I generally try to avoid randomly linking to other content on the Web. Enough other bloggers do nothing but that, producing almost zero original (or even personal) content in the process.

But xkcd's latest comic appeals to my inner nerd so tough luck. Enjoy.

Anyone else noticed the recent advertising blitz by the cosmetics companies targeting men? Shit like "You think you look rugged, she thinks you're working too hard."

I can't begin to tell you how much it gets up my nose. Nay, fucks me right off.

I went for a quick swim at the gym this morning. Afterwards, in the change rooms, I watched transfixed as one of the guys hauled out a hair dryer, complete with various attachements, and then proceed to spend the next 10 minutes crafting one of these mohawks that are so popular at the moment. You know, the one that looks suspiciously like you spent the night with your hair crammed up someone's butt crack.

And it wasn't even an isolated incident. At the same time one of the other guys commandeered another mirror to do the same thing. Admittedly, he wasn't nearly as well equipped and had to make do with his hands. Clear this troubled him because eventually I was done and when I left he was still standing in front of that mirror trying to decide whether or not hair #25,132 should lie slightly to the left or stand at a 27.2 degree angle.

Now I'd imagine that one popular "defence" might be that there's nothing wrong in trying to look good. Bullshit. This is fallacious. "Looking good" in this case means meeting an arbitrary set of criteria driven by a combination of current fashion (few things are more arbitrary) and (to a much larger extent) a group who have decided that men are the next market to be exploited.

But who can blame them? Look at how successfully they've managed to exploit women.

This is pretty much how it happens to me too. Unexpectedly and at full volume. And Claire reacts in much the same way as the big guy in this video [1.83M, WMV] did.

I figured I've been absent on this forum for long enough that it was high time I stepped back in and gave a rough state of the nation. I really enjoy browsing back through my blog entries. It's a great way to take a nostalgic walk through recent history. Needless to say that's going to be tricker if I don't pick up the pace and bloody well write something down every now and then.

Highlights? Well, work is it's usually busy self. We've had a rough couple of weeks trying to pull together some features in parallel with certain, *ahem*, challenges (self-induced, as the best challenges always seem to be). I got promoted recently, which I suppose counts as a highlight. I'm still enjoying it although the trend away from being directly involved in the day to day technical work seems to be continuing.

It's weird. It's not like I haven't got opportunities to get directly involved in pretty much any of the work I want to. It's something Peter and I have talked about and we've made plans with the specific aim of giving me these opportunies. But the past few days are a great example of what generally happens. 10 programmers, left to their own devices, with the best of intentions, do *not* move in the same direction. And it's through no fault of theirs'. I think this kind of work is generally simply so focused that it's like wearing blinkers. And without explicitly stopping and taking a look around (hard to do when you're on a roll) it's easy to drift a little.

And for some reason I seem to end up trying to drag everyone back onto the path and in the right direction (although perhaps "chosen" is better than "right"). It's not a trend I can easily explain. It just is. Maybe everyone else just got tired of dragging?

The end result, though, tends to be a pretty fractured day. I'm not saying I mind, I'm just trying to figure out where I am. The perpetual search for meaning and fullfillment in life :-)

In other news, Gary and Bev got married recently. So they're falling like flies. Neil and Shona are up in November. Rory and Tarryn (ooh, I hope I've spelt that correctly) are up in January, and Mark and Sarah will follow sometime later next year (unless they've already set a date and I've forgotten, which is entirely possible).

And speaking of Neil, his bachelor's happens this weekend and I've just been informed of the evening's events. It seems they'll include Teazers, amongst other "pleasures".

We recently spent time up in Pretoria with my family-in-law. I really enjoy spending time with them. They're generally pretty chilled but provide me with no end of entertainment. We (or rather I) did have an additional reason for going up: to visit the The Headache Clinic.

I suffer from a lot of headaches. So much so that I feel something like Douglas Adam's Rain God, in that I have a wide range of different headaches that all feel different. So in a sense while other people get "a headache", I get "type 1 - starts as tension in my shoulder muscles and climbing my neck slowly" or "type 3 - starts in my right temple and moves in to camp out behind my right eye" (or variants on the other side of my head, and complete with sub-variants that sometimes include a metallic taste in my mouth).

So we figured we'd front the cash and give it a go. The results remain to be seen. It will be three months before I know if it's helped. In the interim we've tracked down a local physiotherapist who specialises in headaches and we're looking for someone who might do dry-needling (a Western take on acupuncture) or even acupuncture "proper".

In addition I'm trying to eat more healthily (not that we don't do this already, but I'm preferring healthier lunches over the stuff I used to eat) and trying to walk for 30 or 40 minutes as part of "lunch retrieval"). And in addition to that I'm trying to swim at least few times a week. The weird thing is that I definitely feel better for all this but it doesn't seem to have made a bit of difference on the headache front.

I think that about sums up the current state of affairs. Unfortunately my bike is conspiciously absent from all this. I haven't had chance to take it out for a few weeks now, what with a combination of travel, work and headaches (and a weird combo of a stomach bug and the flu that took me down last week). I hope to rectify this shortly, especially given some of the glorious days we've had of late.

I'm busy rereading Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series (highly recommended).

Despite having read it once before, despite owning it, and despite the fact that I'm through the first two books suggesting I can actually read (and therefore might be able to read the spines of the books correctly) I was half way into book three before realising I was in fact reading book two having just finished book one and three in that order.

And for the past few days the closest I've come to realising this is thinking "Hell but this is one long flashback."

Eish.

Sort of.

Does this mean we can expect the A-Team? Airwolf? Street Hawk? I've heard rumours of a Magnum movie.

Hollywood revisits the 80s? Man, that would kick ass :-)