postaday

Twenty five letters only

There are 26 letters in the English language, and we need every single one of them. Want proof? Choose a letter and write a blog post without using it. (Feeling really brave? Make it a vowel!)

You see, I only quoted the post for some context. There’s no problem, I think. More so, for someone who’s mother tongue is different. I come from Russki territories. We use letters which were borrowed from Greece. We just exploded them from twenty four to thirty three. Possibly, there is our lesson of unneeded letters. We will survive with more. We will survive with less. There is no problem.

I’m only trying things out here. It looks like I might do this forever.

Now, going back. It’s not difficult. You only need to word thoughts differently. The use of tools like Internet (World Wide Web) or word lists might help. Even with the vowels. I should refer you to the letter frequency resource. The letter I’m ignoring is the second most used. (Much less so in this post.) But I write just fine without it. It is limiting, tricky even. However one could get used to it.

Do you think it’s worth the try? Try. Let me know in the comments how it goes.

P.S.: The URLs of the links I do not control.

Daily Prompt: No, Thanks

The Daily Post asks the question:

Is there a place in the world you never want to visit? Where, and why not?

Being genuinely open to travel opportunities, I was surprised how quickly my brain came up with an answer – Burma. Why? Because I’ve seen Rambo. And before you scream at me for it just being a movie, read a bit further – Wikipedia page for Rambo movie, and Wikipedia page for Burmese anti-government protests.

What’s in the room? A fear. Or two.

OK, you gonna hate me for this, but I just couldn’t resist and read one more question from the The Daily Post.

You’re locked in a room with your greatest fear. Describe what’s in the room.

I wanted to do a post like that for a while now. But thinking of my fears takes away for a long time and then I don’t know how to connect them all, with which one to start, and how to finish. And on top of that I get really scared thinking of all my fears. But, if I think in terms of the room, and I’m locked in there with my greatest fear, all of a sudden I see … just me. And that explains at least four big fears that I have:

Fear of loneliness. That is probably my greatest fear. I am not comfortable with myself for long periods of time, and I constantly need people around me. I’d rather have the worst possible people next to me, than nobody at all.
Fear of myself. This one comes and goes. But when it comes, it’s pretty scary, and, difficult to explain. But I do fear myself sometimes. For most time, I can control myself pretty well. (Feel free to disagree.) However once in a while I get into that mode where I have an almost out of body experience, watching myself from aside, doing something crazy. It’s almost never good or bad, just stupid. But having no control of it is scary.
Fear of dentists. And I hear you jump up immediately, screaming – YOU ARE NOT A DENTIST!!! And you are right, I am not. But remember that this whole thing is hypothetical. There’s me locked up in the room with my greatest fear. Well, I am afraid of dentists. I’ve had more than a fair share of bad experiences and something snapped. I think I might be so afraid of them, that even if I become one, I’d still have the fear. And given that fear #2, I might just once have an uncontrollable desire to fix my own teeth. Isn’t that scary?
Fear of the dark. Yeah, remember that room? Someone switched off the lights and closed the shutters too, so it’s pitch black. That alone wouldn’t throw me into a panic attack anymore – I used to be afraid of the dark a lot more when I was kid – but given all those other fears in the room, I would be pretty miserable.

OK, enough, as I said before, these thoughts get me scared. I should get of the Internet now and go hide somewhere with people and lights, and without dentists.

What are you afraid off? What would be in that room of yours? Answering ‘you’ is cheating. :)

This is your life. Would you read it?

A year or so ago, I’ve subscribed to the RSS feed of The Daily Post – a blog that tries to inspire people to blog daily, but providing questions, ideas, and unfinished thoughts. I’ve checking with it once in a while, but often had enough things of my own to write about. Still, I find their variety of subjects interesting. And since, I’ve looked at them today, here is an example – This is your life:

If you could read a book containing all that has happened and will ever happen in your life, would you? If you choose to read it, you must read it cover to cover.

I totally would! I think. Sort of. This is actually quite close to the arguments I held in a recent discussion at work. A few of us in the office were discussing the benefits of finding out the gender of your kid during pregnancy, and doing DNA tests to find out which diseases are more pre-exposed to.

