Look at other people's quotes pages, many of which I have had the misfortune to be quoted on...

"Perl eventually will acquire enough syntax that it will collapse upon itself, taking nearby solar systems with."
"The noise from the implosion will of course be valid Perl code."
-- Brian and Joe

"nyaaa!"
"I think a specialist could better assist you."
-- Tori and the Sprint customer service computer

"... then all we need is an ASCII monkey ..."
"WAIT! I have just the thing!"
-- myself and Andrew Krend

Who wants snacks? I have juice and beer and ice cubes for the mischievous and no ice cubes for the not mischievous.
-- Sara Clardy, on the bus to the Danger launch party

That's their favorite network configuration -- "You can't get there from here".
-- Ceej

The role-playing aspect varies. Some servers are designated as role-playing servers, where you're expected to stay in character. (I avoid those because I hate it when people think that role-playing involves addressing me as "thou". How offensively familiar! And yet, somehow they never understand when I take offense.
-- Ceej, on MMORPGS

"Dave suggests that you should use american bytes instead of canadian to avoid confusion."
"With the new internationalization stuff, I think the conversion is done for me at the library level or something... Does 1 american byte = 1.6 Canadian bytes these days?"
-- Brian and Kenny discuss reducing bloat

A system running without kpages is sort of like HAL running without his glowing lucite blocks, so this may fix many recent bugs.
-- Dave Bort, in Change 31149

I just ate a bignormous burrito and I can't even think about coding any more.
-- Chris DeSalvo

The real role playing does not take place in the game. It takes place on these forums where Funcom plays the part of the oppressive corporation, forcing their will on the players, while the players take on the roles of victims, freedom fighters or fanboy collaborators.
-- from a post on Anarchy Online's message boards

"What's your biggest weakness?"
<snorthOOOOORNKsnrtsnrt>
"Ah, apparently, it's that you're a wookie. Don't worry, sir, Yahoo is an equal-opportunity employer. We do not discriminate against seven-foot-tall walking carpets. I'll have to get a protocol droid to interpret for the remainder of our interview."
-- Matt Williams explains the danger of interviewing with a cold

"So you can do flashrecovery and..."
"/etc/hosts? Looks good to me!"
-- Brian and Dave ponder sanity checking uploads

"From whose perspective?"
"I was sitting at my computer when I was writing it!"
-- Jeff and Dave discuss why it shouldn't be 'upload'

"I changed the packing of the structure so when you set the default values it spells my name."
-- Dave explains how to confuse future maintainers

% This program is the result of two of the things I am interested in:
% The japanese language and the PostScript language (PostScript is much
% easier to learn...).
-- Harald Kucharek (in KanaSheets.ps)

"The Balrog never speaks or makes any vocal sounds at all. Above all he does not laugh or sneer ..... Z may think he knows more about Balrogs than I do, but he cannot expect me to agree with him."
-- Tolkien (Letters #210) about a LOTR Film Treatment

I swear that somewhere in here there is the "The Citizens can overthrow the State if the State is being a bunch of fuckers" clause.
-- Joe Doyle studies the Constitution

<scraphime> But it'll be gonen when the buzzwords have died!
<scraphime> s/gonen/gone/
<scraphime> dvorak has turned my Finnish
-- Tori discovers strange keyboard side effects

"It's not an optical illusion, it just looks like one."

I once saw a page that said ``this page best viewed by coming over to my office and looking at it on my monitor.'' You don't often see honesty like that.
-- jwz

Yes, you and the point are ships in the night.
-- Joe Doyle

Give a hobbit a fish and he eats fish for a day.
Give a hobbit a ring and he eats fish for an age.

