customising life

I recently had my hair cut in Hong Kong, and before I knew what was happening they were washing my hair! Well I knew what was going on, but didn’t want to try and argue.

My hair that hadn’t seen shampoo in almost 26 weeks, that’s half the damn year!

Honestly my hair wasn’t going to well, and I don’t think they would have not washed my hair if I’d asked, but I put that down to the length of it.

It was going down past my nose, completely covering my ears, and was getting down the neck of my shirt. It had these annoying and ridiculous curls. I’ve never had hair that long, I’m so glad they are gone.

Now that my hair is much shorter, I’m back off the shampoo. I have however picked up some experience along the way. Brushing, brushing, brushing. Regular brushing allows the natural oils to get away from the scalp and through you hair. It also helps blood circulation, like massage (which is also a good idea) in your scalp too.

And it’s never getting that long again either.

Finally found some time to quickly jot this down.

We had a two and a half day romp in the snow last weekend, which was uncharacteristically good for Aussie snow in July.

Thredbo has such a poor year of snow in 2006 (check out the Snow Depth Chart (1 MB PDF); possibly the worst in 40 years!), so I was anxious about our ski trip this year.

Fears were alleviated in the week leading up to last weekend, where the snow was just dumping down. In my history of Australian snow experiences, this was an unusual treat. The snow was fantastic!

We’ve already planned at least one return trip this season, maybe even two.

Around the office I am more often than not turned to as the technology/computer/network/database/website/email expert. I really wish we had an IT tech or something.

Some users in the office recently were given Office 2007 on their PCs. Why some and not all I don’t understand, but already I’ve had many complaints about it. I’ve never used or even seen Office 2007 until this, and quite frankly don’t ever want too.

But sadly, I know that I will have to as part of my extra-employment activities.

I’ve already had one or two on how the interface works and a good discussion on how the new file formats will (or most likely won’t) work in the context of the office. In our case they certainly won’t work as people are creating new documents in Office 2007, which other staff simply can’t read. I don’t want to be around when this blows out.

But the most interesting was one this morning. Office 2007 killed the spelling tool in Outlook Express. One of our staff is using Windows XP (and Outlook-Express) and since someone installed Office 2007 on his PC it has completely borked his Outlook Express spell checker.

It tries to correct almost every word, yet offers no sensible alternative, whilst also denying the ability to add the proper word to the dictionary.

For example, this ordinary sentence;

Dear <Name>,
Please find attached the latest price list … <blah, blah , blah>

The spell check will query the following words;

Please, find, attached, latest, price, list

While this person was fuming over the inability to spell check their emails, without using Word 2007 as an intermediate step, I was quietly laughing (and cringing) in my cup of coffee.

… and honestly my hair isn’t that bad.

Most people react to the fact that my hair is two weeks unwashed with disgust;

“your hair must be so gross!”

“please stand down-wind”

“don’t touch the pillow with your hair!”

The list goes on.

Yet all who have this reaction, do so out of an ingrained untruth. One that I am out to prove wrong; that you need shampoo.

It’s been two weeks since James and I, over several beers and a long night of poker, decided to forgo washing our hair with shampoo for several weeks as part of the Great Shampoo Challenge. Although the ‘Challenge’ is over (check out the results!) we still are giving it a go.

The theory is of course, that shampoo removes your hair’s natural oils, prompting your hair to produce more to replace them, prompting you to wash your hair again. It’s another one of those things, where the more you fight your body’s natural processes the more you get into trouble.

Now I still wash my hair with water, and I brush it a hell of a lot, and I must say it’s going better than I expected. Yes, it feels different to when you wash your hair with shampoo regularly, but I believe that the way my hair feels is more natural, than the squeaky, stripped hair feel you get after shampoo. It certainly looks better, and I’ve had next to no scalp problems (which were quite common in the times of shampoo). I have read that it will get worse before it gets better, but so far I’m optimistic!

Maybe we’re out to save the environment, maybe we’re rebelling against the ‘machinery of consumerism’ as Richard Glover writes, or maybe it’s just another one of those semi-drunk pacts, that you can’t take back. I still remember the ’swim every day of the year’ challenge a few years back …

In any case we’ve still got 4 more weeks to go. The challenge will continue.

I put together my brothers PC yesterday. I found a nice computer shop in North Rocks; ITEstate, to gather the components for the upgrade to his ancient K6 processor.

Their prices are quite competitive (considering how easy it is for me to get there), and the girls at the sales desk are polite and helpful, as well as being super cute. The guys who get the parts for you are just as friendly. One thing I did like is that he made me stop and double check the serial number of each part before I left.

So for the fraction more I paid, than say going to Fluidtek (but only just), is worth the fact that I didn’t have to wait in queue, and I got what I wanted. Their website also made things easier too.

Anyway enough of a plug.

It took me just over an hour to assemble the parts in my brothers old, and way too small case, which was quick. The mainboard a Gigabyte M51GM-S2G was a micro ATX, so I was able to squeeze it in. It seems quite a good board from first impressions, but I don’t really delve into that area of hardware. So long as all the bits match and work, I’m happy. My only regret was not upping the hard drive specs.

After the ease of assembly, it was time for the pain of installing Windows. While I’ve sold my parents on Ubuntu for their new PC (which is now in the planning stages, and may even become a MythTV box), my brother wasn’t so easy …

He is wedded to iTunes.

But from what I gathered it’s mainly because of the insanely high playcount his library has; he’s so damn proud of it, he can’t let go!

So I started the process at around 3PM, as he returned from his day of Scuba diving (some have it tough don’t they?) and I just managed to finish installing drivers, basic software, etc in time to limp home to bed at around 11pm.

Not the worst time I’ve ever gone through, but made the more difficult by the fact that he had two old IDE drives, I only had one plugged in due to size restrictions, but once plugging in the second, I was left with a nice “hall.dll” not found error message.

Fortunately it was a simple as fixing the boot.ini file using bootcfg, which for the record was quite easy.

… damn it’s hot this weekend!