The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris. -- Larry Wall (Programming Perl)

Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder. Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder. -- Erik Naggum

XML wasn't designed to be edited by humans on a regular basis. -- Guido van Rossum

There really is no learning without doing. -- Roger Schank, Engines for Education

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

Some people suggest that machines would be friendlier if input could be in a natural language. But natural language is probably the worst kind of input because it can be quite ambiguous. The process of retrieving information from the computer would be so time-consuming that you would be better off spending that time getting the information directly from an expert. -- Gary Kildall (inventor of CP/M, one of the first OS for the micro).

The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be. –Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you’re going through hell keep going. ~Winston Churchill

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why. –Mark Twain

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined. –Henry David Thoreau