Quotes: p

I’ve got a novel idea! How about if you don’t waste my time.

Do you want protocols that look nice or protocols that work nice?

In America everyone is entitled to an opinion. However you are not entitled to a professional opinion.

My basic attitude toward performing live is the same now as it was then. … You do it. No nerves… you just do it.

Ayn Rand was the kind of bold female thinker who should immediately have been a centerpiece of women’s studies programs, if the latter were genuinely about women rather than about a cliched, bleeding-heart, victim-obsessed, liberal ideology that dislikes all concrete female achievement.

Civilized man conceals from himself the extent of his subordination to nature. The grandeur of culture, the consolation of religion absorb his attention and win his faith. But let nature shrug, and all is in ruin. Fire, flood, lightning, tornado, hurricane, volcano, earthquake - anywhere at any time. Disaster falls upon the good and bad. Civilized life requires a state of illusion.

These are the times that try men’s souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country: but he that stands it NOW deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered. Yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.

At this point, the IMF drags the gasping nation to Step Three: Market-Based Pricing, a fancy term for raising prices on food, water and cooking gas. This leads, predictably, to Step-Three-and-a-Half: what Stiglitz calls, “The IMF riot.”

He who attacks the fundamentals of the American broadcasting industry attacks democracy itself.

A ship in harbor is safe, but that’s not why the ship is built.

Jello! I forgot about jello! This changes EVERYTHING!

I want my 100 mip desktop PC to have the processor mounted on top of the case in a little ceramic square so I can use it for a coffee warmer. Burying all those heat sinks in the cabinet is a waste of good heat.

Stand your ground; don’t fire unless fired upon; but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here!

File not found. Should I fake it? (Y/N)

I don’t care what is written about me so long as it isn’t true.

If I had any decency, I’d be dead.

If they laid all the coeds from Yale end to end…I wouldn’t be surprised.

This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown away with great force.

Human errors can only be avoided if one can avoid the use of humans

And under HappyNet, whenever rn says “End of newsgroup alt.slack.”, it’ll rmgroup it for you.

And whenever rn sees your .signature it’ll rmgroup alt.slack as well! Yay!

By the way, I know the names of all the Macintosh fill patterns. Like “Bark”, “Linoleum”, “Balls”, and “Pressed Herring”.

Derrida was NOT postmodern, you fool. He’s not even modern, because he’s dead! Get your facts straight.

I do NOT have a sense of humor! It says so in my 1000-line .sig!

I love any post in which somone claims to have done something really stupid while pointing out how cheap the stupid item was. I have a penny gumball stuck in my ear. Top that.

I’m not a NetGod. I _am_ the Net.

If this posting makes you laugh *and* makes you angry, then I win!

Yeah? Well, I AM the NSA!

If you want the rainbow, you have to put up with the rain.

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter.

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.

Monsieur le Chevalier is very bright, but he is no mathematician. And that, as you know, is a very serious defect.

The U.S. Supreme court has a definition of Pornography, and it breaks down something like this: Anything which is without social redeeming value and which appeals to the prurient interest. In other words, any posting on the Usenet.

Chance favors only the prepared mind.

Your only duties in life are to fix my tapes and eliminate the people i don’t like.

A good plan violently executed right now is far better than a perfect plan executed next week.

Do your damnedest in an ostentatious manner all the time.

I don’t measure a man’s success by how high he climbs but by how high he bounces when he hits bottom.

I don’t want to get any messages saying that, “We are holding out position.” We’re not holding anything! Let the Hun do that. We are advancing constantly and we’re not interested in holding on to anything except the enemy.

I fight where I’m told, and I win where I fight.

If everyone is thinking alike then somebody isn’t thinking.

Many of you have in your veins Geman and Italian blood. But remember that these ancestors of yours so loved freedom that they gave up home and country to cross the ocean in search of liberty. The ancestors of the people we shall kill lacked the courage to make such a sacrifice and remained slaves.

Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.

The shortest way home is through Berlin and Tokyo.

wow! you really have a way with words!! they effectively convey your bitterness at your boyfriend’s lack of attention to domestic chores. Edgar Allen Poe, eat your heart out!

I’m the only person I know who has never touched alcohol. And before you ask, I do not have a drinking problem. I can start drinking any time I want!

This isn’t right. This isn’t even wrong.

