a vernal sleep.
My son told me to use that word. And not to look it up.
I am the oldest woman in the world and his girlfriend, whose name I am not permitted to use in a public venue such as this is, is the youngest woman in the world. Not in literal years but in years of enormity. Spiritual enormity.
So it is important how I pass him down to her. I’m told I can tell about the little “i” which I have been reduced to by my father and how it rests in a cataclysmic, horrendous fashion in the crux of all this on the comma, the one little comma that I forgot to localize in a PPL programming language (itself created by an undergraduate or a gradute) in which I wrote my famous program that generated essays on poetry.
So in the St Petersberg Times they tried to tease me about the perseverant comma in my writing and I wanted to shoot something back about the perseverant coma that I was in but I didn’t want to be mean. This was in 2003 or 2004, I don’t remember, but it was almost 20 years since the serious damage in the ICU in Reading and hardly news fodder. So I had to just sit there and take it. For Ian’s sake. And those two things worked together. The little i needed to be localized by a comma. And three young, male section leaders, I was told, spent 3 hours trying to locate that problem to get the program to work on an unpreprogrammed poem and it did and it was a hit but… it was not technically that interesting, it was not a programming masterpiece in terms of making cute use of data stacking structures and the like. IT WORKED!!! That was all that I was concerned with. I had a few fabulous algorithms. I felt extremely guilty about breaking down the beautiful English language into a mathematical representation.
It was irresponsible programming. I broke the rules of the English language and I broke the rules of programming. I got an A but I felt like I had done something wrong. Then, BBN, a company in Belmont, picked up the program and did something with it. I don’t know what but I knew they took a copy. I checked ten years later and all of their work was focused on language AI
Anybody who knows anything from the 80s and 90s about computers knows the expression “pirate software.”
The industry at that point was very much like the music business in the fifties, when musicians were ripped off routinely and got a dime on the dollar for their work.
I would like to see my father file a 3 trillion dollar, class action lawsuit against AT&T for similar problems with what happened in the anti-trust break-up of the company in the mid-80’s with a special emphasis in our family on the Hopkins mistreatment.
He sold his prime patent to the company–as was standard practice at the time–for a dollar. It was worth billions. He did not have enough money to take care of me when I got ill and I had to go to the state hospital. In the wake of the AT&T break-up. I became a zombie for reasons I have explained so many times. Our family was lost. I can’t imagine that others weren’t also hurt in this wackily handled transition.
So, there is not much that I can think of that can remedy my situation other than what I am already, feebly, doing. Short of a Miracle.
But others who knew me and were involved were hurt more peripherally and less viscerally and can back what they lost in a number of ways.
For tonight, all I can think of as regards to what is going on right now, is the well known saying, “Let go and Let God.”
No, I can pray. I promised to pray the Divine Mercy Chaplet for those most in need of the Lord’s mercy and that includes me and I forgot. It is 11:30 p.m. I will go and do so right now.
Un.Bon.Mot 