Blue Notebook Quotes: Volume X


The Big X!



We are a state of highly repressed Scandinavians, and sometimes we like to surprise ourselves.
-Garrison Keillor on Gov. Ventura

Everything died. I know. 
-Jaime Donais, Sysadmin

After all, I'm 23, not dead. 
-Luciana Lopez

There are many great ideas that have come from Apple and many excellent products. iMac is certainly the inbred, autistic, dwarf cousin of all of them. 
-George Weilacher

You only get a small spark of madness in this life. Let it shine. 
-Robin Williams

Best porn I've seen since I stopped buying it. 
-Ivan Kotcher on the Starr Report

I will be paid to go into a courtroom and talk about computers and porno. I love this industry. 
-Sean Mike Whipkey, expert witness

Time to strap on the feed bag and eat up life. 
-Jim Steinkrauss

For those people who like Netscape for religious reasons, I think Microsoft is a bigger evil than AOL. 
-David Card, Jupiter Communications

Not good enough. Perhaps you'd like me to repeat my introduction to the OSI model. 
-Case Ventura, Net-Detective, interrogating space aliens

Ahhh, the eternal struggle, culture vs. agriculture. 
-Noel Munson, on Virginia-Virginia Tech

Monica went down, so now it's the net's turn. 
-Jay Ashworth, NANOG

Should I be drunk before I read this? ... Should we both be drunk? 
-Jennifer Nash

Another girl passes by, and she is more attractive than the former one. 
-Wim Dik, Chairman of KPN, on getting snubbed by AT&T for an international partnership

And then they can centerpunch me on the freeway, or throw a plane at me, and I won't even mind. Because everything I set out to prove, I proved. Everything I set out to say, I said. 
-James Michael Straczynski on the end of B5

I want to get the hell out of here and go home. 
-Joe DiMaggio, recovering from lung surgery (12/98)

You can’t tear Nov. 3 off your calendar last month. It was real. Ask Newt Gingrich. 
-Rep. John Conyers, on continuing impeachment proceedings

The constitution works at football games, too. Especially at football games hosted by public universities. 
-Nick Kessler

Getting into the Hall of Fame and playing in all those World Series were great, but how many people ever have a museum? This is a great honor. 
-Yogi Berra on the Yogi Berra Museum at Montclair State University

Parity is not the American way. The American way is to dominate somebody else. 
-Davey Johnson, Dodgers Manager

Some people are too dumb to breathe but manage to get on the 'net...  
-Sean Mike Whipkey

Never add the mixer first! It just won't come out right when you mix in the booze. 
-Noel Munson

Sir, this is odd, it appears that the collective have stopped their attack...and are having a keg party, sir. 
-Sluggy Freelance

Every day of my life, for the past few years, just reminds me that you do not have to do drugs for life to be surreal or for weird things to happen to you. 
-Ivan Kotcher

Geeks are their own society: a literate, hyperinformed underground. The community accepts people from all walks of life, assuming they have access to the net and the skill to use it. 
-Jeff Spofford

Please do not use the Nanog mailing list as a NOC of first resort. This absolutely does not scale. 
-John Curran, NANOG

Slowly, slowly, democracy has a way of catching up. 
-Anonymous White House official, January 1999

It should be first for the fans, then for the game, then for the Yankees. 
-Joe DiMaggio, January 1999

Computing without encryption is like biology without DNA. 
-Andrew Duncan, ICA

Get past the fear and the doubts. 
-Doug Macbeth

Exposing hypocrisy today serves a purpose, and Flynt has stepped into the vacuum. If the game is sexual McCarthyism, he knows how to play it better than anyone. 
-James Goldsborough, MSNBC

One cannot legitimately hope to improve a nation's free access to information by working to disable its data networks. 
-Statement by a coalition of hacker groups condeming the Legion of Underground's Cyberwar on Iraq and China

The danger of the Internet and satellites that broadcast from a close range threatens us...They broadcast disgraceful, immoral pictures and threaten all humanity and morality and chastity. 
-Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, Jan 1999

Now I'm really not a conspiracy theorist, and I'm really not a paranoid generally. But I do get irritated when I feel someone's making a buck off me and I'm not getting a piece. 
-Ivan Kotcher

At the very least, birthdays are a time for self-reflection, and bearing down on the big four-oh can be rough on anyone. One can only imagine how the Antichrist, the embodiment of all evil, will adjust to midlife flab and sagging. 
-Buck Wolf, ABCNews.com