OK, I have now officially had it up to here with religion and politics. Can I get an amen?

Major funding for The Great Depression was provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

I guess I shouldn’t blame her really, I mean she did give birth to me, which is more than most people do for the world.

Science is one thing and Wisdom is another. Science is an edged tool, with which men play like children, and cut their own fingers.

He’s completely gone off the deep end. I mean he’s more than just a little off, we’re talking more than two tacos short of a combination plate here.

I think my body just told me to lay off the ‘Chef Boyardee’

What a weenie name, Firehawk - you need a cool name like “Great Pre-Historic Bird Rodin”

Ya know, you could vomit on all of your Magic cards. That way you’d know which ones are yours, and there would be no incentive to steal them.

Never worry about a book corrupting a child… Worry if your children are not getting ideas from books.

Russia was always notorious for the gap between culture and civilization. Now there is no more culture. No more civilization. All that remains is The Gap.

AOL and TimeWarner offer up the new org chart of a combined company. Case would be Chairman. Levin would be CEO. And Ted Turner would maintain his role as being pretty darn odd.

British Law prohibits the distribution of pornography for financial gain. What about for public good?

Mama always told me there would be days like these. Of course, Mama has been trading in long-term treasury bonds so she isn’t quite as worried as some today.

San Francisco State University is starting a course that provides an academic approach to cybersex. The course directors had initially employed a Socratic method of teaching, but they had to abandon that strategy as everyone in the class just repeatedly yelled out “Yes”.

Sesame Street is leading an effort to make sure that every newborn has a web page at birth. A web page? My future children already have equity in start-ups and are facing a backlog of anti-trust litigation.

Sites are now looking for new ways to attract and retain visitors. One of the more popular strategies is the use of sweepstakes. It may just work as 93 million Americans participated in a sweepstakes or other game of chance last year. If sweepstakes don’t work, we may see some sites turn to the last resort of creating a compelling user experience and a quality value-proposition for visitors.

some music industrians are suggesting that the recent drop in cd sales among teens is due to the increasing popularity of MP3. There are two issues here. One, the place to compete is the marketplace, not the court. Two, the decrease in music sales among teens is more connected to the break-up of Led Zeppelin than MP3.

Thanks in large part to internet opportunities, US venture capitalists invested $7.6 billion in the second quarter. That is a cool 76% increase over the second quarter of last year. I’m not sure where all the money goes. I am able to run the entire davenetics operation for less than a billion…

It should work in all modern browsers — remember that Internet Explorer is never a modern browser, so no promises there.

Hero of Slashdot? That must rate somewhere below getting an MSCE certificate.

The reason for the success of this somewhat communist-sounding strategy, while the failure of communism itself is visible around the world, is that the economics of information are fundamentaly different from those of other products.

the best revenge is your ex getting fat.

Bill likes gross margins so much, he changed his name.

If you’re really God, why don’t you rise from the dead afterward! Oh, wait…

A Lisp programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.

A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to convince anyone of the existence of God.

It is against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail, and learning to be self-critical?

The computing field is always in need of new cliches.

You can measure a programmer’s perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing viability of Fortran.

The fundamental idea of modern capitalism is not the right of the individual to possess and enjoy what he has earned, but the thesis that the exercise of this right redounds to the general good.

Without content, cyberspace is probably not a place you’d visit. Black holes are very interesting, but there’s no there there, hence few people want to visit a black hole.

You can reinvent yourself only up to the limit of what you’re willing to leave behind.

Hardware: The parts of a computer system that can be kicked.

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen today.

Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.

There comes a time when one must risk something, or sit forever with one’s dreams

A day without sunshine is like, night.

Arguably only art and music place us higher on the evolutionary ladder than any other species – that is, until the arrival of Rap. I think we’ve fallen somewhere behind whales now.

art1 (ärt) n. Human effort to imitate, supplement, alter, or counteract the work of nature.

Before you go patting yourself on the back, I think you should know that koala bears have opposable thumbs as well, and that vultures, otters and chimpanzees all use tools to gather food. Of course, they don’t use variable speed mixers or digital watches, but I think that’s actually a point in their favor.

“General Interest” sites are rarely either.

