WELCOME! 

This is dicksons.ca, the home of Veronica (Roni) and Gareth Dickson. We've put a bunch of stuff on here for your perusal and general entertainment, including news, php and mysql tutorials, sermons, prayer requests, a shopping list, a blog and a few other bits and pieces too. This is our work in progress, so keep checking back!

Most of this site has been written completely from scratch using a variety of XHTML, CSS, php and MySQL. In fact, I think everything except the gallery has been written by us rather than by a third party. Have a look around and if you're interested in finding out any more about how we did some of our projects, just drop me a line using the email page. It's been a learning curve for sure, but it's allowed us to put some cool stuff up and given us the know-how for more projects to come soon.

So anyway, enjoy the site: everything below this point on this page is a bit old, so you may have read it already. We're hoping to add some more RSS/Atom functionality in time (we currently have it working on the Gallery), but for now I think we're going to focus on a redesign... (There's also the slight concern of becoming a boring sod who does nothing else but write projects that are of no use to anyone. Ahem.)

Much has changed since we last updated this page. We're still without internet at home, but Roni is now to be addressed as Dr Roni following her successful viva and her graduation in May of this year. Gareth also collected his MA (Master of Arts) on the same day, and plenty of the clan were able to make it for the celebrations. Roni's grandparents, Dad and Doris all made it over from Canada, and Gareth's parents and grandparents made the trip from Northern Ireland. There will be pictures in the gallery as soon as we get it fully functional again (and have capacity to upload photos to it!).

Roni continues to work for the Medical Research Council at the Dunn Human Nutrition Unit in Cambridge, and Gareth has just qualified into the Intellectual Property Litigation practice of Ashurst in London (see links to the left).

You can browse the site to find out about some of the new features we have recently added. For anyone interested in the development side of the site, we have now updated our php and mysql tutorials, sermons and Canadian visits sections to run automatically from our MySQL back-end. This automates links, tables and layout on each of these pages so that once the content is added the pages automatically update without any formatting on the part of the webmaster and without creating any inconsistencies in the general look and feel of the website.

I mentioned the sermons section of the website. This is where you can either read sermons that others have submitted, or, once you have registered with us (it's dead easy, and free!), you can also submit sermons and edit them. There is also a prayer request page, because everyone needs help and has something to be thankful for.

Please see below for the old content of this page, especially the notes on our photo ordering service which is still running for maybe another month or so.

old stuff

A lot has happened since our old website was last updated. For our start, we ended our period of engagement by getting married on the 9th September 2003 in Northern Ireland. It was a great day and the run up to the wedding could not have been better. We had visitors from Canada, Portugal, Holland, Germany, England, Scotland, Wales, New Zealand and Northern Ireland all attending the ceremony in our home church in Ballymena and then following us up the road to Belfast Castle for a few hundred photographs and a great reception. We'd like to say a big 'Thank you' to all those who came to the wedding and shared with us in our big day, and to all those who have let us use their photographs for this site.

For anyone interested, our official pictures were taken by Alan McMullin, from Ballymena. If you would like to get in touch with him, please email us and we will send you his contact information. You can now order photos from our wedding on this site; ask us for the link if you don't already have it.

Please follow the links at the top of the page if you would like to see some pictures (under the photos section) or alternatively you can follow the wedding archive section to read our vows or have a look at our orders of service.

what's been going on

Gareth has just completed his first year as a trainee solicitor in London. He is training with Ashurst, one of the City's best law firms, and situated right above Liverpool Street Station. The firm concentrates on being a corporate-based practice, but undertakes a huge range of work for all types of clients, including taking part in several pro bono schemes. It boasts one of the most highly regarded private equity departments in the country and a MBO team (management buy-out) that is second to none, as well as an IP (Intellectual Property) department with a great reputation for its contentious and non-contentious work. Gareth has begun his third of four seats, of six months each, in the litigation department, where his supervisor works on corporate litgation including professional negligence and fraud. He has already spent time in the Corporate department where his first principal focused mainly on insolvency and restructuring work, and his second on private equity (Mergers and Acquisitions, flotations etc) deals. His second seat was in Intellectual Property, where his supervisor was head of the Technology and Healthcare Groups. Click the link at the side of the page if you'd like to go to the Ashurst website.

Roni has also been busy in the last 11 months in the run up to handing in her thesis to complete her PhD with Cambridge University. Having originally intended to finish in May 2005, it looks like a completion date of around October / November might be possible, in time for the Christmas holidays. After that Roni will begin work as a post-Doc. in the same lab, under Prof. Sir John E. Walker. For the meantime though we've been trying hard to keep the apartment in order, but with only spending a few hours there between us each weekday, it's not as easy as it used to be! The office is now beginning to take shape, in time for Roni to use it to write up, and it's done well out of a few of our recent trips to Ikea!

visitors pictures

We've had a lot of visitors to our home recently and hope that we can soon add their photos to our collection. So far Andrew and Neil, Steven and the Dicksons senior have all attended various luncheon functions at our old place, while Gareth's parents, nana and papa have made it to the new place too. We look forward to having more visitors over the next few weeks and months.

and finally...

Finally, we really hope you enjoy the site. A lot of work has gone on behind the scenes to get everything working properly and I think we can take a bit of pride in the Wedding Photos Order page (with big thanks to Steven for his help on that). Please contact me separately if you don't already have the link. We want to make it all accessible to everyone who comes across it and enjoyable for you to read. It is designed to be viewed in 1024 x 768 resolution and has passed tests on Internet Explorer, Opera, Firefox, Netscape and Safari, and is CSS2 validated, but if you have another browser where the site doesn't work properly, let me know; I enjoy a challenge! Hopefully in time we'll be able to think of ways around any outstanding problems and then browsing will be a joy for people of all ages, races and browser orientations :-)

I've really enjoyed putting the site together. I learnt a lot about creating web pages, and want to share some of what I have learnt with visitors to the site. If you would like to learn a bit about php, mysql, forms, arrays or if you already know a bit about these and would like to put me right on a few things, go to my page under the family links, or go directly to the tutorials page.

If you have any suggestions or comments, we'd love to hear what they are via our email link.

PS We're trying to start up a small web-design business - if you're interested in seeing what's on offer, please contact us or have a look at the excellent website for the Intellectual Property Lawyers Association (IPLA). Hopefully more will come soon!