Inspiration

Aincient Bookplate

Steale not this book for fear of shame
For here you see ye owner hys name
And when you die ye Lord will saye
Where is that boke you stole away?
Then if you say, you cannot telle,
Ye Lord will saye, then go to helle.

"I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving. To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it, but we must sail and not drift, nor lie at anchor."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes

An unfailingly polite lady called to ask for help with a Windows installation that had gone terribly wrong.

Customer: "I brought my Windows disks from work to install them on my home computer."

Training stresses that we are "not the Software Police," so I let the little act of piracy slide.

Tech Support: "Umm-hmm. What happened?"

Customer: "As I put each disk in it turns out they weren't initialized."

Tech Support: "Do you remember the message exactly, ma'am?"

Customer: (proudly) "I wrote it down. 'This is not a Macintosh disk. Would you like to initialize it?'"

Tech Support: "Er, what happened next?"

Customer: "After they were initialized, all the disks appeared to be blank. And now I brought them back to work, and I can't read them in the A: drive; the PC wants to format them. And this is our only set of Windows disks for the whole office. Did I do something wrong?"

"The relativism which is not willing to speak about truth but only about 'what is true for me' is an evasion of the serious business of living. It is the mark of a tragic loss of nerve in our contemporary culture. It is a preliminary symptom of death."
- Leslie Newbigin