It does not matter…. if you studied at the Sorbonne or not. It does not matter if you spent 5 months, 5 hours or even 5 minutes on your work. It does not matter if you use hot-press illustration board or a napkin; sable brushes or a bic pen. It does not matter what your last name is or who your friends are. The only thing that matters … is that by the time you are done, someone, anyone likes what they see … particularly yourself.

here is more to life than increasing its speed.

Sendmail is, shall we say, unique. Some people say that a monkey would bang out the complete works of Shakespeare on a typewriter give an unlimited amount of time. In the meantime, what they would probably produce is a valid sendmail configuration file.

Have I mentioned how bad the idiots in their admissions office suck? I’d like to get medieval with some of them.

You know your machine is slow when you start putting file commands like “rm” and “chmod” running in the background by habit…

I wished dearly that the Mac and Windows came with built-in BASIC environments. If that were the case, the language I would have discussed in this chapter would have been BASIC. But I didn’t have that freedom. My hands were tied. There was only one real choice. My free will meant nothing, and I was forced into JavaScript. So it goes. The only consolation is that I’m not the only person in the world forced into using JavaScript. There are literally millions.

Cobol has almost no fervent enthusiasts. As a programming tool, it has roughly the sex appeal of a wrench.

[An organization] is much more difficult to copy than strategy.

To complete his camouflage, he was also joined at the last moment by four friends, all of whom were themselves [dressed in] black, though most of whom were probably grievously misled into attending – after all, the number of people who will willingly attend a film that features giant bugs, exploding heads, and Rae Dawn Chong are few and far between.

One or two days out of the big picture is nothing. They’ve gone to a lot of trouble; we’ve gone to a little trouble. Meanwhile, God hates fags.“

Capital punishment turns the state into a murderer. But imprisonment turns the state into a gay dungeon-master.

Well, like most members of America’s cultural elite, I worship PAN, THE GOAT GOD!, but thanks for the thought.

We have not succeeded in solving all your problems. The answers we have found only serve to raise a whole set of new questions. In some ways, we feel we are as confused as ever, but we believe we are confused on a higher level and about more important things.

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction.

Two boys arrived yesterday with a pebble they said was the head of a dog until I pointed out that it was really a typewriter.

Though men often describe her as a woman of "ample personality,” whenever I see Ms. Smith on television I immediately become concerned that I may have over-inflated my tires.

I liken starting one’s computing career with Unix, say as an undergraduate, to being born in East Africa. It is intolerably hot, your body is covered with lice and flies, you are malnourished and you suffer from numerous curable diseases. But, as far as young East Africans can tell, this is simply the natural condition and they live within it. By the time they find out differently, it is too late. They already think that the writing of shell scripts is a natural act.

The essential thing in life is not to conquer but to struggle well.

What she said appears to have been written by nine consultants, eight people from marketing, seven lawyers, six ESL valedictorians, and Mark Penn. She feels very bad about the stuff that happened, as stuff sometimes will happen, because it is stuff, and it happens. Or something.

I’ve just spent two days on the road and put nearly a thousand miles on my car. After that, logging on, selecting alt.config, and seeing “wacky idea” in the subject line of a post there filled my heart with a joy I cannot describe.

Why don’t you find yourself a nice knothole somewhere and shut up?

Cattle die, kindred die, and all men must die, but there is one thing that I know which never dies; the fame of a dead man’s deeds.

Your suffering will be legendary, even in Hell…

We must never forget that the ultimate purpose of an explosive is to explode.

Not only is UNIX dead, it’s starting to smell really bad.

A lot of effort went into making this effortless.

On any Mac OS X box, you can enter “single-user mode” by holding down command-S at startup. This gives you a root prompt and a read-only hard drive, from which you can commence your life of quiet desperation, er, troubleshooting.

Let us start with seems to be the first requirement of orthodox economic discourse: to completely misrepresent a classic work of macroeconomics.

As a matter of fact I hail from Europe and aim to maintain my sense of “whatever” when it comes to these highly North American city vs. suburbia lifestyles, choices, attitudes or whatever it is y'all argue about.

Note to self: When girlfriend suggests a new feature for Camino, do not tell her that we are accepting patches. Violence may ensue.

No one can lack commonsense as much as an intellectual, especially a leftist one, and perhaps most of all a renowned French professor of sociology.

The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha – which is to demean oneself.

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.

I want to start a line of sex toys called “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Dick.”

There are worse things than death. And I can do all of them.

There is no right and wrong. There is only fun, and boring.

