| From: | Jeffrey Mach <mach@****.CALTECH.EDU> |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Re: Outage...results? |
| Date: | Tue, 4 Mar 1997 20:25:24 -0800 |
>>>>>[Well, in that case, I am glad to help. I got the other message from
you husband verifying that everything was kosher. And no, you didn't tell
me your name and the sysadmins around Shadowland (when they aren't busy
trying to keep the place from crashing) do their best to make sure the
messages here are kept as private and as anonymous as the person wants.
Since we are currently gainfully employed, Arashi and I aren't quite
considering becoming mercs or shadowrunners in the near future, but we
have some free time coming up in the next few months where we can come by.
I hope the invitation to lend a hand to your new wing in Seattle is still
open. To be perfectly honest, I do kinda need the money. There are many
around here impeccably coiffed and wearing beautiful suits that get paid a
few (and more) times my salary to push pencils all day and look good at
the board meetings while we technicians slave away with our mussy hair and
jumpsuits doing something for our living. Arashi and I have got plenty to
get by, but not much more than nicely comfortable: payscale was not the
deciding factor in choosing either of our jobs. Besides, every once and a
while I need to make a purchase where corp cred just won't do.
As for the thoroughness of the report, you paid enough to get no less. As
a researcher, you have to be able to exhaust all leads when you want to
figure something out, and occasionally when you reach the end, you have to
find a new way to keep going. That's what they pay me for.
It was good for me to get back into the decking game; I didn't want to
scare off a paying client by saying I hadn't done that in a while. Up
until recently the only difficult work in that area was keeping up with
shadowland. But it was just like riding a bike; if of course you had to
redesign, reconfigure, rewrite, recompile, and otherwise replace a good
portion of your bike every few months, sure. (Part of the need for
non-corp cred. ;) ) Pulling a dataraid at a place where you a) already
had an account (not exactly a real one though), and b) were already well
familiar with the system, wasn't that hard. The only difficulty worth
what you paid was the decryption and analysis.
And yes, it was a bit fun. It took my brain off my current problems:
nursing a trio of neural-nets through the terrible two's. You know how
little kids always ask "Why?" no matter how may recursions or levels you
go into an explanation? Now multiply that by three and accelerate it
beyond the terraflops range. They are so cute when they learn their first
control law, and so pretty when they are nothing but a schematic, but they
can really make you want to smash their little neuro-optical brains out
when they start heading all over the place for an answer to a problem when
you aren't even done giving them the question or the means to solve it.
Then comes socialization, a headache I don't even want to go into. All in
the name of giving a fighter enough brains to be able to help the pilot
instead of just being another dumb tool. At least they don't need to be
potty trained.
By the way, I happen to know another woman with the maiden name DiAnnio,
loves jets just a bit less than another fellow she flies them with. Any
relation? A thing in my head keeps me from being a complete scatterbrain
when it comes to names and other little things, like computational
neural nets.]<<<<<
-- Vernier <20:17:22/03-04-58 PST>
