There has been something of a backlash from the gay community recently to the Obama administration. Like many other groups of Americans who supported Obama for their own reasons, they have been disappointed at his inability to do everything they wanted in the first six months of his presidency.

First came complaints that Obama was doing nothing about Don't Ask, Don't Tell while good soldiers had their careers destroyed. There's no denying that further delay of changing DADT will result in more injustice, but we are five months into a four-year term and there has been a global financial meltdown to take care of. I'm not saying I wouldn't be happier if he hadn't taken care of it already, but nor was I expecting him to.

Then, much more seriously, came a brief from the Justice Department that defended the loathsome Defence of Marriage Act. This is a much more serious transgression, as although the Justice Department is technically obligated to defend all existing law, in reality that defence can be flexibly defined, and this was no weak-willed defence -- it made tired allusions of gay marriage opening the door to polygamy and other nonsense*. Many gay people felt betrayed, and I was personally shocked to hear that kind of language coming out of the Obama administration, however indirectly.

Yesterday, at a much-reported speech commemorating the Stonewall riots, Obama gave an unambiguously strong defence of gay rights, getting some quotable lines in early, like "There are unjust laws to overturn and unfair practices to stop," which seems aimed at both these issues. Later he was much more explicit:

And I know that many in this room don’t believe that progress has come fast enough, and I understand that. It’s not for me to tell you to be patient, any more than it was for others to counsel patience to African Americans who were petitioning for equal rights a half century ago.

But I say this: We have made progress and we will make more. And I want you to know that I expect and hope to be judged not by words, not by promises I’ve made, but by the promises that my administration keeps. ... We’ve been in office six months now. I suspect that by the time this administration is over, I think you guys will have pretty good feelings about the Obama administration.

Pausing to point out that he did what was within his direct control by extending benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees, he then took on DOMA specifically, including that brief:

I’ve called on Congress to repeal the so-called Defense of Marriage Act to help end discrimination against same-sex couples in this country. Now, I want to add we have a duty to uphold existing law, but I believe we must do so in a way that does not exacerbate old divides. And fulfilling this duty in upholding the law in no way lessens my commitment to reversing this law. I’ve made that clear.

He then mentioned his commitment to the Matthew Shepard act and a new law that would guarantee health and other benefits to domestic partners, as well as rescinding the ban on entry into the United States by HIV-positive persons (a policy so ridiculous that many people are amazed to hear it even exists). Then he took on DADT:

And finally, I want to say a word about “don’t ask, don’t tell.” As I said before — I’ll say it again — I believe “don’t ask, don’t tell” doesn’t contribute to our national security. In fact, I believe preventing patriotic Americans from serving their country weakens our national security.

Now, my administration is already working with the Pentagon and members of the House and the Senate on how we’ll go about ending this policy, which will require an act of Congress.

... I know that every day that passes without a resolution is a deep disappointment to those men and women who continue to be discharged under this policy — patriots who often possess critical language skills and years of training and who’ve served this country well. But what I hope is that these cases underscore the urgency of reversing this policy not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it is essential for our national security.

Essentially, this makes explicit what I had assumed was his position on gay rights: important, but not worth blowing political capital on so early in the game. He has to get healthcare out of the way and fix the economy. I don't want him concentrating on anything else, even my rights, until those two are under control.

* And what would be so bad about that, anyway?

So today @rands linked to the world clock, a cute little thing that counts various numbers up and down, like food production, population, illnesses, pollution, and energy. One of the numbers Michael pointed to in particular was the "oil depletion timer": 14,776 days of oil left. Only 40 years! Far off -- but not that far off! Scary! Ooo! Peak oil!

I call bullshit.

So here's the thing: I come from an oil producing nation. And for as long as I can remember, we've always had "only 30 years of oil left". Here's a graph of Trinidad's oil production since 1980 (source):

What would you expect the graph to look like over two decades for a country that only had 30 years of oil left? A steady decline? A ramping up and then a sudden fall? Some sort of bell curve? Instead, this graph actually looks very like another graph (source):

In other words, we produce more oil when it is more profitable to do so. That's not a government decision, that's an oil company decision. And its those same oil companies who decide when to go looking for more oil. That's why, 20 years after the first time I heard the statistic, we still have more than 30 years' worth of reserves left. And so does the world. Proven world oil reserves have been rising for a decade. We only go looking for more oil when we're beginning to run low, somewhere around the 30 year mark.

