Perhaps a Certain Number of Entries

Update

Sun, 20 May 2007 02:15:03 GMT

It's been a while since I've posted an update... let's see... in order of onset...

I've fallen in love with a friend. She means the world to me.

I've gotten divorced. Amicable, mutually agreed upon, almost completely unrelated to the abovementioned relationship, as smooth as such a thing can be, and still absolutely the worst experience of my entire life. I love her still, and I wouldn't give up what we had or what I learned, but wow.

I've had a big job crisis, and a big crisis of confidence, nearly been laid off, and moved into a job (at the same company) that I'm not really fitting into. Still want to change the world...

I've moved, and then moved again, to another country. Beauty, eh?

No other news. Oh, I lost like 75 pounds, I guess.

Hostile to privacy

Thu, 14 Apr 2005 17:53:12 GMT

2008-02-09: Spam showing up in this entry after 3 years(!). Comments disabled.

So, I'm sitting here at the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference, with hundreds of people who are passionate about privacy. The effect? My dubiety toward many of the basic premises of the privacy movement remains... and I'm beginning to develop a certain hostility toward the whole thing. Not to say that there aren't some good points here, but the overwroughtness runs a bit thick... and the willingness to acknowledge the sometimes very large costs of privacy absolutism runs a bit thin.

In other news, I just got my STD test results back.

Hmm. How can I possibly act out my urge to strike back against the paranoia?

Hmm...

HIV	Negative
Hepatitis A	Negative
Hepatitis B	Negative
HSV nonspecific	Positive
HSV II specific	0.2 (normal range)
Syphilis	Negative
Gonorrhea	Negative
Chlamydia	Negative

For the record, I had this test done because I'm a promiscuous perv. Or at least a polyamorous perv. I'm almost sorry I don't have anything more interesting than cold sores.

... and, yes, I know, this represents me exercising control over my personal data space, and all that. Please feel free to retain this information for an indefinite time, to disclose it to others (and not to keep records of who you disclose it to), and to come up with unanticipated secondary uses for it.

Fun with Bioethics

Wed, 16 Mar 2005 22:13:14 GMT

Hmm. OK. So, some of the usual suspects are trying to come up with a bioconservative legislative agenda vis-a-vis cloning and stem cells and weird hybrid human-whatever chimeras and creating babies with same-sex biological parents and what-have-you along those lines. For example, we have Eric Cohen: The Bioethics Agenda and the Bush Second Term . The irrepressible Leon Kass is, of course, involved.

If these guys want to seize the offensive, and if they want to stake out a principled position, then why don't they go after IVF and similar technologies? IVF clearly makes a big change in the historical human mode of reproduction, which ought to trigger Kass, at least, from what I know of him. IVF may cause birth defects, which should surely be a concern even if unproven. Standard IVF techniques create a bunch of extra embryos which are basically going to be thrown away; if you believe that every embryo possesses the full dignity of a human being, then what's with creating these "extras"?

Some of the same arguments these guys are making now used to be made against IVF. What's changed?

So, maybe what they really want to do is to force their opponents to seem scary, while not themselves admitting that any consistent application of their principles would ban a popular reproductive technology? Tch, tch.

View Poll: A poll

Asshatted hypocrisy, or hypocritical asshattery?

Mon, 14 Mar 2005 22:21:22 GMT

Just got e-mail including the following paragraph (comic name removed, emphasis added):

We're sorry to hear of the delay. I've checked into the matter and determined that your order shipped on December 23rd, 2004. We would think this a straight-foward issue of lost mail, except that we were notified last week that Canadian Customs Officials have confiscated another customer's [sexually-oriented-comic-book] order, classified it as "obscenity", and will destroy it unless the recipient can defend its artistic merit to their satisfaction. (This is darkly amusing in light of the fact that the work is printed in Canada).

Every once in a while something happens to remind me that the US isn't the only broken place in the world.

Sorry about that, dude... but you'll get your Christmas present eventually...

It's all fun until somebody loses an eye...

Sun, 06 Mar 2005 23:18:54 GMT

... thus, yesterday's Science Day party was pure fun. I'm happy to report that nobody was, in fact, blinded with science. There were some complaints about the soundtrack. Apparently I included too many songs about microwaves.

