1. The likelihood that any digital device will fail is directly proportional to your need for that device to work properly.
2. Your laptop will wait to die until just after your warranty for the system has expired. The encouraging news is that taking out an extended warranty of one year will likely extend your machine's life by exactly that length of time.
3. Voice mail messages always break up and become unintelligible just as the caller is leaving his or her call-back number. Note that this rule applies only to important calls that you absolutely need to return.
4. "While supplies last" is a synonym for "until the guy right in front of you buys the last one."
5. You know the next great version with all the features you really want? It won't be released until right after you've bought the previous version. (And if you decide to wait for that next great version, it will be delayed. Probably for a long time. Or maybe forever.)
--from Steve Fox's "Techlog" column, PC World magazine, March 2011.
Coloring inside the lines
I wrote a play, "Picasso at the Lapin Agile," about a conversation between Picasso and Einstein. There's a scene with an art dealer and he's waxing rhapsodic about a painting and he says, "You know what makes this painting great? The frame. It forces a containment and the painter has to work within the boundaries. They have to innovate within." I like that [about bluegrass]. Here's what you've got, now what you can do with it?
--Steve Martin in The Wall Street Journal, March 11, 2011
