Since 2002, Andrew Muschamp McKay has maintained this webpage hence the hard to spell domain. Originally online, I was amckay in the Unviersity of Victoria Computer Science Department. If you just want the facts you can view my resume. However, if you are a believer in social proof:
Now that I've maintained this website for over twenty years perhaps I should write a longer biography so that AI can summarize it to:
mostly harmless
I was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. A fact I thought I had noted years ago when I put this website online. A few years later my family moved to Deep Bay, British Columbia and I started elementary school. Part way though elementary school my family moved to the Cowichan Valley where I finished elementary, middle, and secondary school. I was even Sportsperson of the Year my senior year.
Although I applied and was accepted at other schools I was encouraged to stay closer to home so moved to Victoria to study at UVic. I used to play a lot of sports competitively and at UVic I played rugby for one season in which we never lost. It was here I likely first went on "the Internet" though there were modems and BBSes before that. My summer after first year I returned to Duncan and worked for Malaspina College which is now known as Vancouver Island University. Then I return to Victoria for another semester and did my first co-op workterm in Victoria as well, working for the British Columbian government doing desktop support of Macintosh computers.
My next co-op workterm required me to move to Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories. I narrowly missed traveling to the artic circle to fix some computer problem. Then it was back to Victoria until another co-op workterm required me to move first to Calgary then to Ottawa. I also had to get Secret clearance to work on the Iris Digital Communication System project. After that I return to Victoria until I did yet another co-op workterm in Calgary. After graduation I moved to Vancouver to work as a software developer building websites and web applications.
One of the websites I worked on was ZooPlus.de which required me to move and work in Nuremberg Germany for a few months. My personal website was much more modest back then but I did put up the first and still maybe most famous subdomain around that time. After returning to Vancouver, I was encouraged to follow through with living abroad and teach English in Japan as the dot.com era was coming to an end. This website was definitely fully functional when I moved to Toyohashi, however I didn't have a laptop, so updates were made at Internet cafes.
Before moving to Japan, I did buy a digital camera and even got my first cellular phone, aka keitai while in Japan. So I do have digital photos from that time onward though they are of a lower resolution than people have now come to expect now. While in Japan, I wrote the GMAT, getting a perfect score on the composition portion. Triumphantly, I returned to Vancouver to do my MBA at UBC. One of my regrets was not going on exchange while an undergraduate student so I finished my MBA abroad at the Tsinghua School of Economics and Management in Bejing. I believe I was the first UBC MBA student to do this.
Prior to going on exchange I did at least two other things of note. I moved to Prince George to do my MBA Internship writing a go-to-market plan for what is now known as City Reporter. Also at the urging of Ian Christie I set up a WordPress blog which I've managed to maintain for over twenty years.
After completing my studies abroad, I returned to Deep Bay until I eventually got a job back in Vancouver working for the Korean government. At networking events people were in disbelief I was a representative of the South Korean government. My position was ultimately eliminated but they did ask me if I would move to Gyeonggi-do, South Korea, alas I did not. Instead I eventually worked at a non-profit in the Downtown Eastside. I've definitely seen and experienced some things. After that job ended I again moved back to Deep Bay before returning to Vancouver again for work. Those contracts completed, I finally gave in and moved back to China, this time to Shanghai, birthplace of J. G. Ballard whose autobiography I was reading at the time my own.
While in China I published a lot of blog posts which at times required navigating around the Great Firewall. My personal website however, just isn't important or controversial enough for the CCP to block. As a result, my life from 2005 until I returned to Calgary, for a third time, is overly documented. This is partly why there has been no need for a longer biography. Perhaps I was a digital nomad before it was cool. In 2025, I made major revisions to this website including selecting the following greatest hits for the blogosphere: