Re: Am I worthy monk-status?

If you don't say anything, you'll never say anything stupid. Of course you'll never say anything interesting either.

Speaking as an unreformed fool, I prefer stupid to boring. Although this week would have been better personally being stupid, but my mouth is bigger than my foot. *sigh*

Do your best and take it as it comes and you won't go far wrong.

Comment on Re: Am I worthy monk-status?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Say something interesting by John M. Dlugosz (Monsignor) on May 19, 2001 at 02:25 UTC
In a previous age, the WWW had not been invented yet and I had to barter with the local university to get access to Internet email (there was no such thing as an ISP yet), I belonged to a "newsgroup"-like discussion group on CompuServe. It was mainly populated by fellow writers and developers, and the discussions were very philosophical and deep. In it's heyday, it was quite a group. Anyway, it was noted one time that the lurkers outnumbered the active participants by about 80:1 ! We would chat about the wisdom of the ages or the wimsey of the moment, and out there was this hidden audience totally unknown to us except for traces in the system logs. Occasionally someone would get up the courage to post something and thus join the group; most always newcomers graduated from being lurkers, so like long-period comets we knew there was some vauge population "out there" but never really thought about it much. One day that itself became the subject of conversation. Why are all these people watching us, and what are they getting out of it? Some cross between PBS (this was before Discovery Channel) and a geek soap opera? We pondered but could not truely comprehend. —John	[reply]

Replies are listed 'Best First'.

Say something interesting
by John M. Dlugosz (Monsignor) on May 19, 2001 at 02:25 UTC

Anyway, it was noted one time that the lurkers outnumbered the active participants by about 80:1 ! We would chat about the wisdom of the ages or the wimsey of the moment, and out there was this hidden audience totally unknown to us except for traces in the system logs. Occasionally someone would get up the courage to post something and thus join the group; most always newcomers graduated from being lurkers, so like long-period comets we knew there was some vauge population "out there" but never really thought about it much.

One day that itself became the subject of conversation. Why are all these people watching us, and what are they getting out of it? Some cross between PBS (this was before Discovery Channel) and a geek soap opera? We pondered but could not truely comprehend.

—John

[reply]