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Archive for April, 2008

Computer “Science”

Friday, April 25th, 2008

I am rectum’al about some things though probably not when I reek of alcohol (sometimes) or almost falling asleep, like now. One of those things is spelling. The people that I chat with often have to endure my misspellings : ‘ey man’, ‘transcenadnce’ and ‘eligjtment’ are samples from my chat logs the other day.

No matter that when I read chats/blogs from people, I expect none other than perfection. Another anality of mine, which I gratuitously violate(d), is grammar. The denizens of the interwebs have got their tubes connected to their rears when it comes to grammar and spelling; stool samples are easily collected: ‘rediculous’, ‘there’ instead of ‘their’, ’should of’, ‘could of’ and incorrect use of the semi-colon.

GOD! Grammar isn’t rocket surgery*! That’s how we get stupid expressions that don’t make any sense anymore! The old expressions are pardoned because they help gave birth to hotforwords.

This is a long-winded post to mention the awesomely rad Computer Science Unplugged,  about computer science and how it has little to do with computers**.

* Thanks DHH for this new (to me, and stupid) internet meme probably automagically rendered a gazillion times more popular after startupschool. DHH is actually a very nice guy, no ill feeling.

** Notice how real sciences don’t have “science” affixed? Thanks, Richard for the observation the other day.

Just do it

Friday, April 25th, 2008

I attended startupschool about a week ago and that was quite a blast. The folks at justin.tv and omnisio have got the video transcripts up, definitely worth a watch.

I missed the major parts of two talks, and by Murphy’s law, they just had to be two of the top 3 talks I wanted to hear; Paul Buchheit and Paul GrahamWe had a production server outage, so I was furiously competing for wireless access point time with 400 other geeks (and PG during his talk… XD).

I did, however, manage to catch this quote from one of PG’s slides:

A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.
George S. Patton
US general (1885 - 1945)

I wonder why this wasn’t even a discussion topic for the HN crowd, but this struck a chord in me. It is now my motto.

Wonderful hacker gathering and awesome pre- and post- parties. Much love for SUS. See you next year.

P.S.: We got that production issue fixed BTW