"I love Halloween, the one time of year when everyone wears a mask, not just me. People think it's fun to pretend you're a monster; Me, I spend my life pretending I'm not. Brother, friend, boyfriend, all part of my costume collection. Some people might call me a fraud, I prefer to think of myself as a master of disguise."
—Dexter, S1E4 "Let's Give the Boy a Hand"
Category: quotes
Not So Easy to Get a Program Right
"By June 1949 people had begun to realize that it was not so easy to get a program right as had at one time appeared. I well remember when this realization first came on me with full force. The EDSAC was on the top floor of the building and the tape-punching and editing equipment one floor below on a gallery that ran around the room in which the differential analyser was installed. I was trying to get working my first non-trivial program, which was one for the numerical integration of Airy's differential equation. It was on one of my journeys between the EDSAC room and the punching equipment that hesitating at the angles of stairs the realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent in finding errors in my own programs."
-Maurice Wilkes, Memoirs
Open Plan
I've had the misfortune to work in "war rooms" (no fighting allowed!) and "open plans" before, and for some reason I always think of this, for a moment before the noise distracts me:
Some things about living still weren't quite right, though. April for
instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in
that clammy month that the H-G [Handicapper-General's] men took George and Hazel Bergeron's fourteen-
year-old son, Harrison, away.It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn't think about it very
hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn't
think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his
intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his
ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a
government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would
send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair
advantage of their brains.George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel's
cheeks, but she'd forgotten for the moment what they were about.
On the television screen were ballerinas.A buzzer sounded in George's head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits
from a burglar alarm.
—Kurt Vonnegut, "Harrison Bergeron" (1961)