About
A seasoned technologist with thirty years of international startup experience and a broad palette of scientific, business and computing skills. I work the long boundary between deep technical research and pragmatic commercial execution — whichever side a problem needs.
Currently I split my time between Blackcat Informatics® Inc. — the consultancy I've run since 1994 — and applied research at the intersection of TDA, manifold learning, and large-language-model semantics. The through-line across more than thirty years has been the same: find elegant solutions to complex technical problems, exploit problem isomorphisms, and ship code that does what it says on the tin.
Earlier in my career I was instrumental to numerous tech launches, acquisitions, pivots, and exits across telephony, high-performance computing, crowdsourcing, bioinformatics, and security — over twenty-five startup launches across the years. I've moved high-throughput systems to the cloud (a social platform supporting massive concurrent counts in the early 2010s, scientific analysis pipelines for genetics and satellite imagery, multi-continent high-resiliency financial deployments) and learned, every time, that minimum-footprint systems built on open-source primitives outlast the elaborately-architected ones.
I'm an active member of the local Vancouver and Alberta startup and development communities and enjoy fostering new talent. Dangle a good problem in front of me, tempt me with a cup of coffee, and I'll yak your ear off on just about any topic.
Currently
Helping organisations shape their AI and large-data strategies through the current technology inflection — not the buzzword version, the version where you have to actually decide what to build, what to wait on, and what to ignore.
Researching emergent semantic-graph relations in high-order semantic vector spaces — hyper-dimensional topological analysis using complex continuations and homomorphisms applied to high-dimensional embeddings, with fusions of QCD and Hamiltonian dynamics, to surface structural relations that aren't explicit in the source corpus.
Building coding-ethos — policy-as-code for AI coding agents. MCP server, CEL policies, git hooks, SARIF, all the static-analysis guardrails. The premise: agents should not be able to ship code that violates your team's standards, even if you're not in the loop.
Maintaining a handful of small libraries — the structured-error library e and a fast C++ LRU cache first written in 2004 and still useful. Earlier Python tooling (pyqa_lint, git-ai-reporter) has been folded into coding-ethos.
Notes
Working notes, position pieces, and short essays. Mostly things I would otherwise post elsewhere — cross-posted here so they outlive any one platform.
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Engineering principles should be runnable policy, not slide-deck nostalgia
The thing I keep running into with multi-agent setups is that the engineering principles a team actually cares about — how to handle errors, when to wrap shell calls, what counts as a critical path — live in a wiki page or a slide deck nobody reads. That's already a problem for humans; for an LLM agent it is a guarantee of policy violation.
coding-ethos is the position I've taken: those principles belong in a single
coding_ethos.ymlfile, and from that one file the build emits everything that needs to know about them —CLAUDE.md/GEMINI.mdagent instructions, Ruff / Pyright / golangci-lint configs, compiled Go pre-commit hooks, agent tool-use guards, and an MCP server the agent can query at runtime.The key invariant: the engine that writes the markdown rules is the exact same engine that evaluates CEL expressions at the git-hook level. They cannot drift. If the hook denies an action, the agent gets back a structured
skill_idhint instead of a generic exit code — so the feedback loop closes inside the agent's own context rather than landing on a human's screen.Heavily opinionated, currently slanted toward Python and Go, in active development. Posted on r/GeminiCLI with worked examples; read the original thread if you want the implementation walk-through, and feature requests are welcome on the repo.
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Standard Graph Neural Networks need curved semantic manifolds
Standard Graph Neural Networks are structurally constrained when mapping complex text attribution: linear aggregation in flat Euclidean space inevitably forces semantic drift. To map high-dimensional knowledge faithfully you have to transition to curved semantic manifolds, where the geometry itself carries the relational structure.
Across thirty years of building scientific analysis pipelines — genetics, satellite imagery, multi-continent high-resiliency financial applications — the through-line has been the same: representations must remain mathematically faithful to their underlying geometry, or they stop being interpretable the moment the data leaves your dev set.
I've recently open-sourced a framework that discovers emergent knowledge-graph relations in high-order semantic vector spaces through manifold learning and spectral analysis. Initial proofs, a small teaser, and the Python codebase live at paudley/nonlinear-semantic-graphs; the working paper that motivates the design is in Publications.
