Patrick Russell McElhiney - Homepage
Addressing Misconceptions About My Lack of a Personal Life
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The purpose of this post is to address misperceptions about my personal life, which should be noted more like the lack thereof. I don’t mean that in the sense of disappointment – I mean I have no personal life. I don’t seek out personal relationships – I haven’t for over 15 years. What I mean by “personal relationship” is any relationship that would ever result in a sexual relationship. The reason why I’m not interested in personal relationships is because I literally have no interest in them. Information that is posted on this website that paints a picture of me being the perfect man in the sense of a potential partner are for the purpose of ensuring that the door isn’t completely closed, however there is no prevalence of me seeking out personal relationships during the past 15 years.
Recently, someone implied that I was attempting to do exactly the opposite of what I stated above. It was offensive to me because this person attempted to claim that friendship is a personal relationship, and I completely disagree. All of my friendships are professional relationships. There have been no incidents of me trying to seek out sexual relationships with anyone for the past 15 years. It must also be noted that thoughts and communications do not constitute sexual relationships. The fact that someone would attempt to damage my career through this type of accusation, with absolutely no proof, is absurd. So far, it has resulted in me losing sleep, and having anxiety attacks, and it may also be impacting my ability to study in my school program.
After explaining myself to this person, I’ve requested that this person admit that she was wrong, and apologize, however, she has not done this as of the time of me writing this. Liking someone because of their career, and wanting to get to know them better isn’t correlated to me developing personal relationships in the past. If I had wanted a personal relationship with this person, I would have told her. That never happened. Ruining a professional relationship due to a false perception makes me worry that this person is unfit to serve in a professional capacity. While I would prefer to not make this an issue, this has caused me great pain, and I worry that if I don’t report it, there could be other mistakes made by this person. The only thing this person would need to do to avoid this course of action would be to admit that she was mistaken, and apologize. If she doesn’t do this, she is persisting in her falsehood.
Let me be very clear here – I have no problem with this person not wanting a personal relationship with me because I didn’t want one with her. The problem is that she is destroying a professional relationship because, as she stated, she believes that I was interested in her in a personal manner. I’ve stated that if this person is going to continue down this path of thought, then I want absolutely nothing to do with her. I don’t want her to be anywhere near me because this is highly offensive to me – because I don’t seek out personal relationships. I am posting this information, so that anyone else that ever thinks that I’m trying to pursue a personal relationship with them, will know that it’s extremely unlikely, as I’m just not really interested in personal relationships at all. Even though I don’t close the door completely, it would require a great deal of effort from a woman to get me to change my mind, and this person didn’t put any effort into it – she made an accusation that was false. I can’t describe in words how disappointed, professionally, I am in this person for both making the accusation, and not admitting that she was wrong and apologizing.
Women in Technology
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Most people don't realize this, but if you take a look around in the industry of technology, you can see that there's an absence of a lot of women, and it was interesting that in one of my Computer Science classes, we discussed this issue, in a class that I believe is entirely all men. There's not one woman in the class, and my professor, Dr. Phil Hatcher, pointed out a stupid thing that the people at Sun Microsystems came up with, that the first 8 bytes of a Java class file reads "CAFEBABE". What that means is in every Java class file, which is an object code file of the code that a Java class uses with the Java Virtual Machine, starts out with the "CAFEBABE" bytes, a rather sexist thing to hard-code into every single Java class file in the world. What in the world were they thinking?
It's not difficult for me to not sexually harass women in my own industry, even when I'm attracted to them, just because of the way I was raised - I just don't have too much of an interest in sex in general. I can't remember any incident that I've ever sexually harassed a woman in my own industry, let alone at all - because I've basically just never had an interest in having sex with anyone. So when I see things like this in my industry, it's shocking to think that women would put up with the stereotypes that are established by my fellow workers. I guess I just limit myself in the type of attraction that I have to women - I'm never trying to get anything from women, like men usually are. I'm also offended by the way men protect women, as if they belong to them. It's just a problem, really in every industry, but especially in computing fields - women just don't want to get into computing and technology fields, because they feel like they're outnumbered.