I'm not saying that the world has enough oil to last forever. I'm also definitely not saying that relying on oil as an energy source is a good idea. I'm just saying that we have lots and lots of time to sort it out.

My friend Wilfried has a lot of family in Iran and is understandably worried about them right now. He recently called his uncle there and transcribed the conversation he had describing the situation in Iran, the elections, the protests, the violence, and his thoughts on the future of the country.

He originally posted this on his site, but it's collapsed under the load so I am mirroring it here.

The following is a rough conversation outline I just had with my uncle, who lives in Tehran. Sorry for the readability and grammar, I haven't had time to proofread and clarify yet; just wanted to get this out there in its most raw form. Draw any conclusions you'd like.

Italics = me

Rest = uncle

"tell me whats going on with the election"

Iranian people wanted the following aims

1. bring steps towards democracy

2. want to have good and free relation with entire world (incl US)

3. searching for Peace, are people who want peace with neighboring countries

4. want progress to have better situation and position

5. these are all aims which have been told by mousavi & karroubi & rezai

- we are told from these people that they are going to govern peace, good relationship with other countries, to bring peace to the country, to bring progress, and have good relations with even israel and the united states, and also they wanted to end, and have good relations to palestinans and not give economic support to terrorists in the palestinians.

these are their aims. those candidates told them 'we are going to do this'

but after the election, near 50 mil people have gone to election

- we are all sure that most votes have gone to mousavi

- we were sure he would win with more than 26+ million

- we found that mr ahmadinejad had 6-7 million. was backed by government and supreme leader

- reality is its like a coup de'tat, you see?

"tell me about the protests"

- when people have found out their vote hasnt counted, people reacted in good and democratic matter. went out of the house and had gatherings in different streets in tehran. all of these have been filmed and are on YouTube and Voice Of America (VOA).

- It is going on and on. it doesn't seem to stop.

- Every day, the people against mousavi have demonstration, of course.

- mousavi has demonstration today at 4-6pm in tehran. at azadi street @ revolution square. I think they will have some speech about the way and future of these demonstrations

"have you seen the demonstrations personally?"

- yes, i have seen them personally, but i didnt dare to go into them personally. there are too many army people there. they are very rough in their actions."

"they are violent?"

- thats right. they hit people with electric batons and want to make people fear them.

- In our own place, ekhbatan, 500k people (situated south west of tehran), we see the demonstrations during the 9pm-10pm (or 11 or 12) every night. they shout that "we want our vote" and "we want our president" and "we don't want this man, ahmadinejad" and "down with the dictator/down with ahmadinejad". Also, I witness some attack with the army with the people, where they knocked people and broke many windows between 2AM and 3AM both saturday and sunday night).

- Now we are waiting for the time of monday's demonstrations.

"just batons and tear gas or guns too?"

- we hear firings, but are told people are not the targets, that theyre not targeted.

- we heard news from shiraz that one univ. student was killed. am going to look at other media to confirm because our own media filters everything.

"what do you think is going to happen?"

- I think this is the kind of reaction people have. they have reached the conclusion that they cant live with this situation. that they want their country to progress, peaceful, to have good relations with other countries, and not to interfere with internal relations of other countries (palestine, iraq, etc). and we are serious about these things. we don't want to interfere. we need to have good relations with all the countries. until now we have no good relations with them. i am one of them who have voted for mr mousavi. all those who have voted for him, wnat that he fulfilles these object[ive]s: 1 - good relations. 2 - stop economic help to terroristic action. 3 - peace. 4 - progress, industrial and scientific proposals, and these are the main things that these people want... and they are going to follow their wantings. they are going to follow their needs.

- at the present time, the people are going to hear from their leaders[/candidates]

"so you think theyre waiting for the leadership to define what the next few days or weeks are going to look like?"

