Rules of Optimization: Rule 1: Don’t do it. Rule 2 (for experts only): Don’t do it yet. -- M.A. Jackson

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)

Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot. -- Eric S. Raymond

Its a shame that the students of our generation grew up with windows and mice because that tainted our mindset not to think in terms of powerful tools. Some of us are just so tainted that we will never recover. -- Jeffrey Mark Siskind in comp.lang.lisp

Any sufficiently advanced technology is undistinguishable from magic. -- Arthur C. Clarke

Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve. –Napoleon Hill

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away. –Maya Angelou

If you don’t value your time, neither will others. Stop giving away your time and talents- start charging for it. ~Kim Garst

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