A blowtorch is a wonderful thing. You can get one of those for about 25 bucks at Home Depot. And there's a ton of things that you can use a blowtorch for, in browning a steak or touching up the browning of a chicken or making creme brulee.

It's very hard for individual inventors to get paid. For the same reason that private equity is valuable - broadly, that's a good thing - in the case of patents, many that own them aren't in a good position to take the next step.

My career at Microsoft really was getting in the way of my cooking.

Near Marseilles in the south of France, bouillabaisse is a cult food. In Toulouse and Carcassonne, the bean-based stew cassoulet is a cult food. Spain has paella and a number of others. Italy has so many, its cuisine is practically defined by them.

Economists want their discipline to be a science, and they have nailed down a few precepts, but many of their debates are still clouded by ideology.

Words can hurt you. In the larger world, it frames how people think about you, and it can hurt you in lots of little, subtle ways.

Bill, we left megalomania behind a long time ago. Now we are gigalomaniacs.