Rob Hasker's Collection of Quotes
Organized by the person who said it or brought the quote to my attention.
- MSOE Students
- Anonymous, Jan., 2015, in response to my suggestion that being
blocked was a necessary part of being creative: "It's hard to come up
with new ways to do things until the old ways stop working."
- K. Thao, May, 2017: "The beautiful thing about knowledge is that it
can be gained."
- N. Mayers, 2019: "Four hours of trouble-shooting can save you 10
minutes of reading the documentation."
- BWH:
- Dec. 10, 2005, during a conversation on dreams: "I think dreams are
nighttime entertainment for your brain."
- Jan. 22, 2006: "Dreams are pretty unstable things."
- Quoting Einstein: "Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the
world."
- Dec. 8, 2009, after a discussion of some people who appear to be very
difficult to reason with: "I believe what I believe is right, and nothing
you believe will make me believe differently."
- Dec. 28, 2009: "See, that's the nice thing about the universe. Every
time you think you've hit a low, it shows you a new low.
- Aug. 17, 2010, after hearing the uproar over the Muslim center near
ground 0: "History is a constant battle between good, evil, and stupidity."
- Sept. 12, 2010, paraphrasing Terry Pratchet: "To robots, time is just
another number."
- May 24, 2011: "The only way to make fun of Obama is to make fun of how
hard it is to make fun of him."
- Feb. 26, 2012, during a discussion of movies like
Dumb and Dumber: "Stupidity is the opiate of the masses."
- 2007: "How do Vikings communicate? Norse code" (Original joke, at least to us)
- SGH:
- about 4 years old, while watching clouds out the kitchen window: "The
clouds are like in the Spirit movie. Spirit is in front. Clouds are making
Spirit and the other ones they're going to your and mommy's grandma's
houses."
- 8 years old, while I'm eating ice cream with the kids after we had
painted the porch: I (innocently) asked,
"I'm covered in paint, caramel, and ice cream;
what does that make me?"
Sarah: "A dad."
- May 8, 2013: "Math books again, are problematic."
- William Hasker
- "You can’t have a meeting of the minds without having a meeting.” -
April 13, 2021
- JAH
- "Communicating with a 16 year old male is like talking underwater to an
octopus." - Feb. 16, 2012
- Rita Rukashaza
- NATALIE'S LAW OF ALGEBRA: You never catch on until after the test.
- ANDERS'S THIRD NEGATIVE PRINCIPLE OF COMPUTERS: Making a backup disk
ensures that you will never use it.
- HALDANE'S LAW: The universe is not only queerer than we imagine, it's
queerer than we can imagine.
- UWP Student in CS/SE 343, Fall 2002:
- "Mountain Dew is great - you can drink it warm or cold."
- Grady Booch:
- said "Bjarne Stroustroup, the inventor of C++, says that our
civilization runs on software" in
http://www.fawcette.com/dotnetmag/2003_02/online/lthe/default.asp
- Pete Schumacher
- Summer, 1996: "If it ain't tested, it's broke."
- Phil Wagner
- June 27, 2003: "Pragmatism can be a very bad asset."
- Rob Hasker
- Winter, 2018: "Process improvement is about measuring the unmeasurable
and improving the unimprovable."
- May 9, 2017: "Automation beats documentation."
- May 9, 2013: "It's a Windows box. A window into the darkest recesses of
your computer."
- April 4, 2012: "Knowledge is a dangerous thing. Knowledge that
knowledge is a dangerous thing is even more dangerous."
- July 19, 2003: "Taking an exam without having done any practice
exercises is like going on a date without taking a shower."
- July 20, 2010: "Having kids is like software engineering: you have to
enjoy the moment where everything works so much you're willing to forget
all those moments where nothing works."
- Joe Clifton
- Sept. 3, 2003: "The only thing worse than counting beans is counting
them wrong."
- 2006, on birthdays: "Having them is a lot better than not having them."
- Scott Nykl
- June 24, 2004: "Providing [computer] tech support for your neighbor is
like feeding a stray dog."
- Johannes Kaufmann
- Sept. 28, 2007: "Linux without grep would be crap."
- John Christianson
- June 7, 2008: [When you feel left out] "like a dog at a squirrel party."
- SE 4730 Student, May 2011: "Checking in broken code is less helpful
than not working on the code in the first place."
- Denise Rostad, 1/16/2014, in response to Jill expressing frustration
at not being able to remember what she was supposed to be looking up when
she sat down at the computer: "That's OK, Jill. If you forget what you
were going to look up, just keep going until you get to the end of the
Internet. You will find it in there somewhere."
Books
- Terry Pratchett
- Thud!, Harper-Collins, 2005; thoughts of Sam Vimes:
- "Vimes had never got on with any game much more complex than darts.
Chess in particular had always annoyed him. It was the dumb way the pawns
went off and slaughtered their fellow pawns while the kings lounged about
doing nothing that always got to him; if only the pawns united, maybe
talked the rooks around, the whole board could've been a republic in a dozen
moves."
- p. 183: "Coffee was only a way of stealing time that should by rights
belong to your slightly older self."
- Feet of Clay, Harper-Collins, 1996
- pp. 66-67: "Rumor is information distilled so finely that it can filter
through anything. It does not need doors and windows--sometimes it doesn't
even need people. It can exist free and wild, roaming from ear to ear
without ever touching lips."
- Heilein, Friday
- ...with all
governments everywhere tightening down on everything wherever they can,
with their computers and their Public Eyes and ninety nine other sorts of
electronic surveillance, there is a moral obligation on each free person
to fight back wherever possible--keep underground railways open, keep
shades drawn, give misinformation to computers. Computers
are literal-minded and stupid; electronic records aren't really records
. . . so it is good to be alert to opportunities to foul up the system. If
you can't evade a tax, pay a little too much to confuse
their computers.
Quotes from other materials