I read a blog called “The Art of Manliness”. It’s a site about being an old-fashioned guy. Being a gentleman, dressing well, grooming, etc. One of the things that they talked about a while back was shaving. The guy was extolling the virtues of the safety razor. At the time, it sounded interesting but it wasn’t something I’d ever spend my own money on. Well, Jess bought me a shaving kit for Christmas, including a beaver fur brush, a safety razor and face soap. I tried it for the first time this week. I have no idea why I’ve been wasting money on my Gillette piece of crap all these years.
I’ve used some of the typical razors all these years with increasing numbers of razor blades that don’t seem to improve my shave. Some would argue that I don’t replace my blades often enough, but I’d say every 2-3 weeks should be sufficient for the price you have to pay. I’ve been using the same safety razor blade the past week and each shave is as good as the last. The instructions I read said that I should replace it every week. Oh, dear. That’s awful, right? A set of 10 razors will last me over 2 months at that rate. The price? 5 bucks. 50 cents a blade. For a 2 month supply of my current razors costs almost 40 bucks, and that’s if I feel like I need to change the blade every week. However, it’s just the price. The whole experience is so much better. The shave feels so much better. I spent the first day after I shaved just rubbing my face thinking I had never managed to shave that closely. That’s another thing. I can shave the night before, skip it the next morning, and it’s still looks better by the end of the day than my prior shaves.
Get your significant other to get you one you’ll thank me. Before you start shaving, let me give you a couple of observations and early lessons learned:
- When you are applying the soap lather brush it on against the grain. Gets the bristles to stand up a little bit.
- You’ll basically be putting the top of the razor on your face and then tilting it down a bit. You need to remember that this is a rigid razor and not a nice flexy bendy razor.
- Your face is going to gesticulate a lot. To get to those hard to reach places you aren’t going to have the advantage of the angled disposable razors. Pucker your lips. Stick out your chin. Stretch your cheeks.
- Apply ZERO pressure. It is a safety razor but it is not the lawsuit-proof razors from Gillette or Schick, so you don’t want to slip and cut yourself. More importantly, though, the more you press down, the more razor burn you’ll get. (This goes for disposables, as well but you’re scratching a bare razor blade against your face in this case, rather than a series of tips of razors covered by wire.)
- It’ll take a little more time but I think it’s worth it. You can get to the point where it only takes a couple more minutes than a more typical shave.
Jess and I got a bunch of money for our wedding. We have a savings plan, etc. so we decided we were going to spend the money on stuff we wanted, rather than needed. We bought our new couch, which was the big ticket item that she wanted and we also got iPhones. At first I thought this was going to be something where I had it, I liked it, but would otherwise just be a gadget that’s fun to show off at parties.
Boy was I wrong.
While it is something I certainly lived without, it has rapidly become indispensable and it was and is certainly money well-spent.
- The GPS in DC is just as good or better than our dedicated GPS receiver. On our way back from Puerto Rico, I made a wrong turn on the way back from home. I played with the iPhone GPS while Jess fished out the GPS receiver. While I didn’t manage to find my way home with either and went on instinct, if I had stuck with the iPhone, I would have probably not had any problem because I could see the whole map, while the GPS receiver required me to follow the directions more than reading the map and the directions were, frankly, bad.
- At work, Jess and I are able to text message back and forth. Instead of getting a call and having to stop what either of us are doing, we can finish up and reply at our leisure. We can check up on each other if one of us wasn’t feeling well in the morning, coordinate pickups in the evening, and things like that that are so convenient.
- I did not take my laptop on my most recent trip. I just took my cell phone. Aside from the obvious issues of size and trying to type on a small keyboard, I didn’t feel like I lost anything. I still had e-mail and I could check on news whenever I needed or wanted.
- Instead of having to fumble with an extra camera (and mine is a slightly big and clumsy camera), I can just pull up the iPhone and take a quick snapshot and with the Darkroom program that steadies the shot, I can get shots that are just as good and sometimes better than my real camera. I used to think I didn’t like taking photos just ’cause. Now I’m always clicking away with the camera.
- I have an e-book reader and it’s a nice once. I currently use Stanza and read books off the Project Gutenberg website. It does an excellent job of formatting them and making them easy to read on the screen. Amazon has also created a Kindle program for the iPhone, which means I can buy Amazon e-books, as well.
- Oh, yeah. It’s also my iPod.
Am I saying that the iPhone is some kind of transformative technology? Yes. That’s what I’m saying. When I look at it and use it during the day, I can’t help but remember the PADDs from ST:TNG (Personal Access Display Devices). They were little handheld computers that interacted with the main computer. Sound familiar? I’m not necessarily saying that everyone should go out and buy one (the barrier to entry is still too high for most, unfortunately) but as Apple begins getting competition from the other carriers and phone companies begin producing competitive phones, I think more and more that that is the direction things are going to go. I know this has obviously been already said by others but I just thought I’d add my voice.
