Activity

I never actually made the decision to stop working. For a year after my meeting with the idiot, I told people I was “between contracts.” Then, over the next year, the state of between-ness somehow became permanent. I did volunteer work for a group that helps nonprofits with computing problems, but …

Debugging: what an odd word. As if “bugging” were the job of putting in bugs, and debugging the task of removing them. But no. The job of putting in bugs is called programming. A programmer writes some code and inevitably makes the mistakes that result in the malfunctions called bugs. Then, for som…

It happened while I was in the middle of an argument with Bradley Thorne. I had come across a bug of his, some anomalous behavior in a window, nothing major, a level-three. “It’s not my bug! Not my bug!” he was shouting. “It says right here it is!” I responded, holding up the printout of the code. …

“When you’ve come from academia, every single thing here seems odd,” Wallis said. “Which particular type of ‘odd’ are you referring to?”

“How he wanted me to disown what I studied.”

“Oh, yes,” Wallis said. “The same thing happened to me at my first job. ‘Did your fieldwork in Borneo? Not much…

I sat and gazed back at him as his yes-nods slowly came to a halt. Was that the purpose of those nods: to tell you how you must answer? For I saw there was no other reply I could make. I was supposed to say, Yes, I was done with it. That everything I’d cared about for the last ten years was a hopel…