- Wikipedia: One of the most well entrenched informational websites in "the Internets", has an operating budget of only 6 million for day-to-day operations: servers, hosting, bandwidth and a staff of only 23 people! I am fascinated by wikis in general. People are calling for 2009 to see a shift in social networking and I think the "Borg collective" attributes of sites like Wikipedia are a way more logical lineage to the next big thing than the largely exhibitionist / voyeuristic attributes of something like Facebook.
- Portugal has a drinking age of 16
- I fear setting off fire alarms more than I fear setting off fires. My new place has no fire alarms. Yay me!.
- The domain name America.com is worth several million dollars and once was for sale for $30 million in the hay day of domain craziness (and was actually only registered in 1994, a time when I was actually on the Internet which is depressing. If only we knew!) and it looks like it was for sale last year. I can't actually find if it sold, due at least in part to my laziness. I found an interesting site while looking this up that rates values of domains. Based only on traffic and ad revenue, they say its worth $12723.9 USD.
If you do some quick math, this valuation is only a multiple of 2 against yearly gross revenues. (this is less important as America.com is an obvious brand, but as a simple site that is only supported by clickable ads, it has 5000 and change pageviews daily and makes $17. If you do some reading on the boards, people find that a couple of bucks a month for a domain is perfectly reasonable.. They just host a 100,000 of them.)
Sounds crazy to me, but in a way, people have found a way to estimate the bricks and mortar of sites supported by ad revenue, using publicly available information, it just still doesn't matter.
- Wedding videos.. If I ever own one with me in it (the possibility of which seems to be dubious these days), I never want to look back on that day thinking that that time was any better than the now. Sure its a special day, but I think a lot of married people pull that tape off the shelf once a year and aren't wistful of the day, but wistful of that time in their relationship. A time when things were better. I've got enough regrets in my life, I really don't want the start of a marriage to be the pinnacle of the most important relationship in my life.
- I am remunerating on the difference between "culture shock" and "shock to the system". At times, I think most people (including myself) get the two confused. People land in a place like Marrakech and its dirty and noisy and smelly and they say, "I am reeling from the culture shock". But its not really culture, its a condition. Its shocking yes, and aspects of that condition are a result of culture, like those derived from architecture.. but the fact that you need to walk through a backed up sewer to get to your hostel isn't culture.. its just because the infrastructure sucks. Yet back home, people sit over a glass of chardonnay around their warm and cozy living rooms and show pictures of a backed up sewer and say things like "it took a long time for us to get over the culture shock".
Words and sayings that I've been liking (not all new, but in my brain for the now):
- modernity
- feculent blather
- platitudes
- Accidental hobbies
- "Great contrasts, ponderables, insolubles" (thanks Bob)
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