Cold-hearted orb that rules the night
Removes the colors from our sight
Red is gray, and yellow white
But we decide which is right
And which is a quantization error.
-- ppmtopgm manual

I've argued that of all the anime series of the past five years, Lain was the best at getting the creative point of Evangelion. Some people thought the point was that you should make a series about mecha piloted by sullen teenagers --- but the point was that you can do anything you want.
-- Carl Horn, VIZ's translated Eva Manga 6:2

"It's a crime against beans."
-- Tony Myles reacts to the Tofurkey

"There's a fine line between 'organic' and 'biological'"
-- Joe Palmer's observations on the industrial design of Scout Electromedia's 'Modo'

"We're so underground people don't even know they have our record."
-- Baron, after Ficus asked somebody about a kissing contest mp3 they were sharing w/ napster and he had no idea he had it

"It's a blue light special on good code."
-- dbort@kmart.danger.com

"It's pretty scary looking ... and it's only like nine polygons"
-- Chris DeSalvo

Bart: Milhouse...Milhouse, wake up, quick! Look out the window.
Milhouse: No way, Bart. If I lean over, I leave myself open to wedgies, wet willies, or even the dreaded rear-admiral!
-- The Simpsons, "Treehouse of Horror IV"

"I knew that there was great potential in 'run, jump, and climb' adventure games, but the result was beyond any expectations. It sold millions of copies, established a new genre of adventure games and spawned hundreds of similar products. There are now more sideview platform video games than any other category. I wanted to do a game with a running man. I had designed one and I liked the effect, but I had to make a game out of it. So, I thought, 'Well, he has to be running somewhere...' so I drew a path. And then I had to put it into a place - so I picked a jungle. The idea took all of ten minutes. It was a simple idea - a man running in a jungle. But, it spawned a genre of side-scrolling games. It was the beginning of a genre. Also, I guess people just remembered it as being neat."
-- David Crane explains Pitfall

There are other languages that are nice for certain kinds of applications, but if I were stuck on a desert island with only one compiler I'd want a C compiler.
-- Brian Kernighan

<lemson> i'm off to become a manager. with a quick stop by mcdonalds on the way!
<Zaphod> Mild-mannered David Lemson is secretly Project Manager Man!
<Ark> is he on the same team as Bitter and Judgemental Man
<Ark> or a foe?
<spruance> foes
<spruance> he's in the american superhero league, i'm in the national
<spruance> we only meet in the superhero bowl, held annually

Occam lent me his razor, and I chose not to shave.
-- David Fischer

OSS is good at creating more code to do more work, but it isn't very good at creating less code to do more work.
-- David Jeske

Change 966 by ceej@choline on 2000/07/17 16:34:25

        to everything (merge, merge, merge)
        there is a season (merge, merge, merge)
        and a time for every checkin, under heaven

        a time to add files, a time to delete
        a time to branch, a time to sync
        a time to edit, a time to revert
        a time to laugh, a time to weep

        Mostly the latter, though.

It's better to not try and succeed than to try and fail.
-- Jeff Bush

Be Inc's relationship with its shareholders continues to resemble one of those weird sex games where you hold your breath just long enough to avoid death by asphyxiation.
-- The Register, in an article about Be at Comdex

When the RNG hands you a lemon, #apply it and see if you can make invisible ink or something.
-- Joel Gluth on rec.games.roguelike.nethack

I think a better idea is a contest to see how many types of pasta one can recognize in the Mozilla Spaghetti Code.
--howard berkey

In trying to be both a tutorial and reference work, this book aims itself in style halfway between the two extremes of manual, Tedium and Gnawfinger's Elements of Batch Processing in COBOL-66, third edition, and Mr Blobby's Blobby Book of Computer Fun. (This makes some sections both leaden and patronising.)
-- The Inform Designer's Manual, Graham Nelson

FILO.
Which Randy knows is short for Finux Loader, a program that allows you to choose which operating system you want to run.
"Finux," Avi mumbles, answering Randy's unspoken question.
Randy types "Finux" and hits the return key. "How many operating systems you have on this thing?"
"Windows 95, for games and when I need to let some lamer borrow my computer temporarily," Avi says. "Windows NTY for office type stuff. BeOS for hacking, and screwing around with media. Finux for industrial- strength typesetting."
"Which one do you want now?"
"BeOS. Going to display some JPEGs. I assume there's an overhead projector in this place?"

-- Cryptonomicon, pg 184, by Neal Stephenson

/* ----------
   scsi_cd_write does nothing, barring a major device physics breakthough.
   ----- */ 

But soft ! In place of des'late cube I see
A saintly countenance from the floor above.
A useless choad from marketing not he,
But quasi-engineer we've come to love.
He hark from better places far afield
To bring us fabled games of blood and gore.
By placement his new purpose is revealed:
Confer with magi wise and learn their lore.
This mighty war'rior has but purpose one:
To take his present work and make it swift;
And though the task at hand is well begun,
His presence here will give it added lift.
A visitor he be, so treat him well
And mind the tales he carries back to tell.
-- Scott Barta welcomes Andrew Kimpton to his new cube down amongst the engineers.

"Lights Camel Action"
-- Stump, Charlton Heston

"If I have hacked deeper than them, it is because I stand in their trenches."
-- Graham Nelson

"I only communicate with him via evil thought-rays."
-- Joe Doyle

"geek love frightens me"
-- Colleen Noonan

"Microsoft, of course, claims the AOL-Netscape deal proves the DOJ has no case (you get the feeling that Microsoft wouldn't hesitate to claim the sun rising, world peace, and/or Hurricane Mitch proves the DOJ has no case)"
--Mike Masnick in the Up-To-Date Newsletter

You're right, it needs bubble help to warn them. "Warning, the time 2:30am occurs during the witching hour, and will be unavailable once a year. Blame the cows."
-- Brandon Long, discussing the limitations of cron

"Hey dude, double indirect this."
-- Baron Arnold

"C++ has dulled your senses."
-- Ficus

A program without a "main" is like a fish without a bicycle.
-- Jon Watte, being helpful on the bedevtalk list

"All that really mattered was the user experience of the software. It didn't really matter what was in the box, or who it was from, because it was dark in the box and that was that."
-- Joe Palmer (Designer of the BeBox), in "It's Dark in the Box"

http://developer.intel.com has all information about Xeon, BX, Celeron, etc. CNN is not the best place to get technical documentation about Intel's chips.
-- Dmitriy Budko

The engineering school, and the 'engineering-ness' of the student body, on the other hand, was incredible. I just think they should offer a senior semester in slacking, social boot-camp, and general fun-having to try and cure engineering students before they let them out.
-- Dave Jeske on UIUC

I officially redefine "free" as meaning "provided with ketchup". Any other usage with me is misleading. Is that burger free?
-- puge@pobox.com on gnu.misc.discuss

"We have enough people here who know about UNIX and enough people who play Quake that we can make sys-admins out of parts."
-- Ficus, about Be's lack of a fulltime sysadmin

"I think I've given enough to society, society should get me a home theater system."
-- Jeff Thompson

<mrw> groobot: don't crash.
*** Signoff: Groobot (EOF From client)
<mrw> he can't follow instructions yet.
-- Matt Williams, demonstrating some of the neater bits of software development

IF FICUS DOESN'T QUIT COMPLAINING ABOUT C++, HE WILL BE FOREVER REVOKED THE LICENSE TO USE EDDIE, REGARDLESS OF THE HARDWARE PLATFORM, OPERATING SYSTEM OR JURISDICTION.
-- Pavel Cisler, in the Eddie license

Man, swetland goes to code for Be and I switch to the Argus NT group in the same week. #uiuc is karmicly balanced, but I really got screwed
-- Dave Terrell

"... here we have to go back through and flush any blocks that are still dirty. with an arched brow you astutely ask, "but how could this happen given the above loop?" Ahhh young grasshopper I say, the path through the cache is long and twisty and fraught with peril."
-- Dominic Giampaolo, in a comment in bcache.c

"This is tradition! This is our *culture*!"
-- Matt Hellige on the pronunciantion of LaTeX

"Cool! We've gone to a version 2 of our protocol and we haven't released anything yet."
-- Paul Watts on the SigOps DFP

"There isn't enough shouping in modern music."
-- Paul Watts

"You know, me asking you what your name is, is never going to be as fast as calling you Fuckhead"
-- Nathan Schrenk, explaining why static typing is more efficient

"In my opinion, shareware tends to combine the worst of commercial software (no sources) with the worst of free software (no finishing touches). I simply do not believe in the shareware market at all."
-- Linus Torvalds

"Just because they taste like ass doesn't mean they're bad cigarettes."
-- Matt Hellige

<ir0nic> "Are there any PICO users in this room? There's one! Against the Wall! He looks like he uses vi! Against the Wall!"
* ir0nic does the crossed hammer salute
-- Joe Doyle, on #uiuc, recovering from The Wall the evening before

