecturer teaching systems analysis on the MSc program at Birkbeck college, University of London. I have written four database books. The most recent was published on 27th September 2002.

I consider the linking of databases to the internet an important and interesting issue and am pleased to have made some progress in this. My preferred technology for this is Notepad, HTML, ADO, SQL, ASP, Scripting: VBScript on the server side and Javascript on the client side, DHTML. You can see my examples of these here I enjoy the Visual Basic programming environment and sometimes play with its graphics aspects just for fun. I am also keen on simple mathematical and logical problems of my own devising. My current research project is to find automated means for checking and removing redundancy in sets of rules. I also have ongoing interests in Venn diagrams, graph theory and the four colour problem.

My wife Sylvia and I have three grown children, one a Post Office engineer, one a teacher, and one a programmer / composer. In June this year our Daughter Stephanie and her husband Kerim gave us our first Grandson Rudi. I enjoy sailing Wayfarer and other dinghies, listening to jazz, looking at modern art and classical architecture. My favourite city so far is Venice. I'm currently looking forward to sailing across Sligo bay in a dinghy (done - great! - now to get my own boat! ( - done - still learning 'the ropes' of sailing in this spectacular coastline - mostly lake sailing so far, but last summer had an encounter with a seal in Sligo bay, who popped his head up a few feet from my boat as if to say "You OK mate?" and then disappeared. He looked like he had a swimming cap on.)) and exploring the beautiful countryside and coastline of Sligo. Since summer 2002 I've also become interested in electric and other unorthodox means of flight. Can you get a) a candle, and b) a NiCd battery to lift their own weight? For how long? Work and Energy continue to interest me. Have written VB3 programs - with databases - to virtually automate major sections of my model aircraft designs. May ASP them and put them on a new website.

I've recently started a website dedicated to working out for myself some of the issues in life at the beginning of the third millennium. This takes the form of the John and Sally website. It's still in its early days (I'm writing in January 2005). I've also just set up a new website radicaldebate.com that I'm not yet sure quite what to do with.

23-feb-07: radicaldebate.com is now up and running, with its own chatline (go on, express yourself) and regular contributors. John and Sally have been integrated into it - and you can now talk to them direct! Other current interests include MP3, pen drives, water pump design, novel forms of energy conversion, musical groups Jay-Z and Eminem.

Ireland Phones: 00353 71 91 89 964 (home) (071 91 89 964 from Ireland), 00353 87 983 4652 (mobile) (087 983 4652 from Ireland)

U.K. Phones: 0789 909 0962 (mobile) (0044 789 909 0962 from Ireland)

Email: carter.john@itsligo.ie