Chapters / An income
(links to chapters are underlined)
Flash back: The university library apple lab, ca1980.
Three or four apple II stations were set up at the library of my university. The things were fascinating, this weird language compressed to 8 bit tokens. IF became 1F, OR became 1D, GOTO maybe 2A. Your program stated at address 3D0, so to start you entered 3D0G. Like the night! It was tempting to make random changes in a working program, just one number change; if it worked keep it. The idea never produced anything though. (Ha Ha. #gold the hash tag cues read.cash to search gold! )
At this lab, there was a pair of fellows, straight out of central casting, one abusive and dominating, the other hen-pecked and subservient. How abusive their langauge was!
They were cracking Apple games, tracking down the few lines of code that unlocked a program. Sometimes it was as simple as changing a 'no' in the program to a 'yes'.
As an aside, I would love to have animated SVG on read.cash.
Apple II, ca1980
But the eye of the reader has been drawn to this time for the following:
Student loan money, invested at 10% (!!), paid for my very own Apple II. Later, maybe, we can hear about the sorta chubby guy humble-bragging about their digital audio converter they built 'cause off the shelf didn't cut it that I didn't believe. Up to the top floor of an old rooming house, ('just up the street from Ralph and Jerrys') and there apple-writer met my poetry. It was missing something though. Using hints from the cracker duo, I modified it to open a new file with the name of highlighted text. This was to write a multi layered love poem to the neighbor across the hall. I can still recall the scent of Nag Champa wafting across.
Some time later someone handed me this sheaf of paper, some sort of Hyper manifesto or other, describing a Hyper Text Protocol. Another suggested my Apple-writer hack should use some cryptic universal identifier. Still.. not a clue.
Here we are, 40 years later, and I am writing a hyper-linked narrative again.
Stepping in to the role of artist's assistant consumed most of my energy, an alarming amount. 'Not Sustainable' I would lament. 'There is no secondary market for the art you give me.' A difficult topic to mention, and myself no sales person, leads would slip past me, wouldn't know a sale if it danced in front of me.
Finally, though, there was money coming in. From the county! Seems they need folk to be assistants to folk who need them. So odd, to be getting now minimum wage, the same dollars per hour that was top tier steelworker wage in my youth. The credit union account filled up, while the trust fund (did I mention that??) slowly sank down. Balance . . . still delta down. But zero crossing projected safely into the future.
The agency administering this bounty ran with the least expenditure. It seemed to work, but likely rife with attack surface, should anyone want anything behind their system. Their main concern for an employee was SSN and Drug test. SSN, of course, is needed by most any employer, but .. not as an ID on a phone check in system! That was shared across multiple agencies!!
And of course every employee must have a physical once a year. So once a year, in batches of 10, we filed into a room two steps from prisoner intake, and, personal effects in lockers, delivered a supervised urine sample. Back for assembly line blood pressure and done. Physical.
Much different from the steelworker exam, which was MUCH more thorough. I -had- attempted other jobs, post eviction from reality some twenty years back (yet another un-explored digression), most notably the Hedge Fund Programmer position; will train, no experience needed. The physical exam there, at least on application, was ability to navigate the subway or ferry. The mental exam was.. rewarding. A bit cagey about their actual application of our putative programming efforts, I suspect a large component was monitoring sentiment via whatever data scraping comes to mind. Twitter, the Google vector, chat boards. My eyes popped wide to see the lead's library shelf full of econo-physics books. Why did I not pull some down and browse!
If you come to a fork in the road?take it:pick it up:don't pick it up. Hey look, a quartary operator. Like choose, for enumerated types.
Imagine the fork where I pull down the books, having applied myself to learning their weird language instead of dancing at the club, and hook in with the hedge fund world. Whehyw, that was a close one, right?