"One World, One Web, One Program"
-- Microsoft Promotional Ad

"Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer"
-- Adolf Hitler

<stuffas> I love typing NULL
<stuffas> it's like shouting at pointers
<stuffas> and bossing them around
<stuffas> "nullify him"
-- Sean O'Connor

"Your Shopping Cart lives to serve. Give it purpose--fill it with books!"
-- Amazon.com

"How can you be depressed in a world where a man makes a living selling concrete wildlife?"
-- Matt Ruff, Fool on the Hill

"Well that makes life a lot easier ... I can take her out of my home directory now."
-- Ari after breaking up with someone

"The dark underbelly of the net is pretty bloated."
-- Nathan Schrenk, after an anti-spam rant

"I think I'll use the earlier, less deficient NE2000 driver"
"Yeah, well, it's full of... features... now"
-- Brian Swetland and Doug Armstrong

Duh. it's called the "interweb" now.
Woman, you are so yesterday afternoon. It's the "intraweb", "hyperweb," and "supra-dupra-web" now.
-- KC Smith and Paul Watts on uiuc.test

<cbradio> the proverbial golden ass of shopping!
-- Colleen Noonan on #uiuc

"Perl is poison on the brain"
"If you're taking python classes, your IQ doubles."
"That's how I got to be so smart."
"So whereas before I was essentially a vegetable, now I am in fact the smartest man alive."
-- Dave Kammeyer

"I think the sideeffects of these python classes are reduced lifespan."
-- Brian Runk

"I knew there had to be a catch."
-- Dave Kammeyer

"uh oh, not the Uber Phallus of Jehovah again."
-- Brandon Long on uiuc.test

"For this reason, I like Catholicism best. It's so riddled with idolotry and mystic ritual that it provides the best guidance to those incapable of guiding themselves."
-- Joe Doyle on uiuc.test

"See, I do have a special name for it, so that makes me superior."
-- Dave Kammeyer, defending the term "javascript applets"

<GoodAsh> I remember why test sucks!
<GoodAsh> It's like if you dropped a valuable ring into the toilet, and know you have to sift through the septic tank to find it
<GoodAsh> you may find what you were looking for and it's really nice, but you get way more shit
-- Mark Ashton, on why uiuc.test sucks.

"Look. In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure."
-- Tyrena Wingreen-Feif, a character in Dan Simmons' Hyperion

Martin Silenus made an expansive gesture. "I was baptized a Lutheran," he said. "A subset which no longer exists. I helped create Zen Gnosticism before any of your parents were born. I have been a Catholic, a revelationist, a neo-Marxist, an interface zealot, a Bound Shaker, a satanist, a bishop in the Church of Jake's Nada, and a dues-paying subscriber to the Assured Reincarnation Institute. Now, I am happy to say, I am a simple pagan." He smiled at everyone. "To a pagan," he concluded, "the Shrike is a most acceptable diety."
-- from Dan Simmons' Hyperion

"In twentieth-century literature he appears first as Bugs Bunny and then as the Hacker."
-- John Hackworth on the Trickster Archtype, from Stephenson's Diamond Age

A locked gun cabinet and a primaeval Macintosh desktop-publishing system, green with age, attested to the owner's previous forays into officially discouraged realms of behavior.
-- Dr. X's lab, from Stephenson's Diamond Age

The House of the Venerable and Inscrutable Colonel was what they called it when they were speaking Chinese. Venerable because of his goatee, white as the dogwood blossom, a badge of unimpeachable credibility in Confucian eyes. Inscrutable because he had gone to his grave without divulging the Secret of the Eleven Herbs and Spices.
-- from Stephenson's Diamond Age

"one principle I generally live by in life is, `Don't lower the bass until you get nauseous'"
-- Fred Jacobs

"John Bekas is the god I worship. He fixed jdbc when it sucked at its worst."
-- Fred Jacobs

"Why program by hand in five days what you can spend five years of your life automating."
-- Terence Parr

"You know how you sometimes say your computer falls off the network? Well, this time the network fell off the computer."
-- Paul Watts, holding up a AUI/10T MUA that fell off of isengard

"Oh, I'm afraid UX3 will be quite operational when your friends arrive..."
-- Adam M. Beal

"It would have helped if the Culture has used some sort of emblem or logo; but, pointlessly unhelpful and unrealistic to the last, the Culture refused to put its trust in symbols. It maintained that it was what it was and had no need for such outward representation. The Culture was every single human and machine in it, not one thing. Just as it could not imprison itself within laws, impoverish itself with money or misguide itself with leaders, so it would not misrepresent itself with signs."
-- from Consider Phlebas, by Iain M. Banks

1. When a distinguished, but elderly, scientist says that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2. The only way to determine the limits of the possible is by going beyond them, into the impossible.