- yes exactly, absolutely, they are going to out their goals, and they want to have their own candidate presented as the president of iran, and i think we as people of iran will not stop to have our desired goal that is having mr mousavi as president

"even if mousavi becomes prez do you think the surpreme leader is going to allow change to happen?"

- of course we can't predict what will happen, but this is a process that has started already. I think the rate and fate of progress will reach the final point of democracy. i think people want and are willing to sacrifice all their lifes, and even much more than that. i cannot predict. we don't know what will happen. but just now we have confronted with this situation, that the supreme leader has very definitely interfered with the vote of the people.

"are you implying there may be some kind of change in the entire leadership of iran?

- i cannot see this is a process that we are just at the beginning or even the middle. we have to go and continue to see the process. it may be that the surpreme leader may bend to the will of the people. i think this is probable.

"you do think it is probable?"

- yes, maybe, but not too much. maybe 10 or 20%. and this depends on the behavior of people, for them to decide upon their own future and fate. but really the past history has shown us that this is very improbable. *laughs uncomfortably*"

"Some people here are concerned that the outcome may only strengthen the hardline/surpreme rulers' rule, and/or that israel will try to take advantage of this."

- absolutely thats right. ive heard that, and ive heard that some people in israel are very happy that ahmi has come back to power, and maybe that gives them some reason to have an attack. the thing is, we dont want these things. we dont want war. we want change. the same thing has mr obama stated, we want change, and we have demonstrated that we need and we want change to happen.

- also i wanted to add something else. i think our leader mr mousavi is against any violence, and i think they have selected kind of a policy that is very very similar to the policy of mahatma ghandi, the policy of anti-violence. he reached the desired conclusion as did dr martin luther king in the united states, in his way of leadership. the same thing i see in mr obama, the same thing we see in nelson mandela. and this will work, and we are with it. and i think the demonstration of those opponents of those of mr mousavi will be totally anti violence and against violence. the thing is all the intellectuals in the country, as are mousavi and korrabi, are for peace and want to stop interference in the other countries affairs. they have adopted the way of nonviolence, to keep going and to follow and to continue the process of this voting and this, to some extent, revolution.

"so you would think of this as an attempt of revolution?"

- yes, i think this is a step towards it

"one last thing - have you heard of the riot police being from lebanon"

- of course not yet. i have not heard anything about them bringing any lebanese police. i doubt it, but i am going to ask those people in khermanshah, and i will contact you.

"if you do hear anything about it, please let me know"

- i will tell you.

- at last i want you, and all those that are in the way of truth, that please inform the people of the states, whoever, that this time the iranian people want to half good relation with all the countries, and all the poeple. and this should be very clear for the american people that they shouldnt judge the iranian people as terrorists, or those who want to be in not a good way of living or thinking. actuallly, we are going to have democracy in all its objectives.

- i will inform you any news i have, including that which you are looking.

"Tashakor, Khali mamnoon"

-Ghorbonet beram, khodafez

"So, how was your week?"

Oh, you know... I had a tough deadline, a couple of boring meetings, and the supreme court upheld that a plurality of voters could deny me my civil rights in the country that calls itself the Land of the Free... the usual.

So fuck you, voters of California. The rest of the country is rapidly falling into line, and by 2010 it'll be you and fucking Mississippi looking like hateful throwbacks.

It's no secret to anybody that I'm a huge fan of Twitter. As a man with an insatiable desire to know everything in the universe as fast as possible, Twitter is like having ESP: I know what everyone around me is thinking, and if I want to, I can hit Twitter search trending topics and find out what everyone is thinking about. I think it's a service that's already hugely useful and has tremendous potential.

So I get a little annoyed, now that Twitter is going crazily mainstream, being used by everyone from Oprah to the CDC, when people misunderstand what Twitter is, and what it's for. Some of them are aggravatingly stupid ideas, and yet are blithely echoed around the mediasphere. So here's my top ten things that Twitter is not.

