Sunday, 12 April 2009

Quotes of Note or Nonsense



A few quotes of note.

From SMH Heckler: "This Government needs to concentrate on what they were elected to do - they should put more effort into providing services and spend less time imposing draconian penalties for minor, harmless breaches of outdated laws. (Our Note: We emphasise HARMLESS and relate it to a $330 fine for walking your dog on an empty beach at 7.30am in Sydney).

From The Castle movie:
Federal court judge: And what law are you basing this argument on?
Darryl Kerrigan: The law of bloody common sense!

"It is often easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission."
"If it's a good idea, go ahead and do it. It's much easier to apologise than it is to get permission."
One of my heroines, a fellow engineer and a co-worker at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) for one amazing year before she died at age 85 in 1992. - Grace Murray Hopper. For several years I was the only female hardware engineer for DEC in Australia - I left in favour of corporate environmental management when things started to go the way of desktop, PC computing. (Oceancare link, computer recycling link, bush walking link)

From the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 1994: "When Admiral Grace Murray Hopper died, the world lost an inspiration to women and scientists everywhere. Her outstanding contributions to computer science benefited academia, industry, and the military." I lost an inspiration too, but of course her brilliance and brazenness (meaning she was not a lady-in-waiting) continue to inspire me. She believed that the decisions of the past were not the best method to choose the way forward. How novel!

Last week I worked on a case to keep pets in a NSW Strata. The owner's corporation objection to the application was based solely on the premise that the past predicts the future. How annoying...but none-the-less we achieved pets in strata, a success no doubt aided by such a illogical argument.