3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
-- Clark's Laws

Don't throw shit on an armed man
Don't stand next to someone throwing shit on an armed man
Don't shoot lasers at mirrors

--From Niven's laws

"Meijer is the emacs of grocery stores."
-- Matt Williams

"What's in the box?"
"Pain, but if you dig deep enough you might find a prize."
"Thats right, its Gom Jabar cereal!"
-- Geoff Raye (on #uiuc)

"I want to be a named pipe when I grow up."
-- Geoff Raye

Voyager - the "B Ark" of the Federation
-- Seen in a signature file

"The best security people convince you that you should shoot yourself instead and that it was your own idea to boot. Damn I like security."
-- Paul Pomes (on cso.general)

"Deliver yesterday, code today, think tomorrow."

"My lady, I am a hero. It is a trade, no more, like weaving or brewing, and like them it has its own tricks and knacks and small arts. There are ways of perceiving witches, and of knowing poison streams; there are certain weak spots that all dragons have, and certain riddles that hooded strangers tend to set you. But the true secret of being a hero lies in knowing the order of things. The swineherd cannot already be wed to the princess when he embarks on his adventures, nor can the boy knock at the witch's door when she is aray, on vaction. The wicked uncle cannot be found out and foiled before he does something wicked. Things must happen when it is time for them to happen. Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophecies may not be left to rot like unpicked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a long time, but not forever. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story."
-- Prince Li'r, from The Last Unicorn

The next few are some wisdom from notes/quotes in the X/Mosaic 2.8 Alpha distribution:

"It's because the buf is not really a buf... it's just some random data..."
-- Michael Lee

"Faces know about Documents and Documents don't know about anything."
-- Paul Bleisch, on the 2.8 design

"Wow! It built!"
-- Paul Bleisch

"We're almost semi-functional, once I finish this crashing bug"
-- Brian Swetland

"I don't think I ever use the same memory twice."
-- Paul Bleisch, after being asked if he copied the URL passed to the load function

"Brian, you checked in the very scary box things..... aaaaaah." -- Paul Bleisch, on #define BOUNDBOXES

"if a tree-named newsreader is used to post something on usenet and nobody reads it, is it really lame?"
-- KC Smith

The dot matrix, it's so slow
And the laser, well - toner's low
Rlogin's broken, won't connect
Concentration? Yeah, that's wrecked
Xterms closing without warning
It's so late it's almost morning
 
Chapters to go before I sleep..
chapters to go before I sleep..

"While any sensible person knows rationally that having a cheering section doesn't actually improve the abilities of artificial intelligence routines, we'd like to give in to the superstition that it actually can help.
-- Geoff "g0ff" Raye, asking people to come cheer for his team in the MechManiaII programming contest

"I can't union with the null set."
-- Greg Kaiser, explaining why his social life mathematically sucks

"Out of paper? Is it serious?"
-- Dave, about ACM's laser printer

"Did you know there's a 'places of interest' section in the phone book?"
"We're trying to find something to eat and he's surfing the phone book!"
-- Mike Lee, Scott Powers

" I think the purpose of dating is to get warez."
-- Geoff Raye on #uiuc

"no.. a freudian slip is when you say one thing but you mean your mother."
-- Unknown, via KC Smith on IRC

"I can't say 'We're doing this because we're violating patents'... that's the *wrong* answer"
-- Chris Dunlap

"This is not the libc you're looking for."
"This isn't the libc we're looking for."
"They can go about their business."
-- Geoff Raye on #uiuc

If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants.
-- Isaac Newton

In the sciences, we are now uniquely privileged to sit side by side with the giants on whose shoulders we stand.
-- Gerald Holton

