Recently in Trite and True Category
Humility is the worst form of conceit.
--François Duc de La Rochefoucauld
I love the smell of toner in the morning.
It smells like ... tenure
--Thomas Jay Peckish II, on the alternative to perishing, with apologies to Robert Duvall...
I always ask for a middle seat when I travel. It's such a great way to meet people...
--Thomas Jay Peckish II
Are they real schizophrenics, or are they just wearing a Bluetooth headset? When people are walking down the street talking to themselves, who can tell anymore?
--Thomas Jay Peckish II
He'd stir the pot once, and then act as if he'd made the whole stew.
--Grandma Mulligan, Brian's gray-haired grandmother from the County Armagh
Don't worry about what you say, nobody's going to read it anyway...
--Thomas Jay Peckish II, on 'blogging...
There are what? Thirty million 'blogs on the web? …each in its own way, a desperate cry for help…
--Thomas Jay Peckish II, ditto...
Blogging is the second most self-indulgent thing a person can do. Think of Paul Reubens, only in an empty theater.
--Thomas Jay Peckish II
It is not a bad idea to get in the habit of writing down one's thoughts. It saves one having to bother anyone else with them.
--Isabel Colegate
Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
--Robert Heinlein (1907 - 1988)
Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
--Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784), from Boswell's Life of Johnson
Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good.
--Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784) (attributed)
Don't think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire. I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drives into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do, and bark.
--Samuel Johnson, English author, critic, & lexicographer (1709 - 1784)
There is none so blind as he who cannot see.
--Thomas Jay Peckish II
Software doesn't break, nor does it heal.
Buildings can be attacked by termites and rodents and rot, but the only vermin that attack software are programmers.
--Thomas Jay Peckish II
Thinking "Outside of the Box" is quite decidedly "Inside the Box" these days...
--Thomas Jay Peckish II
If information is the currency of the new millennium, then we’re all churning the float…
--Thomas Jay Peckish II
Given enough fingers, all programs are brittle…
--Thomas Jay Peckish II
Eric Raymond's legedary open source screed, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, cites Linus's Law as: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow"...
Playing bop is like playing Scrabble with all the vowel missing.
--Duke Ellington, born 29 April 1899
Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.
--Bertrand Russell
An individual human existence should be like a river, small at first, narrowly confined within its banks, and rushing passionately past boulders and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in his old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue... I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do, and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.
--Bertrand Russell
The Stones' songs came spontaneously like an inspiration at a séance. The tunes arrived 'en masse' as if the Stones as songwriters were only a willing and open medium.
--Keith Richards, on Creativity, Rolling Stone, 5 May 1977, p. 51
If you don’t have a backup, you might as well delete it now.
--Thomas Jay Peckish II
Don't touch anything you unless you’ve got time to break it.
--Thomas Jay Peckish II
Software never heals.
--Thomas Jay Peckish II
If it ain’t been tested, it doesn’t work.
--Thomas Jay Peckish II
Baby Steps.
--Thomas Jay Peckish II
First, do no harm.
--Thomas Jay Peckish II
Do the best you can do, not the best you could do.
--Thomas Jay Peckish II
Programmers are the handmaidens of change...
--Thomas Jay Peckish II
An axiom: the solution to every problem is contained within itself. Its plan, form and character are determined by the nature of the site.
--Frank Lloyd Wright
The raw materials for software, caffeine and sugar, are quite inexpensive. Labor costs, however, are quite another matter.
--Thomas Jay Peckish II
Indeed, it has long concerned me that the coffee and sugar exporting nations, were they so inclined, could do to the American software industry what OPEC did to the overall economy with its crude oil embargo during the early seventies.
Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
--Mark Twain