I'm not sure I can claim we did all that well with our science goals... but we had some success.

The score:

Glowing pickle - A few flashes, no sustained light. Dissenting opinion says that the flashes were just sparks shining through the pickle, but I think there was some real pickle-based emission there. Experiment curtailed by the loss of the fuse on the variac. Generally not considered a success. Special thanks to Megan and David for going out to find soggier pickles... and ice cream... :-)
Superconducting magnet levitation (Meissner effect): flawless, easy, and Very Cool. Highly recommended.
Freezing random shit with LN2, observing changed physical properties: worked fabulously, and served as much-needed revenge on the pickles. Created a bit of a mess in the driveway....
Condensing LOX using LN2 and using it for FIRE bwaahahaha!: moderate success. We proved to ourselves that we had oxygen, but apparently we had a lot of nitrogen, too.
Playing with magnets and ferrofluid: Informally enjoyed by all. Barb and Gail independently discovered that the ferrofluid interacted interestingly with the "checkerboard" magnets from the levitation experiment.
Cloud chamber: abject failure. Wicking material didn't. No visible fog. Supersaturated region presumably not formed. I think I must have missed some key instruction. I will make this work one day.
Room-temperature diamagnetic levitation: success! I think we knocked the gold off of some of the magnets trying to get them into the right layout, though. Kudos to Andy for finally creating a 3x3 checkerboard... AND cutting the graphite.
Carbonated grapes: apparatus fabricated, experiment not attempted due to general exhaustion. I should still have some dry ice, though...
Ice cream: not attempted due to nastiness of the LN2. Did you guys know that you nead a freakin' prescription for USP LN2? I guess I shouldn't be surprised, since you also need a prescription for salt water...

Now to finish cleaning up the garage...

This tripe has no right to be this funny.

Fri, 04 Mar 2005 18:10:47 GMT

I dunno. Maybe it's just that my brain has gone. Found via BoingBoing...

L0rd 0f teh Ringz0rz
Teh Tw0 T0werz.

WTF="Sif"? Sif=fux0r?

Fri, 04 Mar 2005 02:27:37 GMT

OK, this is the "interview" meme. spider88 has asked me 5 questions (I guess that's the canonical number), which I'm meant to answer in "interview" style. I answer them here, and then any of you who want to may request in the comments that I come up with questions to ask you. Thus groweth the tree from one root into many branches.

So, why'd you stop posting? Or, why do you *need* to start posting? :)
I stopped posting because I got busy around the holidays, and I guess because I lost faith that anybody wanted to read it. Once you've stopped for a week or two, it doesn't seem to make so much difference to let it go for just another day... so it's been "I'm tired" or "I'm depressed", or "I don't have anything to say", or "I should really do xyz instead" (frequently followed by doing something else entirely).

I guess I don't need to start posting, but LJ is part of a program to keep my social contacts alive and to expand them. I telecommute most days, don't know the neighbors, and could easily go for weeks without seeing a soul besides catgalbarb... so I actively try to keep relationships going, some in person, some on the phone, some via e-mail, some on IM, and some via LJ. It's too easy to lose people...

I was first inspired to start posting in my journal by reading those of others. "Personal" blogging sounded kind of silly to me, but I was surprised how much more in touch I felt with people when I was reading about their day to day lives.
At what point in childhood did you say to yourself, "Oh damn - this is puberty!"
I don't have a lot of narrative memory that far back in my life, but I'm sort of under the impression that I was actually watching for it, and not at all worried or taken by surprise. My parents had taken the full-information approach, embarrassed-to-deliver-it-directly divsion, and given me some good books, so I was pretty clear on what to expect. I don't remember what showed up in what order. I remember that I felt my first ejaculation (not sure if it was my first orgasm) was pretty strong confirmation.
I have no idea what city you live in, even though I know you're in the Bay Area.
Beautiful Belmont, California, jewel of the Peninsula, since 1995. Born in Oakland, lived in a few cities in the East Bay before age 5, lived with my parents in Oakland until about 19, moved into their in-law unit with catgalbarb for another few years, then moved briefly to Danville, less briefly to Dublin, and here. I've lived in the Bay Area all my life except for a few months "visiting" Montreal when I worked for ZKS.

