tag archive: quotes

Puzzled, I looked up and down the street. What traffic, I asked? The traffic that would be there, said the law, if there was any traffic.

This was a bit metaphysical, even for me, so I explained, a bit lamely, that in England we just park wherever we can find a parking space available, and weren’t that fussy about which side of the street it was on. He looked at me aghast, as if I was lucky to have got out of a country of such wild and crazy car parkers alive, and promptly gave me a ticket.

I’ll share this quote I randomly came across this morning:

“I believe every day’s a good day when you paint.” —Bob Ross

In the many times I’ve read the book, Blake’s line — “Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires” — has stood out to me and disturbed me, and I felt like I needed to understand it, but I wasn’t quite getting it. I think now I’m finally starting to comprehend. This isn’t something I can strangle. I have to act on it. I have to find a way to deal with it.

I’ll start with the guy. Thornton (not his real name) is in this group because we work in close physical proximity and he has little choice. Thornton reads the posts and gives limited feedback in order to maintain a slightly more bearable working relationship. I know that many topics make Thornton uneasy — including talking about him in a post like this — and I often imagine his reactions. Since good writing should take us to scary or at least uncomfortable places, I know I’m doing well when I can picture Thornton sweating through a post, afraid of where it might go next. I expect Thornton will fall out of this group when our careers take us to different areas and cubes.

Because then I would have nothing left to strive for.

Charles Ullmann: “So You Want to Impress Important People?“

I love the Kornbluth brothers’ movie, Haiku Tunnel. It really made me feel the emotional toil of (not) mailing 17 important letters. I daily experience this kind of crisis in my own job.

I also follow Josh’s blog, where yesterday he shared this bit of awesomeness about his spinning class:

Threatening their opponents with the endless purgatory of litigation, over which some might prefer death itself, they assert claim to any thought which might have entered another cranium within the collective body of the corporations they serve. They act as though these ideas appeared in splendid detachment from all previous human thought. And they pretend that thinking about a product is somehow as good as manufacturing, distributing, and selling it.

I just finished reading Masters of Doom by David Kushner, a book about John Carmack and John Romero. When the story is well told, I love books like this about people who have done great things.

I don’t play games much these days, but I loved Doom and Quake, and have admired Carmack in particular for his apparent programming virtuosity, his views on patents, and his support of free software. (I also thought Romero was pretty cool, and gained a greater appreciation for his work from reading the book.)

On patents, there was this from his days at Softdisk:

Al had never seen a side scrolling like this for the PC. “Wow,” he told Carmack, “you should patent this technology.”

Carmack turned red. “If you ever ask me to patent anything,” he snapped, “I’ll quit.” Al assumed Carmack was trying to protect …

Don’t just wait around for an Atlas to appear. Become one. Focus on the details and the steps. It is popular to want to be a part of something so grand that the messy little details of actually doing the work aren’t important. “We are going to colonize space!” is so very far away from “Did you order a new roll of shielded cable today?” that it excuses people from making progress. If you want to do something great, take small, concrete steps towards it every single day.

– John Carmack, Letter to Jerry Pournelle