For nostalgia I keep a copy of Mathematica on my laptop, so I can pretend to be an an actual computer scientist and not just an overpaid button-presser.

Ten years ago I used it to fit a nonlinear model to some performance metrics to predict the behaviour of a disk array past the maximum load level I was allowed to use for testing.

That’s the last time I did something that Excel couldn’t handle.

In university I learned how matrix exponentiation can be used to calculate the maximum throughput of a mesh network. In real life everyone just buys 10x the bandwidth they need.

It’s depressing.