Dave Tompkins :: Teaching :: profQUOTES

My profQUOTES, as quoted in mathNEWS (good and bad).

Volume 122, No. 2, May 31, 2013

"I'm so easy to derail. Game of Thrones, Walking Dead, my baby... hey, wanna see some baby pictures?"
"You love it, you want to marry it, that's how much you love your code."
"All the kids these days die on peanut butter."
That's like a rearview mirror, doesn't really matter." [you can drive without it but it's better if you have one]
That's pretty much the life of a cat. You sleep, you eat, you sleep, you die."
"If you have all these registers it's like mo' money, mo' problems."
"If you see someone screaming at Starbucks, they're volatile. That's where the word comes from."
"We're going to talk about different methods for using the bathroom today."
"Consumers are people who like to eat the bread. I'm obviously a consumer."
Student: "Where do we find that?"
Prof: "Uh... on da google?"
"You could wait for more toilet paper, but the door's locked, so that's not going to happen."
"This is our werewolf killing box."
"Chopsticks are the way to go now, according to Wikipedia."

Volume 122, No. 3, June 14, 2013

Student: "So what if we fork again?"
Prof: "Oh yeah, right after you fork you wanna fork again."
"I'll do that again, you obviously didn't think it was as cool as I did."
Prof: "Rhymes with 'flallock'."
Student: "Phallic?"
Prof: "malloc."
Student: "What if we quote you on that?"
Prof: "You better quote me saying 'don't quote me on that'"
"I'll work on my Pacman sound effects. Wokka wokka wokka wokka wokka."
"Like you guys beat lizards? I don't know what you do."
"When they said 'don't divide by zero', they never told you 'or else I'll kill you!'"
"Are you allowed to kill your child? Are you allowed to kill your parent? You decide."
"Cuz I'm old. That's pretty much the reason."

Volume 122, No. 4, June 28, 2013

"For those of you with only 5 friends or less, this is awesome."
"So it goes from ooooooooo (0x00000000) to seven-fuff-uff (0x7FFFFFFF)"
"Go look at the segmentation on an Intel chip. You'll need to take a shower, it's so icky."

Volume 122, No. 5, July 12, 2013

"Yesterday I went to the bank to negotiate my mortgage. That's about as grown up as you get kids."
Prof: "Knock knock"
Student: "Who's..."
Prof: "Interrupting cow! MOOOO!"
"I rarely teach; I lecture. I hope you learn, and you hope I teach."
"Look at this diagram. See, it's not something I made up."
"If it's too damn high, you ain't doing a good job."
"My OS prof, who was quite a hoot, went to Africa to shoot rhinos or something."
"Do you want your operating system to be a communist?"
"Maybe by the time I retire I'll explain concepts so hard it'll make a nose bleed."
"It would be awesome if I got a nose bleed."
"I think I feel like some of your kernels, because I just want to crash."
"How clean are your friends? You might want to evict your dirty friends."
"I don't know if 'accessing' your friends is the right word."

Volume 122, No. 6, July 26, 2013

"How many of you have used 'nice' before? Oh look, only one nice guy in the room."
"I couldn't find a good Wikipedia article about it, so I might have made it up"
"I've got a big drawer of stuff that I no longer have drivers for."
"I've written drivers for devices and I know the sequence of events that will crash the operating system."
"I'm all grown up, in theory."
"I guess you don't really date, a better analogy is a job interview."
Student: "Mini Kit-Kat or a Toblerone?"
Prof: "Watcha want. I've got a Costco membership."
"I didn't think touch worked that way. It's been a while since I touched something"
"[swears]. You already did my teacher evaluations, so it's OK."
"Now if a pretty girl comes over, I don't fix her disk drive. I learned my lesson."
"If you wanna be safe, fill up your memory with pictures of your cat."