My Pictures & Collected Quotes

9th November 2011

(Once upon a time I would have described myself as “Slightly below average” in programming skill. I have since learned that I had a radically skewed impression of the skill distribution, that programming skill is not what people actually optimize for, and that modesty is against my interests. These days if you ask me how good of a programmer I am I will start telling you stories about how I have programmed systems which helped millions of kids learn to read or which provably made companies millions. The question of where I am on the bell curve matters to no one, so why bother worrying about it?)

15th October 2011

What you can spend and what you can afford are very different things.

15th October 2011

What you can spend and what you can afford are very different things.

10th August 2011

If you think you are an idealist, get off twitter, put down your placard, stop gazing at your navel to examine your privilege. Put your money and time where your mouth is. Go and volunteer in a primary school and sit with those who are struggling to read, go and become a school governor, go and do a bit of training to become an adult advocate so that when one of these kids goes through the judicial system and their parents can’t or won’t participate in the process, you can be called on to speak to and for them. If you can’t do any of those things, work an extra shift or do some baby-sitting to free up a colleague or friend who can. Unlike gesture politics, these acts will make a difference. I’ve seen the difference they can make; I’ve seen the tragically slight difference between the 20th and 21st percentile. It’s the difference between me and my brothers, between prison and college. It’s the difference between the young offender I taught in Cardiff and his cellmates. His daughter, proudly ruffled in a dozen layers of pink lace, was christened with his probationer officer’s and my first names, because as he said, without us, he’d be ‘dead, not a dad’. I was touched by that comment, but I also thought the tragedy was that most boys who started out like him were both not dead and serial dads. His daughter is very lucky, she’ll be brought up with different values to those he grew up with. Aspiration, like alienation is very easy to spread. You just have to get off both your arse and your moral highground to spread it.

3rd August 2011

Hindsight, I think, is a useless tool. We, each of us, are at a place in our lives because of innumerable circumstances, and we, each of us, have a responsibility to move along life’s road, to find a better path if this one does not suit, or to walk happily along this one if it is indeed our life’s way. Changing even the bad things that have gone before would fundamentally change who we are, and whether or not that would be a good thing, I believe, it is impossible to predict.
So I take my past experiences… and try to regret nothing.

12th July 2011

You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage - pleasantly, smilingly, nonapologetically - to say ‘no’ to other things. And the way to do that is by having a bigger ‘yes’ burning inside. The enemy of the ‘best’ is often the ‘good’.

27th June 2011

People who do not love themselves can adore others, because adoration is making someone else big and ourselves small. They can desire others, because desire comes out of a sense of inner incompleteness, which demands to be filled. But they can not love others, because love is an affirmation of the living growing being in all of us. If you don’t have it, you can’t give it.

27th June 2011

The fate of your heart is your choice and no one else gets a vote.

27th June 2011

The appearance of things changes according to the emotions; and thus we see magic and beauty in them, while the magic and beauty are really in ourselves.

26th June 2011

Hi ananth! I just make a playlist on mixpod, get the code for blogger and just paste it onto the tumblr customize page and reduce the height and width to 1 :]

Thanks paperheart-t for telling me how to play music on page load on tumblr.