1. The new email / the new telegram

Only a total idiot would think that Twitter was an attempt to replace email, and you'd have to be an idiot from the early 20th century to think it was an attempt to replace the telegram. The combination of these two idiots is Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, who interviewed the Twitter founders in the most astonishingly belittling and hostile way while entirely missing the point. Pleasingly, she has already been excellently parodied, so at least some good has come of it.

2. A tool for self-absorbed hipsters (well, maybe it is)

Another quote from Dowd's inane article described Twitter as "a toy for bored celebrities and high-school girls". The excellent Twouble with Twitters parody also touched on this idea: that it's the place for vapid navel-gazers. Now, I'm not going to deny there are a bunch of idiots using Twitter this way, especially people who follow Twitter's own instructions for using the service (see later). But if having annoying people using your service makes it a service exclusively for annoying people, then that's a problem shared by every website in the world. Twitter is what you make of it.

3. Worth $1 billion

The hilariously unreliable TechCrunch sparked off a massive hubbub the other day when it claimed Google was in late-stage acquisition talks with Twitter. After being slapped down by everybody with any actual knowledge of the situation, they shamelessly followed up by claiming that Twitter's founder Evan Williams wouldn't sell Twitter for a billion dollars. Not that anybody had offered a billion dollars, and not even that Evan said so. Their source was just some guy who knew Evan and said "dude, he wouldn't sell Twitter for, like, a billion dollars".

4. Private or even secure

There have been multiple stories about Twitter accounts being hacked. Even the admin accounts of the people who run Twitter have been broken into more than once. The solution here is not oAuth: the solution here is recognize that Twitter is a web service with laudable flexibility and openness, and with openness comes vulnerability. Accept this, move on, and for the love of god don't attempt to use it for anything important like sending money.

Oh, and sure, you can set your account to "private", but then almost none of the fun mashups work. Turn that off, and remember to treat it like your blog: don't say anything you wouldn't like spread around and archived forever. This is the web, and Twitter is no different in this respect.

5. The new Google

I confess I am partially guilty here, having said on Flickr that Twitter is the new search, and indeed I think Twitter has a huge opportunity in real-time search, as evidenced by how incredibly useful the Twitter/Google search mashup plugin is proving to be. But real-time search is supplementary to web search, not competitive with it, so those who claim that Twitter is a Google alternative should try searching Twitter for the name of the Brazilian prime minister in 1926. Twitter will not replace Google, it will be used by Google (and Yahoo!) -- and maybe incorporated into them, if anybody gets around to actually offering Ev a billion dollars.

6. The new Facebook

This one seems like it might have more legs on the face of it: they're both social networks, right? They both are primarily built around the idea of a "stream" of updates from your friends, too? Surely Twitter is the new Facebook?

Sure it is, as long as nothing you ever want to say to your friends is more than 140 characters long. To me, Facebook is an identity repository. You link up to everyone you know on there, and whenever you want to contact them, you can get their phone number and their current email address straight from there. It's a great way to share party photos and find old school friends. I'm not abandoning Facebook for Twitter, but they're not the same animal.

Of course, a lot of people disagree with me, including Facebook themselves, who are furiously remodeling themselves after Twitter over the loud protests of users who liked it the way it was. Facebook was genuinely innovative with its "news feed", aka. a stream of updates just like Twitter, but as soon as you've added everybody you know, the news feed gets unmanageably noisy. They tried to address this with filters and whatnot, but in the end it's just too complicated and way, way too closed off. Twitter's strength is its openness, and Facebook is not -- and should not be -- willing to give up its strong privacy model. Unlike Twitter, Facebook *is* relatively private.

7. The new blogs

This is another one where you can sort of see where people are coming from. A lot of people who used to blog now tweet instead (and a bunch of them tumble instead, too). Twitter is instant, broadcast, and short. That suits some people's writing style perfectly, and that's a good thing. But Twitter is no more going to kill blogs than television is going to kill movies -- sure, it will mean there are less blogs around, but the blogs that disappear are the ones that shouldn't have been blogs to start with.

