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If you’ve already subscribed via RSS, my bandwidth would appreciate you switching to the FeedBurner feeds, as would my stats obsession :o). If you’re reading through the automatic LiveJournal cross-posts, this doesn’t affect you, although if you ever stop using LJ as your feed reader, you’ll find the FeedBurner subscribe link at the top of my blog.

My name is Nicolas Ward, generally known as UltraNurd on the intertrons. I am a software engineer working in Natural Language Processing for BBN Technologies in Cambridge, MA. I am a part-time masters student in computer science in the Harvard University EECS department. I am the guildmaster of Mellonea in World of Warcraft. I am a huge geek.

What is this blog?

To be honest, I don’t really know yet. I have recently gotten interested in social media, mostly as a Twitter user. I used to blog on LiveJournal (you’ll note the complete archive of that is available here), but once I got into a work routine, I didn’t have much to post about, or rather never took the time to post. I am now trying to get back into regular long-form blogging, since basic life updates and short comments to the void are fulfilled by microblogging on Twitter.

I am naturally interested in all things computer-related, but I have a wide variety of interests. I like to think of myself as a maven (as per Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point). I expect my posts will fit into several potential categories:

• Computer howtos
• Book and video game reviews/discussions
• Political and religious commentary
• Software ideas (probably focused on NLP)
• Current school projects
• My experiences with social media
• Responses to friends’ blog posts
• LiveJournal archive

If any of that is interesting to you, I hope you’ll enjoy reading at least some of what I blather on about.

I license everything I write, as well as all of my pictures, using a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0-US (“CC-BY”) license. In general, that probably means you can quote or copy anything I post, as long as you say it’s from me, except where otherwise noted. For a number of reasons, including licensing issues, I won’t be blogging with any specifics about what I do at work. They own my brain when I’m on the clock.

What do I read?

You can check out my blogroll on the left, but I’ll highlight some of the blogs that aren’t written by famous people, and explain why I follow them.

• An Bui – An is a friend of mine from college, and she is directly responsible for getting me on Twitter. She writes about social media marketing.
• The Camel’s Knees – My sister Joanna is currently serving with the Peace Corps in Gao, Mali, West Africa. Her ability to post is intermittent, but she writes about development and nutrition issues, as well as describing elements of Sonrai culture.
• Tweetworks Blog – Tweetworks is a Twitter threading tool developed by Boston local Mike Langford. He writes about the Tweetworks tool, as well as general Twitter issues.
• Brett Nordquist – Brett is one of the first people I started following on Twitter randomly; he writes about tech issues, and raising his kids.
• Ku Photos Blog – Emery was my college roommate for three years, and is an awesome photographer. Check out his work!