Drummers are freaks. There's just something wrong with drummers. 
-Walt Mink (From SeanMike's .sig)

The best road trips always ended in sanctions. 
-Wade Craig

When you've got your head in the Net all the time it's easy to forget that there's a world of people (and customers) out there that are not wired and probably never will be. 
-Justin Smart, ICA

We're growing a man in a barrel on our kitchen table. 
-Emily Domalski

All OS's suck. Some just happen to occasionally suck less than others. 
-"BOFH Mantra" as quoted by Jeff Uphoff

How cool you are as a person doesn't necessarily correspond to the # of posts you make on nanog. 
-Hui-Hui Hu, NANOG

Hey, if you can't laugh, you're screwed. 
-Jim Steinkrauss

You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline - it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer. 
-Frank Zappa

Who’s kidding whom here? I have to live with myself. I have to live with my conscience. I have to live with the Constitution. 
-Sen. Robert Byrd, on why he will vote against conviction in the Senate

Could it be the case that many of us have latent split-personalities, and that the Internet is an environment that allows these personalities to split and 'flourish?' 
-Gerry McGovern

In PSINet's defense, they don't suck that much. 
-Johann Hukari

I really don't know what to say except "fuck it" from now on here is my advice for everyone. If things don't go your way, laugh and then say "fuck it" cuz it really doesn't matter. 
-Shannon Mier

Every two weeks, this column will come stumbling in, stinking of stale pizza, covered with the blood, sweat, and tears that come from supporting a sprawling site. 
-Website staff of the Motley Fool, introducing their column in Network World (2/9/99)

The place is in my mind, heart and soul. 
-David Wells, leaving New York, 2/99

Although it varies wildly in depth and duration, the experience of alienation is close to universal among geeks, nerds and Webheads, the people who dreamed up, built and inhabit the most vital parts of the Net and the Web. 
-JonKatz, slashdot.org.

The days are going to be filled with work and the nights with partying, but I guess that's how life is supposed to be. At least for now. 
-Scott Macbeth, on a semester abroad

It would also be cool if the images were super high res so they would meet my sacred axiom of art: "art is better if it can be my desktop image." 
-Rob Malda, slashdot.org

Do I know jack about it? No, but a good Sys Admin inhales the manual in a short time and does the job. 
-Bill Pemberton, sysadmin

The information-age infrastructure that allows consumers to shop anytime and employers to hire anyone, anywhere turns everything and everyone into a fungible commodity. 
-Eugene Linden

Economics really deals with some very basic economic questions. 
-Prof. Belous, GWU

In a society that goes through celebrities like socks, DiMaggio was one of the few who had that special aura that made him immune to the demythologizing forces that grind so many others into dust. 
-Mike Celizik, MSNBC, 3/7/99

A society that produces Zima has no right to criticize the booze of other lands. 
-L. Fitzgerald Sjoberg

My den is turning into a geek command center. 
-Evan Light

Do *not* promote your club/fraternity on this list, for then the LORD your GOD will bend you over your sousaphone and assrape you. 
-The Holy FUQ, Chapter 14, verses 1 through 4, Standard SnM Version (Sean Mike Whipkey) 3/23/99

You’re only going to have two kinds of companies in the future: those companies that go global and those companies that go bankrupt. 
-John Zeglis, Pres. AT&T 3/21/99

Also consumed a pitcher of Icehouse, which almost got me drunk. Christ, I miss Czech beer... 
-C. B. "Wahoo" Wiegand

Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy. 
-The Cluetrain Manifesto, Thesis 7

Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them. 
-ibid, Thesis 20

When a certain group of friends knows each other for a certain amount of time, an odd phenomenon occurs: they part their hair the same way in the exact same spot. You, Peter, and Marshall do this. Scary. 
-Kat Thompson

I don't want to go off to some city where it's ho-hum, let's go watch the game, I want go some place where we're going to get after it and that's what New York is all about. 
-Orel Hershiser, signing with the NY Mets (3/26/99)

My finger hursts becaus alkochol and X-Zacto blades don't mixe. Ouch. dammit. ouch. dammittt. 
-Grover, UVA Arch. '01, drunken email (4/2/99)

I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. 
-Neal Stephenson

The baseball season is supposed to start in Cincinnati. It’s tradition. End of story. 
-John Allen, MSNBC

This, gang, is what would have happened if the Gulf war had been covered by the Bravo channel. 
-MovieJuice on The Thin Red Line

