Nick Black

About me:

Howdy! I fitfully emit into yonder Space of gibberish, and peer through the strange fishbowl ye olde internete provides (I don't post much to this particular timesuck, already wanking far too much on my lj). I'm fascinated by the lot of you, and add people pretty freely; there are no special places in this isotropic, homogeneous, curved Lorentzian manifold we call the Universe. The Good Book provides the watchword: "There is serenity in Chaos. Seek ye the Eye of the Hurricane."



sleeplessly i code in the shadow of atlanta, keeping the packets moving and the cachelines humming, striving to be the finest programmer in the land. a formalization of the halting problem's tattooed to remind myself life is uncomputable in the large, and one must think outside the turing tape. then again, thus spake the master programmer: "after three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." i recently became the first man to clear god's bong, which is certainly something.


I am about as clear-cut an ENTP as you can be. Here's more info on the type of champions.

we work in the dark
we do what we can
we give what we have

our doubt is our passion
and our passion is our task
the rest is the madness of art

Born 1980-10-05 0251 -0500 at Northside Hospital (Atlanta, GA) -- I share this birthday with the Linux kernel, a fact which delights me. Attended Little River Elementary (Woodstock), graduated and entered Marist School (Dunwoody), was kicked out in the 11th grade and graduated from Walton High School (Marietta) in 1998. Attended GT for a year and a half, meanwhile programming for Corporate Psychology Resources and then CNN, and corrupting the youth TA'ing for the CoC . I've lived snugly along the mighty CONNECTOR (a multiplexing of 75/85 - aerial map) within the tre ghetto fabulous Home Park / Atlantic Station and their surrounding Midtown phatlands since 1999, save a brief taking up of residence at Ridgeview Institute (Roswell) in the spring of 2000. I was there diagnosed with Type I Bipolar Disorder, and emerged homeless and out of school. Hacked code for Telesync for a minute, then was hired to lead the development team at Trellis Network Security (Alpharetta) upon their founding in 2000-08; this would become Reflex Security, where I worked a fine lustrum leading research and development of intrusion prevention. Fall 2003 saw a ride back into GT's valley of death, finally clinching a BS in Computer Science with specializations in Systems, Theory and Networking. On a dark December night in Our Lord's 2005th year, I pledged myself to CipherTrust Research (Alpharetta, GA), swearing to uphold and defend RFC's 2821, 2822, and all the rest besides. There I now practice code artistry and regulate with a staff of rigor, prepare for a MS in one of:

• Nuclear and Radiological Engineering (Fusion),
• Biology (Computational Bioinformatics), or
• Computer Science (Information Security),

and hope to start my Ph.D. here or here or maybe even here by 2009 or so. I hack for about 85 hours a week, and more and more frequently find myself watching Apocalypse Now late at night, naked and shivering over stubbed-out cigarettes, clutching a bottle of Maker's. My Volvo has multiple parts held together with duct tape, these being the only successful repairs I've made on a car (update! the Volvo died and was sold to rednecks, who've long since melted it down into crystal meth. I drove up a bitchin' Miata from the Bahamas, and subsequently wrapped it around a highway divider. I am now looking into a scooter). I smoke roughly 40,006 Newports per day, and try to drink a Tab with each. At some point in my life, I hope to run a used book store. My life is dedicated to improving the world through the expansion of human understanding, and one day raising kickass children both rigorous and comely. I love C++, Prolog, ML and x86 assembly language, but grow violently ill at the mention of perl. I converted from the evangelical / fundamentalist Christianity of my parents to Deism at 12, embraced logical positivism and atheism at 13, and have found peace in chaos as a Discordian since the fateful summer of 1998. I suffered, died and was buried, and on the third day rose again, in fulfillment of the ..Scriptures. My political/philosophical beliefs, if compressed to the semantic measure of a bumper sticker, would be summed up "Every Man an Everyman" and can best be summarized as "Leibnizian Optimalism" (a much more active, dialectical process than "Leibnizian Optimism", embracing and extending most of the ideas o..f transhumanism). Lately it occurs to me -- what a long, strange trip it's been.

I am one of the happiest people I know, and certainly the most furious worker (exempting various true academics). It is one of the great blessings of my life that the two form a kind of positive feedback; the happier I am, the harder I work, the happier I become, the harder still I strive, and then I infuriatingly pass out sometimes. Alan Lightman said it best, or at least skillfully paraphrased Tennyson:

Einstein wrote that when he first realized that gravity was equivalent to acceleration - an idea that would underlie his new theory of gravity - it was the "happiest thought of my life." On projects of far smaller weight, I have experienced that pleasure of discovering something new. It is an exquisite sensation.., a feeling of power, a rush of the blood, a sense of living forever. To be the first vessel to hold this new thing.

All of the scientists I’ve known have at least one more quality in common: they do what they do because they love it, and because they cannot imagine doing anything else. In a sense, this is the real reason a scientist does science. Because the scientist must. Such a compulsion is both blessing and burden. A blessing because the creative life, in any endeavor, is a gift filled with beauty and not given to everyone, a burden because the call is unrelenting and can drown out the rest of life.

This mixed blessing and burden must be why the astrophysicist Chandrasekhar continued working until his mid-80’s, why a visitor to Einstein’s apartment in Bern found the young physicist rocking his infant with one hand while doing mathematical calculations with the other. This mixed blessing and burden must have been the "sweet hell" that Walt Whitman referred to when he realized at a young age that he was destined to be a poet. "Never more," he wrote, "shall I escape."

A manager was about to be fired, but a programmer who worked for him invented a new program that became popular and sold well. As a result, the manager retained his job. The manager tried to give the programmer a bonus, but the programmer refused it, saying, "I wrote the program because I thought it was an interesting concept, and thus I expect no reward." The manager upon hearing this remarked, "This programmer, though he holds a position of small esteem, understands well the proper duty of an employee. Let us promote him to the exalted position of management consultant!" But when told this, the programmer once more refused, saying, "I exist so that I can program. If I were promoted, I would do nothing but waste everyone's time. Can I go now? I have a program that I'm working on."

In the east there is a shark which is larger than all other fish. It changes into a bird whose wings are like clouds filling the sky. When this bird moves across the land, it brings a message from Corporate Headquarters. This message it drops into the midst of the programmers, like a seagull making its mark upon the beach. Then the bird mounts on the wind and, with the blue sky at its back, returns home. The novice programmer stares in wonder at the bird, for he understands it not. The average programmer dreads the coming of the bird, for he fears its message. The master programmer continues to work at his terminal, for he does not know that the bird has come and gone.

Read along with dank! Here's my Amazon wishlist.