If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders.
-- Hal Abelson

In computer science, we stand on each other's feet.
-- Brian K. Reid

"Every program has at least one bug and can be shortened by at least one instruction -- from which, by induction, one can deduce that every program can be reduced to one instruction which doesn't work."
-- Unknown

"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."
-- Donald Knuth

"At Group L, Stoffel oversees six first-rate programmers, a managerial challenge roughly comparable to herding cats."
-- The Washington Post Magazine, 9 June, 1985

"If a tree is rendered in the forest and there's no light source, does it cast a shadow?"
-- Ancient SIGGRAPH Zen Riddle

Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas ... with the music at top volume and at least a pint of ether.
-- H.S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"

"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come."
-- Matt Groening

Colvard's Logical Premises:
        All probabilities are 50%.  
        Either a thing will happen or it won't.

Colvard's Unconscionable Commentary:
        This is especially true when dealing 
        with someone you're attracted to.

Grelb's Commentary
        Likelihoods, however, are 90% against you.

The first time, it's a KLUDGE!
The second, a trick.
Later, it's a well-established technique!
-- Mike Broido, Intermetric

And Jesus asked unto them, "And whom do you say that I am?"
They answered, "You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of our being, the ontological foundation of the context of our very selfhood revealed."
And Jesus replied, "Uhh, what??"
-- Charley Kline on uiuc.general

"Yeah, but the config file... it's like the Necronomicon. You are warned away, but you go regardless, hoping to learn unearthly secrets. If your sanity survives, you spend the rest of your life conversing with daemons, running from shoggoths, and striking fear in to most mortals. I dont know whether it has driven me insane or revealed to me deep secrets about the universe."
-- Victoria Lease on sendmail 7/11/96

"See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux, you have to be a sneaky bastard too ;-)"
-- Linus Torvalds

"The 'net is bizarre. It's such a cool place to live."
-- Scott Banister

"What! I don't know about you, but *I* don't live on the 'net."
-- Max Levchin

"I sure as hell don't live in Champaign-Urbana, that would be depressing!"
-- Scott Banister

"Wrong ID or fish slapped."
-- one of Max's amazing error messages

"We run an outlaw band here. You just stick a network connection, and a bunch of computers, and a bunch of dorks in an office... and it's lots of fun."
-- Scott Banister, about SponsorNet

Most people aren't aware of the fact that UNIX actually dates back to the Cthulhuvian epoch, and was widely used in R'lyeh. The R'lyehish word fhtagn is actually a technical term, and literally means "sleeps on an event". Thus, Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn literally means "in his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits blocked on I/O".
-- Andrew C. Bulhak

"This patch fixes the Problem of Evil and the dangling-else ambiguity."
-- Andrew C. Bulhak

"Do not thump the book of G'Quon. It is disrespectful."
-- G'Kar

"[You] wouldn't know satire if it walked up to you on the street bare naked, bit your ass, and then proceeded to put on a rainbow colored afro wig and started jumping up and down singing 'The time to get a clue is now!'"
-- Joel Jones on satire

"Well then it would just turn into a class and you guys would all ditch."
-- Alan Braverman, on why he doesn't like a teacher-student setting for SigSoft meetings.

"The moral of the story is there's no PEZ today, but you can still learn X."
-- Alan Braverman at a SigSoft Meeting

"We don't print around here. That's barbaric."
"Ahr. If it can't be faxed, it's crap!"
-- B. Swetland and D. Wellman

"There are only two ways of dealing with women...and neither of them work."
-- Jeff Thompson

"My God. Whoever's piloting that shuttle's a madman!"
-- Ivanova (about Londo), "A Voice in the Wilderness II"

"Now, uh, landing thrusters. Landing thrusters. If I were a landing thruster, which one of these would I be?"
-- Londo, "A Voice in the Wilderness II"

"It is a natural law. Physics tells us that for every action, there must be an equal and opposite reaction. They hate us, we hate them, they hate us back and so, here we are, victims of mathematics."
-- Londo, "A Voice in the Wilderness I"

"Before they get out of that room, I want to run them through every emotion in the book."
"Oh. Well, which emotion are they being put through now?"
"Boredom. Which is going to take a while."
-- From Interface

"Mr. Roark, we're alone here. Why don't you tell me what you think of me? In any words you wish. No one will hear us." "But I don't think of you"
-- Toohey & Roark, "The Fountainhead" by Ayn Rand

