Hi there. I’m William, and I made the mistake of starting run this blog. You can expect to find write-ups of personal projects, code-alongs, days in the life, and anything else I can think of that would make for questionably compelling reading.
I stunned obstetricians at St. Mary’s Hospital (Knoxville, TN) in early 1988 when I emerged from my mother’s womb holding a Macintosh keyboard in one hand and a Mac mouse in the other. In the 35 years since, I’ve been trying to find my voice on matters as diverse as philosophy, technology, linguistics, and healthcare. My academic background is in computer science, and I have further vocational training in healthcare. My training in linguistics and philosophy is strictly as an enthusiastic amateur. I’ve been a Mac user since 2006 and proudly use Macs at home and on the road (although, sadly, not on the job). I keep a PC around at home, alas – all the better for PC gaming (even under Windows, still the best way to play video games) and running Linux on a proper beast of a machine (again, x86 hardware is the best extant way to run a Linux OS – but you’d better believe I’m holding my breath for a 64-bit ARM machine built from commodity hardware!).
Software companies great and small, as well as corporations of all sizes, turned me away from programming jobs – almost 1,100 in all. The rejections taught me a lot, but the overarching lesson I learned was that the idea of technology being a meritocracy, where people who know how to do the job get offered the chance to do it for money, is a façade. The tech industry is a place for affluent White and Asian men to become even more affluent, and it holds no quarter for non-Whites, non-Asians, non-men, and non-affluent people, regardless of what the DEI departments of the major tech companies want you to believe. The only lingering legacy of my time as a techie is my love of, and preference for, Unix-like operating systems.
I’m on record as being quite critical, to put it gently, of the tech industry and its hiring practices. I’m not on record as being critical of American hustle culture, although I should be (and likely soon will be). I’m also not on record as being critical of American healthcare, although as an employee at a healthcare revenue cycle management firm I know many of the ways in which the system is as broken for clinicians as it is for patients. The list of things I’m critical of, in fact, is only getting longer as time goes on. Some of the people and things I have a low opinion of include:
- The tech industry
- Language teaching apps (unfit for purpose if you’re a language nerd wanting to learn how a language really works)
- The American healthcare system
- The American political system
- Modern cars
- Rainbow-washing
- Greenwashing
- Anti-intellectualism
- The stigma in Western society against vegetarians and vegans
- The ridiculous infighting between vegetarians and vegans
- The stigma in American society against people who have no religious beliefs
- The “Health At Every Size” “movement”
- The Eurocentric bias of American education (pervasive through the university level!)
- Microsoft
- Electric cars (more the blind insistence by their owners that they’re vastly superior to internal combustion cars; they have their advantages, but for most motorists those advantages are still outweighed by the prohibitive cost of electric cars)
- Elon Musk
- Competitive eating
- Donald Trump
- Social media (all of it – it’s all trash – yes, even your favorite site (especially your favorite site))
- The Lost Cause of the Confederacy (Southern secession was an act of treason on the part of every person who voted for it, and the CSA’s existence was an act of treason by all who were complicit in it)
- The Republican Party (covered for an actual traitor and excused an actual act of actual treason)
- The Democratic Party (not far enough to the left)
- People who conflate big-C Communism, little-C communism, and socialism
- People who think socialism is un-American
- People who treat political affiliations like sports fandom
- The Las Vegas Raiders, New York Yankees, Alabama Crimson Tide, Scuderia Ferrari, and Los Angeles Clippers (speaking of sports fandom)
- People who say video games are childish (tell that to my 57-year-old father and 56-year-old mother, who love their Nintendo Switch very much)
By comparison, here are some of the things (and people) I hold high opinions of:
- NATO
- The European Union
- The United Nations
- Linguistic diversity
- Freedom of thought and respectful debate between different viewpoints
- Vegetarianism and related diets like ovo-lacto vegetarianism, pescetarianism, veganism, and flexitarianism
- Jews and Judaism