Who Am I?

TL;DR

I'm a multi ethnic avid photographer and technologist from Saint Vincent and the Grenadines living in the New Jersey suburbs.

Longer

In 1966, I was born in the British Overseas Territory of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. Saint. Vincent and the Grenadines became an independent nation from the United Kingdom on 27 October 1979, at which point I became a citizen of an actual country for the first time in my life.

My father, Cooper Williams, was a banker, and following his career path, we moved around between the islands. During that time, I lived in a few other West Indian islands, including Saint Lucia and Barbados, where my baby brother was born, and Antigua & Barbuda, where I spend my early teenage years. We could easily travel and live between these island nations because of their membership in the Commonwealth of Nations.

My early childhood (the mid-1960s to early 1970s) was between a rented home in New Montrose in Kingstown, St. Vincent, and the Barclays Bank house in Port Elizabeth, Bequia. I spent a lot of time with my grandparents in La Pompe.

I don’t recall the dates, but we lived in Castries, St. Lucia, for a few years before I turned 11. In the late '70s and early '80s, I lived in Antigua and Barbuda during my early teenage years. In 1983, my family moved back to St. Vincent and the Grenadines, where I finished high school and completed my O-levels and A-levels at the St. Vincent Grammar School. For a few months, we also lived on Saint Kitts and Nevis. I experienced a different West Indian culture on each island, influencing who I am today. I consider myself West Indian with no particular allegiance to any island¹, although I have a sweet spot in my heart for Antigua and Bequia. My family emigrated from St. Vincent & The Grenadines to Flushing, Queens, in 1986 to attend university, and I became a citizen of the United States of America in 1992.

I love drinking craft ale and freshly brewed coffee. I buy fresh beans from a local organic fair trade retailer and brew at home every few days. I grind the beans myself and brew using either a French Press or Chemex pour over with an Able Kone filter. I don’t drink Starbucks.

There are two excellent craft ale breweries within 15-20 minutes in the local traffic of my home. Between Troon Brewing and Flounder Brewing, I am privileged to have some highly-rated New England style IPA, American Pale ales, and porters. Conclave Brewing is a little further out is Conclave Brewing, which makes super delicious, and The Referend Bier Blendery, which produces spontaneously fermented ales in the Belgian tradition. I don’t drink Budweiser, and I rarely buy retail.

Work

I’m an information security professional, Apple geek, web developer, and avid photographer. This weblog is where I share my incoherent and random thoughts and rants about technology, photography, coffee, diabetes, and life. I started blogging regularly around October 2001, bouncing between platforms (Radio Userland, Blogger, Moveable Type, etc..) before settling on WordPress circa 2004. I taught myself how to build Linux servers, compile Apache and OpenSSL web servers from source code, and install and configure MySQL. All because of my desire to make secure and high-performance WordPress websites. I taught myself PHP and JavaScript to complement my Perl website development work.

The first ten years of my career (starting in 1994) were in multimedia research and development, systems integration and full-stack web application development. I created web applications for various financial services and pharmaceutical companies on Linux, Apache, MySQL, JavaScript, Perl, and PHP. The next ten were spent on information security, vulnerability assessments, log management, security awareness, security architecture, compliance, and advisory for Bristol-Myers Squibb. Since 2013, I have worked independently at Monkey Hill, LLC, a consultancy I started in 2013 after my role at Squibb was eliminated. My current work is in information security architecture.

Computers

The journey from Commodore VIC-20/Commodore 64 (1981/1985) to DOS PC (1986) to Microsoft Windows PC (1990) to UNIX/SunOS/Solaris (1992) to Linux (1994) to Apple Macintosh (2005) took twenty-four years. I bought my first Mac, a Mac mini, in 2005 and fell in love with OS X, a Unix with a world-class GUI. Soon after buying that first Mac, I bought a MacBook, an iPad Touch, and an iMac. Later the iPad was released in 2010, and I had to have one that same week. Then I bought my first iPhone (2012) and an Apple TV.

The iPad is my go-to computer, but I use my iMac heavily for photo editing. I’m an app junky, and you can find many iOS and OS app reviews on this blog.

