I grew up on islands and ended up in New Jersey. I work in cybersecurity and spend my weekends watching birds. I’ve been writing here since 2001, which makes this blog older than most social networks still standing — and just as unstrategic. It covers photography, birding, craft beer, the open web, Formula 1, and whatever else I can’t stop thinking about. No algorithm. No niche. Just me.

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I’m Khürt Williams. I was born in 1966 in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines 🇻🇨, back when it was still a British Overseas Territory. My childhood was a moving mosaic of islands — Bequia, Barbados 🇧🇧 , Saint Lucia 🇱🇨 , Saint Kitts and Nevis 🇰🇳 , Antigua & Barbuda 🇦🇬 — before we settled back in Saint Vincent. My father’s banking career made us nomadic, and in 1986, we emigrated to Flushing, Queens. I became a U.S. citizen in 1992.

I live now in Montgomery Township, New Jersey, with my wife Bhavna. I’ve been here long enough to know the good light in the marshes, where the shorebirds gather in July, and which local breweries are worth the drive. But I still feel the pull of the Caribbean — particularly Bequia and Antigua, two islands that remain home in ways I don’t fully have words for.

By day, I work as a Lead Cybersecurity Architect. That part of my life is rigorous, structured, and detail-driven. The rest of it is this blog.

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Island in the Net

This blog has been my home on the web since 2001. The name comes from Bruce Sterling’s 1988 novel — a book dense with data havens, nanotech, and unsettling foresight about the world we’d eventually be living in. I discovered it as a young man trying to understand what the future might look like. The phrase island in the net stayed with me: the idea of a place apart, yet still connected. A personal node in a larger web.

That’s what this site has always been for me. Not a platform, not a brand. A place to think out loud.

You’ll find posts here on photography, birding, craft beer, cybersecurity, the open web, Formula 1, science fiction, native plants, and whatever else is currently occupying too much space in my head. It is personal, informal, and nonlinear — a reflection of how I actually think.

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Photography and Birding

I picked up a camera in 1987 at Drew University, where I took a fine art photography course and spent late nights in the darkroom developing Tri-X and HP5. My first camera was a Pentax P3. I shot mostly on Kodachrome — drawn in by its colour and its particular quality of nostalgia.

After a long hiatus, I returned to photography in 2006 with a Nikon D40, and eventually moved to Fujifilm’s X-series, where I’ve stayed. I love the tactile feel, the physical controls, the way these cameras echo the analogue era without pretending to be it.

These days I shoot birds — primarily shorebirds, wading birds, raptors, and terns along the New Jersey coast and further afield. Birding snuck up on me gradually and is now a serious discipline: early mornings, long waits, specific tides, the particular satisfaction of finding something rare in an ordinary place. I shoot with the XF 150–600mm, which is an unreasonable lens that I have no regrets about.

Photography is how I slow the world down. Birding is how I pay attention to it.

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The Other Things

Coffee. AeroPress or Chemex, freshly ground, from local fair-trade roasters. No shortcuts. Coffee is both ritual and restoration.

Craft beer. Pilsners, kölsch, stouts, saisons. I support small New Jersey breweries — Flounder, Odd Bird, Wild Fern, The Seed — and I’m drawn to clarity, complexity, and character, whether in a glass or a conversation.

Science fiction. Cyberpunk was my first language for understanding the future. I still read, and consume more through film and series. I am also, without apology, the kind of person who reads security whitepapers for pleasure and configures networks just to understand how they behave.

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Living with What I Have

In 2006, I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes (LADA), managed with an insulin pump and continuous glucose monitor. In 2018, Graves’ disease led to a thyroidectomy and orbital decompression surgery.

Managing these conditions is a full-time job running beneath everything else — always planning ahead, always adapting, rarely visible. They don’t define me. But they shape how I move through the world, and occasionally they shape what I write about.

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Why Any of This

I’m a systems thinker with a restless, curious mind and an irrational number of interests. I write to explore, to document, and to make sense of things — sometimes the architecture of security, sometimes a heron standing still in a salt marsh at dawn, sometimes what it means to carry a body that requires constant negotiation.

This blog isn’t built for an audience. It’s built for me, and you’re welcome in it.

If something here resonates, I’m genuinely glad. If it doesn’t, there’s always something else around the bend — there usually is.