A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer. -- Bill Gates

Chance favors the prepared mind. -- Louis Pasteur

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

Everything that can be invented has been invented. -- Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899

All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky. -- Joel Spolsky (The Law of Leaky Abstractions)

The only constant in the world of hi-tech is change. -- Mark Ward

If you are not willing to risk the usual you will have to settle for the ordinary. ~Jim Rohn

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Believe you can and you’re halfway there. –Theodore Roosevelt

What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do. –Bob Dylan