(Trial 16: I see you only tweeted once with your old account. Why?
I never consider myself to be a noisy person, your Honor. And the tweet was automatically sent on my behalf in exchange for the free popcorn. Yes, I would really love to reclaim my account, the password of which I unfortunately forgot. However, it is not possible for I have already permanently deleted my old private gmail. By doing so, I foolishly thought that my older self died along with it. Such naïveté! Now I understand that there is no true death but Your death, and there is no true life but Your life.)
(Trial 17: Where did your grudge against Dr. Fan come from?
Oh, that. It was actually Dr. Qing Zhu, also known as Frank, who is Dr. Fan’s husband. When I spent the summer after my first year at Johns Hopkins at Prof. Chien’s lab, Prof. Chien asked Dr. Zhu, a postdoc at the time, to supervise me. However, it turned out his way of supervising was asking me to wash his used beakers and test tubes… Should have listened to You then, your Honor. And he had kept being a straightforward meanie during his stay… In the case of Dr. Fan, she was more or less the same, but she pretended to be a good Christian (Baptist, to be specific). I loathed that back when I was an atheist, and I absolutely hate that as now I consider myself a Christian.
Anyhow, it seems that Dr. Zhu has founded his own company by now. How fortuitous! Do you know you can actually help Prof. Chien by hiring his own son? The poor kid was a quite decent computer programmer until being laid off after an M&A of his employer. If he hasn’t found a job by now, you should definitely lend a helping hand. I tried to help him once when I still had the other AADPS, but Prof. Chien turned me down for he did not think his son was quite ready by then.
By the way, the tax filing of this Nova Minds LLC, previously known as Frank Technologies, does not add up. Have you been naughty, Frankie? How come you only make a fraction of your wife’s? Should I report you to the IRS? Anyway, your Honor know this already.)
(Trial 18: So did you wash test tubes and beakers for Dr. Zhu or not?
Yes, of course I did! And I also helped them reverse engineer a NI LabView program that controlled the sputtering machine. (In retrospect, my hacker career really started here.) It seemed that, unlike me, the previous lab member had left and did not bother to leave the source code. Seeing that they really needed to modify the program, I did my part of research. Turned out that NI has put this unique feature in LabView 7 so that even “compiled” LabView programs could be opened. They silently took the feature away from LabView 8 for obvious reasons. But I managed to secure an evaluation copy of LabView 7 to get the job done. I guess people were just too busy with their own businesses to notice. After all, it was not scientific research, and I always wondered WHAT SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH REALLY IS, your Honor.
And I would say I am the one of few persons on earth in possession of this esoteric, verifiable, but worthless piece of information.)
(Trial 19: And why did you secretly want to leave Prof. Chien’s lab?
It was to my belief that Prof. Chien spent a great deal of time viewing adult websites in his office. No, your Honor, I hacked a lot of things which I would prefer not to openly discuss, but Prof. Chien’s MacBook Pro was not among them. I just stumbled upon his browser history once. Actually at the time I figured that just making him fire me and not saying a word about this was the best course of action. Did not realize the plan could backfire…
I mean it is absolutely Okay for adults to view adult sites, I watch my share of online porn in my office, too. Hell I even dated an African American (as a typical Baltimore resident would be. BTW, she still owes me a few hundred bucks, but I more or less forgave the debt a long time ago. And you can actually take free HIV test at the Student Health and Wellness Center if you are a JHU student. Can get free condoms, too, though the quality is so-so.) back then. But I thought Prof. Chien watched a tad too much.
And it was the time I made up my mind that I shall no longer offer complimentary IT service during the rest of my life. Frankly speaking, it was a horrible experience on my end.)
(Trial 20: As We have shown you, do you now understand what would happen if you actually committed suicide?
Yes, your Honor, I do.
Instead of writing the “future endeavors” email, the Department Chair would send the “missing nice guy” email, only to all Chinese graduate students of course and not many would actually care. Instead of me removing any mentioning of myself, the new webmaster of my old advisor would do that. That would be all, and if I crawled out of my grave, I would probably kill myself again.
How many souls remember Mr. Yangkai Li anyway?)
(Trial 21: Let me ask You a question instead. In Your eyes, is a living bastard truly better than a dead saint?
Yes, that is correct.)
(Trial 22: If it takes a freak to save a life, are you willing to be that freak?
Yes, I will, your Honor. You are the King of kings, and I understand what your greatest emperor had done. Many emperors had the power to start a war, few had the power to bring peace to the world.)