2002.11.12
You can be sincere and still be stupid.TJ Holland on the loveblender pointed out a site, brainyquotes.com. I wish they had a random feature like I have though.
Geek Article of the Moment
Wonderfully smart yet accessible article The Law of Leaky Abstractions. It explains how web pages and e-mail can reliably land on your doorstep, even though the underlying connections (hardware and software) may be flakey as heck, in very amusing terms. Also says that although we abstract things in programming and whatnot, trying to make difficult tasks doable with a couple of keypresses, that since you need to learn what's going on in the guts of the system anyway to deal with it when it breaks or doesn't perform as quick as you need, you have more to learn with Easy-to-Use systems, not less.
Wow. That really puts into words some of my problems with things like hard core J2EE, and why it's so hard to take advantage of all the bells and whistles it offers. I really hope "The Law of Leaky Abstractions" meme starts to spread...