Science means unresting endeavor and continually progressing development toward an aim which the poetic intuition may apprehend, but which the intellect can never fully grasp.

it’s amazing what you can accomplish when you’re young and foolish

We will be better and braver if we engage and inquire than if we indulge in the idle fancy that we already know – or that it is of no use seeking to know what we do not know.

We’d be out of our ever-loving minds to walk away from Unix […] Sun Microsystems has made irresponsible claims that HP is abandoning Unix. These statements are a reflection of the small company they are coming from. […] If HP was only an $8 billion company like Sun, we also might be less ambitious

Patience is the best remedy for every trouble.

Also in the news: Our generation is the first ever to have sex or to die. We’re special, so as a generation we must respectfully request that you bite us. And give us $20 to go to the movies.

Back in the Old Days, there were some mail-reading programs called CUI and VUI. People pronounced them “sooey” and “vooey” and it never used to bug me, but in retrospect I think I would be a happier person today if I had kicked them all in the shins.

Career Objective: A challenging position in which I can creatively use my computer-related skills to help more people die.

Did you hear about Rob? He drank a whole case of Yoo Hoo in the dark and said “I summon thee with pony and helicopter. With pipe organ and Graham Greene memoirs. I summon thee.” His office-mate heard him screaming from down the hall, and when he got into their office Rob was gibbering incoherently and all of his hair was white and he was hiding under his desk hugging his stomach and rocking obsessively. So his office-mate said “Damn it, Rob, I’ve had it up to here with the gibbering and the rocking and the screaming. Every day it’s the same god-damned thing. By the way…nice hair.”

Either I’m getting predictable, or stay the hell out of my diary.

Emperor Greg: Reject yesterday’s tomorrow. Emperor Greg: Obey. Emperor Greg: He may not solve your problems, but he’ll try not to crush you like a grape.

Every place has its advantages and disadvantages. Pittsburgh has its snow, but Palo Alto has those giant carrion weasles. You decide which is worse.

Heh. Very funny. The problem with engaging in such wild speculation, of course, is that you might strain yourself. I’d hate to see you get hurt or, god forbid, killed over such obviously false accusations, no matter how amusing they might be. Maybe in the future you should be more cautious.

“Hey, you got your sexual misconduct in my power lust!” “Well you got your power lust in my sexual misconduct!” Fade into the logo for ‘Unhinged Crunchies’ or something….

I lost all of my powers during the night, so I just returned to work to resume my “mild mannered programmer” persona until I am needed again. Until then… I wait.

I still contend that shiftiness is a leading cause of murder.

I promised that if you re-posted this statement then I’d comment, but I forget what I meant to say. Here are some email-things that I’m going to cleverly disguise as content: wHATEver. HTH. YMMV. ydcwtsbyaa-wam-ipysb! IMHO. grn.

I think “funny” is the wrong word. I think it’s a kind of art. (First, let me define what I mean by ‘art’…oh, never mind. Hi Jay.)

I think I identify with bats and squirrels – small, quick, and potentially full of rabies.

I think that I can confidently swear, to god and all things holy, that if I AM getting the cold that I suspect is stalking me, I will pick up the pick axe that I bought from Jody and start a spree of crime and killing of Old Testament proportions. I will commit such damage to American civilization that, hundreds of generations from now, parents will be telling legends about me to their children in front of the camp-fires that will be the most technologically advanced sources of light and heat that I will leave for them to inherit. Where I walk I will leave a trail of scorched and salted earth. Dogs will no longer be domesticated.

I think you’re selling yourself way short by just aspiring to Infomercial Thug. You’ve clearly got talent, kid, and that talent’s going to take you places that my Thugs and I can only imagine. Make me proud. And one day, when you’re the Infor-Pope looking out on your vast and profitable domain, all of your enemies long since expired on your Spiked Treadmills and sold at a fair mark-up to your white-toothed, wrinkle-free populace…think of me kindly. Or I will squash you.

I want to be in a field where the big buzz words are “babies,” “reaching” and “dopamine.” That field would be “evil mad scientist who lives alone on an island making his or her race of freakish supermen with animal DNA and things I found in a meteorite.”

I wouldn’t recommend it as a movie, but it’s valuable as an example of the advancing state-of-the-art in “dissolving vampire” technology.

I’d hold my breath, but I’d rather you hold yours.

I’ll tell you what the problem is with kids today. With your computers and your running water and your fancy-schmancy opposable thumbs…you have no appreciation for the sublime.

I’m not trying to be an advocate of materialism. I’m trying to support a firm policy of “easy answers for difficult times.”

I’m often pissed when people don’t notice jokes that make me particularly happy, but in keeping with the season I have chosen to be thankful that I don’t get beat up more often.

I’m philosophically opposed to grounding straps on the grounds that many powers originate with sparks of electricity. Sure, sparks are annoying, but there’s a slippery slope; first grounding straps become acceptable, then people start avoiding catwalks spanning big vats of chemicals, then someone enacts legislation restricting radiation sources within population centers…do you see where I’m going here? Stop the madness.

I’m pretty sure that I’d take a pay cut to be ‘Irredeemable Idiot,’ as long as I’d get to have business cards. I bet the job comes with a cool hat, too.

I’ve been wondering if most people I know aren’t just killing time until it returns the favor.

If I had to distill all of my thirty years of personal experience into one piece of advice that would most help kids today, it would be this: Kids…Uncle Greg needs a nap right now. Why don’t you play quietly in the other room for a couple of minutes. Just a few minutes, that’s all I need. Really. Please.

In this particular case, I’m pretty sure that he’s rubber. You, it appears, are glue. (Martin’s helium, and I’m the abstract concept of jingoism.)

Informercial Tzar isn’t a title that can be bestowed - you have to fight your way to the top in televised cage matches.

It turns out that elf cookies are pretty weak individually, but they have a fudgy group consciousness and they attack in packs like wolves.

It turns out that the rocket-pack is a fake…that guy just knows how to fly.

Last night’s dream started with a trip to New York for Thanksgiving and ended with an inter-stellar villain saying “You humans are too puny a race to receive the amount of crime that I can deliver.” I’m hoping that my holiday season this year will start and end the same way.

Maybe we could have a separate mailing list for discussing how the different members of unhinged look in Martin’s pants?

memo to myself - this probably won’t be funny tomorrow. memo from myself - it’s not even funny now.

Now I have to decide if I want to battle evil or perpetrate it….

Okay, back to my compelling narrative: Nothing else happened.

Okay, in the pursuit of honesty and because of the respect in which I hold you people I should probably admit that I intend to savor your deaths as I would the gentlest sips of fine wine. Sorry about the initial confusion.

Other skills might be useful. Send me your CV and a current photo. If I don’t feel that there’s a named-role suitable to your abilities, you may still be eligible to wear a t-shirt that says “Thug #7.”

People start out with souls for the same reason that D&D characters start out with a handful of gold - the thing itself isn’t too useful, but you can trade it for magic items and cool powers that might come in handy later.

Piracy isn’t all parrots and eye-patches, you know. There’s inspections and paperwork and boring coworkers who never stop talking to you even when you pretend to focus all of your attention on the anchor that you’re polishing, and always the ever-present danger of being killed in China to the tune of a Ricky Martin song.

Raise your hand if this sentence helps you to see the way that English looks to someone who doesn’t speak it.

Style, baby. I know that I’ll show up at my sister’s place bedraggled and cranky. If I start out in my normal persona I won’t have accomplished anything, but I figure that if I start out all spiffy and happy then I’ll demonstrate entropy and my trip will be art.

Technology doesn’t kill people. My mighty Fist of Wrath kills people.

The math to explain it gets complicated, so you have to view it through mythological filters. Basically: Don’t piss off Ishtar.

There’s no movie that sucks so much that you can’t find good parts to enjoy, and there’s no movie so good that you can’t find sucky parts to resent. You go to a movie, and it’s this big complicated detailed work, and you’re the one who gets to pick your focus. You can bitch about the plot holes or rave about the music; the quality of your experience is in your own hands, and no experience is more objectively real than another one.

Those things are useful for a while, but once you’re finally the Centauri Emperor they just nag, nag, nag….

today’s weather: Sunny, with thunder, rain, hail and snow. That’s another reason that I like Pittsburgh: It’s like living in the End Times every day, without all of that pesky Judgement.

Urg. That ‘Emperor Greg’ thing seems kind of lame in retrospect. Based on that, I think I’m going to move the whole ‘control the world’ project to a back-burner while I work on personal growth.

…while we were there she got her nose pierced with a relatively big hoop. She asked me my opinion of it, and I said that I really liked it and that it gave her this whole “formidable woman of strength” look. She said that she’d always had that, and I said “Yes you’ve always had it, but now it’s in your nose.”

World domination is like making a souffle’ - if you get yourself embroiled in too many local instabilities, results will be poor. Local instabilities can be created by either alienating religious leaders or slamming the oven door.

You’d think that a movie that starts with a rabid Nepalese Rat-Monkey and climaxes with a zombie battle featuring a man armed with a kitchen blender would…well…be my favorite movie ever. You’d be horribly mistaken.

You’re a good and valued friend but I probably wouldn’t assassinate you without the proper fees, paid in advance.

A fish doesn’t know about water, a mac programmer doesn’t know about core leaks

All right, new policy: Whenever I get spam email, I reply not only to the listed reply address and postmaster@site, but also andrew@site. Because there’s usually an “andrew” somewhere. And they probably deserve it.

I believe there’s something in the Bible about “Thou shalt not call anyone insane who owns and is competent with more firearms than you own sharp sticks.”

I’m sure there are dozens of “web authorship for cretins” books that have advice on this topic. I’m also sure most of them are brain-damaged.

If C++ has taught me one thing, it’s this: Just because the system is consistent doesn’t mean it’s not the work of Satan.

It’s like looking into the face of death, only it’s Gilligan.

It’s not virtual reality until you can be tortured to death in it.

Live the imagination. Lick the reality.

On the planet next door to mine, writing poetry is regarded as a sort of metaphorical draining all the sewage out of your mind. Everyone does it, but nobody has the illusion that anyone else wants to see theirs, or could even understand it. They write it in small dark rooms furnished with cracked mirrors and musty shapeless carpets. When each poem is finished, it’s burned in a dirty bucket. Then the author goes outside, locks the door, and gets on with enjoying his or her life. On my planet, nobody is any good at poetry. This includes me.

Out of the penis-pan, into the crossfire.

“Recursion: see ‘Recursion’” is a very old joke. It’s also a stinking lie. The correct definition is: Recursion: If you know what recursion is, just remember the answer. Otherwise, locate someone who is standing closer to Douglas Hofstadter than you are, and ask him/her what recursion is.

So, is it my imagination, or are packets from CS to Andrew being written out in longhand by epileptics, taped to heavily sedated passenger pigeons, flown across campus, and re-entered by front panel toggles by a corpse?

Spelling is hard because English is a slut of a language. I blame the Norman conquest.

This post does not represent the official opinions of ATK, C&C, or any other groups that may have changed their names from one of those recently.

Truly it is said that the hacker whom the Gods would make mad, they first inspire to add one more layer of abstraction. Just one more. Then it’ll be perfect.

Unsubtle cookies: “You can call me Sugar. This is my pal Milkfat. We’re pretty big in town here, and we thought we’d come over and help you get settled in. And epoxy your arteries shut, and kick you in the blood sugar so hard it comes out your ears. Get the picture?”

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must have been caused by an incompetent grad student.

The facts here aren’t speaking for themselves, or else they are, but in ancient Aramaic.

We’ve got too much beer.

They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir pelcgb.

So perl is like a graceful swan, gliding across a lake. But underneath the water, there’s these little legs, paddling like buggery.“

It is not news that the United States has the world’s most stupid right-wing politicians. What is shocking is that they have managed to attract so many media and opinion makers to join their smear campaign against Bill Clinton.

I would use trial-and-error but that always turns into trial-and-renistall-windows for me.

A Harvard law degree or a Stanford MBA is not just a degree. It says everything about who you are. Without it, you’re just ordinary.

An object in motion tends to stay in motion, until it needs gas or a taco or something.

I’ve got quotes that will get me fired. What I need are quotes that will get me laid off.

This week’s DFMM unemployment seminar is scheduled for 1:00 PM today (Wednesday October 3, 2001) at the Hollywood Star Lanes. Refreshments will be available at the bar.

The core competency of an enterprise portal company was… you look like Yahoo.

You saw him? He calls himself the marquis de Carabas. He’s a fraud and a cheat and possibly even something of a monster. If you’re ever in trouble, go to him. He will protect you, girl. He has to.

Pennsylvania is just a state that gets in your way when you’re trying to get to other states!

