Simple things should be simple. Complex things should be possible. -- Alan Kay

Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent. -- Eleanor Roosevelt

Courage is grace under pressure. -- Ernest Hemingway

The art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it [Leadership]. -- Dwight D. Enseinhover.

In general, we can think of data as defined by some collection of selectors and constructors, together with specified conditions that these procedures must fulfill in order to be a valid representation. -- SICP, What is meant by data?

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

Don’t be afraid to give up the good to go for the great. ~John D. Rockefeller

You become what you believe. –Oprah Winfrey

You’ve got to get up every morning with determination if you’re going to go to bed with satisfaction. ~George Lorimer

It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation. ~Herman Melville