Freebsd Fortunes

But the greatest Electrical Pioneer of them all was Thomas Edison, who
was a brilliant inventor despite the fact that he had little formal
education and lived in New Jersey.  Edison's first major invention in
1877, was the phonograph, which could soon be found in thousands of
American homes, where it basically sat until 1923, when the record was
invented.  But Edison's greatest achievement came in 1879, when he
invented the electric company.  Edison's design was a brilliant
adaptation of the simple electrical circuit: the electric company sends
electricity through a wire to a customer, then immediately gets the
electricity back through another wire, then (this is the brilliant
part) sends it right back to the customer again.

This means that an electric company can sell a customer the same batch
of electricity thousands of times a day and never get caught, since
very few customers take the time to examine their electricity closely.
In fact the last year any new electricity was generated in the United
States was 1937; the electric companies have been merely re-selling it
ever since, which is why they have so much free time to apply for rate
increases.
                -- Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?"

"But this has taken us far afield from interface, which is not a bad
place to be, since I particularly want to move ahead to the kludge.
Why do people have so much trouble understanding the kludge?  What is a
kludge, after all, but not enough Ks, not enough ROMs, not enough RAMs,
poor quality interface and too few bytes to go around?  Have I
explained yet about the bytes?"

"But what we need to know is, do people want nasally-insertable
computers?"

Buzz off, Banana Nose; Relieve mine eyes
Of hateful soreness, purge mine ears of corn;
Less dear than army ants in apple pies
Art thou, old prune-face, with thy chestnuts worn,
Dropt from thy peeling lips like lousy fruit;
Like honeybees upon the perfum'd rose
They suck, and like the double-breasted suit
Are out of date; therefore, Banana Nose,
Go fly a kite, thy welcome's overstayed;
And stem the produce of thy waspish wits:
Thy logick, like thy locks, is disarrayed;
Thy cheer, like thy complexion, is the pits.
Be off, I say; go bug somebody new,
Scram, beat it, get thee hence, and nuts to you.

By doing just a little every day, you can gradually let the task
completely overwhelm you.

"By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.  In fact,
it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to
invent. (R. Emerson)"
                -- Quoted from a fortune cookie program
                   (whose author claims, "Actually, stealing IS easier.")
                   [to which I reply, "You think it's easy for me to
                   misconstrue all these misquotations?!?"]

"By the time they had diminished from 50 to 8, the other dwarves began
to suspect 'Hungry' ..."
                -- Gary Larson, "The Far Side"

By trying, we can easily learn to endure adversity -- another man's, I
mean.
                -- Mark Twain

Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to
point B very fast while other people dash from point B to point A very
fast.  People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are
often given to wonder what's so great about point A that so many people
from point B are so keen to get there and what's so great about point B
that so many people from point A are so keen to get there.  They often
wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell
they wanted to be.
                -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

C, n.:
        A programming language that is sort of like Pascal except more
like assembly except that it isn't very much like either one, or
anything else.  It is either the best language available to the art
today, or it isn't.
                -- Ray Simard