Something Confusing about "Hard": It's tempting to think that if it's hard, then it's valuable. Most valuable things are hard. Most hard things are completely useless -- (picture of someone smashing their head through concrete blocks kung-fu style). Hard DOES NOT EQUATE TO BEING valuable. Remember Friendster back in the day? You'd sign in, invite friends, have 25 friends, go to their profile, and then it'd show how you were connected to each one. That's an impressive [some geeky CS jargon] Cone traversal of a tree - 100 million string comparisons per page -- it won't scale. Used to take a minute per page to load, and Friendster died a painful death. MySpace -- not interested in solving problems They use the shortcut of "Miss Fitzpatrick is in your extended network" (i.e. even when you're not even signed up for MySpace) They didn't solve the hard problem. But they make the more relevant assumption that you want to be connected to hot women. [LOL] Shows Alexa graph showing that in early 2005 Myspace took off, and quickly bypassed Friendster and never looked back. -- Max Levchin, PayPal founder, Talk at StartupSchool2007

When your enemy is making a very serious mistake, don't be impolite and disturb him. -- Napoleon Bonaparte (allegedly)

Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want. -- Cited by Randy Pausch

Understanding why C++ is the way it is helps a programmer use it well. A deep understanding of a tool is essential for an expert craftsman. -- Bjarne Stroustrap

640K ought to be enough for anybody. -- Bill Gates, 1981

Why teach drawing to accountants? Because drawing class doesn't just teach people to draw. It teaches them to be more observant. There's no company on earth that wouldn't benefit from having people become more observant. -- Randy S. Nelson (dean of Pixar University)

Winning isn’t everything, but wanting to win is. –Vince Lombardi

You may only succeed if you desire succeeding; you may only fail if you do not mind failing. ~Philippos

If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much. ~ Jim Rohn

Change your thoughts and you change your world. –Norman Vincent Peale