the corner office

I went for a haircut this week. Well, not a haircut-haircut, more like a hairtrim, but that's not the point really. During the haircut/trim I had to endure the one bit of haircut/trims I really wish hairdressers would do without: the head massage.

Having my hair washed - that's OK. It's functional, it feels nice, I'm happy. Stop there, towel me up and send me to my seat. Please don't subject me to the 5 minutes of head rubbing. It's not that I'm against having my head massaged, I just find the whole human dynamics part of it too hectic to navigate.

First, I'm just not quite sure how to react to having some lady I don't know massaging my head. What's the right thing to do? I'm pretty sure that 'oh yeah, harder harder little to the left aaaaaah yes, ooooooh I like it like that' isn't appropriate. But after that, I'm lost. So? Sit back and look content? I'm not sure if my 'content' look will give her nightmares. Do you have to make her feel better by looking like you enjoy it? Is she thinking I'm a heartless machine serial killer if I'm not responding? I know that if I try to muster the half-amused and detached 'yeah it's cool I'm cool and I do this every day' look, I'll just come across like a perv with a daft grin.

I'd rather just not go through that.

Also, what if the aunty's just not very good at it? I don't think I've ever had a particularly good head massage at a hairdresser. Sure, in principle, a head massage is nice, and I'm not saying it always sucks, but generally speaking it's either too hard or too soft or pulls your hair or just feels like someone's looking for ticks.

I'm guessing that most hair-wash-head-massaging ladies are doing their apprenticeships and being thoroughly exploited, or really in need of the money and being thoroughly exploited or just not well in the head, and being thoroughly exploited. So if your job entails massaging people's noggins, you've got enough problems, without people giving you grief about it or bitching 'cause you're crap at it. I just couldn't do it. I'd rather just live with the bruising and bald spots.

That brings me to my final point, which is that generally speaking, the head massage just feels a little bit porno. I've never had anyone who's been entirely erm, enthusiastic about it. It always just feels like it's a kinda down-to-business, everyone else is doing it so we gotta do it to keep the customers happy vibe. I know this woman doesn't really want to be massaging me. I know I'm like the 50th head she's massaged today, and there's nothing special about my head to make it in the least bit exciting or interesting for her. She's not getting any kick out of it - sensual or professional (except for the crazies, but I'm sure they're statistically insignificant).

She's just doing it 'cause she's gotta, and it goes without saying that there are a great many things in life where if the party of the second part is doing unto the party of the first part just 'cause they gotta, then the party of the first part is probably better off not being done unto at all.

Which is precisely my point. I just think this whole head massage business is a monster which has grown out of control. I, for one, am happy to leave haircutting/trimming to the professionals, and stick to enjoying head massages in the privacy of my own home.

Grumble grumble... I'm sitting here, quietly tinkering away, and I look up at my CPU monitor on my Gnome toolbar and notice that my machine's a little busier than it should be. I take a peek at the system monitor, and notice a process called trackerd is the chief CPU hog. A quick search and it turns out that this is a file system indexer. I recall reading something about this on the new feature list. Not very nice of Ubuntu to not even ask me if I want it running, but it wasn't hard to switch it off via the Indexing control panel dialog.

Whilst searching, I saw a good few forum and blog entries griping about the whole trackerd thing, since a great many people are seeing sluggish systems once this daemon gets going. A fairly common theme is 'Ubuntu is getting bloated'. If tracker-bloody-d is anything to go by, I'd have to agree. I guess it's just symptomatic of other things. It's not going to change, but it's disappointing that inevitable creaping featuritis, mixed with a healthy dose of 'let's dazzle Windows users with crap and hope they convert' is the order of the day with many of these ambitious, heavily marketed open-source projects.

For me, I should really just put some time aside, bump myself over to Xubuntu, or roll a leaner fluxbox desktop or the like, and be done with it. I like many of the Linuxey things you just can't get on a Windows box, but I must admit, I find myself getting increasingly more frustrated with Gnome. It's never been my favourite, but it's starting to really get to me.

I don't want all my posts to be grumbles and whinges though, so on a brighter note, tomorrow night is Friday night, which means pizza night! Mmm pizza.

A good weekend. South Africa wins the Rugby World Cup, and then against all odds, Kimi Raikkonen wins the F1 championship. Both nail-biting till the end, and both well-deserved victories. Well done Boks, and well done Kimi!

(OK, 2 sports posts for the year. No more, I swear).

Today saw the release of Ubuntu 7.10, aka 'Gutsy Gibbon'. I thought I'd go ahead and upgrade. How wonderful 8MB ADSL is... I had the 800 megs in update files in no time. The upgrade went off without a hitch, which is usually the best thing you can say about an upgrade.

This version has Gnome 2.20, which is as unexciting as any previous version. There's also Compiz Fusion support which is really cool but beyond my laptop's graphics capabilities, so I wobbled a few windows and then switched it off. But it's nice to know it's there. Oh, and Nautilus is as rubbish as ever. That's about it.

Rather a nice weekend. Aunt-visiting-from-South-Africa, cousin, cousin-in-law-to-be, sister and brother-in-law came to visit yesterday. Lunch at the Crown in South Moreton (well recommended), followed by a drive along a few country lanes and a lazy afternoon with everyone making a fuss of Leo.