It's not that they believe that they can't do the work, and trust me I know a lot of women that can do the work, but it's just that they don't like putting up with the sexual harassment and stereotyping at work all the time. It made it extremely difficult for me to figure out what I wanted in my personal life, to the point that I'm just running my business, and I hire women, but I don't want anything personally from them. I'm just trying to make a living, and I think that a lot of single men in my industry are in this mindset that the women are there to be preyed on, and that's just not how I see my fellow workforce at all. I think it's wrong to stereotype, and to be sexist, and I think it's going to be a long time before a lot of it gets worked out - like the Java class file starting bytes - they're practically there forever, until Oracle writes a version of the JVM that can read both old class files and new class files that have a different file identifier other than "CAFEBABE". I think it's astonishing that someone actually figured out that you could write the word "CAFEBABE" in hexadecimal, because the values only go up to 0-9... A-F... there's no such thing as a G, or an H in hex. It stops at F. It's just amazing that people actually put the thought into coming up with that file identifier, and that it's still embedded in every Java class file. Leave everything to men, and this is what you get!
--Patrick R. McElhiney
The Art of Programming
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Patrick has noticed that certain days are better than others as far as the amount of code that he can write, and he's working to figure out why some days are more productive. Patrick's goal is to be as productive as his best day programming, every day that he writes code. He isn't as concerned with the sheer amount of code that is written, because as anyone knows, when you're programming in HTML, or something that you're familiar with, it's very easy to produce a lot of code - such as when you're copying and pasting lots of code, and altering it just a little bit. This isn't what Patrick considers his 2,000 lines of code per day average contribution to projects. If you count the brainless programming of these sorts, Patrick could easily write 50,000+ lines of code a day in HTML/CSS, but what's the point? If you can write a program that does everything for you, why do you need to write 50,000+ lines of HTML/CSS a day? Certainly that would be quite an accomplishment for a fifth grader, but for a seasoned programmer? It's a waste of their time. It's much better to write AI that can automatically write articles for you, but that type of code takes a lot longer to conceptualize and manufacture - however, the value of that code is worth millions of times more than the HTML/CSS it produces.
Patrick has heard people suggest that everything has already been done, however he continues to come up with ideas for new products and services. The difficulty has been finding the time to produce the projects associated with these ideas. MCE123 Technology Development just shows some of the value of Patrick's work - that he'd be able to survive in a tough position like CTO or CIO, but there are a lot of things that Patrick thinks he could improve his knowledge on - such as corporate finance, executive coaching, and project management skills. But that will come later - for now Patrick is just solely focused on how to become a better computer programmer. He wants to be able to be as productive as possible each and every work day, and there are not many days that Patrick doesn't work. Work is really all Patrick understands - he has no evident personal life, and hasn't for decades. He just works on anything he can, whenever he can, and right now that is mostly academic-based work, but the fact of the matter is that Patrick's personality makes him extremely anxious when he isn't working. It's tough for Patrick to relax - and companies should be willing to pay more for that level of dedication, because there are not many people that have the drive that Patrick does. He hasn't always been rewarded for all of the extra work that he puts into things, but he's also never been a liability to a company. Patrick just wants to be the best employee that he can be, because if he's not the best with regards to his work, he has nothing to show for at the end of the day. Other people have families that they go home to, and raising children takes a lot of time... Patrick spends all of that time working on his career - and it shows in his work ethic.
Progress of Patrick's PhD Studies
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Patrick R. McElhiney has been working on his PhD degree at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, NH. He is majoring in Artificial Intelligence, which is in the field of Computer Science. Patrick can be seen in the dark green shirt in the middle of the group above, that met for the Responsible Conduct of Research conference for all incoming PhD students at the University of New Hampshire. Only 1% of the world's population has a PhD degree, and Patrick believes it is such an honor to be able to pursue higher education and scholarship at UNH.
Dean Cari Moorhead said that this event was a great success - there are 105 new PhD students this year (Fall 2018) and only two of the students didn't show up for the meeting. The meeting required the advance passing of 12 modules that taught about the ethics in research, such as how to treat animals, how to deal with nuclear and chemical materials on campus, and how to properly cite sources. Although not all of these modules pertained to Patrick's research specifically, it was good to learn more. Dean Moorhead added that the meeting was the one place that we'd ever see as many PhD students, or "PhD wanna-bees" as she phrased it, in one location for probably Patrick's entire career. He wasn't so sure of that - there could certainly be other opportunities in Patrick's future.