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2021-08-20

No Country for Old Arduinos

 I was given this task in Facebook:


My response: No Country for Old Arduinos

 

I modified the original opening dialogue for the movie 'No Country for Old Men'


I was main programmer of this company when I was twenty-five years old. Hard to believe. My grandfather was an IT man; father too. Me and him was programmers at the same time; him up in Plano and me out here. I think he's pretty proud of that. I know I was. Some of the old time programmers never even used an IDE. A lotta folks find that hard to believe. Jim Scarborough'd never used one; that's the younger Jim. Gaston Boykins wouldn't use Do Loops up in Comanche County. I always liked to hear about the oldtimers. Never missed a chance to do so. You can't help but compare yourself against the oldtimers. Can't help but wonder how they would have operated these times. 

There was this summer intern I sent to the electrical engineering summer camp at Huntsville here a while back. My recommendation and my testimony. He built a replica of a fourteen-year-old girl. Papers said it was a crime of passion but he told me there wasn't any passion to it. Told me that he'd been planning to build a replicant for about as long as he could remember. Said that if they turned him out he'd do it again. Said he knew he was going to graduate school. "Be there for about fifteen months". I don't know what to make of that. I surely don't. 

The cyber crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure. It's not that I'm afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to disassemble a circuit board to even do this job. But, I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don't understand. A man would have to put his job at hazard. He'd have to say, "O.K., I'll be part of this IoT world."