We picked this part of the Peninsula because it was between where I worked and where catgalbarb was going to school, not for any intrinsic merit. It's OK, but it can be awfully dull... and nowadays it's far away from everybody we know and everywhere we go. Moving, however, would be an enormous hassle... 6 cats and an incredible amount of junk. Maybe someday.
Same question I gave [Bad username: 3D"wkfauna"]: What academic degrees do you have? If none, how did you get so smart? :)
Double A.B in math and computer science, UCB, 1985.

I basically showed up for some of the classes, all of the tests, and nothing else. I took the classes required for my majors, and little else. I wish I'd understood how much I could have gotten out of the experience if I'd done things right.

I slouched through high school in a similar way (except that I don't think I'd have gotten any more out of that if I'd paid attention). In high school, they grade on the homework, so I ended up having to transfer into Berkeley from a community college; I never would have made it through the standard admissions process. 1560 on the SAT, maybe a 3.2 high school GPA.

Wasted chances...
Did you have a Palm V when everyone else did? Do you still use it or another handheld? If not, why?
A Palm III was my first handheld. It died, and I replaced it with a IIIx, which also died. I might have had a third Palm. I don't think I ever had a V. I stopped using the palm in late 2000 or so.

I bought a Zaurus SL5500 on eBay just as the 5600 was coming out, and I sometimes use it a bit, but I don't really use it as a PDA. Until recently, it hasn't been (reasonably) possible to make it sync with my Big Evil Employer's internal calendar software, and I live by that calendar. I'll probably start getting some real use out of the Zaurus when the long-promised calendar upgrade at work is finished.

Behold. I have found this meme worthy.

Wed, 12 Jan 2005 19:58:30 GMT

January 27, 2005 is
LiveJournal Rabbit-Hole Day

"Let's have a day where nobody's life makes sense anymore, where any random LJ you click on will bring you some strange new tale. Let's all fall down the Rabbit Hole for 24 hours and see what's there. It will be beautiful."

More information

"I am!", I cried

Wed, 05 Jan 2005 20:26:24 GMT

Still here; I just haven't been posting, because I suck. I mean, I have excuses, like having been sick and travelling and jet-lagged and overwhelmed with Holiday Foo and trying to catch up, but we all know that all those are just ways of hiding from the brutal truth of my overwhelming suckage.

December 22: Drive to Sacramento, fly to Seattle, drive to Rochester, Washington
December 24: Christmas Eve festivities. Act like a jerk. Notice that I have a cold.
December 25: Fly to Sacramento, drive to El Dorado Hills. Feel wiped by cold.
December 26: Drive home, see friends. Feel wiped by cold.
December 28: Fly to Montreal, see photogeek_mtl and blueelf13. Have fun despite cold (both kinds). Learn about Star Wars video games. Spread cold internationally.
December 30: Take sleeper train to Toronto. Stay awake coughing until 02:30 or so.
December 31: New Year's Eve party chez cypherpunk95 and ketzie. Probably spread contagion to enochsmiles and chocolatecoffee. Cough. Still feel better than everybody else in the morning...
January 1: Take it easy. Very easy.
January 2: Fly to SFO. Get picked up by catgalbarb, who has now been wiped by cold for several days.
January 3: Try to catch up with e-mail and whatnot. Drive to Faceless Evil Corporation HQ to get access to messages that tell me how to use new remote authentication card they sent me. Run various errands. Feel somewhat wiped.
January 4: Continue to catch up. Relapse into coughing, as usual.
January 5: Message catch-up complete. Now trying to work. Paid and volunteer work are, of course, piled up...

... and I should be working. So I'm going to go do more of that now...

Photoblogging

Sat, 01 Jan 2005 02:38:35 GMT

So, you geeks want to play hardball, eh?

Sat, 18 Dec 2004 22:20:39 GMT

This almost works, if you read it artificially enough.

hukuma, enochsmiles
catgalbarb, </a></a>photogeek
sunah, mr_privacy
densaer, fanlain

chocolatecoffee and
ketzie, ephermata
cypherpunk95
blueelf13

Take that!

How the hell do you stress "ephermata", anyway?

Responses to rottenness

Sat, 18 Dec 2004 05:06:54 GMT

I'm baaaaack.