Tunes and speed, what more could you ask for. 
-Jim Steinkrauss on his family's new boat (4/99)

The challenge is to take the Mets back to the playoffs and then somehow make it all the way to the Yankees, so that the baseball century can end with one more Subway Series. 
-Mike Lupica, NY Daily News (4/99)

Incidentally, today I handed in the last paper of my academic career. It was only fitting that the paper concerned the human anus. 
-Nick Kessler, JD

Who cares how it affects the team? This is bigger than wins or losses. You're talking about a guy's life and bigger things than baseball. 
-Chad Curtis, Yankees, on Daryll Strawberry's arrest (4/15/99)

Scouts and managers make the Luddites seem like pushovers. 
-Christopher Koch, CIO Magazine, on IT penetration in baseball dugouts

In the end it is clear that all economic progress rests on competition. 
-Alan Greenspan

Anyone who hits on her will have to make sure his (or her) ears are clean and is wearing pants at least part of the time. 
-Peter Tait, laying down the ground rules for hitting on his younger sister

We can't have a gun control *and* abortion debate going at the same time without taking down at least one server...let's not try. 
-Leah Slife, the Pep-Band mailing list

The Cubs now are 4-1 when the tiny stuffed animals are handed out. 
-Associated Press (4/26/99)

Trust me, it's much more fun when you don't have class. 
-Jeff Hawkins (5/11/99)

This is the third time the Atlantic ocean has fucked with my personal life. 
-Dawn Nafus (5/15/99)

I'll be back when I'm back. 
-Joe Torre, on when he'll return to managing the Yankees (5/16/99)

It is all so typically Boston and, indeed, New England to wallow in history and become trapped in it, rather than to celebrate history while keeping it in its proper place. 
-Bob Ryan, Boston globe (5/99)

Hello everyone. I just accidentally rebooted the file server, so bear with me. 
-Jaime Donais, Sysadmin, on her second-to-last day (5/20/99)

Food, Beer, Wine, Network Diagrams, Conversation. 
-Alan Hannan, NANOG (5/99)

Just as soon as I figure out a way to make or find a waterproof keyboard and monitor, I'll be doing 400KBps from my pool. 
-George Weilacher on network connectivity, (5/99)

Telecom is a great and wondrous thing, with no stupid laws needed, unless you're a moron. 
-Grendel Drago, Slashdot (5/99)

Congrats. You've made your first step towards being a SysAdmin.
There's no escape for you now, I suggest drinking heavily. 
-Bill Pemberton, SysAdmin, (6/99)

Giuliani, on the other hand, is a true New Yorker - which is to say he’s neurotic, aggressive, thin-skinned, whiny, pompous and full of himself. He also has a negative side. 
-James Liecks, MSNBC (6/99)

Kill Jar Jar. Dagauss Often. Live happy. Any questions? 
-Anonymous Coward, slashdot.org (6/99)

I believe that a whole species must have the humility to nurture the Earth and the pride to go to Mars. 
-Buzz Aldrin (6/99)

That's why we need more movies of naked chicks blowing stuff up. 
-Sean Mike Whipkey (6/99)

You sit over there and you watch that ball come out of his hands and you just drool. 
-Tom Kelly, Twins manager, on Pedro Martinez

The manufacture, marketing and distribution of stupid, worthless shit is an unfortunate but unavoidable reality of any modern industrialized nation. 
-C. Brian Mattson, The Onion (6/99)

So imagine the crowd. We have underage devil worshippers, a large gay population, and Star Wars geeks all in the same club. 
-Liz Edwards (6/99)

Some material may not be appropriate for loser dweebs. 
-Imagine Radio ad.

Kids are midgets who pee the bed. Who needs that? 
-The Self Made Critic, The Brunching Shuttlecocks

In this game, in this world, don’t underestimate anybody. 
-Dave Eiland (six career victories, none since 1995), Devil Rays, on his victory over Pedro Martinez (the best pitcher in baseball at the time) (7/99)

E-Commerce is like buying a boat, except in this case it's a hole in the Internet that you're pouring your money into. 
-Justin Tate (7/99)

For a long time, the prices and margins for international telecommunications were better than the drug trade. 
-Ross Mayfield, CEO RateXchange (7/99)

Take a distribution, rename, stamp CDs, IPO. 
-Rob Malda, Geeks in Space, on Linux companies' business models

July 23, 1999


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