Believe and act as if it were impossible to fail.
— Charles F. Kettering
Good advice that is hard to always follow.
Recently in Quotable Category
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
— Theodore Roosevelt
In the final analysis, all that really matters are your actions. You may talk a good story, but no matter how good you are at selling others on your capabilities, eventually you have to perform.
— Napoleon Hill via Sabir Semerkant
The World Trade Center Site will forever hold a special place in our City, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves - and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans - if we said ‘no’ to a mosque in Lower Manhattan.
I hope the rest of the nation is listening.
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
— Scott Adams [via @the99percent]
[Entrepreneur or unemployed] are the same, with one key difference: as an entrepreneur, you have cards printed naming yourself as president and chief executive.
— Glennys Christie responding to a NY Times article about creating a start-up when unemployed.
The problem with the world is that everyone is a few drinks behind.
— Humphrey Bogart
Being faith-based doesn’t trump reality.
— Bruce Sterling
In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Live the life you’ve dreamed.
— Henry David Thoreau [via The Impossible Cool]
The Impossible Cool continues with the awesome inspiration quotes:
Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.
— Thomas H. Huxley [via The Impossible Cool]
Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
— George Bernard [via The Impossible Cool]
From the New York Times Some Parents Oppose Obama School Speech:
…telling children they should not hear out the president of the United States, even if their parents dislike his policies, sends the wrong message — that one should not listen to someone with whom you disagree.
It’s rather sad and remarkable what an intolerant and absolute society we still are as a whole. In the past decade it seems worse, but then again I wasn’t alive during the civil rights moment or the days of the civil war to compare. It seems to be forgotten that this country was founded on and has succeeded based on compromise and debate, not blind absolutism.
You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself.-- Galileo Galilei
The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather in a lack of will.-- Vincent Lombardi
Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.
-- Alfred Lord Tennyson
On the same theme as yesterday's quotable:
Software needs an editor like a writer needs an editor or a museum needs a curator.
-- Jason Fried
Once you get a piece of code to the point where you believe it works - it’s passing its tests - go back over it and edit it. That is, go back and edit it for clarity, flow, and style. Just as if it were an essay.
-- Michael McCracken [via Daring Fireball]
Referring to an article in the Wall Street Journal on the problems Duke University recently suffered and initially blamed on the presence of iPhone's on campus (proven to be a bogus excuse), John Gruber of Daring Fireball comes up with this translation:
Translation: A lot of IT infrastructure is fragile rickety crap, and the people responsible for it aren’t smart enough to fix it so they make rules and place blame based on little more than superstition.
Based on my experience he's right, but I'm not sure I'd use such harsh words. I think the typical IT staffer is far less motivated and up-to-date is more adapt then saying these people aren't smart. They also operate in a highly political environment that saps intelligence.
I have a new philosophy. I'm only going to dread one day at a time.
-- Charles M. Schulz
Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.
– Charlie Mingus
Posted on Mike Doughty's weblog:
I watch the American Idol.
It is the terrible awful show.
Watching it makes Jesus angry.
The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it. -- Henry David Thoreau
This was in my (unconfigured) Gmail Web Clip display when I checked my mail this afternoon.
...all the PHP code I’ve seen in that experience has been messy, unmaintainable crap. Spaghetti SQL wrapped in spaghetti PHP wrapped in spaghetti HTML, replicated in slightly-varying form in dozens of places. -- Tim Bray
I've done a bit of PHP coding and I have to agree. I was lost trying to structure my code in some clean and reusable way. The PHP code in MT using Smarty isn't too bad, but its hardly the norm. I think ultimately the problem is that PHP makes it easy for people who don't know what they are doing to achieve results even at the expense of good solid development practices and methodologies.
Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe. -- Abraham Lincoln
Via a post on productivity by Brad Isaac.
...maybe life isn't a journey to uncover new truths in far off places, but instead to simply gain enough to experience to understand what is all around you, all the time.
-- Matt Haughey, Advice
From an email my friend Pete Cuce sent. Reprinted with permission:
People that like to bitch make time for it.
Commenting on the application of "desperate heuristics" to make sense of feeds like RSS, Phil Ringnalda adds:
In Atom, doing so is equivalent to gathering up everyone who spent years enduring the endless arguments on the mailing list, and urinating on them.
Brilliant! Well put! The original post about some Atom tests he ran and additional comments are here.
A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. Winston Churchill
Having read Mena's speech at Les Blogs and follow-up comments this quote seemed an appropriate one. She may not have been the first to talk about civility or etiquette, but she makes some good points. If we all believe that blogs are a powerful tool then we must all think before we shoot. All too often that restaint seems lost by the best of us.
Matt Haughey writes:
Show, don't tell. It crops up time and time again and is some of the best advice I've been given.
I have a different spin on that life advice that has been with me as long as I can remember -- actions speak louder then words. Funny how I from time to time get wrapped up in words that I get distracted from just doing what I'm talking about.
Om Malik writes:
When you cannot comprehend the revolution, you try to poo-pooh it. Scoble, having been assimilated by the borg, laments desire for thin client type functionality as a “disease that’s all the rage lately.” He thinks thick clients are coming back. Like Bell Bottoms, Disco Music and Happy Days!
Basically, when I was complaining on how I was tired of the critics of Six Apart dissecting all my posts and being so determined in their nastiness, [Anil Dash] made me realize that I need to write for the people who support the company. Mena Trott, Six Years of Dashes
Hooray! Mena is back. Ben too. In the past few days I think Mena has equaled her previous year's public weblog posts. In the past week or two I think Ben has quadrupled his yearly output. Exciting. Really, it is.
Relatedly everyone's favorite Six Apart homey, Anil Dash is celebrating his personal weblog's 6th year anniversary.
Via 37 Signals, a quote that is true for any writing, even software.
"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell." -The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. 1959.
Working on a crossword puzzle with ink means two things: you find yourself more conservative, (You wait until you are fairly confident before committing to something.) and when you inevitably make a mistake anyway, it gets messy to patch things up.
Software development is the same way. No matter how carefully a developer proceeds, at some point a mistake will happen, and if the erroneous code has gone out the door, you have a messy situation that needs patching. At that point, software can begin to look like a badly scribbled-out crossword. Depending on the location of the error—whether it's in a fundamental API or just an implementation detail for instance—external developers can be affected as well, making their code messy too.
-- Micah Dubinko, Life After Ajax?
