Also looking a bit haggard. This is after 3 hours of sleep, a trip from Salt Lake to San Francisco to Portland in addition to some cold/flu type of thing trying to take me down.
It was time for the mustache to go.
’stache free
Originally uploaded by elbow donkey.
On a flight this morning next to me sat an older guy in what I assumed was his mid sixties. He and I sat on the right side of the plane, his wife on the left side. Before the flight started she handed a granola bar past me to him, and before he ate it, he bowed his head and lifted his right hand up in front of him, obviously praying.
Right before the plane took off, he prayed again. He’d bow his head and lift his hand up, with the palm facing out and the thumb spreading out, pointing towards my knee, holding the position for thirty seconds or so.
I didn’t think it was strange until he did it for about the fifth or sixth time. I know there are some really pious men in this world, and there’s nothing wrong with someone taking a moment to pray on a flight, but this was getting excessive. I was beginning to think he knew something I didn’t about this flight.
Then I noticed a gnarly blister with a flap of skin hanging off the web of his hand, between his thumb and index finger. He elbowed my elbow, and said “Check out that nasty mother f**ker” as he peered at his wound through the top halves of his glasses, avoiding the lower bifocal part of the lenses, palm facing out, thumb pointing my way, prodding the flap with his other finger.
I have a Roomba – it’s this little robot that cruises around my house and sucks the dirt out of the carpet. It’s a great thing to have if you have kids, and does a pretty good job. I think it met or exceeded our expectations, which is great. It’s by no means a novelty, and adds to the quality of life.
Thing is, the company that makes Roomba also makes robots that can kill other humans. That fact alone has turned people off to buying a Roomba – Matt being one of them. From a link* Matt posted, he says this:
“someone please build BloodOnYourRoomba.com to note the ethical dilemmas of supporting killbots by buying vacuums.”
Now, my apologies to Matt for making a big deal out of this, but I think that’s just crazy. I suspect it’s tongue in cheek as well, so I’ll keep that in mind, but I take issue with people who have ethical problems buying a vacuum cleaner simply because the same company makes robots with guns.
Following that same logic, Matt should also not like cars, because in times past and present, car manufacturers have built engines and vehicles that soldiers then use to kill people. Toothbrushes – well, you can’t like toothbrushes either, as people like Procter and Gamble make toothbrushes, and have product lines geared specifically towards military applications (albeit not deadly, but they aid those who are deadly). Matt should avoid flying as well, because Boeing is pretty good at making some deadly aircraft, as is most every jet airplane manufacturer aside from Airbus.
I think I could also make the argument that if you don’t like Roomba because it has a killer cousin, than you shouldn’t also like the Internet, given it’s origins as a military project. Sure, it was designed as an unbreakable network of communication primarily (a defensive move), but some of the precursors to the Internet like Ham radio and crypto systems and were directly developed to help increase the odds of our team killing more of the other team.
And then there’s this (and this is the spin that iRobot puts on it as well, which I do believe is spin, but also partially true): these robots reduce the risk of human lives (the lives of our team, which I’m happy with, but often at the cost of the other team, which might not be the other team, but people caught up in the middle who just happen to be in the line of fire from a robot that can’t make that distinction). But I think the motivations are just, and I wish the people we went to war with had similar resources. Eventually what I’d like to see is robots fighting in the streets with lots of explosions and grinding. We could buy popcorn and watch as we settle our differences through robotic superiority alone. For me, buying a robotic vacuum cleaner helps get me there.
While I’m only able to prove that I have exactly 7 years of blog entry archives (minus a day), there are about two years worth of missing archives that are on some Zip disk or floppy somewhere – formats I’m no longer able to read even if I could find the right disk. The michaelbuffington.com domain has been around since 99, and before that I was writing my personal “plan” on stompzine.com, a punk/ska music review site I ran long ago.
Calling it a “plan” wasn’t original – I was playing a lot of Quake at work, and I followed the “.plans” of the developers (I think that’s what they were called). Basically, people like John Carmack would use their “plans” to announce what new changes to the game were coming and talk about known issues with hardware, etc. Eventually they started getting more verbose, and began talking about how they just bought a new Ferrari, or were taking helicopter lessons. This was my first peak into what eventually turned into the blog format. That was in mid 1995, and I emulated the act almost immediately upon seeing it.
Over the years it never occurred to me that there was this gigantic thing percolating with weblogs. I had heard the term weblog and then eventually blog and it never occurred to me that this was what I had been doing for a couple of years already. I found sites from people like Jason and Matt, and never once assumed it would be as big as it is today (only a few people did back then).
I’m finding myself checking flickr several times a day now to see what my friends are taking photos of. This particular behavior couldn’t have been predicted when I first started using flickr. I sort of didn’t get what the hype as all about, and probably didn’t catch on to the social aspect of it due in part for not having any contacts added to my profile, but more in part because I had no contacts to add in the first place (I’ve since fixed that, thank you).
And I also find myself wanting to share my photographs on flickr much more now. At this exact moment, I have photos of the last few nights of dinner with friends and travels and such, and I’m experiencing physical discomfort over not being able to email them from my mobile phone, the Internet connection being down on it.
I can only imagine that my experience is typical of others as well – I’m rarely on the cutting edge when it comes to these things, but usually just ahead of the mainstream curve. If I’m accurate in describing myself like this, flickr will very shortly grow to enormous, near Google-size proportions in terms of popularity.
I saw a dog wearing a diaper this morning.
