Some Days in the Life - May 25, 1999
But for now, I am tired.
Brewster Academy remains an amazing place. No matter how disheartened I was yesterday (and in many ways remain) it remains an amazing place. This is good for me to realize and remember today, as we have Round Three of an extended meeting with someone highly unpleasant today. The best way to survive these meetings is to focus on the fact that you are right and he is wrong and no matter how much yelling takes place, you will remain right and he will remain wrong and that's that. Today, I don't have to be actively right. I just have to be passively right while my boss is actively right. My boss is very good at being actively right.
I'll talk my concerns over with him, too. He's not likely to get involved directly -- that's a good way for him to disrupt the political balance and he knows it -- but he'll likely center my perspective a bit and that'll be a good thing.
I need a haircut, badly. Especially before, oh, Graduation. In an era of short hair, I'm beginning to look like an overweight member of the Monkees. Time to change that.
The problem is, I have this straight scottish hair going. The most common look I can force out of my hair is "Commander Riker," which the beard sadly reinforces. (The haircut doesn't make me taller, more handsome or more endearingly wooden so I don't even get the practical use of the resemblance). I've found one really good hair stylist in Maine but she's usually booked solid for the times I could get over there and besides, I should really have someone who can cut my hair locally. It shouldn't be hard to cut my hair. But, sadly, it is.
In geek news, I've downloaded and installed the SETI@Home program, which I think I like better than the other major distributed computing project that's out there -- namely, the RC5 Bovine project, which uses distributed computing to crack encryption codes and show the inadequacy of current encryption regulations. Which seems to be slowly becoming a non-issue, as the Federal Government's been caught with their hands in the foreign cookie jar recently. It's looking more like strong encryption export regulation may become a little saner sometime in the near future.
In either case, I couldn't really feel the dream of Encryption Cracking, even if I could understand and support the statement being made. SETI, on the other hand, makes sense to me. We're not spending the money as a nation or world that we should on a project of this magnitude, so it falls on the citizenry to start looking at the skies. While I'm told I could rebuild my satellite dish into a radiotelescope for this, I'm shallow and want to continue watching The Powerpuff Girls instead.
But I have computers. Those computers have CPU's. Those CPU's have idle cycles. Those cycles can go to a good cause. The chances that my computers will make a Contactesque breakthrough are so unlikely as to be ridiculous, but heck -- it can't hurt.
Besides, unlike the RC5 interface, which uses status bars and cow imagery, there's lots of really cool looking Fast Fourier Transformation graphs on the SETI information screen, and constant updates. The guys who coded this were better than science geeks, they were science geeks who knew people like me would respond to something that looks like Star Trek's background console images. Granted, I won't win a cash prize should my computer find Alien Life... but my computer will have found Alien Life.
On the other hand, someone will actually win the RC5 contest. There's no promise that there are aliens with radios out there. But heck, if I can't be romantic about space, I should stop writing science fiction.
Of course, I have stopped writing science fiction. I've been Outlining Role Playing Games and framing out Children's Fantasy. I need to get back into SF. Just because no one wants to buy it doesn't mean I don't want to write it, after all. There's so much to write out there, though....
Well, heck. At least there's always this journal, right? Hello? Hello? Dang.
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