Gregory Todd Williams

I had dinner with my father and Doug, a family friend who my father used to work with (I believe). I got to sit through a long, wandering conversation on amateur radio, and the people they had met through amateur radio, the different bands they worked and when they worked them, and what conditions were optimal for, say, 10 meters versus 80 meters. I got to hear how they intend to plug in Doug’s 100 watt transmitter to my father’s 40 meter dipole tomorrow. And I got to shrug when they asked me why it was that I wasn’t using my license, and how easy it would be for me to pass the code test and move on up to a General or Extra license.

We talked about programming languages, old and new, that we had used, or that we wanted to learn, or that were poorly design, or beautifully designed. We discovered that none of us had ever done anything with Pascal, and that we agreed on C++ being a rather awful language. It started to become rather clear, though, that, despite knowing more about languages than most people I know, we really were from two completely different generations, brought up on different hardware, and different software, and different thoughts.

And I had no answers for them when they marveled at the multitude of options I have in life right now and asked why I wasn’t in Japan, or Chile, or grad school. Why didn’t I have a girlfriend who would make going to grad school difficult, but might just be willing to follow me there. Why wasn’t I teaching English in Japan, or at least taking more Japanese courses. And for god’s sake, why wasn’t I using that radio license?

Sigh.

“So many options,” and so little going on.