Good luck in Dallas, Derek!

Five years ago, during a simpler and much more idealistic time called freshman year, we were all honking, laughing nerds. We were all computer science majors, living in the same dorm on the same floor, playing that same fucking Counterstrike game. Right-clicking on our mice. Setting our computer monitor resolution to 1152 by 864. Defragging our hard drives. Hacking into the Pentagon. Threatening each other by saying, "Motherfucker, if you piss me off one more time, I'll... I'll... I'll fucking CTRL+ALT+DEL you is what I'll do!"

None of us would get laid that year, obviously.

Some of the geeks on our computer science floor weren't even real geeks in the first place. Some were just unfortunate mute Hindus who were somehow herded together with our bunch. Others were simply misguided fools who figured they would get into computers just because they enjoyed playing videogames as a child. Still others were pretenders who didn't really know anything about computer programming but looked ugly and wanted to fit in somewhere. You can say that these guys were nerds by style, but not by substance.

Ah, freshman year in computer science. Those were some humble beginnings. Now we're all grown up.

Yesterday Derek threw himself a going-away party because he's just landed a job in the information technology industry at a big-name corporation in Dallas. He leaves in a week, and I'm really stoked for the guy because he's got the aptitude and passion to really make something great of this career opportunity.

People always ask me why I decided not to pursue a career in computer science anymore. Well, what happened was outsourcing. A friend of mine who works in the industry used to tell his two daughters, "Eat all of your dinner; Indian and Chinese people halfway around the world are starving." Nowadays he says, "Do all of your homework; Indian and Chinese people halfway around the world are starving for your jobs!"

This is not to say that Derek will ever lose his job or that I would ever lose my job either if I were a computer programmer. I just don't want to deal with any prospect of job instability. And besides, I'm not too interested in computer science these days either.

But you know what, maybe that just means I'm not a honking nerd anymore.

Now, what ladies don't know is that some nerds end up becoming billionaires. This could possibly be the case for Derek, who definitely got laid in college but knows damn well that he would have gotten a lot more punani if only he hadn't always worried so much about the evolution of dynamic address translation and virtual storage facilities in IBM Enterprise architectures.

Anyway, Derek... have fun in Dallas, and good luck. In getting laid!