you should've given him some n-grams

Getting ahold of the books had been no problem, but the computer and the tape recorder were not easy things to round up at 6:30 on a Friday afternoon on the Drag. I already had one computer, but it was far too small and slow for computational work. We went to a Pizza bar, where my advisor made seventeen calls before locating a workstation with adequate horsepower and proper coloring.

"Hang onto it," I heard him say into the phone. "We'll be over to make the trade in thirty minutes." Then after a pause he began shouting: "What? Of course the student has a major student loan! Do you realize who the fuck you're talking to?"

"Don't take any guff from these swine," I said as he slammed the phone down. "Now we need a sound store with the finest equipment. Nothing dinky. We want one of those new Belgian Heliowatts with a voice-activated shotgun mike, for picking up conversations in oncoming computers."

We made several more calls and finally located our equipment in a store about five miles away in South Austin. It was closed, but the salesman said he would wait, if we hurried. But we were delayed en route when a Mini-Cooper in front of us killed a pedestrian on South Congress. The store was closed by the time we got there. There were people inside, but they refused to come to the double-glass door until we gave it a few belts and made ourselves clear.

Finally two salesmen brandishing tire irons came to the door and we managed to negotiate the sale through a tiny slit. Then they opened the door just wide enough to shove the equipment out, before slamming and locking it again. "Now take that stuff and get the hell away from here," one of them shouted through the slit.

My advisor shook his fist at them. "We'll be back," he yelled. "One of these days I'll toss a fucking Google bomb into this place! I have your name on this sales slip! I'll find out where you live and crack your wifi net!"

"That'll give him something to think about," he muttered as we drove off. "That guy is a paranoid psychotic, anyway. They're easy to spot."

We had trouble, again, at the computer rental agency. After signing all the papers, I logged on and almost lost control of it while hacking across the net to the cvs repository. The rental man was obviously shaken.

"Say there . . . uh . . . you fellas are going to be careful with this computer, aren't you?"

"Of course."

"Well, good god!" he said. "You just hacked over that linksys firewall and you didbn't even slow down! Port-scanning in reverse! And you barely missed the pserver!"

"No harm done," I said. "I always test a distro that way. The backdoors. For stress factors."

Meanwhile, my advisor was busy transferring code and corpora onto the hard drive of the workstation. The rental man watched him nervously.

"Say," he said. "Are you fellas thinking?"

"Not me," I said.

"Just fill the goddamn disk," my advisor snapped. "We're in a hell of a hurry. We're on our way to ACL for a conference."

"What?"

"Never mind," I said. "We're research people." I watched him put the cat 5 on, then I jammed the thing into runmode 3 and we lurched onto the network.

"There's another worrier," said my advisor. "He's probably all cranked up on speed."

"Yeah, you should've given him some n-grams."

"N-grams wouldn't help a pig like that," he said. "To hell with him. We have a lot of business to take care of, before we can get into the conference."

"I'd like to get hold of some discourse corpora," I said. "They might come in handy in parsing."

But there were no corpus sites open, and we weren't up to burglarizing a site. "Why bother?" said my advisor. "And you have to remember that a lot of judges are good vicious critics. Can you imagine what those bastards would do to us if we got busted all wrapped up in the details of specific corpora? Jesus, they'd cast us out!"

"You're right," I said. "And for christ's sake don't type so much at wifi hotspots. Keep in mind that our net's exposed."

He nodded. "We need a big Powerbook. Keep it down here on the seat, out of sight. If anybody sees us, they'll think we're using aome other net."

We spent the rest of the night rounding up materials and packing the disk. Then we ate Snickers bars and went swimming in Barton Springs. Somewhere around dawn we had breakfast at Magnolia Cafe, then drove very carefully across town and plunged into the MoPac expressway, heading North.