Men hate passion, any great passion. Henry Cameron made a mistake: he loved his work. That was why he fought. That was why he lost.
-- from "The Fountainhead" by Ayn Rand

"We don't understand the software, and sometimes we don't understand the hardware, but we can *see* the blinking lights!"
-- Unknown

"Its much more fun to be sand than oil in the machinery of life."
-- Unknown

"Ivanova is always right. I will listen to Ivanova. I will not ignore Ivanova's recommendations. Ivanova is God. And if this ever happens again, Ivanova will personally rip your lungs out!"
-- Ivanova (re: Babylon 5 mantra), "A Voice in the Wilderness I"

"Understanding is a three-edged sword"
-- Kosh (Babylon 5)

"The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote."
-- Kosh (Babylon 5)

"My god, man. We've become a tourist attraction. See the Great Fallen Centauri Republic. Open nine to five...Earth Time."
-- Londo Mollari (Babylon 5)

"I think that's illegal in Illinois."
-- Ben Gross, after listening to Dan Pape read off names of Thai dishes.

"We puke on the shoes of traditional design."
-- Dave Morgan, commenting on the "Let's put a FPGA in there and worry about what it does later" philosophy of board layout.

"Augh. My boss comes up to me and says 'One of the users, he wants you to call him right away - its an emergency.' 'What is it?', i ask him? 'Oh. He can't seem to find a news group about making clay pots.' I respond, 'This is not my job.'"
-- Pat Dughi

"I need a phone number off a piece of source code in the cabinet."
-- Jason Lindquist

"mail? that's so asyncronous"
-- Dan Simms

"My goal is to graduate and never see corn again."
-- Matt (A co-worker)

"If I could get HEAD with Mosaic, I'd stay at work all the time."
-- Dan Pape

"Be a realist. The glass is twice as large as it needs to be."
-- Greg Kaiser

"Of course my answer is it probably isn't water."
"Why?"
"Because I'm a cynic."
-- Brandon Long, Dave Jeske, and Brandon Long

"F is for Fun (and Fortran)"
-- Jeremy Leboy, commenting on CS110F

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, I could get the word processor file, but it seemed like too much work"
-- Amy Ryan, after editing postscript for 45 minutes...

"emacs misadjustment is painful --- vi is like a big 'ol bench seat in a mid-70's GM."
-- Joel Jones, on the dangers of a poorly adjusted editor.

"It's Illinois! You're supposed to _love_ candy-corn. You can only get candy-wheat in Kansas."
-- Dave Morgan, confused by our disgust at candy-corn.

"I don't have to sync it or do some kind of powerdown sequence or something?"
-- Joel Jones, on shutting down ACM's laser printer.

"I think KA9Q was based on a phone conversation with the guy who read Comer and who did the linux net/1"
-- Dave Jeske, lamenting the lack of a good TCP/IP stack in VSTa

"That chocolate flavor dip is pretty gross. Its gonna be awful hard to finish it."
-- Pat Dughi

"I just couldn't parse your clothing."
-- Joel Jones, after doing a double-take at Amy's coat & dress combo. The ensuing discussion of what kind of grammar clothing parsers use is too frightening to repeat here.

"With a name like Ithamar, you don't *need* a middle name."
-- Ish

"The last thing I need to do is to get hit upside the head with a dildo."
-- Ish, commenting on a Green Day opening act mentioned by Kristin

"Who needs television -- I have ISDN."
-- Ben Gross

"This is like bad devil music."
-- Norbert Burger commenting on Soul Coughing's "Bus to Beelzebub"

"Nothing sucks like a Sun."
-- Joe Gross, commenting on ux4 rebooting.

"Look! They they did the About Box first!"
-- Jay Kreibich, commenting on the fact that the sign in front of the new Chilli's in Champaign was up far in advance of the building.

"I could take it upon myself as a loyal american to win one for Bill. to win one for Al Gore, to win one for approximately 100 members of the house of representatives."
-- Greg Kaiser, expounding on his "Baseballs for Peace" web project.

"Hey, Blow me! I've been having to come up with jokes to keep you amused to do my work for me for the last half hour!."
-- An offended Greg Kaiser after Dave Morgan suggested he was not putting much effort into his CS231 lab.

