Eric's Cyber-Avatar

• One of my favourite things to do is peel an orange in one piece.
• As a kid one thinks that the adults have everything under control and are very organized. As I have grown up, I have realized more and more that that was an illusion.
• One of my pet peeves is people who modify code written by others, and don't follow the coding style of the author.
• It is not true that women cannot keep secrets. Where they love, they can be trusted to death and beyond, against all sense and reason. It is their weakness, and their great strength.
  The Hollow Hills, by Mary Stewart
• My Amazon Wish List.
• My Blog.
• "When you're younger, you think that people who are charged with making weighty decisions are people who are very bright and older and wiser, who really know the answers. It's one of the discoveries of midlife that people who make those decisions are people just like the rest of us. They're just ordinary people."
  - Ann Berget, Minneapolis School Board
• "The trouble with much creativity today, in my observation, is that many of the people with the ideas have the peculiar notion that their jobs are finished once the ideas have been suggested. They believe that it is up to somebody else to work out the dirty details and then implement the proposals. Typically, the more creative the man, the less responsibility he takes for action. . . . Ideas are useless unless used. The proof of their value is their implementation. Until then, they are in limbo."
  - Theodore Levitt in the Harvard Business Review (August)
• "Think of your many years of procrastination; how the gods have repeatedly granted you further periods of grace, of which you have taken no advantage. It is time now to realize the nature of the universe to which you belong, and of that controlling Power whose offspring you are; and to understand that your time has a limit set for it. Use it, then, to advance your enlightenment; or it will be gone, and never in your power again.
  "Hour by hour resolve firmly, like a Roman and a man, to do what comes to hand with correct and natural dignity, and with humanity, independence, and justice. Allow your mind freedom from all other considerations. This you can do, if you will approach each action as though it were your last, dismissing the wayward thought, the emotional recoil from the commands of reason, the desire to create an impression, the admiration of self, the discontent with your lot. See how little a man needs to master, for his days to flow on in quietness and piety: he has but to observe these few counsels, and the gods will ask nothing more."
  - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations Book II. (translator unknown)
• "Remind yourself constantly of all the physicians, now dead, who used to knit their brows over their ailing patients; of all the astrologers who so solemnly predicted their clients' doom; the philosophers who expatiated so endlessly on death and immortality; the great commanders who slew their thousands; the despots who wielded powers of life and death with such terrible arrogance, as if themselves were gods who could never die; whole cities which have perished completely, Helice, Pompeii, Herculaneum, and other without number. After that recall one by one each of your own acquaintances; how one buried the another, only to be laid low himself and buried in turn by a third, all in so brief a space of time. Observe in short how transient and trivial is all mortal life; yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a handful of spice and ashes. Spend therefore, these fleeting moments on earth as nature would have you spend them, and then go to your rest with good grace, as an olive falls in its season, with the blessing for the earth that bore it and a thanksgiving to the tree that gave it life."
  - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations Book IV;48 (translated by Maxwell Staniforth)
• My Xbox Live profile.

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Eric D. Hendrickson

Last modified: Sat Jun 23 22:19:59 CDT 2007