Spinning Yarns

Despite what you may have read on my web page of late, I am not any longer “a Ph.D. candidate from the Department of Computer Science at Dartmouth College,” nor have I been for some months now. But before you whip out a blank sheet of e-mail to start typing up your heartfeltest congratulations, I should also let you know that I am not a Ph.D. recipient from the Department of Computer Science at Dartmouth College, either. I left the program, but did not finish the degree. My failure to update my web page, as well as my sudden and lingering silence here on the web log, is the direct result of those particular circumstances. Let us say, for the lack of a better idiom, that I was not sure how to admit to the world that I was done without being finished. So, there, now I’ve said it, and it’s done. And I’m not.

Lacking a Ph.D., my prospects of teaching at a college or university are effectively gone. This is a fact I am still coming to grips with; I defined my sense of being and purpose by my teaching for so long, that I’ve almost forgotten a time when my dreams were different. That loss, however, is not nearly as disheartening to me as the fact that it took me several months to find employment, during which time I drifted without compass through a sea of self-doubt. Having found some at last—compass, but also employment—I now feel a bit safer crawling up out of the River of Denial, wherein I have been wallowing for some time now.

As I was walking home from the office this evening, I was thinking about how to explain all the things that led up to my giving up on the Ph.D., in clear and pithy sentences that would make it all clear to my friends and family out there in the world. But honestly, I don’t think I could do it in less than a week’s worth of writing, and hardly anything but the Proceedings of the 19th Annual International Conference of the Special Working Group on Evaporative Pigment Dessication could possibly be less interesting to the world at large. Suffice it to say this: If you really want to know the whole story, you will have to ask me about it in person, and should be fully prepared with a bottle of finest single-malt Scotch Whisky. Half, I will drink, in order to loosen my tongue; the other half you will need in order to cope with the ennui. Meanwhile, let us roll up the scroll on that chapter of my life, and move on.

My current occupation is doing some contract programming for an energetic young start-up company called Magnetk which makes a couple of very cool and incredibly useful tools for accessing files across the network. That doesn’t sound like a big challenge, right? After all, everybody accesses web pages and e-mail across the network all the time. They key here is that their product works better than that, and doesn’t require you to manipulate everything through a Baroque entanglement of crufty and poorly-tested blob of AJAX-based web pages reeking of bad advertisements, spyware, and festering boils of browser incompatibility. Instead, what you get is a nice, seamless icon on your desktop that you can open just like any other folder, read and write your files, and get on with your life. Good stuff, and good ideas.^* And the fine folks at Magnetk have some other exciting ideas cooking, as well, which I hope I can get my fingers into—not only because it pays the bills (though that never hurts), but also because I think their ideas are good and useful ones, that deserve to see the light of day. It’s fun to be a part of something like that.

So, anyway, there it is: My long silence, ended. I have a lot of ideas bottled up kind of waiting for this to get out the door, so I hope I will find some time to do a bit more writing here again. And, in the meantime, I guess I should probably re-write my web page to say something different, now that I’m no longer neither a teacher nor a student for the first time in ages. What am I? Damned if I know. Maybe it’s time I stopped defining myself by what I do.

^* And, if I may be so bold as to advertise my own efforts, some nice, clean code as well!

Filed by Michael at 22:32 under Academic, Personal
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