Max Parry

Thank you for visiting my presence on the Interweb thingy.

Before I retired this site was a means of providing information to clients and prospective clients. When I retired, I also retired the professional content, and this site was born.

I am living out my retirement in Neumagen-Dhron, a small village in the heart of the beautiful Moselle valley. Neumagen-Dhron is the birthplace of the German wine industry. It also has a claim to be the birthplace of the Roman Catholic Church, although a few other places also make that claim. It’s a great place to live, although it can be very embarrassing every four years when the World Cup rolls around. However, the performances of Die Mannschaft in 2018 and 2022 did a lot to redress the balance (I confess that I might have let my Schadenfreude show).

I never tire of reminding my German friends of 1966. I was in the Wembley crowd on that glorious day and the ball did cross the line! This last part might not be correct, but it’s my story and I’m sticking to it! Incidentally the expression “Wembley Tor” (Wembley goal) has passed into German football fans’ vocabulary and is used to describe a situation when the ball strikes the bar and then bounces on or very close to the goal line. To illustrate my determination not to let my German friends forget 30 July 1966, my car license plate is the area code followed by WM 66. I am sure you will understand that I am doing my best to ensure that every German knows that in this case WM 66 means Weltmeister 1966 (1966 World Champions)!

R.I.P. the late, lamented 1966 heroes:

Sir Alf Ramsey

#6 Bobby Moore OBE

#1 Gordon Banks OBE

#2 George Cohen MBE

#3 Ramon Wilson MBE

#4 Norbert Stiles MBE

#5 Jack Charlton OBE

#7 Alan Ball MBE

#8 Jimmy Greaves MBE

#9 Sir Bobby Charlton CBE

#11 John Connelly

#12 Ron Springett

#13 Peter Bonetti

#14 Jimmy Armfield

#15 Gerry Byrne

#16 Martin Peters MBE

#17 Ron Flowers MBE

#18 Norman Hunter

#21 Roger Hunt MBE

Long live the surviving members of the 1966 squad: #10 Sir Geoff Hurst MBE, #19 Terry Paine MBE, #20 Ian Callaghan MBE and #22 George Eastham OBE.

R.I.P. my other late heroes

Ken Buchanan MBE

Patsy Cline

Edsger Dijkstra

Tom Graveney OBE

Stanley Michael Bailey Hailwood MBE GM (Mike the Bike)

Pauline Hailwood (the first lady of motorcycling)

Alfred John (Jack) Kelsey

Gordon Lightfoot

Kenny Rogers

Jarno Saarinen

Conway Twitty

Howard Winstone MBE

Here you can see how I spend my time in retirement. I sometimes wonder how I ever had the time to work!

For a while I kept my hand in technically by occasionally producing software to help retail foreign exchange traders using the MetaTrader 4 (MT4) charting platform. The MT4 programming language is MetaQuotes Language (MQL), which is a derivative of C. Writing MQL was an interesting experience for me as I have long held the view that C is a language that is not really suited to modern software development. It encourages, and even rewards, bad practice and all too often results in write-only code.

I have experimented with Java, Excel VBA, C#, Python and Go (Golang). C# and Go are also both derivatives of C, but despite that I quite like them. Although I like C# and Python, I am not convinced of the advantages of Object Oriented Programming (OOP). I feel that it is, to some extent, a solution looking for a problem! After all this research I have settled on Go as my first-choice language for the present. My current project is building an extension to the Money Manager Ex accounting program in Go. I originally wrote a similar program in Python.

Click here to see my professional qualifications.

Click here to read about the people who were the major influences on my career.

Click here to see what I miss about England (it's not a big list).

Click here for details of some services and products I recommend.

Click here to see the charities I support.

Click here to read my life mission statement and a few other random thoughts.

Click here to see Max's Musings, which is a collection of my observations on random topics.

If you wish to contact me, you can find my contact details here