Author: jamespatewilliamsjr

I used to tell myself if I ever had to get a “crazy check” (Social Security Supplemental Income), I would commit hara-kiri. Unfortunately, when the time came on February 14, 2014, I failed to have the bravery to make good on my former promise. My parents tried to get me to go onto the federal government’s dole way back in 1989. It is indeed fortuitous that the Social Security Administration’s independently  appointed private psychologist decided I was too sane to get the handout from our not so benevolent governent in that long-forgotten era. See I only had one degree in 1989, a Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry from LaGrange College, three unsuccessful years at Georgia Tech, and approximately eleven years of open source computer software development. The state of Georgia did have the “heart” for me to grovel before that not so benign entity by having me do a year as an indentured servant at the old school New Ventures organization. That really helped further develop my self-esteem, NOT! I just fail to make good on some of my oaths unlike the great computer scientist Alan Mathison Turing or the troubled but brilliant musician and lyricist Kurt Donald Cobain.

In the late summer of 1983 I developed a Trojan Horse program for the Data General Eclipse line of minicomputers. The program was written in Data General BASIC which was a variant of Dayton BASIC (Beginner’s All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code). The user interface of the program exactly mimicked the logon screen of the Data General Eclipse. The program would capture username and password login combinations and write them to a disk file. Of course, the program was running in my account, so I could not allow the unsuspecting user to logon. I would just simulate failed login attempts. Normally, when you pressed the “Esc” (escape) key while in a Dayton BASIC program, the program would you stop executing and return the user to his login user account. Well Data General’s BASIC has a statement “On Esc Go To #####” where ##### was a line number. I used this statement to keep the user from aborting my program and discovering the logon ruse. I captured a few unsuspecting users’ logon credentials during the test phase of the program. Then I informed Professor Kenneth Cooper of the existence of my Trojan Horse program. We used this program to successfully capture the logon credentials of the system manager Steve Dudley.

Dr. Cooper was so impressed with my Trojan Horse and other security flaws that I discovered in the Data General Advanced Operating System (AOS) Program Manager that he arranged for me to have an interview with the company in its Atlanta office in the fall of 1983. I was still living at my birth-family’s house on 601 Hill Street, LaGrange, GA with my mother and father. I was not driving at the time and Atlanta is about 70 miles northeast of LaGrange. Dr. Cooper volunteered to take me to the interview. The day of the interview we stopped at an International House of Pancakes Restaurant in Atlanta. I had never eaten at an IHOP before that day. I was interviewed by a male individual whose name I have long forgotten. I remember the interviewer had attended Georgia Tech as a math major in graduate school and he had not finished like I failed to finish in chemistry as a graduate student in the period 1980-1983. He showed me a copy of the Data General macro-assembly language source code for the Data General Eclipse Program Manager. He asked if I would like to have the copy. I immediately and emphatically stated “Yes”. Well right about that point he was conveniently called out of his office leaving me alone with the source code and my briefcase.  I proceeded to load the two-inch high printout into my briefcase. In retrospect, this could have been a loyalty test to see if I would take Data General source code out of the facility. I think the interviewer left his office, so he would have plausible deniability about the whereabouts of the source code. Anyway, I was never a truly serious candidate for the job due to my home living conditions and the fact that I was not driving at the time. Also, Data General was trying very hard to transition from a minicomputer manufacturing company to a personal computer builder and seller. I saw the writing on the wall that the company could never compete efficiently in that marketplace. The company struggled on to 1999 but was never very successful with its portable computer that was introduced in 1984.

In late 1983 and early 1984 I started thinking about ways to become a superuser on the Data General Eclipse system without using a Trojan Horse or a direct attack by patching the operating system’s Program Manager. I remembered that in the corner of the physics laboratory at LaGrange College was a little bricked off enclosure that housed alpha, beta, and gamma radioactive emitters. Well the only thing I needed for a normal user to transition to a superuser was to change one bit in the memory image of the profile of the user. I got to thinking that if I could cause a limited cascade of multiple bit errors in the memory word containing the superuser flag bit that the ECC (Error Checking and Correction) hardware of the minicomputer could not correct then I might have a chance changing from a normal user state to a superuser state. I performed a thought experiment where I would expose the semiconductor memory chips to some form of radiation to induce the desired transition. I never carried out a real experiment because the minicomputer was a $250,000 system and I could perhaps cause serious damage to the machine. In retrospect, I think a gamma ray emitter with a collimated lens would have been best hope of causing the desired cascade a multiple bit memory errors.

I live in a diverse residential and commercial neighborhood of LaGrange, Georgia. I call 201 North Lewis Street apartment #6 home. The apartment complex is on the corner of West Haralson and North Lewis Streets. Location, location, location. The former Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) was across the street on West Haralson. The old VFW building is up for bidding through McKeen Reality. Kids Zone, a children’s mental health clinic, is in the old Zachry building at 200 North Lewis Street. There are at least two investment companies in the area and two banks one block and two blocks away. There are five churches within a several block radii of my studio apartment. The  only negative aspect is that I must keep my music turned down and unfortunately, I currently don’t own headphones nor a portable music player such as smartphone and/or Apple IPOD.

