Time to Kill...

It’s the first day of August. It’s a Saturday. It’s my off day. Well normally it’s my working day. But for some very special and joyous reason, it’s my off day. “Time to kill a lot I have” as Yoda would have said it. Quite where in the Star Wars series he said it, please do not ask me.

What do I do with a lot of time to kill? I can choose from watch TV, read, trying to catch up with some sleep, cruising around aimlessly, window shopping, house chores, baby sitting etc. The list goes on and on. One of the killing time activities is surfing. Before you start thinking of beach bums with bermuda shorts, delicious behind with tanned six pack torso, with surf board in hand, this is not the surfing not on the beach kind. It’s the kind of surfing used to be for the nerds of this world but now it seems everyone bar the few still in the dark ages, nerd or no nerd are into surfing. Surfing the internet seems to be one of the most favourite past time nowadays. On the PC, on the notebooks or on the smart phones and to certain extend not so smart phones, everyone is surfing the cyber world, the world wide web, the internet.

Everything, anything in this real world can be found in the internet. Useful information, useless information, trivial matters, serious ones, long lost family members, forgotten friends, new love, old love, gossips, facts, PG rated, X-rated. It goes on and on. Basically everything you can think off. Google it, it will be there. Sometime ago, a friend said one way of measuring how popular you are is by goggling your name. Imagine his horror when he goggled his name, no entry appeared. He was obviously very popular.. NOT!

Freedom of information some people call it. But as in everything, freedom does not necessarily mean a totally good thing. No regulation on what is put on the internet. No way of telling if it is a fact or a lie. One thing we can do, is not to trust the internet 100%. Take the information with a pinch of salt. An example of this is how readily available information on health and symptoms of any disease is. Before you go to the doctor, you somehow manage to come up with the diagnosis and even the prognosis. Some may even doubt what the real life doctor says and prescribed. It seems a few minutes surfing on the internet made us a well qualified doctor compared to someone who had gone through at least 7 years of medical training and many many years of professional training and experience. The internet seems to be taken too seriously and taken as the truth. In actual fact, the internet is only a very useful tool to disseminate knowledge and extend our network and source of information. For expert and professional advice, trust should and must still be given to the right professionals of the real world.

Back to my surfing. Came across a very interesting albeit to many people useless site. With a domain name of thelongestlistofthelongeststuffatthelongestdomainnameatlonglast.com, it definitely attracts attention. This particular site has a collection of facts and trivia about things that are the longest of their kind in the world. Useless but some are hilarious.

The longest name of a country? With 74 characters with spaces and 63 characters without, Al Jumahiriyah al Arabiyah al Libiyah ash Shabiyah al Ishtirakiyah al Uzma holds the record. It is more widely known as Libya. Imagine how twisted tongued the newsreader will be!

Another, the world's longest abbreviation containing 56 letters: NIIOMTPLABOPARMBETZHELBETRABSBOMONIMONKONOTDTEKHSTROMONT
Which stands for Laboratory for Shuttering, Reinforcement, Concrete and Ferroconcrete Operations for Composite-monolithic and Monolithic Constructions of the Department of Technology of Building Assembly Operations of the Scientific Research Institute of the Organization for Building Mechanization and Technical Aid of the Academy of Building and Architecture of the USSR. Do they even understand what abbreviation means? And who in the world would give something such a long winded name. No wonder the USSR is no longer around.

You can try the website for more. Have fun ...

PS:
Only do this if you have plenty of time to kill. You have already wasted enough of your valuable time reading this useless entry. Ha ha ha ....