This morning as I was waiting for a bus I noticed a girl waiting as well. She was reading a book, and had crazy white and black hair. When I first looked at her, something was nagging at me. She looked really familiar but I couldn’t pin down why she looked familiar. I kept puzzling over it, and kept glancing over, and finally just decided I couldn’t take it, so I asked her:
“Hi, um, so I keep looking over at you because you look super familiar to me and I can’t figure out why. Where do I know you from?” Immediately realizing that this sounded like a pickup line (which I didn’t want her to think at all, me being very happily married), I said quickly “I’m genuinely curious, I just can’t place, it, I swear it’s not a pickup line or anything.”
She seemed relieved at that point, but didn’t seem to want to play along. I asked “did you grow up in Orange County?”, and she tentatively said “Yes”, and I said “I went to Marina High School in Huntington Beach, did you go there too?” and she said “No, but I went to Ocean View.” Ocean View High School was another high school in the same district, so I had narrowed it down to the city at least.
She asked “what elementary school did you go to?” and I said “College View”. Her face sort of lit up, and she said “so did I!” I asked her name, and she told me (I’m leaving it out of the story because I don’t know if that’s right, mentioning someone’s name on the Internet who may want to remain anonymous) and it turns out that I remember her from my 4th grade class and she remembered me.
We were both dumbfounded, and talked about what the odds were. I told her about living in Portland with Carrie and the kids, and she told me that she went to fashion school and was designing clothing.
We parted ways when her bus came.
The odds of this happening are probably not as slim as I think, but it’s still pretty crazy. Maybe even crazier is the fact that I hadn’t seen her since the 4th grade, and through all the years, somewhere in my head her face still remains in my memory to the point that she looked familiar enough to motivate me to ask. Pretty amazing, human memory.
I can’t believe it’s been a year already. You’re a fantastic kid and I can’t wait for what the next year brings.
Three times in a row now I’ve met the same man on my way to San Francisco while in and around the airport.
The first time, I saw him on a flight out and on a flight back. It was the first time I’d recognized someone I’d seen on a previous flight.
The second time, we both had 16F printed on our boarding pass. He’d gotten to the seat before me, so I let him have it. I sat next to him instead, and we talked about how crazy that was. I figured out he was a fellow geek (it was my assumption to begin with – not sure why) and said things like “they didn’t lock the record as we were both updating it” and stupid geek things like that. He has a really good laugh, and uses it a lot.
The third time, after parking my car in economy parking, he walked up to the bus pickup stop I was waiting at. We began talking – he commutes on a to San Francisco every Sunday night, returning Thursday. When I asked him what he did, he laughed nervously and said “I cannot say.” He has a heavy Indian accent and speaks like a lot of English speaking Indians – with a wider vocabulary and better command of the language than I have, but with a rolling accent. My brain has to work hard to understand him. I laugh, and say “Really? Top Secret eh?”.
He replies by first giving a huge belly laugh, then saying “No, really, I cannot say. You musn’t keep asking, I insist on having your consideration. If you keep inquiring about what I do I will laugh ever so hard. You will surely put me in a coma.” I draw the line at putting someone in a coma, so I stop asking. Anything less wouldn’t gain my compliance. We get on the shuttle. We get split up in the airport. When I board the plane and take my seat, he’s sitting at the window seat next me. Crazy!
We talk about the coincidence a bit, and for the rest of the flight we ignore each other. After the flight while in the terminal I stop to put on my jacket, and he stops next to me and says “tiny bits!”, raising his eyebrows at me, obviously excited. I say “sorry?” and he replies “I said tiny bits!” and starts laughing super hard. Puzzled by “tiny bits” I say “I don’t understand” and he responds “it’s what I do! Tiny bits! Everyday!” and begins laughing as he walks away.
I never did get to finish the conversation, as he essentially disappeared right after that. I’ll have to ask him the next time I see him.
I caught myself pondering something as I was driving today: “I assume deaf people are allowed to drive without restriction – so why do ‘in ear’ headphone manufacturers make sure you know that they shouldn’t be used while driving because they impair your hearing – what specific issues might you run into that would make not hearing a serious or life threatening disadvantage while driving?”.
It became clear immediately as I heard the attention grabbing sort of “buzz buzz” noise that police cars have and their drivers use to get someone’s attention. In this case, the someone being pulled over was daydreaming, and not paying attention to two things: his speed or his rearview mirror.
When the Sheriff asked if I knew why he pulled me over, I told him I was daydreaming and hadn’t noticed I slipped above the limit. He said “Oh yeah, what about?”, genuinely (he was a nice guy). I told him about my quandary over driving deaf and he said “you know, funny you should mention that – the last person I pulled over was deaf, and it took me three miles to get them to pull over – I had to get beside them and motion to them to pull over, which took easily a few minutes.”
So, after he gave me a nice fat ticket (no sales tax = expensive traffic tickets) and we parted ways, two things came to mind: radar/laser detector, and this idea:
It’d be cool if all cars had WiFi, including Police cars, and while driving, each created a mesh network. Maybe we’d all have Macs in our cars, and it would be like Bonjour (formerly Rendezvous). Each car computer would discover others nearby, and temporary ad hoc networks would form. I’m not new in this thinking at all – Rael and I talked about this a while back (he had lots of similar ideas which he should write about sometime soon, nudge nudge).
Our in board computers could enable handsfree or single button pushing to active audio chat sessions with nearby drivers. You could chew someone out, or ask someone for directions, or have a police officer cut in and say “would you mind pulling over, the lights are freakin’ people out”. Kids on road trips could play networked games with other kids nearby, and maybe while waiting in line in a drive through you could order from a web page rather than wait to yell into a box.
There would be kinks to iron out, and the extreme temporary nature of the networks would require some clever ideas (which I fully encourage), but wouldn’t that be interesting?