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The Spiritual Journey of Phillip R. Montgomery: Chapter 1
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The Spiritual Journey of Phillip R. Montgomery: Chapter 1 |
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fractal007 Senior Member
since 2000-06-01
Posts 1958 |
Of the man named Phillip and his discovery within his own house. A description of his happy life in the town of Ball River. 1 It was just past eleven on a saturday night when Phillip R. Montgomery found the old book in amongst a pile of garbage from some forgotten time, still waiting to be thrown away and burned. The attic was a dusty, dark place any time of year. Nevertheless, Phillip never considered it a fearful or anxious place. It was just a repertoire of his own development as a human being, a place to keep gifts from friends and occasional mementoes. He dusted the book off, looking curiously upon it, and then brought it down to the living room. Phillip's living room was a spacious place that always seemed alive with light and activity. He always had guests there to discuss matters of business (mostly pertaining to his computer programs and their quality) or to discuss philosophy or current events, or just to talk. Everyone in Ball Creek was on good terms with Phillip. Anyone who came into his house, and especially into that spacious, inviting living room, knew he was in the hands of a good host, no matter whether or not he agreed with anything Phillip said. Phillip placed the old book on his coffee table to await further inspection and reading when time permitted. He thought nothing further of the book as he proceeded to bed. He slept well, though he dreampt a strange dream in which he was a father and had a wife. He barely remembered the dream when he awoke to reality again. 2 "That particular structure," Phillip began in his usual analytical tone, "will not satisfy all requirements of this project. We need an error trap that will catch anything. We need, I'm afraid, to assume the user is as stupid as can be and therefore dumb enough to make the kind of mistake that will crash the program." He was explaining the basics of error trapping to some students at Ball Creek's local highschool. Some considered him overly tough when it came to instilling good programming practice and ethics in his students, but when the computer science exams came they were always thankful for the extra push to become near perfect programmers. Most of his senior students went onto technology programs in university or college, and many were rumoured to hold very well-paying jobs. Phillip was always modest about his achievements, insisting that many factors come into play in a student's future successes, including that student's work ethic. "Yeah but who would be stupid enough to put 12.222 years old under age?" Devin Publowsky was always the persistant one, never giving up until the teacher had sufficiently defended a point against his barrage. "Me," Phillip responded. "When I mark your assignments I will do everything in my power to make them crash. When I work at NG Computers in town I write code that is passed on to betatesters(remember, I told you guys about them last week) who try their best to crash it. What I write is much more complicated than what I am asking you to write for this project. I have given you all the resources necessary to write decent code that is uncrashable. Besides, you don't want to be showing your friends your cool new programs only to have them crash and emberass you, do you?" Some in the class chuckled as Phillip rested his case and Devon was happy. "And so," Phillip instructed the class, "you will need to make your YearsOfAge variable a real value to account for anyone who might do as Devon suggested. Next class I'll show you something called truncation. That will make it so that your programs will not spit out 'hello so-and-so you are 17.00000000000 years old.'" With that the bell rang and the students in Phillip's small grade 11 computer science class promply departed, each going his separate way. As he waited for his grade 12 class Phillip cleared the whiteboard so he could start anew. 3 Phillip stared into the black screen of the booting computer, praying that this would be the last fix he needed to make in order to get Mrs. Perkin's machine to work again. He felt the sensation of relief and accomplishment that he loved as he saw the startup screen for the operating system flash by as the computer booted as normal. Just to be sure everything was in working order he ran some diagnostics and took a stroll through the registry. Everything was in place and he could now phone Mrs. Perkins with the good news. NG Computers was a cozy place to work. Everyone dealt with the crunching force of deadlines with a responsible indifference. He had once read in a text file called "The Tao of Programming" that messages from corporate headquarters were carried, metaphorically, by a bird and dropped in the midst of the programmers like bits of seagull droppings on the beach. The master programmer did not even notice that the bird had come and gone. Though many working at NG Computers were novices all were indifferent to the gravity of any impending deadlines or situations. Nevertheless, a deadline was never missed and a customer was never disatisfied. Phillip moved Mrs. Perkins' computer over to a table from which it could be picked up in the future by the customer. He then went on to writing his java-based menu class for the Ball Creek town hall's website. He opened his email account on his workstation and read the five new messages from the betatesters. His newest "super-efficient" layover algorithm kept returning null-pointer-exceptions half the time. The constructor was too slow. The class was not adaptable enough so that NG Computers could market it elsewhere. The image queue was too slow. The class did not seem to integrate well enough with the webpage. Although these concerns were often raised prematurely they served as helpful reminders of modifications he still needed to make to the class. It was the function of betatesters to send negetive emails to programmers and other workers in NG Computers. However, each negetive email was, for Phillip, a doorway to a whole new world of puzzles and mysteries, which he would delight in solving. "If history is to change, let it change. If the world is to be destroyed, so be it. If my fate is to die, I must simply laugh" |
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Christopher
Moderator
Member Rara Avis
since 1999-08-02
Posts 8296Purgatorial Incarceration |
Fractal - I don't know if i've said this before or not (ignore me if i have, lol): you have some great ideas. i think if you were to combine two suggestions into your work, you would be a little farther down the road toward being a good writer. 1) use a more "conversational" tone; there is a place and time for formal, but i believe your ideas suffer under those restrictions. 2) expand - expand - expand. you present a lot of things that you just don't follow up... or flesh out. Just my suggestions Chris |
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fractal007 Senior Member
since 2000-06-01
Posts 1958 |
I agree Christopher. I may have exagerated my second fault here, since I plan to use it to my own ends in this particular series of "short stories". I think I may need to start watching people more. I have heard that watching and observing people's social behaviour can be a very effective way of improving one's writing abilities. Thankyou for the compliments and the critiques. "If history is to change, let it change. If the world is to be destroyed, so be it. If my fate is to die, I must simply laugh" -- Magus [This message has been edited by fractal007 (10-08-2002 12:30 AM).] |
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