who?

I am known online by the handle omz131, more by accident than design2.

Attitude := Coffee + Tangerine Dream + Dada + punk

I mangle words3, wrangle bits4, and know where my towel is5. I can wax poetic about the intersectionality of utility and futility:

I encounter systems
  bloated
  ceremonial
  dubiously useful

I build tools as dérives
  mostly for myself
  sometimes for others
  YMMV

My tools drift
  across systems, networks, protocols, and people
  Observing flow
  Mapping friction
  Finding gaps

Collaboration is optional
Clarity is not

Computer languages should be strongly typed

RTFM

I cut my teeth, like everybody else in the early 1980s, programming in BASIC and 6502 assembler while listening to The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on the radio. I’ve been online since the days of V.24 modems and X.25 networks and today my network packets arrive through an optical cable with staggering speed (FTTH FTW).

I am a typical Gen X dude who is busy getting on with my own thing and don’t feel the need to humblebrag to the whole world about my accomplishments. I don’t care about followers or acquiring kudos or the need for validation or whatever.

I was educated in London (UK) and spent most of my time staying up the late into the night to listen on the radio to LBC’s Nightline. I graduated with a BSc (Hons) in Design and Innovation from The Open University. I went to Camberwell College of Art (who are apparently quite good) and was awarded a Master in Fine Art (MFA).

Most of my career is spent in greenfield projects, to do the thinking and hand-on heavy lifting. When I do brownfield it is because something has gone terribly wrong and somebody needs it fixed yesterday. I’ve seen (and made) enough mistakes to know where the bodies are buried; and if I don’t know, I’m pretty good at sniffing them out.

After my mid-life detour art school to get a MFA, an unexpected NMI to raise humans6, survive COVID, and other timeline events, I’ve returned to my roots: programming and building systems build for an audience of one. But as any veteran of the protocol wars knows: a system for one person is easily adapted to be multi-tenant multi-protocol utility^2, isn’t it?

Perhaps it’s time to make the web, and indeed the internet, more human.

I live in the EU.

If you haven’t already done so, I highly recommend that you read:

  • Julian May’s Saga of Pliocene Exile (wikipedia)
  • William Gibson’s Neuromancer (wikipedia)
  • Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (wikipedia)
  • Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs (wikipedia)
  • Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motocycle Maintenance (wikipedia)
  • Albert-László Barabási’s Linked (wikipedia)

$LastModified: 2026-04-22 18:31:16Z (Wed, 22 Apr 2026) $

  1. If you recognize the name “outer module Z-13” you must be one of the 10s of people who watched the 1987 BBC TV Series Star Cops. It is a shame, because it was an exceptionally good series, has stood the test of time remarkably well, but is hardly known by anybody because it was only broadcast once on BBC2’s terrestrial network before eventually having a very limited VHS and DVD release in the UK. ↩︎

  2. I wanted an eponymous domain name, but some asshat was name-squatting it. After much searching for an available name, “omz13” came out top. Yes, its a bit weird, and hard to spell, but it has been my online identity for decades now. ↩︎

  3. I started writing as a freelance journalist; I detoured into technical writing (for privately held micro corporations to behemoth F500 corporations); and then found myself in business analyst and process management roles where, ironically, I was doing even more writing than before. ↩︎

  4. I have written code and built products. The most surprising thing about technology is just how much involves moving bits and bytes from point A to point B. Occasionally, you move things from point A to point B via point C where some of the bits get twiddled, much to the consternation of point B who, when they receive them, panic for no good reason. The world is also small and inter-connected: when I started programming, I wrote some code that was published by the BBC on their Telesoftware service; then I worked on teletext receivers at General Information Systems7 (UK); and onto Softel (UK) to build the first version of PC Swift, their subtitling workstation, which was a pivotal shift away from proprietary and expensive hardware to COTS-based hardware. ↩︎

  5. If you do not get the “know where your towel is”, you need to dig into The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Despite what other people think, the definitive, if perhaps wildly inaccurate version, is the original BBC radio version. ↩︎

  6. Because mother nature is fickle, and it was a “fork(2)”. ↩︎

  7. A poor choice of name for a company because everybody associates GIS with Geographic Information Systems instead of General Information Systems Ltd. But, it was formed by Chris Curry after he left Acorn, so it did have some pedigree. I was involved just after the mains-borne devices (the “red boxes” that were the 80s version of a smart home) and before they got into smart cards: I spent my time in broadcast data receivers (for BBC Micro and PCs). Other people worked on the smart shopping terminals that tried to do natural language input and web shopping in the 80s, something that was so ambitious and also too far ahead of its time to work within the available technology. ↩︎