Leo, for his part, was on fine form, charming everyone by being adorable and sociable. Of course, the minute the last guest was out the door, the toothless grin dropped, he hauled out a pack of cigarettes and a six pack and plopped down on the couch hurling abuse at the TV and his parents and ripping the heads off his teddy bears and making foul bodily-function sounds and scratching himself in unmentionable places.

OK, not really, I made that last bit up (mostly). The little man knows how to turn on the charm for an audience, though. That's not a bad thing, and way preferable to the alternatives, but I hope he doesn't start thinking it's going to turn his parents into pushovers. No way, no chance of that happening. Nuh-uh, never.

Ronwen mentioned something about a post on a blog we both follow, and I said 'hey, I haven't read any posts from that person in ages'. So I went digging around in my Bloglines folders and realised that somehow I'd lost the blog's feed. Goes to show - these fancy no-effort tools are great, but a little bit of finger trouble and you're none the wiser.

Trawling through my Bloglines subs was a bit of an eye-opener, though. I'm still subbed to blogs which haven't been updated in years... quite literally. Take Southern Cross, an early South African blog, for example. They haven't posted anything since August 2004. I guess it's safe to say the dudes have given up. I made my peace with the idea, and hit the 'unsub' button. I could do the same for quite a few more, but there are others where I'm hesitant. I'm subbed to some blogs where the authors have done the Farewell thing... and in other cases, they've just gone quiet... but if any of them ever decided to start blogging again, I'd like to know about it. Going through some of these dormant blogs, there are quite a few I'm remembering fondly. I rather miss their blogging.

How long before you decide to flip the switch on a dead blog? A month, a year? More?

I also just realised that as of the beginning of October, I've been blogging publically for over 4 years. That's a loooong friggin' time.

I feel that apologising for lousy posts might be a slippery slope around here, but I do feel compelled to acknowledge that last night's post was sub-par, even by my standards. Not only was it a grammatical wasteland, but it was also just plain arb. I woke up this morning and remembered that I'd blogged something, and then remembered what it was, and thought who cares? Even I don't really care that much about the subject matter, and I'm the one who wrote the post. That's what you get for posting far too late at night when you should be asleep letting your neurons regroup.

On the upside, I've made pretty good progress on the assignment front, with only two left to do, so the pressure's off a bit on that front. No more having to read horrible textbooks on the bus each day. Yay!

New chancellor Alistair Darling had a bit of a rough day, revealing all sorts of proposals in his pre-Budget report which look like hurried cribs from the Conservatives. Watching the Labour missteps the past few days was just painful. How hard can it be not to put your foot so wrong, day after day after day? I suppose the flipside is you can screw up all you like when deep down you're thinking 'by the time elections roll around, people won't even remember that this happened, neener neener neener'.

There was a documentary on Panorama this evening about a potential sub-prime mortgage crisis in the UK (*). I don't find the doomsday predictions very persuasive, but I don't doubt that the property and financial markets could take a bit of a beating, and to be honest, a bit of sanity in the property market wouldn't be an entirely bad thing for people like us who're not (yet) on the property ladder.

As always though, it didn't take long for me to get a little fractious at the tack the documentary was taking.

I don't for one second disagree that irresponsible and dishonest lenders should be taken to task and vilified if they're acting unethically, and prosecuted if they're breaking the law, but why was there absolutely no focus on the culpability of borrowers themselves? I'm not talking about hard-working people whose only crime was not being financially literate and being too trusting of lenders who lied to them about repayments and the like, but the reporter very sympathetically interviewed one woman who lied about her income and financial situation at the encouragement of her broker. While the broker's company deservedly came in for naming and shaming, this stupid and dishonest woman, who chose to remain anonymous, probably because she could (and should) get nailed for fraud, got portrayed as an unfortunate victim!

It boggles the mind.

(*) For South African readers: sub-prime mortgages have nothing to do with the South African notion of the prime overdraft rate. Instead, they're basically mortgages granted to people who're a poor credit risk and who don't qualify for credit from normal lenders.

I average about 1 sports-related post a year, this is 2007 taken care of. It's about Formula 1, which I take a passing interest in since the missus is an F1 nutter.

I don't really have anything against Lewis Hamilton, but you won't see me crying if he loses. It's nothing personal, but since he rose to fame Formula 1 TV coverage has turned into The Lewis Hamilton Show, and the bias and blind devotion is all too much. Hamilton defies team orders and screws over his teammate and he's a maverick hero with a winner's mentality. Alonso follows orders and conveniently screws over Hamilton and he's a bad loser and rotten sportsman, and oh yeah, he steals candy from little babies and kicks puppies. I have no doubt that the Spanish media fawn as ridiculously over Alonso, but I don't watch Spanish coverage, so I don't really care about that.

There's also the spying thing. There's no doubt that Lewis is a brilliant driver, and would probably be deserving of the championship. But not this year. Maybe I'm just not paying attention, but how do two drivers whose team got kicked out of the constructor's championship for cheating, get to race the same unfairly-advantaged cars and have a legitimate claim to the championship?

Go Kimi!