The world is full of assholes. And clearly people are insane.

View Poll: Reacting to ratfinks

Hints: The authorities didn't think the stupidest of the choices were off limits. The person with the spying friend is apparently almost as much of a sack of shit as the friend.

Yeesh.

They're like "Dude! I'm not poly!" and I'm all "Dude! No way!".

Mon, 06 Dec 2004 23:00:35 GMT

Funny thing... used to be that I figured everybody I met was monogamous, or at least into SM (serial monogamy, you perverts!). I was rarely disappointed. Occasionally annoyed, but not disappointed. :-)

Nowadays, when I find out somebody isn't poly, at least somebody who's been introduced to me by a friend, I'm taken aback. I mean, somebody mentioned being monogamous the other day, and I blinked three or four times. It just didn't cross my mind.

Yet the large majority of my friends, let alone casual acquaintances, are in fact strictly monogamous, or serially monogamous, or at most "loosely monogamous" ("Oh, it's OK to fool around until you get into a serious relationship"). Even among those who might be called "poly", many are from the poly-lite "swingers" school ("Oh, sure, sex, but only in structured situations where there's no danger of emotional attachment").

So, since most people are some flavor of mono, and that didn't surprise me in the past, why am I starting to be surprised at this late date? Strange. Am I getting narrow-minded?

View Poll: Question of the Day

Humping iron

Mon, 06 Dec 2004 06:25:57 GMT

I finally got the exercise equipment moved! And I thereby proved to myself that I need to make more use of it! Which I can, because now it's moved! To where I can make more use of it! And, even better, to where Barb can, too, without even breaking a leg! Woohoo!

Now we have an elliptical machine and a weight bench[1] in our front room. It looks so stylish you'll all just simply die when you see it, darlings! Truly you will!

And not only that, but the Logjam is broken. Now I can clear enough of the garage floor to actually move things. Like moving the shelves of music box crap, and whatever else I stuck behind them 8 years ago, to where the elliptical trainer used to be... and then I can wire up the rack where the shelves used to be, and move the file server out of the guest room, and it won't sound like we're running a vacuum cleaner in there all the time, and we can have actual guests without having to turn off the backups. And it won't act as a vacuum cleaner and suck up construction dust. And it'll have decent power and AC. Wootoo!

Plus, there ought to be enough space left over in the garage to make it a little easier to keep clean. I'll be able to find tools! I might even be able to do work out there! Truly, wonders never cease! Woothree!

In other news, I'm actually getting somewhere on that research plan for the Giant Soulless Evil Corporation. Real text has flowed from my metaphorical pen. I am on a roll! Woofour!

So, now I have to start actually using the weights, instead of just the elliptical machine. I haven't lifted weights in 10 years. This should be quite interesting. Grunt. I'm thinking maybe I'll log my progress on both weights and aerobic in an LJ filter or something, so as to expose myself to public ridicule when I slack off.

In other news, I've updated my LiveJournal interests. I now have 112 of the little buggers. Maybe I'll write a bio next...

[1] The weight bench has been sitting around unused since the beginning of time. It's going to be replaced with some sort of machine soon. Suggestion?

LJ ref-o-rama

Sat, 04 Dec 2004 19:46:56 GMT

Whelp.

Last night, I went to the Long Now[1] seminar with densaer. Ken Dychtwald on the consequences of human life extensions, and the like. Relatively short-term stuff, and relatively standard content, but he's a good speaker. Turns out catgalbarb's friend psybelle is involved with Long Now... but not that particular night. Maybe next time... looks like densaer and I are going to be going to this sort of thing on a regular basis.

After that, it was a party at the home of hukuma and rebbyribs. Many comments about my evil haircut. Out-of-towners galore. OK, two out-of-towners I knew: enochsmiles and chocolatecoffee. Snogging shamelessly, I might add. :-) chocolatecoffee didn't recognize me at first sight... I may have to shoot myself. :-)

Wow, look at all those <lj user=""> tags! I'm note sure what that means, but it can't be good. :-)

Whilst I was off gallivanting, catgalbarb went off and picked up her sister Laura, sister Laura's husband Dave, and sister Laura's and sister Laura's husband Dave's two-year-old daughter Casey at the airport. None of them have LJ accounts, so I'm not sure if I'm allowed to talk about them or not, but, hey, I'm a non-conformist. There are no rules.

