First Post 2007

Happy New Year to my readers.

One of my new year resolutions is to reorganize my several blogs. Currently my two most active blogs are the SOAPbox blog, which concentrates on SOA and the service-based business, and the POSIWID blog, which concentrates on system thinking. Shall I continue with the less active blogs, such as InnovationMatters and TrustBlog, or merge these into the SoftwareIndustryAnalysis blog? And what about the BusinessOrganizationManagement blog, which I started when I was teaching a business module to computing undergraduates? Please let me know what you think.

Meanwhile, I want to respond to being tagged (by Masood Mortazavi). As you may know if you read other blogs, this is a game that involves providing five pieces of self-description, followed by tagging five new bloggers.

1. James Governor introduced me to LastFM, where my moniker is NotWallpaper. However, as a world music fan, I prefer Calabash. My favourite radio programme is LateJunction.
2. Like Robin Wilton, my first degree was in philosophy. (Readers of my 1992 book on Information Modelling may have spotted references to Frege, Quine and my fellow-student Timothy Williamson. Although when I was a student I spent more time reading Bateson and Elster.)
3. Like Nick Gall, I started programming at high school. (We used to code Fortran onto punched tape, and send them to a local firm for processing. My first program was a simple loop to calculate square roots by Newton's approximation, my second program, which not surprisingly I never finished, was going to construct poetry from randomized wordblocks. Nearly ten years later, as a postgraduate student at Imperial College, I started to write a Simula program to construct computer music using interacting agents. But when I discovered that someone at MIT had already done this, I decided it would probably be better to spend the summer completing my dissertation on semantics instead.)
4. Like Kathy Sierra, I like questions better than answers. (That was one of the other reasons I didn't last long as a programmer; I kept asking awkward questions of the systems analysts, so they called my bluff and made me join them.)
5. Like Tim Bray and Tim O'Reilly, I am uncomfortable about perpetuating a chain letter. But this one seems pretty harmless, so I invite Michael Fasosin, Andrew Johnston, Michael Platt, Roman Rytov and Graham Shevlin to participate if they wish.