omz13

This site contains my personal ramblings and stuff that is of interest to me. My background is as a typographer, programmer, author, and business process consultant, so this site contains ramblings, information, and perhaps software, within those fields: you may find it useful; you may not.

This site is run and maintained by omz13, the nom de plume of David Somers.

In the dim-and-distant past I was known by the handle “mushroom”, and I used to geek around with people like whalemeat and southfork: whalemeat burnt himself out and changed professions to become a coach driver; and sadly southfork was killed in a motobike accident whilst on vacation.

I live in Luxembourg, but am an English expatriate.

How I ended up in Luxembourg is a long story and I am not going to bore you with the details. Suffice it to say, if you are going to live somewhere, you can’t get much better than Luxembourg (even though the inhabitants do insist upon speaking strange languages such as French, German, and, of course, Luxembourgish. The fact that living here offers certain fiscal advantages helps too :-)

There are letters after my name. Honestly.

• I’m a MBCS (which is something to do with the BCS) and also a CITP.
• I’m a MISTD (which is defiantly something to do with the ISTD and not the ISTD).

The first computer that I ever used was a Commodore PET 2001. This was back in the late 1970s. It was a very cool machine as it had a real (flat!) keyboard and an integrated tape deck (to store data, not to play music). At its heart was a 6502 and a staggering 4K of memory. (Yes, that 4096 bytes!)

My first computer was an Acorn Atom. Cute isn’t it? Also with a 6502. After the Atom, I got a BBC Model B, then a BBC Master, all based on the 6502 lineage of CPUs. My first PC (as in IBM PC) was a clone with a 80286 and a fantastically large 150MB hard drive. At present current machines are all built by me and are Pentium IV and AMD Duron powered goliaths with online storage capacities measured in TBs. I have also been let loose on other machines, such as a DEC Alpha workstation (which was a fast as the brown stuff off of a shovel), PDP-11s, VAXen, and Big Iron (yes, there is nothing like using a Real TN5250 to connect to a Real IBM Mainframe).

I design books (or did you think I was joking about the MISTD?). Ask me nicely, and I’ll be more than happy to design a book or two for you.I write books. For many years I worked as a technical writer, writing very technical stuff for very technical people. My first real book was written using Microsoft Word on DOS; before Windows, Word ran on DOS and it was good and lean and it was fast. These days I tend to use FrameMaker or InDesign. In the future I will be using my own home-developed DTP application.Some of the techie stuff I’ve written about includes:

• the Class Programming manual for DEC’s LinkWorks (part number AA-QGQWA-TE)
• TCP/IP networking for IBM Global Networks (when the IBMers around me didn’t know anything about TCP/IP and were pretty clueless about anything non-IBM)
• smart credit cards (for Europay, part of MasterCard)
• private banking systems

Non-techie stuff that I’ve written about revolves around analysing business process and coming up with lots of processes, especially if that means doing lots of cute diagrams using BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation). Business Process Modeling can also be thought of as “programming humans”, which is great since it means I’m essentially programming people, albeit done in a way that Dogbert would approve.I read books; I am a bookworm.I use Microsoft Windows.I use Linux with KDE as my desktop, and use the gentoo distribution (even though the attitude of the gentoo devs can, at times, suck since they tend to be a bit too zealotist for my liking).I develop computer applications. In C, a Real Language for a Real Programmer.I live in the middle of nowhere and have a healthy set of UPS devices to counter the unhealthy 240V power supply that I have.If you want to contact me, its best to use this wonderful Contact Form.