the cool part was that i got to have an e-mail exchange with steve bourne, because he was at the time the past president of the ACM. i mean, we'll obviously never be friends because i had to throw a fucking tantrum over an entire year of income, but it was kind of like:

hey, steve, thanks for writing that unix shell we all use a clone of. by the way, i would fucking really like to get paid since i was living on the couch in fema housing babysitting my friends' kid after katrina the entire time i worked for you guys.

what's great is that i started doing the work as a volunteer and was aggressively pushed into a contract, which they later didn't want to pay, though they had no issues paying for piles of HP servers that went unused or oracle licenses to solve problems that could probably have been solved with mysql.

but hey, i'm still alive, so: yo, motherfucker, wheee!