“I am my choices. I cannot not choose. If I do not choose, that is still a choice. If faced with inevitable circumstances, we still choose how we are in those circumstances.”
Jean-Paul Sartre
In a world where everything is valued as if it was being sold at an invisible marketplace, how do you value the choices that someone makes? I am Eric Priezkalns, and I do not know the answer to that question. What I do know is that I made this, so value it how you please. I made it as a free choice, not for profit. You might consider it worthless, because it is given for free. Or you might measure its value without needing to look for a price tag. I have a passion for writing, thinking, politics and film. If you have similar interests, please browse this site. I hope you find plenty you like.
I write fiction using the pen name of Ray Blank and some of my stories get published in science fiction magazines whilst others are written just for this website. My writing started as an offshoot of my professional career in telecoms but friends and colleagues encouraged me to broaden my horizons, so I did! However, writing for business tends to be a lot more lucrative than creative writing. I am lucky that I have the opportunity to do both.
Revenue Assurance: Expert Opinions for Communications Providers is a book written in collaboration with experts from around the globe, in a bid to explain the subject of revenue assurance from multiple perspectives. It is available in both hardcover and ebook editions from Amazon, from the publisher CRC Press, and from many other online retailers.
Commsrisk.com is the website I am best known for. It provides focused news and commentary about risks faced by the communications sector and its customers. Starting in 2006 as a humble blog on my consulting company’s website, it morphed in 2008 into a multi-author blog in collaboration with peers in other countries, and is now a respected publication in its own right, followed by specialists all over the world.
I have also written about risk, assurance, audit and technology for a variety of print journals and websites. Here are some examples.
- “Size Matters… and also what you do with it” for BillingViews, January 2014
- “Revenue Assurance is an Upstart!” for Inside Revenue Management Issue 74, January 2014
- “The Real Cost of Internet Filters” for BillingViews, December 2013
- “From Risk to Robust: Turning the Big Picture Into a Real Agenda for Change in Telecoms” for Black Swan, April 2012
- “What if a Large Telecom Operated as a Thousand Business Units?“, for B/OSS World, July 2011
- “Enterprise Risk: Your Board Needs You” for Billing OSS Magazine, May 2010
- “Turning Friends Into Customers and Customers Into Friends” for Amex Forum, April 2009
On a different tack, fans of Robert Pirsig and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance may like to learn that I co-authored a paper delving into elements of Pirsig’s philosophy. “The Role of Evolution, Time and Order in Robert Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality” was a 1999 collaboration with Dr. Anthony McWatt. It can be read at Anthony’s MOQ website and at Quantonics.com.
A picture paints a thousand words, and yet beauty is only skin deep. For those superficial people out there, here is a photograph of me. The location of this picture was picked by my friends Mike and Michelle. I assume they take other friends to boring fancy places, but when I visited, they took me to see the 13th Public Drain. Luckily, we skipped the first twelve.