I'm looking to connect with researchers and applied scientists specialising in Topological Data Analysis, Geometric Deep Learning, and Knowledge Representation — especially anyone working on geodesic aggregation or spectral graph theory — to push these ideas into robust enterprise deployments. Comment on the LinkedIn original or drop me a line directly.
Open Source
A curated subset of public work. The full list is on GitHub. github.com/paudley.
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coding-ethos
Policy-as-code enforcement for AI coding agents. MCP server + CEL policies + git hooks + SARIF + static-analysis guardrails so an autonomous agent can't ship code that fails your team's standards.
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nonlinear-semantic-graphs
Discovering emergent knowledge-graph relations in high-order semantic vector spaces — manifold learning + spectral analysis applied to LLM embeddings to surface relations that aren't explicit in the source corpus.
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ai-notes
Working notebook for local-model experimentation, ML papers worth tracking, and small reusable bits of inference plumbing. Public so the notes serve as their own changelog.
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lru_cache
Fast, thread-safe Least-Recently-Used cache as a C++ template, with a comprehensive unit-test suite. First written in 2004 and still useful — the kind of small library that just needs to work.
Older / archive projects
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git-ai-reporter
Git-driven LLM analysis. Watched your commit history and kept CHANGELOG / NEWS files current automatically. Superseded by the broader policy-as-code approach in coding-ethos.
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pyqa_lint
Opinionated quality-assurance harness for Python projects. A Typer-based CLI that bundled ruff, mypy, pytest-coverage, security scanners, and dependency audits behind one verb. Superseded by coding-ethos, which generalises the same idea to multi-language policy-as-code.
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core_data
Docker-managed PostgreSQL setup for local development — opinionated defaults, sensible volume layout, ready in one command. Built because every project re-litigates this.
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colorout
Golang colour wrappers for prettifying spew dump output. Tiny utility; surprisingly handy.
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e
Golang error-handling extensions with structured-error support. Stack-traceable, wrappable, JSON-serialisable.
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tsmdailyreport
TSM Daily Report for IBM Tivoli Storage Manager. Now archive — kept for historical reference; TSM is no longer the right tool for the job.
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ar-ramblings
A long-form walk through the Active Record pattern using PHP — written when ORM design was still a contested topic. Archive value as a teaching artefact.
Career
A chronological view of past roles. Many of these overlap because most have been concurrent consulting engagements through Blackcat Informatics; the role and field tell you what each one actually was.
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Founder & Principal Management Consultant
High-end IT and management consulting for the Vancouver and Alberta startup communities. Domain expertise across high-performance and cloud computing, military-grade security, carrier-grade networking, blockchain, bioinformatics, machine learning, satellite imaging, and cryptology.
- CTO-at-large engagements: high-level management, executive oversight, hands-on execution.
- Solution architecture for complex technical problems — sparse-resource design and future-proofing.
- Cloud navigation: clusters, grids, lambdas, microservices; devops automation across providers.
- Startup process and execution from idea through early-stage funding.
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President, COO & CFO
FinTech firm developing a compliant blockchain platform for tokenisation of Private Equity, Venture Capital, Real Estate, and other alternative assets. Asset Backed Tokens™ enable retail access to traditionally institutional markets.
- Operated a Canadian reporting issuer for several years; certified financial filings as CFO.
- Bridged regulated capital markets with the wild west of cryptocurrency.
- Performed deal due diligence and led legal vetting.
- Authored Solidity contracts and worked across multi-blockchain solutions.
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CTO
Global-scale, high-throughput, real-time geospatial analysis and event-correlation systems — fusing public satellite feeds (GOES-R, MODIS, VIIRS, Himawari) with statistical and ML detection.
- Built a worldwide early wildfire-detection pipeline with NRT analysis of heterogeneous satellite feeds.
- Delivered data to multiple governments and government agencies plus commercial customers.
- Operated a 30 TB PostgreSQL / PostGIS data store and routinely tuned heavy spatial queries.
- Collaborated with university research clusters on LiDAR integration and forest-composition analysis.
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CTO
Built social-promotion platforms with a team of social-marketing experts; instrumented and shaped brand engagement at scale.
