Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier. -- Colin Powell

Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams. -- Mary Ellen Kelly

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

As builders and creators finding the perfect solution should not be our main goal. We should find the perfect problem. -- Isaac (blog comment)

C and Lisp stand at opposite ends of the spectrum; they're each great at what the other one sucks at. -- Steve Yegge, Tour de Babel.

Software is like sex: It’s better when it’s free. -- Linus Torvalds

There are two types of people who will tell you that you cannot make a difference in this world: those who are afraid to try and those who are afraid you will succeed. ~Ray Goforth

Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears. –Les Brown

We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained. –Marie Curie

Don’t let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do. ~John R. Wooden