“Each of you will adopt an empty cubicle and decorate it to appear occupied.”
Dilbert: The cubicle
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Tag Archives: Quotable
Douglas Rushkoff on AOL
“AOL never had a future. AOL was a training ground. An introduction to the Internet for people who didn’t know how to deal with ftp protocols. None of us thought it could last, because once the technological barriers to entry for the Internet had been lowered, no one would need AOL’s simplistic interface or it’s child-safe, digital content wading pools. People would want to get on the *real* Internet, using real browsers and email programs.” — Douglas Rushkoff
Internet of things
“One day every possession will be tagged, and a radio signal will reveal the location of every object. That’s my dream. In the meantime, I’m going to attach my web address to everything valuable that might get lost.”
— Nick Denton has a dream and a good idea.
The Torrent
“Picture a very swift torrent, a river rushing down between rocky walls. There is a long, shallow bar of sand and gravel that runs right down the middle of the river. It is under water. You are born and you have to stand on that narrow, submerged bar, where everyone stands. The ones born before you, the ones older than you, are upriver from you. The younger one stand braced on the bar downriver. And the whole long bar is slowly moving down that river of time, washing away at the upstream end and building up downstream.
Your time, the time of all your contemporaries, schoolmates, your loves and your adversaries, is that part of the shifting bar on which you stand. And it is crowded at first. You can see the way it thins out, upstream from you. The old ones are washed away and their bodies go swiftly buy, like logs in the current. Downstream where the younger ones stand thick, you can see them flounder, lose footing, wash away. Always there is more room where you stand, but always the swift water grows deeper, and you feel the shift of the sand and the gravel under your feet as the river wears it away. Someone looking for a safer place to stand can nudge you off balance, and you are gone. Someone who has stood beside you for a long time gives a forlorn cry and you reach to catch their hand, but the fingertips slide away and they are gone. There are the sounds in the rocky gorge, the roar of the water, the shifting, gritty sound of the sand and the gravel underfoot, the forlorn cries of despair as the nearby ones, and the ones upstream, are taken by the current. Some old ones who stand on a good place, well braced, understanding currents and balance, last a long time. Far downstream from you are the thin, startled cries of the ones who never got planted, never got set, never quite understood the message of the torrent.”
–From John D. MacDonald’s Pale Gray for Guilt
Everybody on the Web is famous to 15 people
In an interview on Tom Peters’ website, David Weinberger, author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web and coauthor of The Cluetrain Manifesto, offers the following on Weblogs:
“If you browse randomly through these 500,000 to a million Weblogs, most of them that you come across will be uninteresting to you. But, so what? It’s not that everybody on the Web is famous for 15 minutes. It’s that everybody on the Web is famous to 15 people.”
No way back
“Sally was looking at a map now and said to the red-haired agent, “We’re on Sixty-four, right? Because if we’re on Forty-four, we’ll wind up down in Bumfuck, Missouri, and there’s no way back.”
From John Sandford’s latest novel, Mortal Prey. Most of the story takes place in St. Louis and I mention it here for my friends to live or lived there.
“I want more life, fucker.”
I had my 54th birthday a week or so back and this line (from Ridley Scott’s 1982 scil-fi classic, Blade Runner) kept running through my head. Replicant Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) goes to see Eldon Tyrell (Joe Turkel), the scientist that “designed” the not-quite-human Roy. Tyrell attempts to comfort Roy:
“The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long – and you have burned so very, very brightly, Roy.”
But Roy’s not having any of it and proceeds to poke Tyrell’s eyes out. As Roy observes,
“It’s not an easy thing to meet your maker”
…but I thought he handled himself pretty well. He came for some answers –if not a solution to his problem– and he was damn well gonna get them.
The replicants of Blade Runner only got four years (I think Sean Young’s character got more than that) but it wasn’t so much how many years they got as that they knew when they were going to die. Maybe in the end, Pris (played by Daryl Hannah) got it right:
“Then we’re stupid and we’ll die.”
We are and we will.
When You Die
“When you die, it is said you see your whole life. But you don’t see it minute by minute, like a speeded-up film. It’s like everything you ever did in all your days was a brushstroke, and now you see the whole painting all at once.”
— Everybody Dies, Lawrence Block
Boiler Room
A great “sales” scene from Boiler Room (2000), written and directed by Ben Younger and staring Giovanni Ribisi, Ben Affleck, Scott Caan, Vin Diesel and Nia Long. The movie was just so-so, but the scene in which Ben Affleck’s character (Jim Young) explains things to a bunch of trainees in a small-time brokerage house is… chilling.
Jim Young: “Goddammit, you fuckin’ guys. I’m gonna keep this short, okay? You passed your sevens over a month ago. Seth’s the only one that’s opened the necessary forty accounts for his team leader. When I was a junior broker I did it in 26 days. Okay? You’re not sendin’ out press packets anymore. None of this Debbie the Time Life operator bullshit. So get on the phones, it’s time to get to work. Get off your ass! Move around. Motion creates emotion. I remember one time I had this guy call me up, wanted to pitch me, right? Wanted to sell me stock. So I let him. I got every fuckin rebuttal outta this guy, kept him on the phone for an hour and a half. Towards the end I started askin him buying questions, like what’s the firm minimum? That’s a buying question, right there that guys gotta take me down. It’s not like I asked him, what’s your 800 number, that’s fuckoff question. I was givin him a run and he blew it. Okay? To a question like what is the firm minimum, the answer is zero. You don’t like the idea, don’t pick up a single share. But this putz is tellin me you know, uhh, 100 shares? Wrong answer! No! You have to be closing all the time. And be aggressive, learn how to push! Talk to ’em. Ask ’em questions… ask ’em rhetorical questions, it doesn’t matter, anything, just get a yes out of ’em. If you’re drowning and I throw you a life jacket would you grab it? Yes! Good. Pick up 200 shares I won’t let you down. Ask them how they’d like to see thirty, forty percent returns. What are they gonna say, no? Fuck you? I don’t wanna see those returns. Stop laughing, it’s not funny. If you can’t learn how to close, you better start thinkin about another career. And I am deadly serious about that. Dead fuckin serious. And have your rebuttals ready, guy says call me tommorrow? Bullshit! Somebody tells you th-they money problems about buyin 200 shares is lying to you. You know what I say to that? I say, hey look, man, tell me you don’t like my firm, tell me you don’t like my idea, tell me you don’t like my fuckin neck tie, but don’t tell me you can’t put together 2,500 bucks. And there is no such thing as a no-sell call. A sell is made on every call you make. Either you sell the client some stock, or he sells you on a reason he can’t. Either way, a sell is made. The only question is: who’s gonna close? You or him?! Now be relentless. That’s it, I’m done.”
Kind of makes me wonder if Ben Younger liked the Glengarry Glen Ross scene as much as I did.
Figure Skating Is Not A Sport
“If you wear makeup or someone hands you a stuffed animal after you compete, it’s not a sport.” — Sarah Maguffee (after watching Olympic ice skating event)