Once upon a time I attended masters' course in IT, and one of the subjects was the methodology of scientific work. The professor said that two most important things are sense of proportion and sense of humor.

Sense of proportion relates to knowing how big is the thing you invent. And sense of humor is necessary if you're wrong about the proportion.

Just discovered, jumping around my old UT messages, that I have invented the safe select (see message #892473), and published it a year before it was named so in an article, but since I didn't have the sense of proportion to write an article myself, I can only rely on my sense of humor to cover my tracks. Probably other people invented it too, it's too good to be invented only once.

I just didn't have a clue that so many people would need it.

There must be some moral to the story, but I forgot what.