One of my favorite poems. In my language arts class in high school we could memorize poems and recite them to our teacher for up to 0.3 added to our GPA. This was one of them.

This should be framed in the the office or every CEO. Although the point of the poem is the inevitability - maybe a good reminder nonetheless.

Memento mori but for businesses.

I like that for years (and maybe it's still there) the back of the Facebook logo sign out front was a molding and decrepit Sun Microsystems logo. It was there on purpose as a reminder that regardless of how many brilliant engineers you hire, death awaits you when complacency arrives. And if you paid attention you could find little Sun logos still lingering around the MPK campus...

The poem that inspired the best 47 minutes in the history of television [0], which will be studied in high schools 500 years from now like Shakespeare is today.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias_(Breaking_Bad)

First time I watched Emperor's Club, I was like hey isn't this just Ozymandias ? It turned out that's a very common confusion, mined by English highschool teachers

https://www.buffaloschools.org/site/default.aspx?PageType=3&...

Anyway, I just chimed in to say if you really want to understand that poem, Emperor's Club is a must-watch. I still can't believe they made a whole 2 hour commercial Hollywood feature film centered around that poem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_Club

Elsethread I was reminded of one of my favorite collection of essays on software development. The last post in its collection is titled "Ozymandias" http://thecodelesscode.com/case/234

    I chanced upon an ancient cache of code: 
    a stack of printouts, tall as any man, 
    that in decaying boxes had been stowed. 
    Ten thousand crumbling pages long it ran. 
    Abandoned in the blackness to erode, 
    what steered a ship through blackness to the moon. 
    The language is unused in this late year. 
    The target hardware, likewise, lies in ruin. 
    Entombed within one lone procedure’s scope, 
    a line of code and then these words appear: 
    
    # TEMPORARY, I HOPE HOPE HOPE 
    
    The code beside persisting to the last—
    as permanent as aught upon this sphere—
    while overhead, a vacant moon flies past. 

https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/master/Luminar...