January 15, 2007

My favorite parts of reading:

1. Starting at my bookshelf and feeling my (not past, not pride of accomplishments) future self broaden with pride - look how smart and wise I will be after reading all of these books that up until now have served only to make me poor.

2. The choosing of another completely different book after reading a good, long one. (define:Long => greater than 100 pages if non-technical.) Example: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (David Eggers) followed up by The Abolition of Man (C.S. Lewis) or potentially an US Weekly or book about open Adoption or how to care for a small child.

3. The feeling of connection with my father, mother, sister, brother, grandfather that I never knew, grandfather that I knew, grandmother that I never knew, grandmother that I knew and adored for her love of books. Everyone has at least one book that they like because it screams back at them the part of the truth that they have figured out through bitter experience or simple stumbling, and finding and reading those books makes you connected to them - to that experience.

4. The smell and the brrrrrrrrrt sound as you flip pages quickly when you get towards the end, physically feeling some sort of accomplishment and wonder at how somehow could express something in something maybe one/two inches and a few ounces.

December 06, 2004

A man is not old until regrets start taking place of dreams.
- unknown

November 03, 2004

"Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day. It is the accumulative weight of our disciplines and our judgments that leads us to either sucess or failure."

October 25, 2004

Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It's quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn't as all. You can be discouraged by failure — or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because, remember that's where you will find success.
— Thomas J. Watson, Sr.

September 20, 2004

"Look where you slipped-not where you fell."
- Old African proverb

September 17, 2004

The Sixth Borough

September 16, 2004

If you want to notice things that seem wrong, you'll find a degree of skepticism helpful. I take it as an axiom that we're only achieving 1% of what we could. This helps counteract the rule that gets beaten into our heads as children: that things are the way they are because that is how things have to be. For example, everyone I've talked to while writing this essay felt the same about English classes-- that the whole process seemed pointless. But none of us had the balls at the time to hypothesize that it was, in fact, all a mistake. We all thought there was just something we weren't getting.

Paul Graham, The Age of the Essay

September 09, 2004

I am learning all the time. The tombstone will be my diploma.

-Eartha Kitt

September 08, 2004

"And it ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, then to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them."
-- Machiavelli

August 30, 2004

Create your future from your future not your past.
Werner Erhard

I just read this quote and read it as: Create your future from you, not from your future past. I like my version better because it makes less sense, so screw him.

August 20, 2004

Professional Software Development: Shorter Schedules, Higher Quality Products, More Successful Projects, Enhanced Careers
By Steve McConnell:

"Striking the right balance between theory and practice in software engineering education depends on making a distinction between education and training. Education seeks to instill qualities in students that will enable them to respond effectively to diverse intellectual challenges. It focuses on general knowledge and includes development of critical thinking skills. Training provides specific skills and knowledge that can be applied immediately and repetitively. Education is strategic; training is tactical."

"The most common kind of occupational development for software developers today is training. It tends to be reactive and provided just in time in the specific technologies that a developer needs to know to work on a specific project. Education in longer-lasting software engineering principles is largely absent from the picture. Some people claim that software development has become too specialized and fragmented to be amenable to standardized education. It is too fragmented for standardized training, but not for standardized education."

Natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience.

—FRANCIS BACON

August 18, 2004

Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?

Alan J. Perlis

August 17, 2004

When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind.

—LORD KELVIN, 1893

Prosperity doth best discover vice, but adversity doth best discover virtue.

—FRANCIS BACON

Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.

—FRANCIS BACON

August 09, 2004

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.

—FRANCIS BACON

"You know you have achieved perfection in design not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away."

--Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

August 04, 2004

Truth will sooner come out of error than from confusion.

—FRANCIS BACON

August 02, 2004

He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils, for time is the greatest innovator.

—FRANCIS BACON

July 30, 2004

It looks obvious until you try it.

—IEEE SOFTWARE[1]

June 03, 2004

“The physicist's greatest tool is his wastebasket.”
- Albert Einstein

May 06, 2004

A beautiful theory, killed by a nasty, ugly, little fact.
- Thomas Henry Huxley

May 04, 2004

A little inspiration to get you through the day:

"That man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins- all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.

"Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding dispair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built."

Bertrand Russell 1903

April 25, 2004

I think I am motivated mostly by dread, by fear of a miserable life. Certainly I am troubled by worries of obsolescence, of incompetence, of unemployability. I would probably be happier if I were motivated by positives, by goals to be attained and rewards to be enjoyed.

—Thomas L. Holaday

February 10, 2004

"Impossible isn't a fact, it is an opinion".

November 04, 2003

"An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest."

Benjamin Franklin

October 29, 2003

"It is not what's inside your head, it's what your head's inside."

David Foster Wallace

September 19, 2003

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."

Bertrand Russell

September 17, 2003

"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public."

HL Mencken.

August 18, 2003

"To escape criticism: say nothing, do nothing, be nothing."

-Elbert Hubbard

August 12, 2003

"Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on."

-Terry Pratchett

August 11, 2003

"An invincible determination can accomplish almost anything and in this lies the great distinction between great men and little men."

Thomas Fuller

August 08, 2003

"If we are not engaged in making ourselves into the kind of person we ought to be, we are automatically engaged in making ourselves into what we ought not to be."

—Unknown

"I am annoyed to find myself continually described by people whom I have never set eyes on as bad-tempered."

Evelyn Waugh, Diary (26 Dec 47)

August 07, 2003

"We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about."

Einstein

July 28, 2003

Whatever the self describes, describes the self.

Jacob Boehme

July 02, 2003

Things aren’t the way they are, they’re the way you are.

Anais Nin

June 23, 2003

"The whole world is put in motion by the wish for riches and dread of poverty."
- Johnson, Rambler 178

June 04, 2003

True, true

You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.
-Wayne Gretsky

May 20, 2003

Horrible misquote

Whilst watching a b-class Alec Baldwin movie in which he tries his best not to sound like a pervert with that strange baritone of his, I heard a cool quote, which I will now massacre:

Doing the right thing is easy, it is figuring out what the right thing is that is hard, and then once you do it is hard not to do it.

Speaking of pumping yourself up for something, check out this story (a picture on this site may not be work safe) at the excellent Other People's Stories.

March 18, 2003

Quotes

"I object to doing things that computers can do."
- Olin Shivers

February 06, 2003

Three ideas

I heard three ideas, quotes that I like today:

-Creativity is a greater predictor of success than intelligence.

-To change is to improve, to change often is to succeed.

-Critics are like eunuchs in whorehouses, they see how it is done, they know how to do it, they just can't do it.

January 29, 2003

Today

"It's today!" said Piglet. "My favorite day," said Pooh.

January 15, 2003

Daily Blessing

I came home from work today while it was still light for the first time in a few weeks. It was barely light, dusk really, where everything looks like a well-shot movie: the golden hour directors use for their best shots.

About five minutes out a huge flock of birds were sitting in a field on a very large farm on my way. Right, and I mean right, as I passed them they flew overhead onto some trees to my left, passing from the dark field where the sun had already exited behind the farmhouse to the brush on the other side where the trees were still soaking in the light. As each bird passed over they changed from black to a strong grayish white color Escher-like as they flew into the direct sunlight.

A million things could have prevented me from seeing this today - any delay during the long day for even five seconds could have caused the performance to happen behind my speeding car or around the next corner - but none of them did.

December 05, 2002

Guarded

There is a little piece of plastic on the screen of my cellphone that has been there for months. They put it on new ones so the screens aren't scratched in shipping. I have kept it on to avoid the inevitable scratching of the screen. I wish everybody had one of those, a whole world covered in a thin sheet of plastic to protect our emotions, our pride - laminated from the initial pain of life.

But the other day I dropped it and the plastic thing was scratched so I took it off and was suprised by how greenish the screen was underneath. I had always thought that it was more gray than anything, but I guess the plastic was hiding its color.

October 07, 2002

Enlightened times

This is easily the greatest webpage on the face of the earth. I have slowly realized in my own life as I grow older that I am not at all in touch with what I want to do during those 5 minute intervals, or more importantly the 8 hour intervals everyday.

October 01, 2002

Goal

"Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power."

Seneca