"Have you ever done an MP and thought, 'Wow! I sure learned a lot by doing this MP!'?"
-- Dan Pape on the CS Dept's Machine Problems.

"It's everything about 0's and 1's... or much ado about nothing and its complement."
-- Prof. Loui of Boolean Algebra

"I think I see Richard Nixon in the west coast..."
-- Commentary on Jay's map of the United States

"Repeat after me: 'Prioritized interrupts are braindamage'"
-- Linus Torvalds on the linux-680x0 mailing list.

"The IO's a bitch."
-- A.C. Patel on neurological computing.

"Hickie warfare is a lot like nuclear warfare. Nobody wins."
-- Joe Gross

"My ass just ordered pop. I hate it when that happens."
-- Jason Weiss, after backing into the ACM soda machine while it was in full-auto mode and dropped a bunch of cans..

"if your waterbed has whitecaps, that means you're having TOO MUCH FUN."
"i think whitecaps would be a "bad thing" (tm)"
-- Jon Roma and Joe Gross on #uiuc.

"You can tell Joe's been using EMACS. There are EMACS droppings."
-- Jill Smith, commenting on a bunch of files endings with tildes.

"I've found that spaghetti sauce simmers best when you play opera at it."
-- Dave Morgan

BW: "I can't get up."
KB: "Can't get what up?"
...
BW: "That's fucking four times tonight."
...
BW: "Noooooo... Rape!"
-- Brian White and Kristin Buxton at Julie's party. 4/22/95.

"Dude, your home page is dull. Where is the high school graduation picture? Where's the link to your best friend's girlfriend's home page? Where's the list of the last 25 CD's you listened to?"
-- Alan Braverman, on uiuc.test.

"For the 8 months I've been there, I've added 12 lines of source code to Mosaic and 10 of them have been commented out."
-- Jay Kreibich, about his NCSA job, 4/13/95.

"Getting a message from the past is easy... you just write it on a piece of paper, stick it in a box, and open it later. Happens all the time."
-- Luke Nosek on space-time theory

"We need to make sure the information they give us is what we want to hear"
-- Norbert Burger, 4/9/95

"Sleep is a poor subsititue for caffeine."
-- Pat Dughi (see the following quote)

"It is through coffee alone I set my mind in motion
it is through the caffeine in my veins
that the thoughts acquire speed
the hands acquire shaking
the shaking becomes a warning
it is through coffee alone I set my mind in motion."
-- found by Pat Dughi (w/ appologies to Frank Herbert)

"You have to be prepared to fail, and I have failed about half the time, I guess. But you simply have to pick yourself up and go at it again with whatever insights you've gained from your failure. If you do keep trying, you will occasionally do something worthwhile."
-- Seymour Cray

"What a tame looking band of weird people."
-- Manu, commenting on a group 'photo' of Discordians at Capricon XV.

"The algorithms you pull out of your ass are pretty shitty."
-- Dave Morgan

"If you have an infinate number of monkeys and an infinate number of Sparcs, they will eventually code Solaris."
-- Dave Morgan

"Core files are the dog shit of UNIX."
-- Jason Lindquist

"Wake up Sleepless! Wake up!!!"
-- Max Levchin, to ACM's bogged down RS/6000

"It's supposed to be unhappy. It's unix."
-- Ben Gross

"# Make the SysAdmin warm and fuzzy"
-- IRIX 5's /etc/rc2

"Application unexpectedly quit."
-- my favorite mac error message

"If you don't run Motif I say, 'stick your head up your butt'"
-- Alan Braverman on X Window System Programming

"You're *such* a mac person."
-- Joe Gross

"I refuse to believe the afterlife is run by you. The world is not so badly designed."
-- Picard to Q in STTNG/Tapestry

"Oh! Smells like ANSI's been here."
-- Larry Wall, Perl 5 Configure Script

"Your stdio isn't very std. Your stdio looks like linux."
-- Larry Wall, Perl5 Configure Script

"Back, evil bubble fiend!"
-- me

"Good... bad... I'm the guy with the gun."
-- Ash, from Army of Darkness.

"Back off man. I'm a scientist."
-- Dr. P. Venkman, ever seen Ghostbusters?