- Ran the dev teams over several product iterations: hiring, team-building, training, direction.
- Set the broad technical direction of Strutta and its fleet of related companies.
- Operated as senior management inside a public-company structure.
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Managing Director, Technology
Owned the technical landscape across the Mobio / LX Ventures portfolio: acquisition due diligence, budget planning, cloud infrastructure, hiring, team management.
Mobio was acquired by LX Ventures, which subsequently rebranded back to Mobio.
- Built a large-scale cloud stack supporting an Alexa top-5000 site (2014).
- Led multi-platform deploys across AWS, GCE, and Heroku.
- DBA of last resort for the portfolio — fixing the evil problems no one else would.
- Executive-team duties for a public-market incubator.
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Founder & CTO
Founded Cogneto in February 2006; raised £1.2 million; assembled a world-class engineering team and built a tightly-coupled user-centric / high-security software programme.
- Contributed to a rich patent portfolio spanning over twelve patents.
- Drove the meshing of user-centric design with adversary-aware security engineering.
- Touched almost every facet of building a first-rate startup — funding, hiring, IP, GTM.
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High-Performance Computing Manager
Specified, provisioned, and operated research-grade computing for the School of Life Sciences.
- 20 TB IBM-based SAN with Tivoli Storage Manager — 2 Gbps pure NFS.
- New Cisco-based network backbone with NAT and intrusion detection.
- 100-processor research cluster on custom PXE / imaging, Sun Grid Engine, and a bespoke deployment package.
- Self-discovering monitoring tools that mapped switch topology and surfaced problem areas as the network grew.
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Sr. Ecommerce Architect — PKI & Cryptography
Founding-team security and PKI architect for a national CLEC. Designed and supervised construction of two high-security PKI vaults and the surrounding infrastructure.
- Coordinated a national audit of GT's networks: 2000+ systems, 1000+ networks, 3 autonomous routing domains, 16 cities.
- Key member of GT's Computer Security Incident Response Team; led several data-forensic investigations.
- Designed PKI-based applications in Perl, C, C++, and PHP — including the Realtorlink Hybrid Authentication system and Secure Private Internet Messaging (SPIM).
- Provided sales-support for PKI and security products.
Earlier roles · short engagements · advisory positions
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Senior Developer
Joined the Ardan Labs team — a high-class collection of talent that takes on some of the hardest challenges in the Go consulting space and provides top-notch training and knowledge transfer.
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Park Board Candidate
Ran on a platform of expanding green spaces, keeping them safe and accessible for all, and increasing community involvement in park-board decisions.
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CTO
Brought AI and big-data to ESG / impact investing — sifting the data corporations shed for the signals that actually describe their behaviour, replacing self-asserted environmental claims with hard evidence.
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Technical Advisory Board Member
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Acting CTO (interim)
Short interim engagement helping bring deep, location-based public consultation into government and funding workflows.
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Chief Architect & VP Engineering
Cloud deployments, devops automation, and the realities of a lean startup development shop.
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Integration Architect
Moved internal groups onto more scalable technologies; cloud, security, and disaster-recovery design for DMM during a brief stay.
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Sr. Developer
Brief engagement at a small Vancouver medical-education shop. Worked on a large medical-education project with a tight team.
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VP Technology
Led the technical commercialisation of a major crowdsourcing platform.
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Hacker — Security & Code Uplift
Security audit of the existing code base; extended and uplifted the PHP management system; worked with the VOIP provisioning systems.
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Sr. Software Architect
Designed, developed, and deployed a high-throughput, cross-platform ICAP server using a multiprocess / multithreaded architecture for seamless inline web-content modification.
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System Administrator / MIS
Owned UNIX administration for a 15,000-user ISP — DNS, sendmail, INN, POP, caching — and the underlying network of WinNT and Sparc servers.
Education
Formal credentials are a short list — most of what stuck came from the long unstructured stretch before that.
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School of Hard Knocks (Internet Edition)
Pre-Internet BBS communities; ran several boards, worked with what would now be called micro-startups, and generally hacked around. The actual education that mattered.
Credentials
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RCMP Reliability Status
· issued by Royal Canadian Mounted Police · active
Higher clearance levels are obtainable upon request.
