Nick Lewis: The Blog

If Windows is enterprise ready, than any piece of software is.

-Some bloke by the name of bhuot

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

-Teddy Roosevelt

*occassionally, myself included

Group intelligence is multiplicative when idiots are involved - combining a half-wit with another half-wit does not result in a full-witted person, it results in a quarter-witted person (1/2 x 1/2 = 1/4). Combining a full-witted individual with a half-wit still only yields a half-wit. The more of these "wrong kinds of people" you have involved in the process, the worse things get.

- Matt Inman, SEOMoz Blog

"A modern paradox is that it’s simpler to create complex interfaces because it’s so complex to simplify them." -- Pär Almqvist , Fragments (of Time)

"The temptation to quit will be greatest just before you are about to succeed."

-an old Chinese saying

This is the true scandal of Lolita. Not that a man should love a child, but that he should prove so helpless to stanch his desires. Deep emotion is the book's central transgression and its saving grace.      Never has this been more obvious than the current era, which has placed carnality in the service of capitalism by stripping from sex any vestige of authentic feeling. We see more and more these days -- virtually any dirty image is at our fingertips -- but feel less and less. Everywhere we look, glistening parts are pumping away in congress, yearning to excite our wildest consumer fantasies. Every day, it becomes harder and harder to make a clear distinction between pornography and advertising.      But Lolita? It has nothing to sell but the truth of ourselves: our afflictions of want, our shame, elusive and horrible and blessed.

-Steve Almond, 'Lolita' Hits Fifty

On September 28, 2004, a search on “podcast” in Google turned up 24 matches. AS I write this, the number is 17,000,000.

-Seth Godin, in his new free* e-book on blogging and the new media

*BTW, when I say the e-book is *free*, I don't mean "free" like "free baby vomit." Rather, I mean, this book is well worth the short read.

"It is in this sense, then, that it seems almost as if a nuclear weapon went off in New Orleans. The people mostly have fled rather than died, but they are gone. Not all of the facilities are destroyed, but most are. It appears to us that New Orleans and its environs have passed the point of recoverability. The area can recover, to be sure, but only with the commitment of massive resources from outside -- and those resources would always be at risk to another Katrina. The displacement of population is the crisis that New Orleans faces. It is also a national crisis, because the largest port in the United States cannot function without a city around it. The physical and business processes of a port cannot occur in a ghost town, and right now, that is what New Orleans is. It is not about the facilities, and it is not about the oil. It is about the loss of a city's population and the paralysis of the largest port in the United States."

From New Orleans: A Geopolitical Prize. By George Freedman, StratFor

"The word intellectual strikes me as odd. Personally, I've never met any intellectuals. I've met people who write novels, others who treat the sick. People who work in economics and others who write electronic music. I've met people who teach, people who paint, and people of whom I have never really understood what they do... But intellectuals? Never.

On the otherhand, I've met a lot of people who talk about "the intellectual". And listening to them, I've got some idea of what such an animal could be. It's not difficult -- he's quite personified. He's guilty about pretty well everything: about speaking out and about keeping silent, about doing nothing and about getting involved in everything... In short, the intellectual is raw material for a verdict, a sentence, a condemnation, an exlusion...

I don't find that intellectuals talk too much, since for me they don't exist. But I do find that more and more is being said about intellectuals, and I don't find it very reassuring.

I have an unfortunate habit. When people speak about this or that, I try to imagine what the result would be if translated into reality. When they "criticize" someone, when they "denounce" his ideas, when they "condemn" what he writes, I imagine them in the ideal situation in which they would have complete power over him. I take the words they use -- demolish, destroy, reduce to silence, bury -- and see what the effect would be if they were taken literally. And I catch a glimpse of the radiant city in which the intellectual would be in prison, or if he were also a theoretician, hanged, of course."

Source: Michel Foucault:The Masked Philosopher. Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and other writings 1977-1984. (page 324)

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible... The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.

-George Orwell, Politics and the English Language