Dr. Jeff Smith, D.C. is a HARDWARE Hacker.

Copyright (C) July 16, 2011
All Rights Reserved, except as noted.

When I was 14 years old, I had the greatest hacker[1] toy ever. It was called the Commodore 64. It had this nasty little Basic, with line numbers, and gotos. That little machine had, as I recall, a total of 8k of ROM, including the 4k kernel and 4k for Basic.

It seemed like a lot back then. I disassembled that ROM and learned the Motorola 6502 machine language. I had no technical manuals, no Howto’s from the Internet. Occasionally, I would get a useful hint from an old magazine called Compute’s Gazette. And the only other Hacker I had to work with was just a friend, I met in school. We were good.

Then I wrote my own 3 pass assembler. It was possible to swap out the Basic in ROM, and replace that 4k of memory with pure RAM. And I had to bum a lot of instruction code to get my deluxe label based assembler to fit in that 4k. In a way, Basic was that machine’s operating system. And I re-wrote it, as an assembler.

After that, in my Junior year in high school, I wrote a paper as part of my science fair project. It was called ‘Disk Copy Protection,’ because I had learned how to crack the 5 1/4” floppies containing video games written for the C64. And I won first place in the State of Arkansas for that paper, and I got to shake hands with then Governor Clinton.

Before I turned 18, I had nearly a complete computer science education. Not only could I bum machine instructions, I was well on my way to becoming a disk Hacker. I wanted to start my own game company, but I didn’t want people ripping off my stuff. Well, how can I put this? I was on the verge of creating my own formatting system for those 5 1/4 inch floppies. It not only sped up access time by 400%, it also managed to store more information in the same space. But I never quite got it to work.

Because something happened to me. I got sick. And my brain got foggy. And I just couldn’t hack any more, not the way that I knew I could. And all the medical doctors had no idea what was wrong with me. They told me it was all in my head. They must think I’m a hypochondriac.

But a few months ago, I saw Dr. Jeff Smith of the Bentonville, Arkansas Smith Family Clinic because he had a sign about treating Fibromyalgia. The medical doctors had never actually diagnosed me with anything that wasn’t mental, despite having three close relatives diagnosed with the same thing.

But this chiropractor not only could diagnose me, he had real hardware to do real tests that said my brain was only firing at about 40% of its full potential. The Atlas bone at the top of my spine had twisted, pushing up into my skull, and putting pressure on my brain stem. This explains both the brain fog and the extreme phantom pain that I felt all through my body.

And after a few months of spinal decompression and other non-traditional treatments, my brain started working. And it happened really fast. And to be honest, I wasn’t exactly stupid before it turned back on. After all, I’d been doing computer science research.

But Dr. Jeff Smith seems to understand what I’m going through. And we had the most interesting, juicy conversation yesterday, during my regular appointment. That man told me that he had built his own computer. You see, he had this old 386…

My Lord! I grok it! That man is a HARDWARE Hacker. And hardware types are REALLY smart, not dumb like us software peeps. So he’s really smart, and chiropractor.

Wait a minute… does that mean chiropractors are some kind of medical hackers? Going to have to think about it…

But Dr. Smith, I told you if you made my brain work right again, I would write you the best testimonial ever. And now, as a Hacker of a different tradition, I pronounce you sir a Hacker. We might need to figure exactly what kind you are though.

But my definition of ‘Hacker’ is sacred. To me, it means ‘To think like/with God.’ (You might express that concept as WWJD?)

But thanks, Dr. Smith. I’m not quite done writing your testimonial just yet.

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References:
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[1] Eric S. Raymond’s homepage, including his definition of ‘Hacker.’ To find out more about the
Open Source Software Hacker culture, read his Open Source Software Papers.

My blog is too eclectic. Going to split into 2 or 3.

As you can see, my blog is just a mishmash of things, from many different topics. I’m going to leave the part of the blog here that has to do with geek culture, and software design.

The Law of Attraction stuff is going to be posted on a new blog. And then I’ll start my new business. I haven’t exactly thought of a name yet, but it will be a small Internet business to business consulting company. But I plan to put an entire University level course online to teach HTML, blogging, Word Press, and anything else anyone wants to learn for free.

Yep, free.

I think it’s a terrific idea.

The move should be done within a month or two.

What kind of business should I start?