A girl named Nina once remarked of me, "I can’t tell if you’re animal or machine.” This would have hurt, if I were human. Luckily I’m a chinese hamster that has been fitted with an experimental math co-processor, wetwired into my brain by Ray Kurzweil. I also have an empathy chip.

I’ve had the privilege of realizing a few dreams, making me a “requited dreamer.” consequently, I suffer from the delusion that every product of my imagination is not only possible, but always on the cusp of becoming real.

I’m one of the most well adjusted tortured souls you’ll ever meet.

We have met the enemy and he is us. We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunity.

Anyway, Faisal, the fate of the civilized world lies with you.

As long as there are ill-defined goals, bizarre bugs, and unrealistic schedules, there will be Real Programmers willing to jump in and Solve The Problem, saving the documentation for later. Long live FORTRAN!

Fortunately, the language adopted by DoD [ADA] has enough interesting features to make it approachable – it’s incredibly complex, includes methods for messing with the operating system and rearranging memory, and Edsgar Dijkstra doesn’t like it. (Dijkstra, as I’m sure you know, was the author of “GoTos Considered Harmful” – a landmark work in programming methodology, applauded by Pascal Programmers and Quiche Eaters alike.) Besides, the determined Real Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language.

Real Programmers use FORTRAN. Quiche Eaters use PASCAL. Nicklaus Wirth, the designer of PASCAL, gave a talk once at which he was asked “How do you pronounce your name?”. He replied, “You can either call me by name, pronouncing it ‘Veert’, or call me by value, ‘Worth’.” One can tell immediately from this comment that Nicklaus Wirth is a Quiche Eater.

Some of the most awesome Real Programmers of all work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Many of them know the entire operating system of the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft by heart. With a combination of large ground-based FORTRAN programs and small spacecraft-based assembly language programs, they are able to do incredible feats of navigation and improvisation – hitting ten-kilometer wide windows at Saturn after six years in space, repairing or bypassing damaged sensor platforms, radios, and batteries. Allegedly, one Real Programmer managed to tuck a pattern-matching program into a few hundred bytes of unused memory in a Voyager spacecraft that searched for, located, and photographed a new moon of Jupiter. The current plan for the Galileo spacecraft is to use a gravity assist trajectory past Mars on the way to Jupiter. This trajectory passes within 80 +/- 3 kilometers of the surface of Mars. Nobody is going to trust a PASCAL program (or PASCAL programmer) for navigation to these tolerances.

The academics in computer science have gotten into the “structured programming” rut over the past several years. They claim that programs are more easily understood if the programmer uses some special language constructs and techniques. They don’t all agree on exactly which constructs, of course, and the examples they use to show their particular point of view invariably fit on a single page of some obscure journal or another – clearly not enough of an example to convince anyone. When I got out of school, I thought I was the best programmer in the world. I could write an unbeatable tic-tac-toe program, use five different computer languages, and create 1000 line programs that WORKED. (Really!) Then I got out into the Real World. My first task in the Real World was to read and understand a 200,000 line FORTRAN program, then speed it up by a factor of two. Any Real Programmer will tell you that all the Structured Coding in the world won’t help you solve a problem like that – it takes actual talent.

The problem with these editors is that Real Programmers consider “what you see is what you get” to be just as bad a concept in Text Editors as it is in Women. No, the Real Programmer wants a “you asked for it, you got it” text editor – complicated, cryptic, powerful, unforgiving, dangerous.

Unix is a lot more complicated of course – the typical Unix hacker never can remember what the PRINT command is called this week – but when it gets right down to it, Unix is a glorified video game.

i mean, there are only 12 notes in western music anyway - how hard can it be to stumble around them until it sounds good?

New contest: be the first to steal Scott Brown’s tokens and do something clever with them. Of course, it’d be difficult to do anything with his account that would damage his character any more than what he’s done been doing himself, but one can always try. :)

Taunting death is only fun until you lose.

All these people, and doubtless many more, were at some time during a long night castigated, vilified, embarrassed or, worst, bored, for which he most humbly and respectfully apologizes.

As no less an authority than the Pat Robertson has stated that all witches are in league with Satan, I would prepare to see a side of Samantha that only comes to the surface after a few Zimas.

A proper salad consists of 6 parts gin and one part verouth strained over ice into a glass with two olives

Don’t call a fraternity a frat. I mean, you wouldn’t call your country a tree.