Lived in: Edmonton, AB · Sherwood Park, AB · Calgary, AB · Dundee, Scotland (United Kingdom) · Huntsville, Alabama (United States) · Vancouver, BC · Spruce Grove, AB (current).
Publications
Peer-reviewed papers, position papers, and explanatory notes. Older items kept for archival reference.
Google Scholar: 664 citations across Artificial Intelligence, Information Theory, Data Evolution.
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Emergent Knowledge Graphs from High-Order Semantic Spaces
A reproducible, from-first-principles method for discovering emergent knowledge-graph relations in high-order semantic vector spaces. Combines manifold learning, spectral analysis, and residual factorization to extract non-linear conceptual structures from embedded text corpora — yielding interpretable graphs, cosine-based similarity measures, and labelled semantic relations suitable for automated ontology construction. Implementation lives in the nonlinear-semantic-graphs repository.
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OXBench: A benchmark for evaluation of protein multiple sequence alignment accuracy
The alignment of two or more protein sequences provides a powerful guide in the prediction of the protein structure and in identifying key functional residues, however, the utility of any prediction is completely dependent on the accuracy of the alignment. In this paper we describe a suite of reference alignments derived from the comparison of protein three-dimensional structures together with evaluation measures and software that allow automatically generated alignments to be benchmarked. We test the OXBench benchmark suite on alignments generated by the AMPS multiple alignment method, then apply the suite to compare eight different multiple alignment algorithms. The benchmark shows the current state-of-the art for alignment accuracy and provides a baseline against which new alignment algorithms may be judged.
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Evaluating Usability and Security: All Ages
Position paper on testing methodologies that surface security and usability concerns across the full demographic range of users — from children through to the elderly — rather than the typical young-adult convenience sample. Argues that age-stratified user studies expose security failure modes that single-cohort studies miss entirely.
Podcasts
Audio segments where I was the subject expert. Both produced by TechTarget / WhatIs.com in 2007 — short "what is X" pieces aimed at a tech-business audience. Written companion notes are in Publications.
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What is a cognitive biometric?
Do you know what a passthought is? We didn't either — until we recorded this podcast. To start off the new year with a bang, the Tech Buzzwords podcast from WhatIs.com tackles cognitive biometrics, a fast-growing new field used in authentication in the finance industry and beyond. To learn more about "cognometrics," Assistant Site Editor Alex Howard interviewed Patrick Audley, the CTO of bleeding-edge risk-adaptive software provider Cogneto.
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What is FFIEC compliance?
In this WhatIs.com podcast you'll learn about FFIEC's attempt to modernize existing banking practices in the context of new online threats like phishing. Assistant Site Editor Alex Howard interviewed Patrick Audley, the CTO of risk-adaptive software provider Cogneto. Topics covered: how implementation of FFIEC recommendations changes the way customers use a bank; the difference between single-factor and multiple-factor authentication; whether a fingerprint, iris scanner, or voice-recognition system is sufficient under FFIEC guidance; how dynamic reporting decreases the incidence of fraud and what real-time risk analysis is; whether there are penalties for non-compliance; and where the majority of funds are stolen in phishing attacks.
Patents
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Globally Aware Authentication System
An authentication system that combines location, device, behavioural, and temporal signals into a single risk score per access attempt. Pre-dates most modern "adaptive auth" / "continuous auth" frameworks; the underlying ideas are now mainstream in zero-trust architectures.
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System and method for user polling over a network
Voting and opinion-collection over networked media — methods for soliciting, attributing, and aggregating user votes across heterogeneous channels. Patent pending (USPTO).
Skills
A flat tag-list of technologies and disciplines. Categorisation deliberately omitted: hierarchies imply a primary axis that doesn't exist for a generalist.
