plenty of vultures out here

"Good luck," said my advisor. "We had a real funk on our hands. That algorithm made me nervous. Did you see its runtime? He was still laughing. "Dynamic programming," he said. "That's a good algorithm!"

I opened the code and scrolled down to the tree kernel. "Move over," I said. "I'll code. I have to get this thing working before the next deadline."

"Shit, that'll be weeks," said my advisor. "That's hundreds of hours from now."

"So it is," I said.

"Let's head out and hear a book reading," he said. "We can get work done there."

I ignored the reading. "A large coffee," I yelled at the barista as the brainstorm took over again. I pounded on the keyboard as I hurtled back into the code. An hour later he leaned over with some friends. "There's a place 'round the block called Headhunters," he said. "As your advisor, I advise you to stop and take a break."

I shook my head. "It's absolutely imperative that we get this thing working before the deadline to ACL," I said. "Otherwise, we'll have to wait until next year."

He nodded. "But let's forget all that nonsense about the hardening of the software dream," he said. "The important thing is the great results dream." He was hacking around in the sourse code. "I think it's about time to chew up some CPU," he said. "That cheap single processor unit ran for a long time, and I don't know if I can stand to wait for the results any longer."

"I like it," I said. "We should distribute the lab with this code and run experiments all night, so the log files fill up all the way to the conference."

He was flipping through iTunes. The laptop was screaming out Portishead beats ten years old. "The poor fool should have just kept up his research trajectory," said my advisor. "Punks like that just get in the way when they bite off more than they can code."

"Speaking of code," I said. "I think it's about time to get into the Eliot and the___."

"Forget Eliot," he said. "Let's save it for soaking down the models in the training. But here's this. Your half of the Tom Wolfe. You'll blow through it like bubble gum."

I took the Wolfe and ate it. My advisor was now tweaking the code containing the feature extraction. Opening it, optimizing it. Then pointing and explaining to me where my loops went awry, as my code went all wonky on this day. A very expensive bug arising from the tree comparison module. "Oh, jesus!" he moaned. "Did you see what God just did to us?"

"God didn't do that!" I shouted. "I did. I'm having a fucking hard time concentrating! I knew this would happen from the start, you dig!"

"You better stay focused," he said. And suddenly he was waving a fat black .357 module at me. One of those snubnosed Python programs with the iterators and the generators. "Plenty of vultures out here," he said. "They'll pick your code clean before morning."