Let me add that if the general population drank like cabal does, all hell would break loose, plus of course we’d eliminate the earth’s vital alcohol reserves, causing moose to get even more irritable than he already is, however on balance, we would see more of the benefits and less of the harm associated with alcohol.

may the first person not in a glass house throw the first stone.

On the good side the open bar at the rear of the plane helped eradicate the fear said engine would cease functioning while the wheels were not chocked.

or like jesus said: “Let he who lives in a metal house be the first to throw horns”

Please complete this phrase “no additional French troops were deployed on the north side of”: a)the city on Thursday, before the riot began, because commanders felt the existing number was sufficient. b)France, in WWII, because commanders felt the existing number was sufficient. c)Vietnam, before the communist uprising, because commanders felt the existing number was sufficient. d)this is a trick question. everyone knows the French don’t deploy soldiers on the north side of anything.

Technically it is a proper usage. The least common, most worthless usage, but still acceptable.

for much of the Internet, the shortest path between two points doesn’t exist.

USENET is a wonderful mechanism for making a fool of yourself in front of a very large audience.

Over the years, the United States has sent many of its fine young men and women into great peril to fight for freedom beyond our borders. The only amount of land we have ever asked for in return is enough to bury those that did not return.

I can see it now…‘It’s summer, we’re bored, we’re all gonna go out and get lives!’

You know, it’s not a good idea to end a psalm with “dammit”.

Troll, troll, troll your post, gently down the datastream…

Not a man to mince words. People yes. But not words.

The way of the portable computer user is as a stony path strewn with plugs and sockets, all the wrong size…

Love is something you do, not something you feel.

Whether or not God exists is none of my business, really. What do I know of existence? I don’t even know how the VCR works.

Well, it looks like the excrement has hit the rotating oscillator.

Life’s a bitch, and life’s got lots of sisters.

What you tend to find in the personal lives of brilliant men is devastation akin to a nuclear bomb going off. Marriages mangled. Wives left for dead. Children growing up as deformed prisoners of war -— all of them walking around with holes where their hearts should be, wondering where they belong, what side they’re fighting for.

Mmm. Meetings. Only seppuku could be this much fun.

Specialization is for insects.

What’s that, Lassie? What, girl? Klingons … off the starboard bow?

Civilisation can be reduced to the following: “I need a hug. Go away.” Unable to solve this conundrum, and having nothing better to do in the meantime, we build cathedrals and drink heavily.

If you’re enlightened and you know it, clap one hand …

The Genie can smell fear.

To be happy for a day: drink beer. To be happy for a year: get married. To be happy for a lifetime: buy a BMW touring bike.

What’s your point, Mr. “I learned to sublimate and all I got was this fabulous career”?

We’re going to use prototypes?!? Oh. My. God!

It worked once; it’s got to work every time.

Bite me. eat chocolate

so, I have a bit of a dilemma. On the one hand, I hate life. On the other hand, I just made blackberry cobbler. How can I hate life while eating blackberry cobbler?

If you have the choice between humble and cocky, go with cocky. There’s always time to be humble later, once you’ve been proven horrendously, irrevocably wrong.

Rod Stewart, hair conspiracy.

Of course, if your job is programming, you can get your job done with any ‘complete’ computer language, theoretically speaking. But we know from experience that computer languages differ not so much in what they make *possible*, but in what they make *easy*. At one extreme, the so-called ‘fourth generation languages’ make it easy to do some things, but nearly impossible to do other things. At the other extreme, certain well known, ‘industrial strength’ languages make it equally difficult to do almost everything.

I have found a proof / of Fermat’s conjecture, but / Haiku is too short.

Apathy, like anarchy, is a temporary state sometimes needed to attain greater enlightenment. The important points to note are: (1) One *can* attain enlightenment this way; (2) It must be temporary.

Do not be arrogant because of your knowledge, but confer with the ignorant man as with the learned.

Obviously, the heroin-fueled fleshpot of Moscow gives rise to passages that some readers may find shocking. Rest assured that we toned down some of the lewdest parts to appease the delicate sensibilities of suburban readers who feign offense to our back-of-the-book sex ads while reaping the economic benefits of the valley’s porn-fueled economic prosperity.

I could believe that. I don’t, but I could.