Status-Q

Nice quote from Kevin Kelly on the (excellent) Triangulation podcast:

The solution to bad or stupid ideas is not to stop thinking. It's to have better ideas.

Similarly, the solution to bad or stupid technology is not to get rid of technology. It's to create better technology.

Q. When are gut feelings a bad thing?

A. When they leave you feeling gutted.

When I was young we had a poster with some quotations on it on the wall of the loo at my parents' house. I had forgotten this one until now:

Using virtual machines on my Mac and Linux computers allows me to fire up a copy of Windows on the very rare occasions when I need it. (Typically about once a quarter). And then shut it down again before anything bad happens.

And then the light of understanding and enlightenment dawned upon me, dear friends, so I share it with you, with apologies for the grammar:

It's called Windows, because that's what you should run it in.

While walking the dog this morning, I was listening to a dramatisation of Plato's Symposium - as one does - and Socrates had a natty little phrase which I found rather pleasing. But first, some background...

I have always been blessed with excellent eyesight, for which I am very grateful. However, Anno Domini does have a way of sneaking up on one. A couple of weeks ago, in a restaurant with some colleagues, I found that the very small writing on the ginger beer bottle was rather more legible when I held it just that little bit further away. One of my companions - of a similar vintage to myself - laughed at me and told me that he had just purchased his first reading glasses, which he then held out for me to try.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, it was a turning point in my life. For the first time, I tried on somebody else's spectacles, and the world looked clearer. And so, as I booked an eye test this morning, I took comfort from the words of Plato, who said something along the lines of:

"Wisdom begins as eyesight starts to fade."

Most pleasing.

Of course, I then realised that the fact I have seldom needed an eye test before now, while so many of my friends have worked their way through many pairs of glasses or contact lenses, may have less pleasing implications...

If at first you don't succeed, remove all evidence you ever tried.

David Brent

This one comes from Rita Mae Brown:

Good judgment comes from experience, and often experience comes from bad judgment.

Are you one of these emancipated women we're having so much trouble with at home?

After a hundred years in a vault, Mark Twain's autobiography is soon to be published. Memo to self: remember to achieve something significant enough in your life that anyone will be interested in reading about you a century later...

It sounds, though, as if the renewed interest in him may be a mixed blessing, which reminds me of a little poem I learned as a child:

Lives of Great Men all remind us As we o'er their pages turn That we too may leave behind us Letters that we ought to burn.

...is a snippet from Frank Zappa:

Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth.