Evolution of Gimodudah

When I first started this page, it was intended for random thoughts. Since that time, new methods -- the blog and Wiki -- have taken over from this page. It still is more random than the remainder of the site, but it is definitely more static than when I first envisioned it.

In fact, the blog and Wiki have become more static than I first envisioned them. It's interesting that these parts of the site which were intended to be dynamic and evolve into the more static portions of the site have become like the more static sections of the site. Once something starts on the Wiki, it seems to stay there.

Perhaps this is because blogs and wiki's have change in their perception by the web audience and we expect them to be more permanent parts of sites. In fact, sites are springing up which are nothing but blogs or Wikis.

So what can you expect here? I'm still not sure, after all, I still can't spell miscellaneous . . .

Recycle Video

The Meaning of Life . . .

The meaning of life is to live it.

This meme caught my ear the other day while listening to NPR's morning edition. I'm not exactly sure why. Perhaps it is just that the statement is so simple. It also has some import in reducing stress. It says to me that there may be no real meaning to life and that the whole trick is just to live life the best that you can. Now the trick is to determine what best means.

I put the phrase "meaning of life" into Google and got 189,000 hits. WOW! That's a lot of meaning. The top hit

http://users.aristotle.net/~diogenes/meaning1.htm

is a remarkably simple page. But, I really didn't find it very useful.

The second entry:

http://truemeaningoflife.com/index.html

isn't much better. Really, all I'm learning from the Google search so far is that searching via a generalized search engine sometimes gives bogus results.

The third entry at least made some sense. Its a page about the 1983 Monty Python movie by the same name.

There is even an FAQ about the meaning of life. This sort of gets one thinking if you have a frequently qsked set of questions, to whom to you ask them?

There's even a Meaning of Life Depot! I wonder what the train schedule is? This site is part of a Religion Depot and the pages have really irritating music with no way to turn it off!

So far, from the first page of this search, I'm not sure that anyone outside of YOU has the key to the meaning of life. Perhaps life IS just meant to be LIVED!

Updated: 17-Jul-2004

So it has been quite a while since I wrote this section. This time, I tried Bing . . . hey, what the heck, it might prove different, if not better.

The first entry is from Wikipedia. Some (set of) random dude's opinion about that phrase. OK, probably as valid as anything else. After all, if you put all the philosophers in the world end-to-end, they still wouldn't reach a conclusion.

The second entry was about philosophy is every day life. Refer to the comment in the previous paragraph.

The third entry is a bit more presumptious. It's a definition from Ansers.com. As if someone actually knew the meaning of life -- see comment in first entry.

The fourth is the Monty Python movie by the same name. It's probably still the most relevant and realistic entry in the bunch!

The Internet has definitely grown since 2004, but I'm not sure that it's any better at achieving answers.

14-May-2011

The Urban Dictionary

Ever wonder what your teenager is saying. Here's a place where you can go to find out. This site allows users to define urban slang. One caution: the site contains some material that may not be appropriate for all ages.

Dictionary . . .

Life-Logic Disorder

A potentially debilitating condition afflicting thousands of people world wide.

Read more . . .

SuperSILLYous

A place for all the Silly things that I hear or think. I'm not sure what will go here, but, I hear a great deal of things that seem silly to me and this is my place to comment on them.

WikiPedia

Here's an interesting site. They are building an open-content encyclopedia in many languages. They started in January 2001 and are now working on 263,297 articles (10-May-2004) in the English version.

"Open content" means that anyone can contribute. You might think that this would result in caos, but, according to the site, this isn't the case. I would still take some articles with a "grain of salt", but it's worth a look as an interesting research tool and information sharing medium.

SPAM

I hate it! And, it's getting worse. But most of all, I believe I hate it because it is crimping the openness of the Internet. For example, I have been going through the site REMOVING all references to my e-mail. Assuming that anyone out there actually reads this stuff, this means I am shutting off communication between them an me.

SPAM has gotten so bad (some estimates say 65% of all e-mail) that we piloted a second SPAM filter on the gateway in front of our current SPAM filter. The first filter simply deletes e-mail from known spammers while the existing filter will take a closer look at the SPAM content.

Actually, they have removed the first filter. It was eliminating 60% of the incoming e-mail. The administrators are working with the vendor to see if this is valid or if it can be "loosened" somewhat to allow ligitimate mass e-mail through.

By some estimates, SMAP cost businesses $9B (US) last year. Yikes! That's a bunch of money! It's like we are being tarrorized by the people sending this junk!

So what can we do about it? First, and foremost, DO NOT BUY ANYTHING FROM SPAM!

Updated 10-Sep-2004