Email: redtexture at gmail dot com
Recent posts
- Rhett Price & Josh Knowles – Boston Subway Violinists – “I Knew You Were Trouble”
- Lincoln on Liberty, 1864
- Sharon Van Etten – One Day
- Historical Housing Loan Interest Rates in the United States
- Douglas Crockford on JSON and JavaScript
- Avi Bryant’s Presentations
- Leslie Lamport on distributed systems
- Interviews with Paul Graham of Y Combinator
- A few of DabbleDB’s foundations
- Why network effects are such a big deal
- (Initial) Ideas are nothing: people and implementation everything.
- Lawrence Krauss on Cosmology
- DabbleDB continues
- Smallthought Systems purchased by Twitter
- DabbleDB’s venture investors
- Experts
- Jim Coplien on conceptions in Object Oriented Programming: DCI, MVC
- Clean Water Act, Section 311 and the Oil Pollution Act
- Lookup categories in DabbleDB
Posts by Month
Twitter Updates
- - Plans are about intention - Predictions are about expectation - Promises are about commitment Chip Morningstar habitatchronicles.com/2012/07/forwar… 2 weeks ago
- An evergreen post on fabulously effective teaching & learning by Ben Tilly "Teaching linear algebra" bentilly.blogspot.com/2009/09/teachi… 3 weeks ago
- “It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones.” Calvin Coolidge, as Massachusetts legislator newyorker.com/arts/critics/b… 3 weeks ago
- RT @jcoglan: Every time we call users idiots we're really calling out our own failure to deliver usable safe computing. 4 weeks ago
- Jane Austen charted territory that today’s game theoreticians failed to reach. - Jennifer Schuessler nytimes.com/2013/04/23/boo… 4 weeks ago
- "...the only way to advance a coherent agenda in Washington is through partisan dominance." Ryan Lizza newyorker.com/online/blogs/c… 1 month ago
Links
Quotations
"The sky starts at your feet.
Think how brave you are to walk around."
- Anne Herbert
"I honestly believe it is better to know nothing than to know what ain't so."
- Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw) Everybody's Friend, or Josh Billling's Encyclopedia and Proverbial Philosophy of Wit and Humor (1874)
"Nothing just happens. Everything is arranged." - James Folsom Sr.
Governor of Alabama
(1947—1951 & 1955—1959)
Quoted by Clarence N. Stone in Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta (1988), p. xii.
“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”
- Michel E. Porter
"What is Strategy" Harvard Business Review (November / December 1996). Page 70. Competitive Strategy (1986). Michael Porter. Harvard Business School Press.
"I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Now, at the end of three years struggle the nation's condition is not what either party, or any man devised, or expected."
- Abraham Lincoln
Letter to Albert G. Hodges. (April 4, 1864)
(The letter memorializes a conversation Lincoln had with Kentucky Governor Thomas E. Bramlette, Albert Hodges, editor of the Frankfort Commonwealth and Archibald Dixon, who served in the U.S. Senate from 1852 to 1855. Bramlette protested to Lincoln the recruiting of black regiments in Kentucky.)
"The number-one thing you want to make the user interface be is a learning environment..."
- Alan Kay
"A conversation with Alan Kay" ACMQueue (December 27, 2004)
"Getting something out the door is the price of entry, not a guarantee of success."
- James Hague
App Store failure and personal responsibility (August 11, 2012)
programming in the twenty-first century (prog21.dadgum.com)
"The model for personal development is antithetical to the model for professional success...
You must embrace failure. You must admit what is. You must find out what you're capable of doing, and what you're not capable of doing. That is the only way to deal with the issue of success and failure..."
- Milton Glaser
Fear of Failure (2011)
"Getting good at a thing involves seeking out opportunities to feel small."
- Rebecca Murphy
A new chapter (June 1, 2011)
"There are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of working on something:
You could work on (a) nothing, (b) something less important, or (c) something more important.
That last type, I'd argue, is good procrastination."
- Paul Graham
Good and Bad Procrastination (December 2005)
"The way you get programmer productivity is by eliminating lines of code you have to write. The line of code that’s the fastest to write, that never breaks, that doesn’t need maintenance, is the line you never had to write."
- Steve Jobs
Q & A, keynote at Apple Worldwide Developers Conference - WWDC 1997
“There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about.”
- John Louis von Neumann
"People who should be the first to recognize the value of an innovation are often the last..."
- Douglas Crockford
Crockford on JavaScript: Volume One: The Early Years (January 25, 2010)
"I used to tell my [medical] students that they must never refuse a procedure based on never having seen it before. They must just go for it. Out there in the real world...you won't have someone to hold your hand just because you haven't seen a procedure before."
- Bongi
"The Best" Other Things Amanzi (December 18, 2008)
"If you invent frequently and are willing to fail, then you never get to that point where you really need to bet the whole company..."
"I believe if you don’t have that set of things in your corporate culture, then you can’t do large-scale invention. You can do incremental invention, which is critically important for any company. But it is very difficult — if you are not willing to be misunderstood. People will misunderstand you. Any time you do something big, that’s disruptive — Kindle, AWS — there will be critics."
- Jeff Bezos
Amazon, Inc. shareholder meeting (June 2011)
"All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money and (b) not having done it before, ever. Every single thing that we came out with that was really great, I'd never once done that thing in my life."
- Steve Wozniak
Founders at Work
"The best creative people want to work for the best clients. If you are a client who doesn’t appreciate great work, or a client who won’t take risks and try new stuff, or a client who can’t get excited about the creative, then you’re the wrong kind of client."
- John Scully
John Scully on Steve Jobs
Cult of Mac
“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
- Attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
- Henry David Thoreau
Walden (1854)
The misquoted source of “good artists borrow, great artists steal”
"One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest."
- Thomas Stearns Eliot
"Philip Massinger"
The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1921)
