Two of My Regrets by James Pate Williams, Jr., BA, BS, MSwE, and PhD

“I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” – Nathan Hale one of the United States first spies.

I regret having been sexually abused, a teenage abuser of alcohol and drugs, and being an unbelievably bad student especially in high school. Theoretically, had I done well in in school I could have been accepted at Georgia Tech and done my undergraduate work there, probably majoring in physics. I would have then attempted to join the Central Intelligence Agency provided that my grades at the Georgia Tech were impressive enough. Had I earned a job at the CIA in 1975, I could have probably advanced through the Directorate of Operations to at least a senior station chief or an executive in that part of the CIA.

Another regret is that I should have started going to the Jobs Fair at Auburn University every year from 2000 to 2005. That way I could have become a somewhat known individual to the CIA and National Security Agency recruiters. After graduate school and I received my terminal degree (PhD), I should have gotten myself together and every six months put in new online applications to both the CIA and NSA. I was 53 when I finally received my Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science so really ageism started operating on my application process.

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Author: jamespatewilliamsjr

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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