I’ve stood my grounds on the side of: the more information, the better. Since the beginning of times, the human race was trying to find out more information, and then pass it on to the next generations. That’s probably one of the reasons why we are social animals – to get easier access to peer information, and better insure the passing to next generation. Humans have a large brain, and we found amazing ways to use. We’ve started mining for information early on, and came up with ways to organize and communicate information better. From cave drawings, to alphabet, to scrolls and paper, all through to digital. We’ve traveled miles, went into great depths and flew to remote planets – all in the drive for more information.

And then, some choose to not know. I don’t get. I can understand information filtering, when it just becomes too much – not everybody wants a Ph.D. in every single science and art after all. I do understand time and money constraints, when you just cannot afford to learn something, thanks to the costs of modern education. I do even understand fatigue, when you have all the information at your fingertips, but just can’t take it anymore. But when none of this is a factor, when you do have access to the information, and it doesn’t cost you much more to learn it, I cant’ think of a reason not to learn it.

Now, back to that book thing again. I would read it for all the information that it has. If it covers my future, my goods and my bads, and even if it covers my death and after-death – I would read it. I want all that information. The thought that stops me from saying that I would absolutely read all of it cover to cover has to do with time constraints.

I am 34 years old. Even with a rough calculation, that’s over 12,000 days. I haven’t lived all days to the full – sometimes I was sick, sometimes I was lazy, sometimes I just slept a day through. But those weren’t too many. I can probably imagine at least a half a page for each day of my life. That’s a book with 6,000 pages, give or take. I’ve also had quite a few of those days that would need a book of their own. But, for the sake of simplicity, I’m not taking about those now. I’m not the fastest reader. It would probably take me a month or so to read through that. And that’s only up to now. I have no idea for how long the book goes further. Every coupe of days add a page. Do I really want to read for a month a full memory of what happened to me until now? Probably not. I have a blog with over 6,000 posts and I’ve never read it cover to cover, even though I wrote all of it on my own. Sure thing it’s nice to read memories once in a while. As I mentioned before, I do enjoy my ‘On this day …’ widget on the sidebar. But that’s just a 4-5 clicks, not a whole book.

I would probably go for something electronic. Like if I had a blog with all everything that happened or will happen to me, instead of that book, I’d love it more. Just think of that! A full life’s blog archive, with all the tools – search, post calendar, tags, categories, occasional images maybe – and all of that without any work. Someone just gave it to you. I would totally jump on that!

P.S.: Now I think I now why I don’t frequent The Daily Post blog. It’s tricky. They ask a simple question, and it throws me into a long post mode.

Shakespear? Yes, sure

Daily Post, a blog that suggest a topic to write a blog post about for each day of the year, raises an interesting question: do you think Shakespear existed? Apparently, a few people doubt the fact because there is way too much work credited to him for a single person to create.

While I’m not that big on history in general and Shakespear in particular, I do have an opinion on the “too much work” reasoning. I’ve heard it before a few times and it was wrong every time I’ve heard it.

15-20 years ago, before the Internet was mainstream, most of the Russian connected people were using the FidoNet. As with any community, there were celebrities in FidoNet, and one of them was a writer under the name of “Alex Exler”. He was credited with so much stuff that rumors were going around that Alex Exler is not really a person, but a creative group of a few individuals. It turned out to be false. Alex Exler is a somewhat known writer, and a very well-known blogger on the Russian web. These days he has a website as Exler.ru. The website is updated daily with movies and gadgets reviews, opinions on software and political news, personal experiences and what not.

10-15 year ago, when I was just getting into the world of Linux and other Open Source software, I’ve heard rumors that Alan Cox is not really a human, but a bunch of goblins working underground around the clock. Alan’s contribution to Linux kernel and many other software projects was huge. More so, he seemed to have never slept. His patches were coming out any time of the day, he replied to his emails within minutes, and also managed to somehow follow all the discussion at Linux Kernel Mailing List (aka LKML) – a mailing list known for its huge traffic. Of course, Alan Cox is not a bunch of goblins. He is a very talented and productive individual.

Without knowing too much about Shakespear, I think that it is much more probable that William was a very talented and productive individual rather than he never existed or he was a group of people.