User:Apollo Aridian
Second Life Name: Apollo Aridian
Point of Contact
As well as in-world, I can be reached at the following e-mail address: apollo.aridian {a/t} googlemail.com.
Obligatory Quotes
"Like any place in Reality, the Street is subject to development. Developers can build their own small streets feeding off of the main one. They can build buildings, parks, signs, as well as things that do not exist in Reality, such as vast hovering overhead light shows, special neighborhoods where the rules of three-dimensional spacetime are ignored, and free-combat zones where people can go to hunt and kill each other." - Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash.
"You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones." - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet.
"It's fairly clear that one cannot code from the ground up in bazaar style. One can test, debug and improve in bazaar style, but it would be very hard to originate a project in bazaar mode. Linus didn't try it. I didn't either. Your nascent developer community needs to have something runnable and testable to play with." - Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
"Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth. There is no spoon. Then you'll see, that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself." - The Wachowski Brothers, The Matrix.
"Show a man the ultimate meaning of life and he will argue against it, preferring instead his own derivation: Not through arrogance, but because he is naturally suspicious, because society has taught him to be mistrustful, because he is a freethinker. Now tell that same man that the ultimate meaning of life is but a whimsy of his condition: that he clings desperately to the belief that there exists in this cosmos some fundamental meaning or rationale for existence purely as a mental safeguard against the crushing expanse of a meaningless destiny and he will yet disagree, arguing that he requires not the validation of God, nor that of the cosmos, or any other such entity. He thinks, therefore he is. Yet he holds an opinion over both sides of the dispute and those opinions hold sway over him. He believes the question to be provably true or provably false and seeks the validation of this proof: thus he believes in the existence of the ultimate truth or believes in the lack of its existence, but he does not believe in it. This is why man can never know the truth."
