I’ve sub­mitted this photo to the Dork Yearbook:

“By the weight of hon­ours strewn about me and my dad’s Franklin ACE 1000 (including, yes, the IBM Regional Computer Techonology Award) you can tell I had just qual­i­fied for the Canadian National Science Fair. But they took me aside and explained that the National Fair was meant to be a gath­ering of peers, and since I was 2 years younger than anyone else and grotesquely small, I wasn’t anybody’s peer. They sent someone bigger. Childhood was a hard time for nerds, yes?”

You know, I don’t actu­ally recall being bitter about that inci­dent. Just a little con­fused and even relieved. Maybe I didn’t believe that writing a fairly straight­for­ward bit of BASIC code could really put me in the National league of dork­ness, and maybe I’ve just never been very com­pet­i­tive. As I recall, there was some weird deal where every province but Ontario had a provin­cial com­pe­ti­tion before the national level, and if I went I was going to be up against the hard-​​bitten sur­vivors of the All-​​Manitoba and Trans-​​Yukon sci­ence fairs without having gone through that level of sea­soning myself. Tough as I look, maybe I was just scared. Maybe I just wanted to go home and work on my real mas­ter­piece, a generic text-​​adventure engine that was frankly too ele­gant for the judges to ever understand.