Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you are a mile away from them and you have their shoes.
– Jack Handey
Category Archives: Quotes
Quote of the day
Oscar nomination
Today’s quotation comes from Oscar Wilde…
To be really mediaeval one should have no body.
To be really modern one should have no soul.
To be really Greek one should have no clothes.
Quote of the day
This one is from W.H. Auden:
We are here on Earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don’t know.
Quote of the day
George Bernard Shaw’s epitaph:
I knew if I waited around long enough something like this would happen.
“We read to know that we’re not alone”
Sorry things have been fairly quiet here of late. I’ve reached a sort of email event horizon where messages that require action or response are arriving faster than I can act or respond to them. After that you go into a kind of tailspin…
The quotation, by the way, is from C.S.Lewis. For your contemplation.
Quote of the day
The origin of this is unknown but I came across it in the documentation for some project-management software:
One cannot bring a baby into the world in one month by getting nine women pregnant at the same time.
Quote of the day
This one is of unknown origin, though I found it in one of Daniel C. Dennett’s books.
Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.
Keeping romance at bay, the Chinese way
“Four students will be grouped together to perform the waltz and they will change partners regularly as soon as one song finishes. This way, the risk of young love will be lowered.”
BBC story here.
Set in our ways
Why do you do what you do?
I like this story, which I’ve seen attributed to David Byrne:
A woman is asked why she cuts the ends off a ham before baking it.
She explains that her mom always did so.
Her mom explains that she learned it from grandma.
And grandma says, “Silly, my pan was too short for the entire ham.”
Your Status-Q quote for the day comes from Norman Lewis’s eTel talk:
The search for acknowledgement is the key to most online activity.
Yesterday I signed up for a Twitter account, to see what all the fuss was about. I was more interested in it as a social phenomenon than because I actually wanted to use it. Which probably indicates that I’m getting old.
For those who don’t know it, Twitter is all the rage amongst the youth of today. You can type out a few words saying what you’re currently doing, and anyone interested in watching can keep up to date with your exciting life. Twitter is to instant messaging what blogging is to email; it’s chiefly a broadcasting mechanism rather than a conversation. This is very convenient for the youth of today, who would otherwise need to send the same updates to their 15 simultaneous IM conversations.
You can send Twitter updates using your mobile, via the web, using an IM client, or a dedicated application, and you can keep track of your friends in a variety of ways including via RSS.
To clarify things, here’s the ‘History of blogging’:
(Many thanks to Dave Briggs, who found this on Mashable.)
Call me
Quote of the day comes from Stephen Uhler of Sun, who, in his talk at eTel, said:
Cellphones have reduced peoples’ expectation of the phone system to the point where VoIP is now viable.
He’s quite right – it wasn’t that long ago that you would have been very surprised, upset even, if a phone call were just to hang up unexpectedly…
Now, as a friend and I once discussed, there’s a problem. We need a new social convention. When the line drops, who should re-initiate the call? The person who made the call in the first place? The person with the cheapest outgoing charges?
We decided that it was probably the person who was on the move, assuming at least one party was mobile. Because they’re the ones who will know when they’re back in a good coverage area.
Of course, we also realised that in an ideal world the service provider, or the phone, would do this for you.
“Press 1 to have the call reconnect automatically when possible…”
The times, they are a-changin’
Moshe Yudkowsky, in his eTel talk, used a wonderful quote from Agatha Christie, who apparently once said:
I never expected to be so poor that I couldn’t afford a servant, or so rich that I could afford a motor car.
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