eDonn.com is in need of change. I may be taking it down for a while, or maybe not updating it; or something like that. So… heh.
I’ve recently been reading one of de Bono‘s books called Parallel Thinking. In it, he writes how sometimes systems grow sub-optimally through evolution: a system starts off small and doing what it was designed to do, and then grows through increasing user input (and a changing context).
Take for example one day, in order to get the top item on a bookshelf, you buy a three-foot stepping stool. With it, you manage to get to the top item easily. One day, the bulb for the ceiling light in your room blows. You think of changing it yourself, but even on tip-toes on the stool you got for your bookshelf you’re unable to reach it.
You decide to put a chair (also three-feet tall) on top of that stepping stool, making the stool-chair combination a total of six-feet. With this new contraption, you reach the ceiling with ease. It is, however, very unstable, and you fall before you manage to take out the blown bulb.
A little flustered, and definitely deterred, you decide to head down to the hardware store and get a six-foot ladder instead. With it, you reach the bulb with ease.
In a very rough sense, you can say that the chair-stool contraption you created was made by evolution. One item follows the next, each designed for a separate purpose — one’s for you to extend your reach three-feet higher, the other’s for you to sit. By mixing these two items together, you get a “satisfactory” but sub-par item, one that allows you to extend your reach six-feet higher but with great instability.
The ladder is made by design. It is designed to provide you six-feet of height, and with great stability. Unlike evolution where the end product is more or less improvised, with incremental improvement, design allows you to create an optimal end-product. To make this analogy a little more accurate, you could say that the wood used for the stepping stool and the chair combined is equivalent to the wood used to make the ladder.
eDonn.com has evolved. It started as a nice little site for me to write about philosophy, of which I was immensely interested in back in 2002. I didn’t care much for readership back then, since there were close to none and I was reluctant to encourage friends to read it.
As the years wore on, I gained a little audience; this gave me tremendous satisfaction as a writer: I loved how people appreciated what I wrote; it validated my ideas; it validated me.
But after a while, I started getting a little tired of writing for its own sake. I had a journal for that, and eDonn.com felt redundant. I was no longer writing for myself as much as I was writing for the invisible audience I had. And as the number of comments I received died down, it became harder for me to continue. Frankly, at times I wished eDonn.com never existed.
But by then, like being stuck in a bad relationship, I felt too attached to eDonn.com to let it go. I think it’s high time some sweeping changes happened. It’s time for me to rediscover my purpose, and the purpose of this website.
The new eDonn.com, if it does come around will be for me to share my ideas — ideas I think other people will benefit from, be it in the form of entertainment, or self-improvement.
I’ll have a separate section of a “blog” — personal space where I will write about my life. I think each section of that site should have more definition. Right now, eDonn.com is, honestly, simply a hodgepodge of ideas each screaming for its own space.
Donn, fragments 
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