January - August 1995
I worked for HMS, helping to get an Outpatients system working and delivered. My responsibilities were mainly as St Thomas' account manager, although I also did quite a bit of performance improving work on the Outpatients system (based on Oracle and Access-1).
I took 3 weeks holiday and 4 weeks unpaid leave to visit Aachen to do mathematics again. This visit was planned far in advance - booked in January 1995 - so I had plenty of time to ensure that my absence would not cause much damage.
September - October 1995
I took a paid position in my old Lehrstuhl B/D in Aachen for seven weeks, during which time I worked almost incessantly on a collection of "c" programs which I called the "integral meat-axe". These programs worked using the p-adic methods developed for character tables in 1984-5 to work more generally with matrices of ordinary integers. I used someone else's long-integer package, and wrote about 20 programs (around 7,000 lines of "c") in the seven weeks, and checked out the feasability of the algorithms. It all worked fine.
During this time I phoned Perihelion and was told that cost-cutting was getting yet more serious, and that I could either take redundancy or a pay cut. I had perhaps been too successful in ensuring that my absence would not cause much damage!
Late October-December 1995
At this time, UK Online
were looking for a contract project manager, so I took it.
These were fast moving and interesting times. I took
"temporary" charge of the tech-support, which had 6 staff at that stage,
and although the project I was taken on to manage was in fact already being
managed by someone else, there were plenty of others, so I managed them!
In particular, the installation of new lines and Ascend max's was an
early project of mine.