Lessons learned in a long life
Kent Paul Dolan
extended series.
------------------------------------------------------------
Putting good new inner tubes in old rotten bike tires is a
waste of time and money, Dad.
Put the coffee in the coffee filter while it is on the
counter, then put the filter into the coffee maker basket.
That way any grounds you spill don't end up in the pot of
coffee.
Masturbate often. Orgasms are infinitely plentiful and
should be enjoyed at every opportunity, but most of the
other varieties are too complicated to acquire to be worth
the bother.
When you type any style of opening bracket character, type
the closing bracket character before adding the intervening
code. You do lots fewer wasted compilations from forgetting
to close a container that way. [Thanks, Paul, wherever you
are.]
Editing tools behave strangely when sharing resources with
compute bound demos. This "vim()" may fall behind, but it
keeps on chugging and rarely loses anything.
The recipie for instant oatmeal specifies adding boiling
water. If you make it with boiling coffee instead, the
whole day has a brighter aspect somehow.
If carpenters built houses the way Microsoft builds
software, the first woodpecker deity to use a word processor
would have done slum clearance on Redmond with an asteroid.
Write the text editor macros to maintain the source code
comments painlessly, _before_ you write the source code.
Then the source code will _have_ some comments when you are
done.
When someone says "you have to trust me on this," no, you
don't, but that doesn't mean you have to reject what was
offered out of hand, either. Test the waters carefully,
some free gifts really are worth gold and silver.
Text editor macros saved in files specific to the kind of
text or type of project, that can be loaded with a keystroke
or two, are A Good Thing. Command line aliases that
autmatically drop you into the macro file ready to grab
macros, along with bringing up the file to be edited,
deserve a MacArthur grant at the very least.
Clutter breeds. Virtual clutter breeds at nearly the speed
of light.
Decaying banana peels smell like cranberries to
gerontological phenomena book writers. Encouraging them in
this belief means you don't need to empty the trash as
often.
Stubborness accumulates with age. And by the way, it is
already much too late to try to talk me out of this notion.
Folding clothes is a waste of time. Shut the bedroom door
behind you instead. What, you were going to let everyone
look at your unmade bed?
Gods who don't exist are powerless against atheist authors
who do, but the people who believe in those gods are more
dangerous than whole barrelfuls of scorpions. This is also
why many great works of science that contradicted church
teachings were published posthumously.
No matter what you do, toes eventually rot. Don't get too
attached to them, they won't be around forever.
Standing up all day ruins your joints. Laying down all day
causes bedsores and gangrene. Walking all day makes your
toenails fall off. Sitting all day makes your ankles swell
up like balloons. Welcome to life in a gravity well.
Whatever you are doing, provide a way to take notes about
other things you want to do later, while you are busy with
that first thing. Then read those notes often. This is
called being organized, and it has quietly constructed whole
civilizations without ever gaining much of a following. [This
current list, and my to_do list, are attached to keyboard
macros in my source code editor that pop them up ready for
additions on the spur of the moment.]
My "to_do" lists have little to_do lists of their own. This
is getting obsessive.
As long as you don't lard it up with a lot of salt or oils,
there's no such thing as eating too much popcorn.
Being obsessive in a good cause is equally obnoxious to any
other kinds of obsession.
Send the president more pretzels. We may be onto something
here.
If Monica had choked on a pretzel instead of a president,
she'd have gone down in history as a great snack food
martyr, instead of being martyred in history for snacking by
going down.
Not knowing how to cook anything that might be bad for you
could be the key to a long and healthy life.
Just as in the bad old days of debtor's prisons, being poor
is _still_ against the law, the authorities have just
changed the phrasing to quell complaints from bleeding heart
liberals.
Hard disk storage is now cheap. Use lots of white space in
your software code for clarity.
Put not your trust in randomizers written by strangers. [Ye,
gods, Scott!]
Mersenne Twister rules! The above rule has exceptions.
Reading Sean Luke's code porting it to Java makes my
eyestalks (re-)cross way back in my brain, though.
Read the author's notes in books; they can help prevent
suicide. Larry Niven, in his Forward "Playgrounds for the
Mind", in _N Space_, says: "I knew it long ago; I'm a
compulsive teacher, but I can't teach. ... I lack two of
the essential qualifications. I cannot 'suffer fools
gladly,' the smartest of my pupils would get all my
attention. And I can't handle being interrupted." Now I
know I'm not the only one stuck with so much to teach and no
way to teach it.
Live for your own approval, and let others do likewise.
Put macros you don't do often on keys you don't type easily.
Put really dangerous macros in a file, and pull them out for
one time use, so you don't trigger them accidentally with a
typo and lose a day's work, like I did 17 January 2002.
Put extra code in macros that doesn't do anything useful,
just fails and stops the macro if the expected data isn't
present.
Celebrate the 28th of September, the day Charles Darwin read
Thomas Malthus' writings on exponential population growth
versus linear food supply growth, and realized that it
didn't take a God to cause evolution to occur, simple
competition would suffice. In another 500 years, evolution
and the origin of species won't orbit around a Designer just
like the sun finally didn't orbit around the earth, years
after Copernicus had died. In between, churches will
again be dragged screaming and fighting toward accepting
obvious scientific reality, and many innocent people will
get hurt in the melees needed to make that happen.
Great cathedrals are not built for the glory of God, they
are built for the vanity of the preacher.
An empty paragraph makes a dandy separator for use within
HTML ordered lists, where other approaches create vicious
artifacts.
xanthian, still copy-editing, but not for much longer.
--
Posted via Mailgate.ORG Server - http://www.Mailgate.ORG
nikolai kingsley
> Lessons learned in a long life, part of a finite but
> extended series.
> ------------------------------------------------------------
never lend money to a junkie.
save often.
that's about all the clues i have.
nikolai
---
1,2,3,4,5
the reverse psychologist @ bawston school for idiots
"nikolai kingsley" <nik...@broadway.net.au> wrote in message
news:newscache$k1slqg$x7p$1...@bartleby.maths.monash.edu.au...
>
> > Lessons learned in a long life, part of a finite but
> > extended series.
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
> never lend money to a junkie.
... she's not a junkie -- sid
--
... yeah tho i walk thru the valley of darkness
i shall fear no evil for i have the biggest penis
in the valley, deal.
-- beelzibub 666