A Quote by Patricia Cornwell

When I was at college there were two things I vowed I'd never do. One was go to a funeral and the other was deal with computers. And then I ended up being a computer programmer in a morgue.
Before 'Dilbert,' I tried to become a computer programmer. In the early days of computing, I bought this big, heavy, portable computer for my house. I spent two years nights and weekends trying to write games that I thought I would sell. Turns out I'm not that good a programmer, so that was two years that didn't work out.
The first thing I think, I was building computers, I started to build a computer when I was 17 or 18 at home, an IBM compatible computer, and then I started to sell computers, and when I sold a computer to a company called Ligo I think, and they were selling systems which became blockbuster.
Every disruptive innovation is powered by a simplifying technology, and then the technology has to get embedded in a different kind of a business model. The first two decades of digital computing were characterized by the huge mainframe computers that filled a whole room, and they had to be operated by PhD Computer Scientists. It took the engineers at IBM about four years to design these mainframe computers because there were no rules. It was an intuitive art and just by trial and error and experimentation they would evolve to a computer that worked.
I'd been on a road trip right out of college, with a buddy of mine. It was uneventful. We didn't get laid. Although one time it was about 800 degrees and we were in Texas. We had shorts on and nothing else and somehow a motorcycle cop pulls up beside me and says, 'Come on, get on it, get on, go, go, go!' So I speeded up and it turns out we're in a huge state funeral. There are about 40 black Cadillacs in a row and then a green van called Mr Greenjeans, with two guys with no clothes in it.
It always helps to be a good programmer. It is important to like computers and to be able to think of things people would want to do with their computers.
When you think about it, there's no way to input things into a computer. It's all... the holes only go out, right? Like you can plug a keyboard or a mouse in but that's a trick because the computer thinks the inputs are outputs. That's a programmer trick, basically magic. The key to the future is to make holes that go in too.
. . . So I vowed to keep myself alive, but only if I would never use me again for just me - each one of us is born of two, and we really belong to each other. I vowed to do my own thinking, instead of trying to accommodate everyone else's opinion, credo's and theories. I vowed to apply my inventory of experiences to the solving of problems that affect everyone aboard planet Earth.
One day, my youngest uncle - the other one who was first to go to college, Randy - and I were sitting out on the front porch. And he was brilliant. He ended up - he just retired from Boeing Aircraft in Wichita, Kansas.
Everybody had to go to some college or other. A business college, a junior college, a state college, a secretarial college, an Ivy League college, a pig farmer's college. The book first, then the work.
They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind.
At our computer club, we talked about it being a revolution. Computers were going to belong to everyone, and give us power, and free us from the people who owned computers and all that stuff.
When my friends who were college age took a year off of school, they'd play in Weatherbox, or between high school and college. People always joined on a short-term basis and I did things one day at a time, I guess. There was never a big plan when someone was joining. They were never joining on a full-time membership basis. Since then, we just deal with it. I'd like to have a band that's a total constant, but it's probably not realistic at some point.
Interestingly, when you do films, sometimes you have conscious reasons, things that you were looking for, or stuff that you were trying to do. And then, you see the film and you think, "Wow, it ended up being something totally different!"
Hugh Grant and I both laugh and cringe at the same things, worship the same books, eat the same food, hate central heating and sleep with the window open. I thought these things were vital, but being two peas in a pod ended up not being enough.
My first introduction to computers and computer programming came during my freshman year of college. I majored in electrical engineering with a minor in computer science, so I learned during my required courses at Vanderbilt University.
I am a granddaughter of immigrants, put myself through college as a waitress, and I started my career as a computer programmer.
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