“There’s a man named Andrew Wagner who lives in the same condo where I’m staying at Sundance. Three times I have encountered him there, and heard him pitch his movie, “The Talent Given Us.” The pitch is: The movie is a fiction film in which his parents, sisters and friends play his parents, sisters and friends. It’s not really a documentary about his family, but on the other hand it is inescapably about their personalities and his feelings about them.

I [eventually] went to see it, in one of those press screening rooms in the Yarrow Inn with the folding chairs on the risers. The screening began ominously with the Sundance host advising us, “If you want to exit, go out at the back of the theater and do not use the side door, which opens onto a locked courtyard.” As the lights went down and the movie began, I had fantasies of doomed critics, unwisely fleeing bad movies through the wrong door and freezing to death in the locked courtyard.

And then — well, then I saw a wonderful movie, one of the most original, daring, intriguing and seemingly honest films of the year. I say “seemingly” because I have no idea how much of the story is true. One thing is for sure: Wagner’s parents, sisters and friends are good sports.

“The Galápagos Islands derive their name from galápago (saddle), after the shells of the aptly-named saddlebacked Galápagos tortoises indigenous to them.

“The Macintosh is counter-reformist and has been influenced by the ratio studiorum of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory; it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach — if not the kingdom of Heaven — the moment in which their document is printed.

DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can achieve salvation.

Naturally, the Catholicism and Protestantism of the two systems have nothing to do with the cultural and religious positions of their users.

“Content management is not a technology problem. If you’re having trouble managing the content on your Web site, it’s because you have an editorial process problem. Your public-facing Web site is a publication. Treat it like one.

“Fairness” is not about laissez-faire (BSD) or about total-control (GPLv3).

“When it comes to people with a religious agenda, I don’t expect them to be polite or take my feelings into account.

“Workers who have frequent intense or emotionally charged interactions with others are more susceptible to burnout.

“Software work is either trivial or boring, and most often trivial and boring. Actually doing it, in most cases, would take seconds, but these seconds are so traumatically dull that they require long bouts of recuperation in between. The only way to save your soul in software is not to do anything.

“Sun isn’t even open enough to give the OpenSolaris community enough documentation to support their own new machines.

“There is nothing so tiring as pretending to work.