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.