About
The proprietor of this website (as one may have ascertained from the URL) is one Nicholas Tam, Esq., formerly headquartered in one humble fortress or another in the rather delightful province of Alberta, Canada. My present base of operations is Wolfson College at the University of Cambridge, where I am reading History and Philosophy of Science and breathing a sigh of relief at my daring escape from the hostile Edmonton winter.
My previous diplomas were in Computing Science and English—an unorthodox combination that makes for a good conversation piece, if not a stable long-term career.
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 could go into more detail, but that would blow my cover, and I happen to enjoy conducting my covert business under the identity of a multiply committed knight of rueful countenance.
I never crease the spines of paperback books.
Elsewhere
Dedicated stalkers can find me on Facebook, Twitter, cross-tables.com, and the World of Warcraft Armory.
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 movies, 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.
