Cryptonomicon fortune file

Cryptonomicon is an excellent novel written by Neal Stephenson. The book has a certain amount of geek-appeal, so I found it natural (while reading it the second time) to mark all quotable passages and later create a fortune collection for use on my homepage.

The collection can be downloaded by by clicking here. If you wish to use it on your own homepage, I recommend my PHP Fortune script.

Examples of the included quotes are shown on the right. Reload this page to see more. Some people may find some of the quotes mildly offensive. Please make sure to look through all the quotes before using it.

The family Altamira is vast enough to constitute an ethnic group unto itself, and all of them live in the same building - practically in the same room.

Given enough time and enough vacuum tubes, a tool might be invented to sum a column of numbers, and another one to keep track of inventories and another one to alphabetize lists of words. A well-equipped business would have one of each: gleaming cast-iron monsters with heat waves rising out of their grilles, emblazoned with logos like ETC and Siemens and Hollerith, each carrying out its own specialized task. Just as a carpenter had a miter box and a dovetail jig and clawhammer in his box.

He had noticed a pink mist in the cabin, and supposed that it was produced by a hydraulic fluid leak. But the hydraulic system now seems hunky-dory, and the stuff on the floor of the plane is not a petroleum product. It is the same red fluid that figured so prominently in Shaftoe's nightmare. It is streaming downhill from the direction of Lieutenant Ethridge's cozy nest, and the Lieutenant is no longer snoring.