USA

When I was working on my PhD my supervisor was invited to a meeting where he would give a talk. He had decided to do a computer simulation to demonstrate something. He had written it all in Pascal, but it didn't work - by which I mean it should have worked but it actually crashed! I didn't have much of a life so I said I'd have a look at it at the end of the day. The code looked perfectly fine, it compiled correctly but when you ran it, it failed. I was a bit puzzled, so I took it to part bit by bit and narrowed it down to one line that always caused the program to abort - even though it was fine. I split the statement in to two lines to see which part of the statement was problematic and it worked fine. I put them together again and it exploded.... The only thing I could conclude was that both were syntactically correct but when the combined statement was compiled it optimised the statement to something that the CPU didn't like, but when it was two separate statements it was fine.... Anyhow my supervisor was delighted on the following day, and made me second author on the paper. I did chat with him about it, but my input other than fixing the bug (which had been bothering him for days apparently) was minor. Anyhow as a result of that bug, and the talk that could take place, I got a job in the US, where I met my wife, and where I managed to visit Yosemite National Park.

For those who've not been to the US, it is a stunningly beautiful country in many places, though if you do visit the national parks spend at least 5 minutes to get away from the crowds because what you will see is really worth it...

The US Post Office has thoughtfully put a date on this stamp, and in 2006 I was back in Europe, and had already had one job and been made redundant once, and we were now living in Hampshire. 2006 now seems like ages ago, but this is the most recent stamp I've posted for about a month...