“You should always call a mountain Grandmother, to show respect. Did you know that?

“The Trans-Sahara Highway is one of the oldest transnational highways in Africa and one of the most complete, having been proposed in 1962, with construction of sections in the Sahara starting in the 1970s. Its central section is still little-used though, and still requires special vehicles and precautions to be taken to survive the harsh environment and climate of the centre of the desert.

“According to the incomplete poem Achilleis written by Statius in the first century AD, when Achilles was born his mother Thetis tried to make him immortal by dipping him in the river Styx. However, she forgot to wet the heel she held him by, leaving him vulnerable at that spot. It is not clear if this version of events was known earlier.

“When you fix a problem for a user, tell them it’s fixed. Don’t tell them how you fixed the problem, or even give them the details of what the problem is. Tech talk is not interesting to most people, and worse, may make them feel inadequate or patronized.

“Social networking sites” on the net are creating nothing new, but rather recreating things we do already - and things in some sense that have been destroyed by our modern/suburban urban designs. With modern society we’ve removed many of the connections of our social networks, and our geographical connection to them as well. The net is rebuilding them, and allowing us to find them around us in the physical world as well.

“If you try to impose a global ordering to the transactions across a lot of systems, it is very much like the way Newton thought of the Universe with time marching forward uniformly everywhere.

The move from this [classical] distributed computing to SOA is like moving from Newton’s Universe to Einstein’s Universe.

“It is better to just implement a language, like in Python’s case, than have a standard and many implementations.

“It is better to bet on yourself than on other people.

“Is it possible to build a successful business without great customer service? Yes. Absolutely. There are untold numbers of profitable businesses that resent and mistreat their customers. It’s up to you to decide if your company is going to make customer service a competitive advantage.

“Knowing the tool-du-jour is very different from knowing the structure of a large class of tools. The beauty of Scheme is that it has reified the structure of a truly huge range of tools into a fairly simple programming language.