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On Tuesday the 23rd of January I shaved off my beard after spending 107 days growing it, see above for the final beard pic. It was an interesting experiment and it’s something that I recommend trying, but I couldn’t keep it.
Having a beard is more effort than being clean-shaven. Eating is more difficult when you are trying to keep your beard out of your food. If you get the full beard (as I did) then the mustache at the sides of your mouth will get into your food (particularly bad for ice-cream). I guess that the benefit of having a waxed mustache would be that the wax would keep it out of the way of the food – the waxed mustache wasn’t just an issue of style!
Madduck suggests that when you drink Guinness you “push your lips past the head and draw up only the dark stuff“. Of course that won’t work if you have a mustache as you don’t want a mustache that’s soaked in beer!
Immediately after cutting off my beard I didn’t shave for almost a week and experienced much less discomfort than I had previously experienced when not shaving for that period. I think that having been used to having a beard an amount of hair that would previously annoy me is not noticeable. Also it seems that the hair was initially softer after I cut off the beard. Maybe shaving somehow makes the hair grow tougher.
When I had the beard I thought that I hadn’t adjusted my body image to match, as every time I looked in the mirror I felt surprised to see it. Once it was gone my new look initially seemed more odd to me than my previous appearance, and it took me a number of weeks to get used to not having a beard.
When shaving off my beard I decided to do it in stages, firstly I did a “goatee” cut and then just a mustache. The mustache is a little lop-sided, but I was in a hurry and didn’t plan to keep it for long.
You might expect that a vaccine against a disease that causes cancer would be widely embraced as soon as it was proven safe. If the disease in question was transmitted by contaminated food or water, sneezing, or most of the other ways that diseases spread then it probably would be widely accepted.
However recently there is a recently released vaccine against Cervical Cancer. The virus in question is only transmitted sexually. Apparently 80% of women in the US will catch it before the age of 50 (so it’s obviously not scaring people away from unsafe sex).
There is a strong Christian lobby against the vaccine, their idea is that if sex doesn’t cause debilitating and/or fatal conditions such as cervical cancer then their daughters will have less reason to avoid it. The fact is that religious people are statistically more likely to practice unsafe sex (see this link) so it seems unlikely that preventing one of the STDs that religious people might catch will affect the amount of unsafe sex.
One thing that seems strange about the entire discussion is that no-one has raised the possibility of vaccinating boys. Vaccinating boys could lead to the virus being eradicated. Even if an eradication attempt fails it will help save some of the Christian girls.
Martin F. Krafft blogs about looking for advice on buying a “beamer“. He describes the word as meaning a projector in Germany (it also means the same in the Netherlands).
Since the time when I lived in the Netherlands I have been using the word in English, most people immediately understand what it means, and I believe it’s a better option than the word “projector“. The only possible confusion in this regard is the term Beamer is slang for a BMW car. But it’s pretty rare to talk about cars and computer display methods in the same sentence so this shouldn’t be a problem.
One thing that has always surprised me is how few people talk to speakers after they have finished their lecture. A lecture might have many questions and the questions may be cut off, but when the speaker leaves the room they will usually do so alone.
When I give lectures at conferences I’m always happy to spend more time talking to people who are interested in the topic and disappointed that so few people choose to do so. It seems that other people have similar experiences, there have been several occasions when I have invited speakers to join me for lunch and no-one else has shown interest in joining us.
Usually the most significant factor in making someone offer a talk at a Linux conference is the opportunity to teach other people about the technology that they are working on. People with that motivation will take the opportunity to teach people at lunch, dinner, whenever.
Linux Conf Au has an event called the “Professional Delegates Networking Session” which is regarded by some people as the way to meet speakers (about half the delegates don’t attend so the ratio of speakers to delegates is significantly better than at other conference events). But it seems to me that it’s more efficient to just offer to buy them dinner. When I worked for Red Hat the maximum value for a gift I could accept was $100US, I expect that Red Hat has not changed this policy since then and that most companies that employ speakers at Linux conferences have similar policies. $100US is more than a meal costs at most restaurants that are near a Linux conference.