A late breakfast is in preparation as I write this. Today's plan probably involves computer upgrades (again/still) and/or cleaning out the garage.

[1]Check out their cool Rosetta project. It sort of looks like it's on hold, though.</a>

Children marred

Tue, 30 Nov 2004 18:20:20 GMT

This is going to offend somebody. I'm sorry. It's important to me.

I just read another story about some obscure school board in Pennsylvania adopting "intelligent design" in science classes. Yeah, I know, it's only some obscure school board, but the POLL results! Per Gallup, 45 percent US-wide believe in special creation. 38 percent believe in "guided" evolution (the question wasn't worded to really show how strongly they might believe). 13 percent go for plain old normal evolution. Eep.

On Thanksgiving, I heard my father encourage a bright, charming little girl to say grace. See, the loving, not-stupid people who are raising her are teaching her that a magic sky fairy created everything, runs everything, defines morality, and demands adulation. And I'm pretty sure they believe it.

That's evil. This stuff deforms children. It harms their capacity for reason, it encourages them to wish away uncomfortable truths, and it teaches them to hide from their responsibility for their own morality. It diminishes and debases them as human beings. It's a loathesome, deliberate marring of a growing mind. And it's all around me.

Recently, talking to friends, I've seen more than I usually do of the adult flaws this creates. These are bright, sometimes brilliant, successful people, loving people, good friends... but there's this weird, warped place in them, where their thinking suddenly twists into this bizzarre singularity. It's like talking to a brain-damaged person... you get to a certain point, and suddenly everything falls apart.

It's scary. It's this huge flaw in otherwise wonderful people, and everybody treats it like it's not only OK, but GOOD. I'm sorry: it's NOT GOOD, and it's NOT OK.

Is it the worst thing that can happen to somebody? No. Not even close. The world has many, many horrors; the top tier is tough to get into. But it's wrong, and it hurts to see it... and I think it's far worse than it gets credit for.

The worst part of this was seeing my father help to brainwash that girl. He's been an atheist since he was a young adult.

He threw off Catholic conditioning enough to deny the existence of God... but now he really thinks OTHER people ought to believe in magic sky fairies, or invisible pink unicorns, or anything else that will order them to live their lives the way he wants to see their lives lived. As he's gotten older, he's become desperate to defend absolutes-- defend them by any means necessary-- and he's been captured by some awfully sloppy schools of "thought". He's still an atheist, but I think he'd like to believe again; maybe he will. But to see him help to teach a child something so evil, when he doesn't even believe it himself.

Sad and horrible.

Planning

Fri, 26 Nov 2004 19:01:06 GMT

I'm thinking about a "Science Day" party for mid-January. The idea would be to take an afternoon and do all those fun elementary-school science experiments we all remember so well. Possible ideas include:

Building a cloud chamber.
Microscopy. We're equipped for phase, stereo, and maybe even fluorescence, if I can figure out what dye to use. Samples are easy had...
Molecular modeling and visualization.
That quickie quantum demo with three polarizers.

Presumably food would be involved (anybody got any good food experiments?). Probably the usual tubbing and/or movies would follow.

Comments and suggestions welcome...

Captain's log

Fri, 26 Nov 2004 18:52:43 GMT

Well. I haven't written anything here for a while. That's probably because things have been pretty dull, mostly. Little tasks here and there, no real accomplishments. Went over to densaer's house Tuesday; hot tubbing, in-front-of-the-fireplace-lying, conversation; very fun and relaxing. We've been getting a fair amount of use out of the hot tub around here, too.

This morning, I'm feeling horny. Hence the LJ mood: horny. Clever, eh? Any lust objects who see me this weekend had better watch out. You know who you are. :-)

Today's agenda: computers, multimedia, furniture moving, cleanup.

Barb's off running a cat show for the weekend.

Yesterday, there was like this whole Thanksgiving thing.

I have a funny relationship with holidays and family gatherings. I get all negative, proclaim that I'd rather just not bother, do it out of a sense of duty, and then relax and have a great time as soon as it starts. Pretty lame, really.

