Five Things

Having been tagged ages ago by Davit Tebbutt, I feel quite ashamed that I haven’t joined in the blog-tag game yet when so many others around me have.  My lame excuse being that I was waiting to set-up It Occurs before I did – see I said it was lame!   Anyway here we go, 5 things you probably didn’t know about me:

1. I completed an aprentiship as, and therefore am a fully qualified weighing machine fitter.
2. I used to be known by the nickname Wally.  This died away after the term started to be used to describe a bit of a fool.  The urban ledgand is that this first happened at Weeley Pop Festival in 1971 – which I was at, I remember the cercumstances, but wasn’t the Wally in question.
3. I once worked as the Keyboard Roadie for the seventies progressive rock band Gentle Giant. A track on their live album Playing the Fool came about because of me.  Breakdown In Brussells [a.k.a., Sweet Georgia Brown] was played whilst I tried, unsucessfully, to repair the Clavinet.
4. The sound system hire company I ran for semi-proffesional groups in and around Birmingham in the 1970’s helped groups such as UB40, Dexies Midnight Runners, and Steel Pulse on their way towards recording contracts.
5. Although only joining the library software industry in 1990, I can trace back my involvement to 1969, when as a service engineer I used to repair the paper-tape punch devices used to enter bibliographic records into the IBM mainframe used by the BLCMP cooperative cataloguging project. The BLCMP project eventually evolved in to Talis, my current employers.

So that’s my history exposed for all to view, now who’s turn is it now?

David Burden, Kathryn Greenhill, Lorcan Dempsey, Grant White, Tim Hodson - thats who.

Why – It Occurs

So why does Richard Wallis need a personal blog?

Well unusually for most prolific bloggers, up until now I have only posted on company blogs.  As Technology Evangelist at Talis, you will find my postings on Panlibus and Nodalities.  Although those two blogs do have a fairly wide coverage (see here to understand what that is) they are not the ideal place to cover more personally relevant issues.  Most who read those blogs will not be interested in whinges about airline travel; books that I’m reading, things that have caught my eye in the news; my opinions on general technology or; why I felt the need to kick the dog in the morning.  Hence It Occurs where I won’t have to think “is it appropriate?” for a company hosted blog before posting.

So why ‘It Occurs‘ as a title? – Two reasons.

Firstly, when I first start to describe new ideas in a meeting, presentation, or similar situation I often hear myself say “It occurs to me that…..“.  Hopefully this blog will be a place to do much of that.

Secondly – I have found, that although you can by your own actions have a significant effect on what happens to you between cradle and grave, the is a key attribute about ‘life’ – it happens.  It occurs all around you – it rains when you do/don’t want it to; your government invades a foreign country; your kids grow up to be great people, despite you skills as a parent – the list is endless.  Also on bad days the name of this blog could be most appropriately be prefixed with the librarians war-cry ‘ssh‘.

Enough for a first rambling post.  I suspect postings here will be fairly intermittent as most of my efforts will will be targeted to the readers of Panlibus/Nodalities, but lets see what happens occurs.