Root On UNIX

[Matthew R. Heusser]

My instrument instructor in Alaska was 77 years old at the time that I got my rating.  Tom Wardleigh had 33,000 hours of flying experience including 15,000 hours on floats and was considered perhaps the best flight instructor in the state of Alaska.  His son had refused to learn to fly, despite his proximity to such a renowned instructor and all of the freedom that flying brings in a state with substantially no roads.  One of the things that Tom's son had noticed was how many times his father went out to search for pilots who had crashed.  His stated reason for never learning to fly:  "I don't want to do something where the opposite of perfection is death."

Being root on Unix is sort of like that.

From: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/

You might also want to check out:
   http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2003/07/17#a876


Interesting stuff.

Perl Mongers on Friday.  See you there?

regards,

Matt H.
-----Original Message-----
From: "Matthew R. Heusser" <HEUSSERM at student.gvsu.edu>
To: grand-rapids-pm-list at happyfunball.pm.org
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2003 10:04:21 -0500
Subject: Re: Speaking of problems ...



"
How to stay motivated

It is a wonderful and surprising fact that programmers are highly motivated by the desire to create artifacts that are beautiful, useful, or nifty. This desire is
not unique to programmers nor universal but it is so strong and common among programmers that it separates them from others in other roles.

This has practical and important consequences. If programmers are asked to do something that is not beautiful, useful, or nifty, they will have low morale.
There's a lot of money to be made doing ugly, stupid, and boring stuff; but in the end, fun will make the most money for the company.

Obviously, there are entire industries organized around motivational techniques some of which apply here. The things that are specic to programming
that I can identify are:

-> Use the best language for the job.

-> Look for opportunities to apply new techniques, languages, and technolo-gies.

-> Try to either learn or teach something, however small, in each project.
"

>From How to be a programmer:

http://samizdat.mines.edu/howto/HowToBeAProgrammer.pdf

I found it an interesting free read. (Free like beer, not free like freedom.  :-) 


Matthew H.(eusser)