Blog title

Today was a good hallwalking day. I didn't encounter any security guards or anyone else to disrupt my solitude. What I did encounter was a yellow sign. Anyone want to take a guess at what this was supposed to mean? As far as I can tell, the sign is there to warn us that there is a sign there.

Yesterday I went to have my hair cut. After over half a century, you'd think this procedure would be routine. It shouldn't be that hard to tell them what I want. I don't really need to have my hair styled, just cut. Every time I go, I tell them I want it to look like it was three months ago - or six months, or two years, depending on how long it's been since I last had it cut. And every time I say that, I get a blank stare that seems to say "I never met you before today. How should I know what you looked like back then?" I go to a hairstylist in the local mall where they seem to have hundreds of people working. Since I just want to walk in when I have time and don't want to wait, I just go with whoever is free, so I rarely get the same person twice. This time, I was assigned to a guy whom I don't think I've ever seen before. I told him I wanted to look like I did two months ago, and he declared that hair grows at half an inch a month, so he would take one inch off. I didn't look much different afterward (my wife didn't even notice) but I guess that's to be expected when you only have two months' worth taken off.

What always shocks me is seeing the hair fall down and noticing its color. It's not even gray anymore - it's white. It seems to still have a lot of black in it when I look in the mirror. Do they intentionally cut away the white hair or am I somehow delusional when I look in the mirror? Maybe I have a big bald spot and a receding hairline and I'm not noticing that either?

I don't usually have it cut this soon after the last time, but next week I am going on a business trip and I may meet with a real live Customer. I work in the Research division of a large corporation, where we are fairly well isolated and just do our Geeky stuff with very little contact with the outside world. This is the first time in several years that I might meet some customers. I've decided that I shouldn't look too uncivilized when I meet them. But then again, it might be good to maintain the Research mystique and show my wild side. If I don't have to meet with any more customers, I might let it grow out for a year this time.

I work for a big corporation in a big office building in the suburbs of a big city. As a certified Geek, I don't like being around people. I have made my life somewhat tolerable by flexing my hours so that I show up at the office at around 4:30 am and go home at about 2:30 pm. This way I can avoid the worst of the rush hour traffic (although rush hour in this part of the country is almost 24/7 by now) and I get some time alone at the office. However, it can be a challenge to become fully functional when you get up at 3:00 am. My solution is every morning, shortly after I arrive at the office, I take a brisk walk in the building, taking a route that covers every corridor on the fourth floor (where my office is (4n-c22 if you happen to work in the same building and are curious)) at least once. I do five laps of this course. A lap takes about five minutes if I walk very fast. This walk can get rather boring, but it is refreshing. I imagine that if aliens from another planet were watching me (surely aliens have the necessary technology to see me from their spaceships) they would be saying something like "There he goes running the maze again. He must think there's food in there somewhere."

The problem is that at some point in the early morning hours, a security guard will come up here to turn the lights on. During the night, they only keep a few lights on to save electricity. If I happen to meet up with the security guard, the result is usually that both of us will be very startled. But at least he has an excuse for being here, he doesn't look very geekish, and he is not walking at a high speed. For a few weeks, things worked out well. He came up at about 5:00 every day, so I just waited until I saw the lights were on in the hall, and then I took my walk. But then there were a couple days when the lights came on at 6:30, and by then other people were arriving, so I couldn't walk in solitude. I adapted to this schedule and did my walk at 5:15 (avoiding 5:00 in case they returned to that schedule) but then today the lights came on at 5:30 in the middle of my walk. Fortunately I was a safe distance away from the light switches and I was able to duck into a lab for a few minutes until I was confident he was gone.

What's funny about all of this is how annoying it is. People are starving in various parts of the world, people are getting blown up by other people (usually in an effort to make God happy) and a lot of people are even dying because of cartoons. Yet I sit here feeling extremely irritated because a security guard comes upstairs to turn on the lights at unpredictable times and I can't walk in solitude. I wonder if we all have a certain amount of displeasure in us and it has to be meted out sooner or later, and if we don't have a good reason, we'll just settle on a bad reason. Maybe Orwell was onto something with Goldstein. Isn't it better to have a target for anger that can be controlled than to let the anger seek some totally innocent target that happens to be there at the wrong time? For those of us who are Republican leaning, the targets are well defined - Osama, gay marriage, abortion, liberals. For those of us who are not Republican leaning, the Republicans themselves are the target. I'm sure I would be much happier if I joined the mainstream and directed my anger at an approved target and got lots of support from the media assuring me I was right, rather than getting annoyed at a poor security guard who has to come up and turn on the lights in the middle of the night (and probably feels somewhat annoyed himself because I'm intruding on his solitude).

This post isn't really about Slow download speed. It's my first post and I wanted a Title that would be more catchy than "My First Post" but I couldn't think of anything. So I just clicked in the Title textbox to see what was in the autocomplete buffer, and it came up with "Slow download speed." I must have posted something somewhere about that topic, and it must have been very important to me at the time for me to go through the effort of posting it, but I just can't remember. Whatever the problem was, it has apparently gone away now because I've been pretty satisfied with my downloads lately, especially since Optimum Online upgraded my service to 15 mb. Anyway, now I need to find a better title for my second post than "My Second Post" and there's nothing more for me to pull from my autocomplete buffer.