I just sent the following email to Kids Zone in LaGrange, Georgia:

https://www.kz-bh.com/

Dear Kids Zone Staff,

The United States has become a myriad number of local and state fiefdoms. Giant global businesses and corporations in conjunction with small businesses have bought and paid for lawyers and politicians to enforce their capitalistic best interests. Now more than ever the Latin phrase caveat emptor (let the buyer beware) is more applicable in the United States than in previous much freer and saner generations. Remember capitalism is all about accumulating wealth for those who have the avarice and acumen for conducting business affairs. You may view my opinions as classic “Sour Grapes”, but I had a low value for capitalism, especially speculative venture capitalism, at a fairly young age.

I went out tonight at approximately 10:00 PM (22:00:00). I walked down and into the Main Street Pub:

https://www.facebook.com/MainStreetPubLaGrange/

but due to my ever-pervasive agoraphobic and current sanity, I sauntered in and out of the crowded bar. On Tuesday and Wednesday night I entered that bar safely and exited without having caused a disturbance. I had one bottled Blue Moon Belgian White Wheat Ale on both Tuesday and Wednesday nights at a hefty $8.00 for two ales plus $2.00 tip for each night. I don’t have a good lifetime experience with bars since I am a verbally belligerent drunk and bars are not an appropriate place to meet people. As usual when I become vocally abusive, I either get thrown into a psychiatric or jail milieu or physically beaten up by a drunken bully.

Since I have ruled out my church and other churches, certain restaurants and coffee houses, mental asylums and treatment centers, and jail as good places to meet people, I have no place to find friends and/or lovers. This town is a hellish environment for single people. Ageism, false chivalry, and sexism are rampant in my beloved LaGrange, Georgia and mostly the rest of My Country Tis of Thee, no longer the Sweet Land of Liberty, but still the greatest country on this biosphere. Workplaces, if ever can be found, are also off limits due to ethics for forming lasting non-work relationships.

Please follow the below instructions:

1. Type Excel in Windows 10 “Type here to search” textbox.
2. Select the Excel App
3. Select blank workbook
4. Select File Save as “Documents” and “Equation and Graph of a Line”
5. Label cell A1 as “x” and Label cell B1 as “y”
6. Select cells A1 and B1 and Alignment Align Right
7. Enter “0” in cell A2 and “=2*a2+2” in cell B2
8. Enter “1” in cell A3 and select cell B2 and drag its right bottom corner to cell B3
9. Select cells A3 and B3 and drag cell B3’s right bottom corner to cell B11
10. Select all the data from cell A1 to cell B11
11. Select Insert Charts Scatter with Smooth Lines and Markers
12. Select the Chart + Button to the Right of the Chart and select Axis Titles
13. Label y-axis as “y=2*x+2” and the x-axis as “x”
14. Label the Chart Title as “Graph of a Line”
15. File Save

I just garnered official word that I am a persona non grata at yet one more business in LaGrange, Georgia. The title of the following reproduced email was “Thank You for the Advance Intelligence”:

1. Dixie Donuts on Lafayette Square
2. Gus’s Grill on Greenville Street across from the Troup County Government Building
3. Waffle House #2223 on New Franklin Road
4.  International House of Pancakes (IHOP)

“I never dared to be radical when young

For fear it would make me conservative when old.”

Quote by Robert Frost

http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/3219.html

Fortunately for me, I did not follow Frost’s sometimes sage advice. I was radical in youth and I have remained true to a modification of my 1984 variant self.

If you knew me before 1984 or even 1994, I was an insane mess of an individual. I was a strange misfit of a character in the 8^th to 12^th grades of middle school and high school. I started emulating my father by imbibing ethanol when I was 11 years old at my sister Susan Williams Harrison’s high school graduation party in the spring of 1965.  I also started smoking cigarettes at the youthful age of 14 in 1967 and I kept up that filthy and unhealthy addiction until June 1994. My father also smoked cigarettes while I was growing up and then in his old age a pipe.

I distinctly recall scribbling Albert Einstein’s tensor equations from his little but germinal and profound book “The Meaning of Relativity” on the blackboard of my 9^th grade homeroom. Although I did not have a complete grasp of Riemannian geometry and tensor calculus, I understood that Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity and its gravitational field equations (Einstein’s replacement theory of gravitation that took the place of the classical theory of gravitation by Sir Isaac Newton ) admitted essentially two cosmologies: cyclic universe that expanded and then contracted or a static universe. I treated the equations back in those halcyon days of my youth as a form of art or graffiti.

I was an off the chain psycho-sociopathic individual until I underwent my first true phase transition in approximately 1984. From the ages of 17 until 31 I was in a Drug Induced Psychosis (DIP) and self-medicating for an inherited and environmentally caused different brain chemistry aberration.

During high school to keep my disruption of my classrooms to a minimum, my teachers would send me to either the chemistry or physics laboratories and the teachers hoped I would entertain myself without blowing up the school or poisoning adjacent classes with gases emanating from improperly conducted experiments. I recall an iodine gas creating chemical reaction that I should have performed under the hood being made without proper ventilation. An eerie and relatively toxic cloud of purple iodine gas resulted, and the chemistry teacher and I rushed to contain the reaction under a hood.

Well so much for my somewhat wasted in more ways than one high school years. Things got worse rather than better in the era of my youth 1971 until Spring 1978. I did the whole spectrum (gamut) of illicit and legal drugs with a special penchant for hallucinogens and hard narcotics. However, in the summer of 1978 I met my calling which was and always is open source development of computer software. I have not met a computer programming language that I did not love.

I hope my beloved hometown of LaGrange, Georgia, and its currently rather diverse population has empathy for my insane and sane diametrically opposed selves.