Thanksgiving is a little weird. I mean, who are we supposed to be thanking (yeah, OK, I know... so who are us atheists supposed to be thanking)? I don't see the point in thanking impersonal natural forces for anything. Maybe remembering that one is lucky, but not doing any thanking. Oh, well. Thanks to all the people who've enriched my life. So there.

One of our Thanksgiving traditions is driving 4 hours to El Dorado Hills in heavy traffic. Yum.

I have confirmed my already confident impression that I can cook all the essential elements of the traditional Thanksgiving dinner. Why do people think of these as hard? It's about the simplest food you can make. Although I'll admit it would have been really annoying time sink without 3 or 4 people working on things.

Today's (OK, yesterday's) news: Are there any more at home like you?

Not a particularly productive day

Wed, 17 Nov 2004 08:53:15 GMT

Didn't get much done today. Bleah.

Went to dinner at Kabul with densaer. Discussed our diverse dissatisfactions. Apparently humans, our politics, and our relationships are imperfect. Whodda thunk?

Yesterday, I learned about adding RSS feeds as LiveJournal friends. Now I have a bunch of 'em. Slowly I become competent.

Also yesterday, went to dinner at Maggiano's (not my choice) with a couple of out-of-towners from work. One of whom I wouldn't have kicked out of bed, but unfortunately I didn't get the opportunity. Such is life. :-)

Yes, I do occasionally eat at home. Why?

Mon, 15 Nov 2004 07:26:03 GMT

What the heck did I do with this weekend? I think it involved taking apart computers.

Oh, yeah, and traffic school. Complete with authentication of the final exam by webcam-based face recogniation software. At least that's what I think the software was doing. Anyway, I have demonstrated my willingness to believe, or at least to regurgitate, the State's preferred mix of fact, "fact", and pure silliness, and thus placated the Leviathan. I will, of course, eliminate reactionary driving habits as a result of my re-education.

Oh, and dinner out yesterday. Zibibbo in Palo Alto. I had the Moroccan spiced prawns and the pork loin. Verdict: OK, but not overwhelming, and overpriced for what it is.

That and housecleaning.

From memepool: somebody's improved on my old idea of a sodomy tour of the US...

Articles of faith

Thu, 11 Nov 2004 20:39:02 GMT

Our senses, fallible though they may be, are our best windows on the truth. Our reason, fallible though it may be, is our gift unique among all beings we know, and perhaps our greatest and highest attribute. To believe in a "fact" without proper evidence, or against evidence, is an abdication of the best in our nature.

Our morality is inalienably our own. To accept without examination the judgement of tradition, of leaders, of the mass of our peers, or even of some somehow-known Supreme Being, is a cowardly and servile evasion of duty.

View Poll: #382720

[Resent after silly post error]

A serious problem

Thu, 11 Nov 2004 08:41:39 GMT

What am I supposed to do with my low-mileage

Ashcroft T-shirts now?

Sending it in...

Thu, 11 Nov 2004 05:34:49 GMT

I'm sitting here listening to Barb taunt the latest cat about the recent removal of his testes[1]. Maybe we should have gotten him neuticles...

Otherwise, well, I guess things are pretty usual. Got through much of my Science and Nature backlog last night, will finish the rest tonight. Who knows, I may actually read a real paper or two...

Speaking of TLAs, how 'bout that new AG pick of Dubya's, eh? Mr. Torture Memo hisself! But Schumer seems to be signalling acceptance. Our working theory is that the Dems are gonna let some Bush appointments go (including Rehnquist's Chief Justice replacement) in order to save up political capital against the need to prevent a real swing appointment should, say, Stevens leave the Supremes. But I'm having fun scaring people with the idea of Ashcroft as Chief Justice.

Hmm. Don't think I've been out of the house today. Telecommuting isn't always so spiffy.

Got a new vacuum yesterday (after 20 years or so): a Dyson DC14 Animal. You've gotta love the name. Really extracts the cat hair.

Installed the Gaim-Encryption plugin tonight. Woohoo! Take that, TLAs! I Pwnz0r Joo! Who's your daddy? That's correct, you, collectively, are my bitch.

[1] Barb informs me that she's not taunting him, but teasing him: "Trying to help him adjust to his new life, and trying to convince him to stop humping my head. So there". Yes, it's true, Chester is a serial head humper. He does, however, seem to be taking the teasing well in stride. Actually, not much bugs him, even when he understands it, which isn't that common. Cute little cat, though...

