Please allow me to introduce myself...

My name's Matthew; a computer programmer by trade, child of hippiedom and by a significant margin the Old Man of this MRes year. I'm -- frankly -- a little under the weather, which should at least serve to abate my more extreme fire and brimstone tendencies today.

Against my better judgement, there are a couple of slides.

This first constitutes a random walk through the best part of a decade misspent in various backwaters of the games and entertainment industry, expending untold ingenuity and intellectual effort to make ever more worthless pastimes available on ever stupider platforms; the nadir probably being cable tv set top boxes that only barely aspired to programmability in the first place.

After that -- perhaps in reaction to it -- I went over to the Dark Side, into the world of Quantitative Finance, writing programs around statistical risk models of the financial markets.

That's not anywhere near the true Heart of Darkness -- consider it more like being an external contractor supplying canteen vending machines to the Death Star -- but nevertheless pretty soul-destroying. The flow of money is as splendid and corrosive as the medieval alchemists could ever have hoped their universal solvent would be.

My subsequent activities -- which is to say, being a student and a part of CoMPLEX -- can readily be construed as some kind of late and desperate striving for redemption after all that jazz...
Posted by matt at April 16, 2007 10:30 AM