Shanti’s Dispatches

Great list of anecdotes on the trials and tribulations here, from some very well-known success stories.

The first on Abraham Lincoln:

As a young man, Abraham Lincoln went to war a captain and returned a private. Afterwards, he was a failure as a businessman. As a lawyer in Springfield, he was too impractical and temperamental to be a success. He turned to politics and was defeated in his first try for the legislature, again defeated in his first attempt to be nominated for congress, defeated in his application to be commissioner of the General Land Office, defeated in the senatorial election of 1854, defeated in his efforts for the vice-presidency in 1856, and defeated in the senatorial election of 1858. At about that time, he wrote in a letter to a friend, “I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth.”

Another one of my favorite quotes:

“If you want to succeed, double your rate of failure.” ~ Thomas J. Watson.

My geeklog / RoR / lolcat blog needed some lovin:

How To: SSH Seamlessly Between OS X and Remote Linux (No Password or passphrase required)

I find that posting something to a blog is the surest sign I’ll remember where to find the info next time I end up needing to do the same or similar thing.

It also forces you to make sure you get the instructions exactly right because you could come under some scrutiny if visitors actually attempt to do what you’re blogging about!

It’s not a perfect system but it works better for me than:

• A) Leaving the instructions buried in my now 1,900+ lines long ‘notes.txt’ file I keep handy on my desktop (that doesn’t count several archived versions that are just as long)
• B) Posting instructions to a Backpack page that eventually gets buried somewhere that I can’t find it and/or remember that I ever made a page for it.

Up next: Backup Brain post on howto SSH seamlessly between two computers sans entering a password or passphrase!