Every once in a while I get a feeling like I should try one of the other browsers available in OS X. I tried Safari for a while and then OmniWeb. (Which just recently became freeware.)
I have no idea why I try every year because I really just waste a lot of time trying to move bookmarks, find equivalent functionality in the new browser, and just generally try to make the browser I’m trying into Firefox. When you run Safari, you just feel like you’re using a browser circa 1998. Omnibrowser was a little better but just not familiar enough to keep. While I was experimenting Safari 4 came into Beta. It’s pretty (I love the “Speed Dial”/CoverFlow knock-off.) but it doesn’t do anything spectacular. I can still see where it’s useful for beginners but I’m, I suppose, a “power user”; I have 30+ RSS feeds I keep track of, I have dozens of bookmarks and they’re stored on a social bookmarking site, (Delicious) and I occasionally edit a website, so having a lot of dev tools available is helpful.
All that said, Firefox just seems like a more solid browser; it works exactly the way I would think a browser should. Every once in a while, I see a new feature on one of the other browsers but the thing is that within 2 or 3 months, it is easily mimiced. I’m pretty well convinced at this point that Firefox will be my browser from now on.
I have never been the one to find the best algorithm to solve a problem. That was clear last night when I started trying to solve some programming problems at Project Euler. The problem was really simple, but indicative of the difference between me and some programmers. The problem was to find the sum of the numbers from 1 to 1000 that are multiples of 3 or 5. I solved it using Scheme (A very cool language, if you’ve never used it.) When I went in to look at the forums, I saw that my algorithm was not the best. There were people who delved into forumulas and equations and some that were even more esoteric calculations included forumulas that had real numbers in them.
If you looked at their code, even the people that had a simple formula to compute it the summation, their code was cryptic, using odd names for formulas, cryptic functions, and functions that only fit the problem at hand. I was excited about my source. It was useful for any size problem. Would work for any numeric range, and was very easy to understand and was self-documenting (Which is saying something seeing as how I used recursion.)
One can make the argument that it’s better to have both a useful, readible solution and the most efficient algorithm. That’s correct and given 2 or 3 hours, I’d probably come up with something that was quicker than what I did. However, it’s an interesting difference between programmers. Some hit the algorithms. Some hit the code and the design. One of my Microsoft Interviews went poorly because the algorithms that I wrote on the fly weren’t the most optimal solution because I was more interested in writing a solution that would apply to the most cases. The guy I was working with was only concerned with sheer performance. For most cases, the middle-case algorithm will do just fine, especially with compiler optimization and high-speed processors. Having the best case algoirthm is a specific job of a specific type of developer that usually has a PhD in parallel computing or algorithm analysis. Most projects nowadays fail or are overbudget. It would seem that it would be better to have code that is easy to maintain or work on than starting with the best algorithm.
‘Course that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Ok. I thought that with a new administration coming in that we’d have fiscal responsibility return and a reasoned approach to recovery that would benefit people other than speculators and stupid people. Alas, I have been hit with yet another disappointment.
The stimulus package is going to include 2 provisions in particular that I just cannot understand. (Oh, in addition to the 100-200 billion or so that don’t add jobs to the economy.) Those two provisions include tax credits for large purchases, including houses and cars. I will quickly discuss the car one so that I can delve into the housing one since it impacts people like me directly.
“Why when you bounce a check, the bank charges you money they know you don’t have any of?”
–Gallagher
To start off with, the feds will be providing rebates for people who buy a car (this was sponsored by a woman who, in my mind, should truly know better–Barbara Mikulski) Who does this benefit? Big business. The car industry and maybe the people who work in the factories, though I don’t believe there’s any provision that you need to buy an “American” car. By listening to any news broadcast in the past 6 months, Americans are drowning in debt. Consequently, government is pushing for Americans to get further into debt. Makes perfect sense.
As far as the housing credit goes, this is stupid on a number of levels. First off, lets look at the problem at the moment. The “crisis” isn’t that people aren’t buying new houses, it’s that people are going to loose the houses they’re in. So, strike one. Second, the with this tax credit, the politicians are artificially increasing demand for houses with access to free money. The past 8-10 years has had demand artificially increased with bad loan deals (that, by the way, they haven’t fixed yet.) so all the politicians are doing as a diluted form of what’s been happening in the past that got us into this crisis to begin with. Strike 2. Going along with that, what happens with increased demand? The part that pisses me off the most–housing prices are going up. Who does this benefit, people with a vested interest in housing prices going up. Namely, current homeowners (which, admittedly, is a benefit) and…companies with junk assets, like, say Bank of America, Citi, Wells Fargo, Wachovia……you know, those companies that we’ve learned to love to hate? Strike 3. And, by the way, what happens when people dive into these houses and the next round of ARM resets that are supposed to happen this year happen and they end up underwater on their mortgages? Umm…strike 4?
