thwarted

Today is Lag b'Omer, which (goofy as it may sound) is a traditional day for haircuts. [1] I've been meaning to get a few inches of split ends trimmed off anyway, and I remembered seeing what's probably a suitable provider of said service a few blocks from where I work. So I wandered over there, only to find them closed.

Oops. Foiled again.

I don't really know what to do with hair. I like it long and I don't want to have to fuss with it (anything more than "wash, towel dry, comb" is too much work), so I haven't given it much upkeep. It reached a natural endpoint on length a while back that's not as long as I'd like, but oh well. I hear I've got a bad case of split ends, but since I can't actually see them myself I don't tend to remember that. I wonder if trimming a few inches would even help. I'm willing to iterate on small trims over a year to fix the problem, but I'm not willing to cut it short.

( footnote )

science fiction and future tech

Occasionally, we all look at the science fiction of decades gone by and are amused by the technology they didn't predict. You know, stories set in the far future where computers occupy entire rooms, because no one in the 60s imagined anything different -- that sort of thing.

I sometimes look at today's SF and wonder what we're getting terribly wrong. Recent Star Trek still postulates separate data and voice devices a couple hundred years from now, but the combined PDA/cell phone/web browser is here now. (Earth: Final Conflict combined them. But it's a recent show, so you'd expect that.)

I realized another such glitch recently while watching Andromeda: data ports. How many stories are out there where characters have data ports directly wired into their brains, like (in this case) Seamus Harper does, so they can just plug themselves in and go? And Star Trek's Borg are seen plugging themselves into ships' computers all over the place (blithely ignoring authentication issues, but let's not spoil their fun too much...). But surely wireless networks will rule the future world and coaxial cables will be a fond memory of the 20th century, right? What's with these physical connections?

(If I recall correctly, Blake's 7 got the wireless thing right with Orac. I think it just had to be near another computer and it could (try to) hack it. On the other hand, the federation's main computer -- what, no distributed network? -- occupied a large room.)

Predicting the future is hard, of course, and sometimes the goal of SF is to create an interesting world, as distinct from a likely one. I'm not complaining.

thwarted no more

The hair++ place next door to my house is open until 8, not until 6 as I had previously thought.

a political rant

The Republicans in Congress are trying to pass a bill (which Bush has said he will sign into law) giving "person" status to a fetus independent of its mother. They're using the Peterson case as justification. This is so wrong. ( Read more... )

not quite EverCrack, but...

A couple weeks ago Dani picked up a copy of Diablo (whatever the current version is). He'd never played before.

He's hooked. I don't think even Civ III produced this level of, err, attention from him. It's kind of cute, in that "I sure hope this doesn't become pathological" way. :-)

Hey, it's good to have hobbies, right?