This is totally not a flame... don't take it personally.

Maybe Fortune is something novel and zany to you, and to some visitors of the site, but frankly, if I had a penny for the past 30 years of sites and emails and scripts assaulting me with stale Bartlett's quotes, Zippy wisdom and USENET ramblings, I could buy out Microsoft.

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[ e d @ h a l l e y . c c ]

I understand your concern. If you feel so strongly against such a printout appearing on every page by default, maybe it's worthwhile to consider adding this as a new Nodelet option.

You can already switch the "monk quips" off in your User Settings. (I have.)

Makeshifts last the longest.

I also believe the PM community indeed has a good sense of humour, and it might be nice to have just a little bit more nonsense.

If it were up to me I'd suggest a complete new section and call it the "PerlMonk Perlsonal Oracle" or something, and would only be completely satified if it spoke complete and total gibberish...

Then again, we could just call it frotune? ;)

P.S. Did they really paint the coffeeshop?
[download]

Teabag
Sure there's more than one way, but one just needs one anyway - Teabag

Maybe "senselessness" or "nonesense" were the worng words. Fortune's output is simply a random selection of predefined quotes. Quotes from famous people (Poets, Scientists, Presidents, etc) and regular expressions (no punn intended) of the comon folk.

Technically, those are "monk quips", which you can turn on or off in your User Settings. Right now there's a fixed list of them, about 15-20 last time I counted. I turned them off a long time ago, and I probably wouldn't turn them back on even if they pulled quotes off a QOTD server or some such. use Perl; has a fairly decent set of quotes from Larry Wall and other Perl people, but even those get old fast.

Count me among the crotchety naysayers.

Like for example, just the other week, I noticed that the coffee shop I pass by every day on my way to work was recently repainted … into an almost neon (salad) green! Apparently, it was painted so almost a month ago.

I've got that one beat. Several years ago, the house across the street from my apartment blew up and was so structurally damaged they had to raze it to the ground. I wasn't home during the initial incident and didn't notice anything amiss until a visitor came over a couple of weeks later and asked where the house went.

(the causative incident was a failed suicide attempt...a clinically depressed guy stuck his head in a gas oven, gas ignited, guy survived, house didn't)

Matt

Huh... I always thought that perlmonks did have a fortunes style thingie. There are about 10 or so quotes that keep coming up on the top of the page, above the "Search" area. It has things like "be consistant", "Keep It Simple, Stupid", "Just another Perl shrine", "Think about Loose Coupling" and so on. I thought this was pretty close to what is proposed hee. Te only thing one might need to do is just add a couple more quotes, cause 10 or so seem to be a bit too little.