If I was a manager at a company that sent employees to a Linux conference I would first send email to some speakers who were working in areas of Linux development that were related to the projects that the employees were working on. I would ask the speakers if they would be interested in having dinner bought for them by my company and give them the option of bringing one or two friends along for a free meal (the friends would probably be people who work in similar areas).
The following letter was published in the RACV Magazine. The Royal Automobile Club of Victoria is a driver advocacy organization that provides roadside assistance and insurance. The fact that they published my letter means that the idea can’t be totally wacky so I’ll blog it. ;)
There have been many mentions recently in RoyalAuto about space-saver spare tires. Some manufacturers claim that they are to save weight which seems to be a benefit for the driver.
I wonder if most drivers really need a spare tire. For my own driving I only have a flat tire about every second year and I almost never drive outside the metropolitan area. Given how rarely I call for road-side assistance I think I would be better off without a spare tire and with the option of having the RACV deliver one for me if I needed it.
I expect that the time taken to deliver a spare tire would be greater than that required for a regular road-side assistance call, and that it might count for more than a regular assistance call, but given that the cheapest roadside assistance package has 8 calls a year I expect that most years I would still use less than half my quota of calls.
Not having a spare tire would save some weight (and therefore fuel) and would provide a little extra cargo space.
Also it seems to me that small cars are unlikely to ever be driven outside the area that is serviced by the RACV and similar organizations. For a small car the lack of a spare tire in the car design would offer a significant improvement to cargo capacity. If the RACV and other organizations endorsed and supported cars without spare tires then the car manufacturers could design small vehicles with more cargo capacity and less fuel use.
The S Class Mercedes has some really interesting safety features, see this 6.8M PDF file for details. If you are interested in technology then you want to read it just to learn about all the cool features – it’s got more technology than a Prius!
The S class includes the following features to protect the occupants in the event of a crash:
- Tire pressure monitors
- Electronic Stability Program (ESP) to selectively apply the brakes to reduce the risk of skidding
- Active suspension
- Pre-Safe is a management feature that recognises a potential collision by the steering and braking patterns of the driver and prepares the vehicle for an impact. This can involve adjusting the sun-roof, the seat-belts, and the driver’s seat position to prepare for impact, closing the side windows, and inflating air chambers in the sides of the seats.
- Head rests that automatically adjust in the event of a rear impact
The following features reduce the risk and/or severity of a crash:
- Night view (infra-red) display gives a display of potential obstacles ahead without dazzling oncoming traffic
- Distronic Plus is a brake assistance package that includes automatic braking based on radar surveillance of the traffic ahead
- 4Matic is a new feature that combines AWD with the traction-control feature that has become common on all expensive cars. This means that when any combination of wheels starts to spin on water or ice the brakes will be applied to them so that the wheels that have good grip can still be used for acceleration.
After a crash there are more safety features that can help you:
- The engine can be automatically turned off after an impact and if necessary the fuel supply can also be cut
- The hazard lights and emergency interior lights can be automatically activated
- The side windows can be partially lowered, if your car lands in water deep enough to submerge it then you MUST open the windows as soon as possible – otherwise water pressure may make it impossible to open the doors – people forget this so it’s good to have an automatic feature
- Automatic door unlocking after an impact (good for rescuing unconscious occupants)
- Cutting points marked on the windscreen and rear window for the benefit of emergency workers who need to cut the roof off with the “jaws of life”
These features are documented as being available in the latest S Class, I haven’t investigated what is available in the cheaper models and I’m not even sure where to find information on the safety features available in older models (a second-hand E class is more in my price range). But if I won the lottery a S class Merc would be high on my list of things to buy!
If you know of other cars that have a similar set of safety features to the S class and cost less then please let me know.
I will probably write a blog post about the BMW safety features in the near future. I couldn’t do so immediately because the BMW web site sucks. They have a form for me to fill in contact details so that they can post me a brochure (I want to read it NOW ONLINE). The form doesn’t like my postcode and refuses to proceed (it should at least have an option for them to contact me via email or phone).