- Software Architecture
- Data Science
- Spatial Analysis
- Machine Learning Security Operations (MLSecOps)
- Cloud Computing
- Agile Methodologies
- Software Development
- Databases
- Start-ups
- Integration
- Web Applications
- Unix
- Linux
- E-commerce
- Security
- Mobile Applications
- MySQL
- SaaS
- Software Design
- Subversion
- Mobile Devices
- Architecture
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Web Development
- Scalability
- Apache
- Software Engineering
- OOP
- Product Development
- Entrepreneurship
- Network Security
- Web Services
- AJAX
- Scrum
- Cryptography
- LAMP
- Android
- Managed Services
- Data Center
- PKI
- REST
- Program Management
- STL Metaprogramming
- Security Management
- Open Source
- Cryptocurrency
- Go
- Python
- C++
- Ruby
- JavaScript
- Perl
- PHP
- jQuery
- XML
Languages
- English · Native
- French · Limited working proficiency
Testimonials
Dated peer recommendations from the LinkedIn era. Kept verbatim with the original dates so you can see how old each one is.
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A wide range of abilities and talents combined with strong leadership and coaching capabilities make Patrick a fantastic CTO. He is an essential part of our team at Strutta, and we are never worried about critical development operations considerations thanks to his presence. Additionally, Patrick is always enjoyable to work with and uses his excellent people skills to motivate teams and ensure the best result.
Danny Wood · Chief Product Officer, Tilt ·
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Patrick has an unparalleled sense of pragmatism when it comes to making software architecture choices. He possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of zero-day exploits and general security concerns. I've been grateful for his DevOps skills countless times in the past. It has been an educational experience working with him for the past three years.
Manu Kapoor · Senior Frontend Engineer, Rival Technologies ·
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Patrick was wonderful to work for: he was informative, his directions were clear, his communication was top-notch and his correspondence was always delivered in a timely fashion. I would definitely work with Patrick again.
Sabrina Gould · Data Entry Clerk, Maxwell Geo Services ·
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Patrick is a combination of an impressive body of knowledge, hobbyist-like interest in technology, and acute business sense. He regularly found robust solutions to enhance Mobio's cloud platform, whilst keeping a keen eye on the ever-shifting business landscape of a fast-paced start-up. As a leader, he was always well-informed, enthusiastic, astute in giving advice, and was most respectful and encouraging. I enjoyed and learned much from working with Patrick, and strongly believe that he would add tremendous value to any team.
Michael Chiang · Senior Data Scientist, Workday ·
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Patrick is a what I call a "visionary technologist" who sees the possibilities, not the reasons things can't be done. His rare combination of deep knowledge of a wide array of technologies, hands on technical expertise, and the ability to manage a team put it all together put him in a small class indeed. Add to that the ability to explain things in a way that laymen can understand which makes him incredibly valuable in a discussion with clients or prospects, and you can understand why I enjoyed working with him and recommend him highly.
Randy Corke · Marketing, The Dinner Daily ·
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Patrick and I worked on mutual projects and he has been one of the fastest most reliable Integration Architects I have worked with providing smart solutions. Patrick's professionalism, great business sense and high technical skills make him lovable and highly respected among peers and managers and his talent is missed in Dominion. I hope that we'll have an opportunity to work together again in the future.
Galya Westler · Product Specialist & CEO, Plazus Technologies Inc. ·
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Patrick was always willing to help with technical concerns and supported his staff all the way to production!
Lance Bryant · Senior Developer, Neo Financial ·
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I have known Patrick for many years. I have had the opportunity to work with him on a project on one occasion. Like me, Patrick is a self starter with a keen eye for solutions. He is one of those brilliant lights and every company should have one.
Lindsey McEwan · Hands-on Creative Marketing Manager (Freelance) ·
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Patrick was an invaluable asset to Galaxy and helped provided significant advancements for the company.
Bruce Sanderson · CEO, DocVM ·
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Patrick is truly one of a kind. Behind the pirate-meets-cowboy façade, lay a truly exceptional technical architect. His experience and more importantly, vision, empowered the development team to build cutting-edge software. It was a pleasure to work for Patrick.
Michael Vay Lee · Director Software Engineering, Article ·
Contact
The fastest way to reach me is email. Encrypted comms welcome.
Email me at paudley@blackcat.ca or call me at +1 (780) 670-0484.
Mail can be sent to me care of Blackcat Informatics® Inc.:
Blackcat Informatics® Inc.112 Westbourne Rd.
Spruce Grove, AB, Canada
T7X 1R6
Encrypted messages can be sent to secure@blackcatinformatics.ca with the following GPG key. Other forms of contact: vCard, QR code.