The Restaurant at the End of the Internet

Recently, Springer initiated a new series on enterprise engineering . This series defines enterprise engineering as: Enterprise Engineering is an emerging discipline for coping with the challenges (agility, adaptability, etc.) and the opportunities (new markets, new technologies, etc.) faced by contemporary enterprises, including commercial, nonprofit and governmental institutions. It is based on the paradigm that such enterprises are purposefully designed systems, and thus they can be redesigned in a systematic and controlled way. Such enterprise engineering projects typically involve architecture, design, and implementation aspects. The increased complexity of enterprises as well as the ecologies in which they operate, the introduction of more regulations and compliance requirements, all require enterprises to be more explicit about their organisational design and performance. I take the position that enterprises should turn to the use of models to make the design, as well as the per...

I call my blog The Restaurant at the End of the Internet , which is a link to Douglas Adams' 'trilogy' on the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In my PhD , each chapter started with a quote from the Hitchhiker's Guide. Except from the last chapter, where I wrote the following: Maybe, just maybe, the dolphins were right after all, and it would have been better for man to have stayed in the oceans, and not have bothered to migrate to the land. It certainly would have been a lot better for most other species on this beautiful, yet fragile, planet. The collective sanity of the human species, is indeed reflected by the very name the humans have given to this planet. What other species would refer to a planet who's surface is mostly covered by water as 'earth'? Every other intelligent species in the universe would have called this planet 'water'. The dolphins did. Jokingly I quoted this text as coming from The Restaurant at the End of the Internet ...

Yesterday I've started blogifying my publication list. In my role as an academic I have my publications listed on my home page. This doesn't allow people to respond/comment to any of the publications. So ... why not create a blog version of them. Publication details, abstract, and a link to the actual publication, and presto! The growing (transferring will take a few weeks) list is available on http://erikproper-publications.blogspot.com

Last year I already blogged about cross blogging. What i'll do this year is possibly blog in other locations as well, but use this blog to gather my postings, and possibly event digests of comments. Why? Well, to create an archive. If only for my own purposes.

A new year! Time for new year's resolutions! Fair enough. The new year is already three weeks old, so maybe I'm a bit late with new year's resolutions. At the same time, we've just passed the third monday of the new year. It seems that the first monday of a new year is the most depressing day of the year. One of the reasons being that this is usually the week in which one realises that all these new year's resolutions have already been broken. Therefore ... time for my new year's resolution ... I shall blog more. I shall blog more. I shall .... But ... this was my resolution last year as well. So what's different this year? The basic excuse for not blogging was lack of time (or priority). But, it's probably also caused by the fact that I'm used to writing scientific papers rather than blogs. I need to develop a new discipline of writing shorter bursts, rather than "short papers". Therefore, I think this year I'll stand a chance of blog...