Who does this benefit? People that were already in the housing market, in the car market and in big business. That’s it. I can’t get my head around how or why they thought this was a good idea but I’m guessing it has to do something with LePetomaineism–”We’ve gotta protect our phoney baloney jobs!” They have to look like they’re doing something, so they’ve chosen to give money to a special anointed few who were lucky enough to be looking for a house when the bubble burst instead of putting that money where it would help the most, in a combination of tax cuts and spending on actual, honest to God infrastructure improvements (read Interstate Highway System, National Broadband, Building of a Renewable Energy Industrial complex)
I finally picked a winner this year! My Steelers won their 6th World Championship yesterday. It was far too close a game for my tastes and they won it ugly but they did it.
And that’s what I wanted to discuss this evening. They won it really ugly. Personal fouls when there shouldn’t have been. A vaunted defense that collapsed. An offensive line that gave Ben little or no protection and when they did, forced safeties. A crappy running game. Who won it? Santonio Holmes, right? Nope. Ben did.
Let me begin with saying that I’ve never been a big Roethlisberger fan. He’s injured more often than he’s well. He’s too inconsistent for my taste (but when you go back through the line of Steelers QB–Bradshaw, Brister, Stewart, O’Donnell, Maddox, and Tomczak it’s sort of a prerequisite). He has a bit of the “right place at the right time” feel about him. However, last night changed all of that in my opinion. He was the leader of the team. He would not lose. He led a come back that only 2 other quarterbacks could ever do–Joe Montana and John Elway–good company to be in. He gave credit even when credit wasn’t due (Offensive Line) and he played hard (no QB slides in this game), he ran around, made plays, and, basically, did everything that he needed to do to win. He’s going to have years down the road where he sucks or doesn’t bring his A game. I will not allow myself to criticize him after the performance he gave last night. Like my favorite coach of all time, Jim Tressel, he’s earned his tenure. He can do whatever he wants with that team from now on.
Ok. The rest of the show so far has me hooked in suspense, but I gotta say, there’s one part of the show that’s absolutely absurd. There’s this lawyer from the AG in the FBI building harassing the director of the field office over one of his agents using “illegal methods of interrogation.” It’s the middle of a national crisis and tens of thousands of lives are in the balance and he’s wanting to question an active field agent. Wouldn’t in any world outside of the 24 world the following conversation happen?
President: Why haven’t the terrorists that, you know, are threatening tens of thousands of lives been caught yet?
FBI Director: Oh, well, one of the agents that’s pursuing them is being harassed by a lawyer in the attorney general’s office.
President: Oh. I’ll call and have him fired.
FBI Director: Thanks. k. Bye.
Really, if 24 did things the way they do in the real world, it’d be called 12.
This blog is three-fold. First, to let everyone know that Jess and I are back and are settled back into a regular routine after the wedding. We were so happy with how the wedding turned out and were happy that we had the people there to share it with. We have gotten our wedding pictures and we’re in the process of diving into them this week. (Anyone know if they make converters from a CF card to USB?) Once we’ve gone through all of them, we will happily post them either on the old wedding site or this site. I’ll let you know when we get them done.
Second, Jess and I have decided to chronicle some of our adventures in married bliss on our wedding site, as a continuation of the wedding site, so please continue to go to the wedding site for updates.
Thirdly, I had a funny story to tell. Normally, when I’m at work, I go to the cafeteria to lunch and sit by myself to read or just not have to think or process for a while. However, once in a while, I sit with a group of other Software Engineers that just shoot the breeze about any old topic while they eat. The other day, I was invited to sit with them and we started talking about the new TV shows that are coming out. (24, Lie to Me, etc.) Behind us was a group of workers that were all under the age of 25 that were all joking and laughing and making plans for Thursday night. I did a real quick scan of my table and noticed that everyone at the table was married. After 28 years, I’m finally sitting at the big kids table. :)
I am just *SOOO* tempted to tell a story that happened at work the other day. For those that are in the computing field, they’d find it pretty darn funny. It’s not personal. It isn’t an attack on any one person and their skills. It’s a funny anecdote wrapped in a demonstration of extreme hypocrisy. However, with the economy being the way it is coupled with stories of people being fired for what they write about their jobs, I am really hesitant. Just suffice it to say, something really funny happened at work the other day and it was enough to make up for a rather long day where I was waiting for other people to get back at me.
So that is to say that this post was quite meaningless, but thanks for reading. :)
