I’m blogging live from John Cleese’s keynote at SunNetworks. For those of you who don’t watch PBS, as John put it, he’s very well known in the UK and Australasia for his work on Monty Python, Faulty Towers etc etc.The theme of his talk is that we simply have to acknowledge that mistakes are part of life, and certainly part of the IT industry. After starting off by deciding his role here is to be the court jester and abuse people – he called the audience “geeks” – Cleese has taken us through a discussion of how many people have made mistakes throughout history, from philosophers to inventors and business people. Turning to the geeks in the crowd he said they were smiling at his message because: “The crap architecture (you built) contains major management flaws that only you can fix. Clever, but sly.” Update: Paul Krill jotted down a few Cleese quotes:“The problem is that we don’t have a good word for the reasonable try that doesn’t succeed.”“Java was once thought of as a nifty technology for animating Web pages.” “Today’s protected system is tomorrow’s unprotected system. So does that make today’s system a mistake? Well, yes, if it’s a Windows System. ““Remember this: It’s practically impossible after a really good idea emerges to recall exactly what the process was that gave birth to it.” “As far as creativity is concerned, there’s actually no such thing as a mistake.” “A man who is afraid to make mistakes is unlikely to make anything.”“Even the attempt to minimize risk can only result in the that greatest risk of all – rigidity.”The British lost the Revolutionary War “because we were leading 8 nil at halftime [and] we lost interest.” Denying mistakes results in lying and cover-ups that build exponentially. “This kind of concealment creates terrible anxiety.” On stress making you stupid: “Suppose Edison was afraid of producing a light bulb that didn’t work? My Auntie Vera put it differently; she said we learn only from our mistakes.” “Science makes continual improvements only by learning from its mistakes in theories.” “I believe the big question here is how to change our attitudes towards mistakes so that instead of living in morbid dread of making an error, as so many people, in the future we only live in dread of repeating that error.”As my guru said: “People expect things to go smoothly despite life-long experience that they never do.” “Why [is SunNetwork being held at] the Moscone Center? I grew up in a town smaller than this place.” “[It is] carefully situated on the San Andreas Fault and they build 80 percent of it underground…and it is the one place in San Francisco where the food is no good.” “What about Scott’s haircut? You’d think he could afford a better hairdresser than Supercuts. Maybe a better hairdresser wouldn’t let him in dressed like that.” Technology Industry