Still Very Angry with the State of Georgia Part 1 by James Pate Williams, BA, BS, MSwE, PhD
I have long-standing anger at the State of Georgia. I will try to elucidate all the ways the Georgia state government has screwed me over almost continuously since the 1980s. And no, I am too poor and too comfortable here to move to another part of the United States.
I was a paid teaching assistant in chemistry at Georgia Tech from Fall Quarter 1980 to Spring Quarter 1981. I was thrown into this role with no real training and extraordinarily little faculty support. The teaching assistants are indentured workers or even slaves of the higher education system in the U.S. Thankfully my first round of being a teaching assistant was ended by my making a D in Inorganic chemistry. Professor Donald Royer was my inorganic chemistry instructor. Coincidentally he later became my research advisor.
My grades and attention span and concentration went up when I was freed of the chains of conducting chemical laboratory lessons and sessions. Some other quarter or quarters I was again an indentured servant in chemistry, and I was still inadequately trained for the role. Finally, I was a research assistant a few quarters at Georgia Tech. I left Georgia Tech sans a graduate degree in the Summer Quarter of 1983. The whole chemistry department faculty tried their best to find the correct niche for me to no avail. I was very downtrodden and feeling defeated when I left Georgia Tech. Before my exit from Georgia Tech, I was offered a chance to transfer to Clemson University and have Professor Adolph Beyerlein as my research advisor. I seem to recall his group was performing high precision computer calculations of the virial coefficients of real gases.
My whole legal name is James Pate Williams, Jr. I was born in LaGrange, Georgia approximately 70 years ago. I barely graduated from LaGrange High School with low marks in June 1971. Later in June 1979, I graduated from LaGrange College with a Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry with a little over a 3 out 4 Grade Point Average (GPA). In the Spring Quarter of 1978, I taught myself how to program a Texas Instruments desktop programmable calculator and in the Summer Quarter of 1978 I taught myself Dayton BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) on LaGrange College's Data General Eclipse minicomputer. I took courses in BASIC in the Fall Quarter of 1978 and FORTRAN IV (Formula Translator IV) in the Winter Quarter of 1979. Professor Kenneth Cooper, a genius poly-scientist taught me a course in the Intel 8085 microprocessor architecture and assembly and machine language. We would hand assemble our programs and insert the resulting machine code into our crude wooden box computer which was designed and built by Professor Cooper. From 1990 to 1994 I earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from LaGrange College. I had a 4 out of 4 GPA in the period 1990 to 1994. I took courses in C, COBOL, and Pascal during my BS work. After graduating from LaGrange College a second time in May 1994, I taught myself C++. In December 1995, I started using the Internet and taught myself client-server programming. I created a website in 1997 which had C and C# implementations of algorithms from the "Handbook of Applied Cryptography" by Alfred J. Menezes, et. al., and some other cryptography and number theory textbooks and treatises.
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