Checking in and the Will to Power

Mon, 08 Nov 2004 04:32:23 GMT

Went and saw The Incredibles with Dana last night. A fun movie, and the first I've seen in a real theater in quite a long time... possibly since densaer dragged me and another unsuspecting victim to House of Sand and Fog (a horribly depressing movie about classically tragic characters, meaning people with tragic flaws, in particular being too fucking stupid to live).

The Incredibles actually had some surprising elements in it. Like, for instance, it starred Ayn Rand as the fashion designer.

Everybody on the Web seems to be talking about the movie's relationship to Rand or (for the less simplistic) Nietzsche... sort of surprising for an animated kids' flick, eh? It really does raise some of the same issues about the relationship of the exceptional person (or any person, actually...) to others, although I don't actually think it comes close to the same conclusion they did. In fact, it may even get to a conclusion that's more philosophically mature than either what appears to my relatively naive eye to be Nietzsche's moral retreat into the worship of the Will or the modern "everybody's unique and special and completely equal" pap. Pretty impressive, really. But I should really have read more Nietzsche and antecedents before I said that, because now somebody's probably gonna flay me.

So anyway...

I spent too much time time today (and yesterday) messing with computers... I still have lots to do around here to get everything into shape, computer-wise and otherwise. I also spent too much time falling back into my bad habit of repetitively surfing the same Web sites. Sigh.

I still need to try to finish the RFP for the first bathroom tonight. And I have to make some appointments for my volunteer work, including one with a SIG leader with whom I don't see eye to eye. Sigh. And I should really write some security engineering practices material for The Corporation Which Will Not Here Be Named.

Less hair

Sat, 06 Nov 2004 06:43:27 GMT

We got new (sharp) clipper blades yesterday.

Those of you who've known me for a while will recognize that my hair runs through a cycle: it starts out varying degrees of short, and grows until I look like a throwback to 1973 (on good days) or like Bozo the Clown (on bad days)... at which point it abruptly goes back to short.

Basically, I hate getting haircuts. I hate being dependent on hired strangers for my basic personal care. I hate having hired strangers modify my appearance (it feels about as intimate to me as hiring a prostitute). I hate waiting in line. I hate trying to explain what I want. I hate the attitude you often get at expensive hairdressers, especially if you obviously haven't had a haircut in a year (and I hate paying for the results you often get at cheap chop shops).

... and, anyway, I'm obsessive about being capable of doing everything for myself. It's not that I actually have to do it all the time, just that I prefer to feel like I can... and maybe do it once. Especially if I'm not supposed to be able to do it.

SO, I figured I ought to try cutting my own hair, at least once. In the absolute worst case, I reasoned, I'd just have to run over my whole head with a 1mm blade. I've done that before; I looked like a dork, but not intolerably so (taking into account the fact that I have a high tolerance).

Some of you might think of this as self-destructive. I prefer to think of it as liberating. I went into it fully aware of the likely outcome, as was my right as a member of a free society.

And, indeed, the likely outcome was the actual outcome. More or less exactly what I expected:

I look like a dork. Sort of a butch dork. Less of a dork than with the 1mm overall cut, no more of a dork than with Bozo hair, and not that much more of a dork than after my last haircut adventure, at the shop of the unhygienic barber. But still definitely a dork.
My hair is very short. Some of it is 1.5mm, and some of it is 13mm. This is, as I knew when I started, quite short indeed. That's the only way I had a prayer of making it work.
It took a long time. Actually even longer than I thought it would. Especially when I had to rig up the video camera to do the back.

Primary conclusion: probably not worth the combination of inconvenience and aesthetic unpleasance... but worth having tried once.

Corollary: I really need to find a decent regular hairdresser.

I did not, however, eat the foreskin.

In other news

Barb's visiting her sister in fabulous Rochester, Washington.

... and I'm getting really jealous of everybody who went to Toronto. Heck, Canada is in general looking pretty good right now.

I am now trying to do all my Web browsing via Tor. It's slow, but usable. Hard to remember how it compares with Freedom.

I'm behind on writing things for work. No big shock, mind...