I also do exciting projects with Raspberry Pi. It’s the smallest and cheapest Linux server I have ever owned.

Programming Languages

I started with Commodore BASIC in 1981, learned Pascal during a college course in 1986, and taught myself awk/sed/bash (1992) and Perl (1997), followed by PHP (2001) and JavaScript (2002). I've taken Java and Objective C courses but didn't use either language, and I have not written code professionally since 2013.

Science Fiction

Although that’s not reflected in the content in this blog, I love science fiction, especially cyberpunk, Japanese animation and superhero graphic novels, and dystopian futures. The website's name, Island in the Net, is taken from a book, Islands in the Net, written in 1988 by a science fiction author, Bruce Sterling. It is a story of data pirates, mercenaries, nanotechnology, weaponry, and post-millennial voodoo. It represents a future where people can use the Internet to topple governments, change lives, and make history.

I read too few books these days.

Photography

My photography adventure started circa 1987 when I took a fine art photography class in college. I bought my first 35mm film camera, a Pentax P3 with an SMC Pentax-A 50mm f/2 lens, and started to "abuse" Kodachrome, Ilford HP5, and Tri-X Pan film and develop my prints in the college darkroom. At that time, I sheepishly admit I shot anything and everything. I didn’t take a camera seriously until 2006, when I bought a Nikon D40 and kit lens. I had exhausted what was possible on my point-n-shoot Sony digital camera. I stuck with Nikon, upgrading to new bodies every few years, until 2018, when I could no longer resist the lustful design of the Fuji X series. I own a Fujifilm X-T3 camera, Fujinon XF27mmF2.8 R WR and Fujinon XF16-55mmF2.8 R LM WR lenses.

I photograph mostly landscapes and nature, but I have recently tried street photography. An obscure word, nemophila, describes someone who loves forests, woods, or woodland scenery and often visits them. That’s me. I love being outdoors, listening to the sounds of nature–birds, running water, the wind in the trees. For me, it’s a form of therapy, a break from the world's worries.

I’m an avid photographer, and if the weather suits me, I spend my free time outside, increasing my knowledge of landscape and nature photography. I prefer natural light, but I’m comfortable shooting anything that interests me: documentary photography, long-exposure photography, architecture, and bird photography. I take photos regularly, both for myself and for others. I do almost all of my editing and exporting from my Mac. As far as gear goes, I alternate between a few cameras:

• iPhone 11 Pro
• Fujifilm X-T3 digital ILC
• Minolta X-700 35mm film SLR
• Minolta XD-11 35mm film SLR

Most images are shot with the Fujifilm XF16-55mmF2.8 R LM WR and XF27mmF2.8 R WR lenses and a small collection of 35mm manual focus lenses.

• MD Rokkor-X 45mm f/2
• MD Rokkor-X 50mm f/1.7
• MD W.Rokkor-X 28mm f/2.8

With my iPhone, I enjoy casual photography, snapping and sharing things with my friends and family, and playing with Adobe Lightroom Mobile. The digital revolution has made photography more accessible.

Auto-immune diseases

In 2006, I was diagnosed with Type 1 (LADA) diabetes, an autoimmune type of diabetes. I’m learning to live with it. I have a Medtronic 670G insulin pump and GuardianLink GCMS to help me manage my diabetes. I occasionally post articles about my diabetes tech.

In 2018, I was diagnosed with Graves' thyroid disease and Grave’s eye disease, an autoimmune form of hyperthyroidism. It was a challenge to life with it, so I had a thyroidectomy at the end of 2018. Graves disease continued to affect my eyes, and a year after the thyroidectomy, I had orbital decompression surgery.

History

I remember attending a presentation on open-source software by Richard Stallman. I remember getting my first computer, a Commodore VIC20. I remember learning Commodore (Microsoft) BASIC and writing my first video game. I remember when I upgraded to the Commodore 64 and floppy storage. I remember getting my first IBM-compatible DOS PC, an Epson with one floppy disk and a green CRT monitor. I remember buying and installing a 2400 baud modem to dial into the bulletin board system (BBS). I remember using WordPerfect to write all my term papers. I remember learning Pascal and writing my first text editor.