It’s death, and that’s life.

People are being born and people are dying ALL THE TIME! — that’s just the way it is. Perhaps it’s just shock that the news of a celebrity death compels so many to hit the forums and Facebook to express their “deep condolences”, “so sorry for your loss,” “he will be missed,” and other cliche phrases comment after comment. Does anybody care, really? I doubt it.

It’s the same for all the “He will not be forgotten!” posts (uh… yes he will). There’s only a small percentage  of extremely famous people — all who have had some lasting impact on our culture, that are “not forgotten” — i.e. Shakespeare, Bach, Einstein etc. If you’re not in that club, good luck.

Wasting time

Your time.  Can’t get it back. How many days have you thrown away the hours? Sometimes there appears to be a good reason, but usually there isn’t. I’m as guilty as anyone of not maximizing my time on earth. Changing ones habits?  That’s another story.

The highly productive musicians who’s lives were cut short, Mozart, Hendrix, Coltrane, Dolphy etc. seemed to be keenly aware that their time was short and yet made the most of it. They didn’t just blow off months and months in a pub.

Challenge questions

In an effort to combat forum spam, I’m experimenting with challenge questions. It’s an interesting problem with a seemingly infinite amount of options. The typical 2+2 = ? is too easy for the bots, as are most math problems. Word problems, especially ones that are relevant to the forum are proving more effective. This may be for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the questions are in English and the bots coming out of China don’t know what they mean (any more than I can understand the simplest of Chinese characters).

Then there’s the logic behind the question. This can be set very high or low. Set to an extreme, you can be sure that only a handful of people would know the answer, for example, who attended a private event. Other techniques, such as using various forms of cryptology to scramble or obfuscate the questions, is another direction an admin could go to weed out the bots.