Simplicity means the achievement of maximum effect with minimum means. -- Dr. Koichi Kawana

Getting back to failing early, I've learned it's important to completely fail. Get fired. Shoot the project, then burn its corpse. Melt the CVS repository and microwave the backup CDs. When things go wrong, I've often tried to play the hero from start to finish. Guess what? Some projects are doomed no matter what. Some need skills I don't possess. And some need a fresh face. -- Reginald Braithwaite

The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution. -- Bertrand Russell

We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. -- Donald Knuth

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

The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil. -- Cicero

It is not what you do for your children, but what you have taught them to do for themselves, that will make them successful human beings. –Ann Landers

We become what we think about. –Earl Nightingale

I have learned over the years that when one's mind is made up, this diminishes fear. –Rosa Parks

It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop. –Confucius