All I ask of you is one thing: please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism — it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard, and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.
—Conan O’Brien
Quote:: Dracula's Bram Stoker Interviews Churchill? About Happiness?
Churchill observed to Stoker, “A man must choose his own way of life, and…it is only by following out one’s own bent that there can be the really harmonious life.”
When Stoker asked what exactly he meant by that, Churchill continued, “Harmonious life. A life when a man’s work is also his pleasure and vice versa. That conjunction, joined with a buoyant temperament, makes the best of worldly gifts.”
via The Happiness Project: Dracula’s Bram Stoker Interviews Churchill? About Happiness?.
QOTD::I Wrote This For You: The Whispering At The Back
You say the things you don’t need to say.
Because it hurts when you don’t say them.
via I Wrote This For You: The Whispering At The Back.
QOTD:Quote Of The Day: » The opposite of “open” is “theirs”
If we allow others to make decisions about what the Net is for — preferring some content and services to others — the Net won’t feel like it’s ours, and we’ll lose some of the enthusiasm (= love) that drives our participation, innovation, and collaborative efforts.
So, if we’re going to talk about the value of the open Internet, we have to ask what the opposite of “open” is. No one is proposing a closed Internet. When it comes to the Internet, the opposite of “open” is “theirs.”
via Joho the Blog » The opposite of “open” is “theirs”.
Quote::Fear of Time Travel : Aardvarchaeology
I find this actually true, people worry of things that probably wouldn’t happen to them, even worse prepare for it. I have the graphic of the one page guide to how to create some stuff we take for granted now for the unlikely nay almost impossible chance that I time travel to the past.
I’m pessimistic. I have a feeling that I’d end up dead, plague-struck, imprisoned or a manual labourer pretty soon. (If I were a woman I’d reckon the first sexual assault would come within hours.) And the funny thing is that somehow I actually worry about this time-slip scenario. It’s akin to the low-level anxiety it causes me in the real world to be living off stipends and not having much of a steady income. But actually, somewhere deep down I’m more afraid of being time-machined barehanded into the Stockholm of Svante Nilsson’s stewardship.
via Fear of Time Travel : Aardvarchaeology.
rePost::Red Squirrel's Nuts – 50% Time
The problem is really to work an extra 20 hours per week on self improvements means you have enough energy to to expend in self improvement. This is why I am limiting myself to jobs within 30 minutes from my house optimistically and within 1.5 hours with traffic. If the commute is too long I’m too tired to study/self improve. Life is too short to waste on a commute.
At the time I was finishing Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers, a book that digs deep into the stories and counter-cultural explanations of successful people. Having someone so close to my context tweeting about a topic related to the book I was reading helped me see something I hadn’t noticed before. I’ve spent years trying to make sense of how a person evolves from a novice programmer to an accomplished software developer. And up until now I haven’t paid enough attention to the raw number of hours spent deliberately working to improve oneself. Uncle Bob calls us to work a sustainable pace in our day jobs (40 hours), so we have time (20 hours) to improve ourselves in the off-hours. Most people don’t do that, though. It’s not considered normal. People who spend time doing more of what appears to be their job in the off-hours are seen as obsessed or workaholics. Maybe we are, there is some grey area there, and I know I’ve taken it too far before. One of the ingredients to being an outlier, though, is an opportunity to work hard. Sure, many outliers have had some good breaks, like being born in the right decade (American entrepreneurs in the 1830’s) or even the right month (Canadian junior hockey players in January), but that luck only provided them with an opportunity to work hard at something that they wanted to do.
via Red Squirrel’s Nuts – 50% Time.
Quote::The Trials of Tony Judt – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education
In one moving essay, recently published in The New York Review, Judt addresses directly his life with ALS. “Helplessness,” he writes, “is humiliating even in a passing crisis—imagine or recall some occasion when you have fallen down or otherwise required physical assistance from strangers. Imagine the mind’s response to the knowledge that the peculiarly humiliating helplessness of ALS is a life sentence (we speak blithely of death sentences in this connection, but actually the latter would be a relief).”
via The Trials of Tony Judt – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.