It is reported that a theater in Florida has changed the name of The Vagina Monologues to The Hoo-Haa Monologues after a complaint.
How does a medical term become so offensive? Is Hoo-Haa less offensive than other terms such as Beaver?
The Vagina Monologues is old news anyway. The idea was surprising when it was new, but that was a while ago. Anyone who wants to complain has really missed their chance.
Wikisaurus has a collection of synonyms for vagina, maybe a better name than Hoo-Haa could be found?
The Norwegian Puffin Dog has six toes that are all fully formed. This has to be a good start for the uplift process.
The requirements for uplift are intelligence, speech, and the ability to use tools (dexterity in fingers). It seems that the Puffin Dog has a finger advantage over other breeds. Also the Lundehund has the ability to spread it’s front legs out horizontally and to turn it’s head around to face backwards, both these abilities significantly increase it’s potential ability at using tools (uplifted dogs could use their mouths to manipulate tools as well as their hands).
So we need to find a breed that has good vocal capabilities and a breed that is intelligent and produce a cross-breed that has the best of all three!
Lundehund Syndrome sounds nasty, and would be almost impossible to breed out of pure bred dogs, but when producing a cross-breed it should be easy enough to do. Given that we don’t care whether the uplifted dogs look like Lundehund’s, have the same number of teeth, or are identifiable with that breed in any way other than dexterity it should be easy to breed out the genetic damage.
According to Debian bug #399113 and linked discussion it is impossible to run a stable system on Xen without enabling PAE. It seems that no-one is considering the fact that a hypervisor that runs on both 32bit and 64bit architectures should be able to support 32bit systems with <4G of RAM (IE not using the PAE feature).
But instead to work around this bug the Debian developers have decided to just enable PAE. This is annoying for me as I have to either buy a new laptop or reduce my use of Xen.
I wonder what will happen if a Xen bug is discovered that only happens on PAE systems? Would that make Xen only an AMD64 thing?
Our despicable prime minister said “I think that would just encourage those who wanted completely to destabilise and destroy Iraq, and create chaos and victory for the terrorists to hang on and hope for (an) Obama victory“.
That statement is wrong in many ways, firstly the US (with Australian help) has destabilised and destroyed Iraq already. Claiming that removing US troops at this stage will do any further harm is unproven (and except for the Kurdish area extremely unlikely). Trying to link a presidential candidate with a terrorist organisation is the worst type of dirty politics.
Texas Republican senator John Cornyn requested that the Australian government stay out of US politics. It sounds like a reasonable request. But I wonder whether John Cornyn got involved when the US ambassador spoke out against the leader of the Labor party at the last Australian Federal election…
Senator Obama suggested that if John Howard wants to criticise his policies in Iraq then he should first send another 20,000 Australian troops (there are currently 140,000 US troops compared to 1,400 Australians). According to the CIA World Fact Book Australia has a population of 20.3M while the US has a population of 298.4M. If the ratio of serving soldiers was to match the populations then Australia would have 9,500 troops in Iraq. If Australia was to be a full military partner of the US (but scaled down due to the smaller population) and therefore had troops in South Korea, Japan, and Germany then the number of Australian troops committed might be closer to the 20,000 number cited.
But this is no criticism of Senator Obama. For a number that was made up to demonstrate his point that Australia is not pulling it’s weight in Iraq it’s a quite reasonable estimate.
The US Democrat Senator Ron Wyden correctly described Howard’s comment as “bizarre“. This may become a catch-phrase for the Howard regime (as the Bush regime is described as a “miserable failure“).
Johnny seems to think that it’s in his best interests to send Australians to fight a war that has no benefit for Australia (or the US for that matter), but he doesn’t have the guts to do it properly. Fortunately for him the Bush regime understands his position and allows him to send a token force to demonstrate support without the risk of any significant number of casualties or having to conscript soldiers.
This mutual meddling in elections is a demonstration of the way Bush and Howard conspire against the interests of the Australian and US citizens. Both countries need governments that look after the interests of their citizens at home and let the UN take a larger role in world issues.
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