I get up each morning, gather my wits.
Pick up the paper, read the obits.
If I'm not there I know I'm not dead.
So I eat a good breakfast and go back to bed.

Oh, how do I know my youth is all spent?
My get-up-and-go has got-up-and-went.
But in spite of it all, I'm able to grin,
And think of the places my get-up has been.
                                -- Pete Seeger

If practice makes perfect, and nobody's perfect, why practice? /usr/bin/fortune never ceases to amaze me.

God grant me the senility to accept the things I cannot change,
The frustration to try to change things I cannot affect,
and the wisdom to tell the difference.

> When there isn't sufficient virtual memory, the compiler bails out,
> giving an internal error message. When I kill some processes, the
> error goes away.

And what is the compiler supposed to do instead? Go shopping for you
and buy more memory?

                                -- Falk Hueffner, on the GNU C++ compiler

"Pseudocode can be used to some extent to aid the maintenance
process. However, pseudocode that is highly detailed -
approaching the level of detail of the code itself - is not of
much use as maintenance documentation. Such detailed
documentation has to be maintained almost as much as the code,
thus doubling the maintenance burden. Furthermore, since such
voluminous pseudocode is too distracting to be kept in the
listing itself, it must be kept in a separate folder. The
result: Since pseudocode - unlike real code - doesn't have to be
maintained, no one will maintain it. It will soon become out of
date and everyone will ignore it. (Once, I did an informal
survey of 42 shops that used pseudocode. Of those 42, 0 [zero!],
found that it had any value as maintenance documentation."
                  --Meilir Page-Jones, "The Practical Guide to Structured
                      Design", Yourdon Press (c) 1988

THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #8: LAIDBACK

This language was developed at the Marin County Center for T'ai Chi,
Mellowness and Computer Programming (now defunct), as an alternative to
the more intense atmosphere in nearby Silicon Valley.

The center was ideal for programmers who liked to soak in hot tubs
while they worked. Unfortunately few programmers could survive there
because the center outlawed Pizza and Coca-Cola in favor of Tofu and
Perrier.

Many mourn the demise of LAIDBACK because of its reputation as a gentle
and non-threatening language since all error messages are in lower
case. For example, LAIDBACK responded to syntax errors with the
message:
                "i hate to bother you, but i just can't relate to that. can
                you find the time to try it again?"

taken from a web page:
I particularly like:
  I've learned to not sweat the petty things, and not pet the sweaty things.

http://www.frontiernet.net/~jlbeam/specials/life/life.htm
some kind of chain letter my dad forwarded me...

  As I've Matured...

I've learned that you cannot make someone love you. All you can do is
stalk them and hope they panic and give in...

I've learned that one good turn gets most of the blankets.

I've learned that no matter how much I care, some people are just
jackasses.

I've learned that it takes years to build up trust, and it only takes suspicion, not proof, to destroy it.

I've learned that whatever hits the fan will not be evenly distributed.

I've learned that you shouldn't compare yourself to others -
they are more screwed up than you think.

  I've learned that depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.

I've learned that it is not what you wear; it is how you take it off.

I've learned that you can keep vomiting long after you think you're finished.

  I've learned to not sweat the petty things, and not pet the sweaty things.

    I've learned that ex's are like fungus, and keep coming back.

    I've learned age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

I've learned that I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy it.

I've learned that we are responsible for what we do,
unless we are celebrities.

I've learned that artificial intelligence is no match for natural
stupidity.

I've learned that 99% of the time when something isn't working
in your house, one of your kids did it

I've learned that there is a fine line between genius and insanity.

I've learned that the people you care most about in life are taken from you too soon and
all the less important ones just never go away.
And the real pains in the ass are permanent.

Pass this along to 5 friends...trust me, they'll appreciate it.
Who knows,maybe something good will happen. If not...tough!

unzip ; strip ; touch ; grep ; finger ; mount ; fsck ; more ; yes ; umount ; sleep

I forgot how dirty unix is...

I do hate sums. There is no greater mistake than to call arithmetic an exact science. There are permutations and aberrations discernible to minds entirely noble like mine; subtle variations which ordinary accountants fail to discover; hidden laws of number which it requires a mind like mine to perceive. For instance, if you add a sum from the bottom up, and then again from the top down, the result is always different.
                                -- Mrs. La Touche

A Severe Strain on the Credulity

As a method of sending a missile to the higher, and even to the highest parts of the earth's atmospheric envelope, Professor Goddard's rocket is a practicable and therefore promising device. It is when one considers the multiple-charge rocket as a traveler to the moon that one begins to doubt ... for after the rocket quits our air and really starts on its journey, its flight would be neither accelerated nor maintained by the explosion of the charges it then might have left. Professor Goddard, with his "chair" in Clark College and countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to re-action, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react ... Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.

            -- New York Times Editorial, 1920

A pain in the ass of major dimensions.
    -- C.A. Desoer, on the solution of non-linear circuits

Infancy, n.:
                The period of our lives when, according to Wordsworth, "Heaven lies about us." The world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward.
                                -- Ambrose Bierce

Cecil, you're my final hope
Of finding out the true Straight Dope
For I have been reading of Schrodinger's cat
But none of my cats are at all like that.
This unusual animal (so it is said)
Is simultaneously alive and dead!
What I don't understand is just why he
Can't be one or the other, unquestionably.
My future now hangs in between eigenstates.
In one I'm enlightened, in the other I ain't.
If *you* understand, Cecil, then show me the way
And rescue my psyche from quantum decay.
But if this queer thing has perplexed even you,
Then I will *and* I won't see you in Schrodinger's zoo.
                                -- Randy F., Chicago, "The Straight Dope, a compendium
                                      of human knowledge" by Cecil Adams

Makes me want to buy:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/science/6dff/

Cheers,

Rich

With the news being full of the pope's death, kind of ironic

The Lord and I are in a sheep-shepherd relationship, and I am in a position of negative need.

He prostrates me in a green-belt grazing area.

He conducts me directionally parallel to non-torrential aqueous liquid.

He returns to original satisfaction levels my psychological makeup.

He switches me on to a positive behavioral format for maximal prestige of His identity.

It should indeed be said that notwithstanding the fact that I make ambulatory progress through the umbragious inter-hill mortality slot, terror sensations will no be initiated in me, due to para-etical phenomena.

Your pastoral walking aid and quadrupic pickup unit introduce me into a pleasurific mood state.

You design and produce a nutriment-bearing furniture-type structure in the context of non-cooperative elements.

You act out a head-related folk ritual employing vegetable extract.

My beverage utensil experiences a volume crisis.

It is an ongoing deductible fact that your inter-relational empathetical and non-ventious capabilities will retain me as their
target-focus for the duration of my non-death period, and I will possess tenant rights in the housing unit of the Lord on a permanent, open-ended time basis.

There are three schools of magic. One: State a tautology, then ring the changes on its corollaries; that's philosophy. Two: Record many facts. Try to find a pattern. Then make a wrong guess at the next fact; that's science. Three: Be aware that you live in a malevolent Universe controlled by Murphy's Law, sometimes offset by Brewster's Factor; that's engineering.