About
The proprietor of this website is Nicholas Tam, formerly headquartered in one humble fortress or another in the rather delightful province of Alberta, Canada, excepting a brief collegial stint in the wonderland of Cambridge University. I like to say my present whereabouts are unknown.
Officially, my signed and framed credentials are in Computing Science, English, and the glorious ur-discipline known as History and Philosophy of Science. Unofficially, I stumble in the proverbial dark seeking elegance in all things, but especially in books and logic games.
In the past I have accepted payment for everything from website design to film criticism to linguistics research to playing something resembling jazz music on various pianos, among other fully funded misadventures. I now conduct my work in the utmost secrecy in the guise of a multiply committed knight of rueful countenance.
The journal on this website is a sandbox, nothing more. Unless otherwise indicated, chances are that the answer to the query “Is he serious?” is no.
Elsewhere
Dedicated stalkers can find me on Twitter and Google+. I am also on Facebook, but please do not attempt to network with me there if I don’t know you personally; I identify my account here solely to avoid confusion with my Australian doppelgänger.
Readers of this website conducting opposition research will kindly note that to date, I have never held membership in any political party.
Historically speaking
Nick’s Café Canadien has been active since July 2003. The site was originally conceived as a testbed for a few CSS template tricks I wanted to try, since I hadn’t done website work since the days of spacer GIFs and tangled tables, and I thought a new site would be a good excuse to catch up to the latest standards. Needless to say, the site design ambitions fell by the wayside and I ended up writing a lot about films, which I’d been doing for years anyway.
Over time, the posts got sparser and considerably longer, as I got in the habit of only investing my time in writing for the site if I had something to say that was worth developing. Naturally, it was not often that I was able to find the time to develop such ideas while they were still fresh and topical. As a result, I would say that since about 2005, less than a third of the posts I’ve sketched out in my head and started committing to the keyboard have actually made it onto the site.
In August 2007, Nick’s Café moved from the University of Alberta servers to its present location at www.nicholastam.ca. Every post from before that is liable to be broken in one way or another, but at least now, they’re easily searchable.
