You never know what you'll find

To all budding graduate students out there, let me make a recommendation to you--go back and look at previous people's work. Not just the real recent stuff that everyone keeps reusing. Go to your University library, go to the stacks, and look at the old, dusty books that no one has seen in 20 years. I just finished reading a collection of papers on Logic/Functional programming edited by Doug DeGroot and Gary Lindstrom and it was pretty amazing the things I found out. I found some pretty straightforward solutions to problems I've been having for a while now in my work. I also learned that some of my "new solutions" weren't so new at all. So...it always pays to look at older work, even in a field like computers where ideas are always best viewed when they're at the state of the art.