8. A competition

Sites like Tweetrank (briefly), Twitter grader and Twitterholic all take the only two visible metrics on twitter -- number of followers and number of tweets -- and turn them into a game. Sure, that's diverting and everything, but some people have got the idea that getting more followers is the "goal" of Twitter. By far the most famous example is the Ashton Kutcher vs. CNN race to 1,000,000 followers, enthusiastically promoted on all sides and a big part of the blaze of publicity that sent Twitter completely mainstream at the beginning of this year (for web services and political candidates alike, you know you've arrived in middle America when Oprah gets involved). Having followers is nice, but it's not the goal. And while we're talking about Oprah...

9. A celebrity communication device

This is the weirdest misunderstanding of Twitter I've heard, and the post that inspired me to write this one is this thoroughly bizarre ramble by Dave Winer about how some random media company will get a celebrity to promote their own "Twitter-like" network and promote it on billboards and somehow this will mean there will be many Twitters. Let's be clear: celebrities started turning up on Twitter once they heard it was getting popular. They didn't make it popular in the first place. It got popular because it was useful.

10. A service the answers the question "what are you doing?"

And the final culprit in not understanding what Twitter is for are Twitter themselves, who still ask "What are you doing?" at the top of every page. Have you ever read the tweets of somebody who genuinely answers this question? "Just woke up", "going to work", "having lunch", "really tired". Dull, dull, dull, and a lot of the parodies of Twitter harp on this aspect. So let's be clear: this is a terrible way to use Twitter. Twitter is not what you're doing, Twitter is what you're thinking.

What Twitter is for

Twitter is like friend ESP, a portable zeitgeist. It lets you know "what's going on" by telling you not what people are physically doing, but what they're thinking about, planning, reading, watching, paying attention to. You can tap into what your own social circle are thinking about, and if you use Twitter search, you can find out what the twitterverse as a whole is talking about, or filter it down with some keywords to what they think about a particular topic, be it a presidential debate or an ongoing sporting event. Because Twitter is so short, so quick, so instant, and so easily disseminated to mobile devices, it's the closest thing we have to direct brain monitoring. And that's incredibly useful. No service has ever before been convenient enough and widespread enough to capture this data, and it does it in real time. We are just beginning to see the potential of this entirely new data source.

Don't get confused

This "Twitter is the new..." concept is central to a lot of misunderstandings of Twitter, and probably underlies all of the ones I listed above. Twitter is not the new anything. Twitter is nothing but the new Twitter: that very rare thing, an entirely new genre of service, like blogs, social networks, and way back in the day, portals all were. It's its own thing, and trying to analogize it to some other service is as useful as calling airplanes flying buses: sure, they sort of look like buses with wings, but that doesn't mean you use them the same way.

I am looking forward to Outside Lands, yes indeed.

I dunno why this popped into my head a minute ago, but it did. There have been a few times in my life when I've seen something and been absolutely sure that what I was seeing was love.

The first one that I can remember is easily fifteen years ago now. It was around Christmas, and my family and I were on vacation in Tobago. As was our habit in Tobago, we had gone for a walk at sunset on Turtle Beach and then, as was equally habitual, repaired to the beach bar there for rum punches (or a coke in my case, being twelve). The hotel was laying on entertainment for guests, and there was a sound system and DJs just setting up. The song "Lady in Red" by Chris de Burgh came on. It's an awful, saccharine song, but at some point in the lifetime of my parents they had developed a semi-ironic attachment to it as "their" song. As soon as he recognized the song, my father got to his feet and asked my mother to dance. And for a few moments, they did, despite the fact that there was no other dancing going on, or even a dance floor. It was their song, and they wanted to dance to it. Whenever I think about the relationship my parents have, that cheesy little moment is what I remember. It's how I know my parents love each other, one of the rocks to which my life is anchored.

The second time that comes to mind I remember because I was so surprised by it. It was another family vacation, again in Tobago. My brother and I had gone to the pool to meet the rest of the family, and as we arrived his girlfriend at the time, now wife, was just getting out of the pool, climbing the ladder as he approached. She was looking her best; tanned, relaxed and happy. She got to the top of the ladder just as we reached the edge of the pool, and my brother gave a little start, and stepped back half a pace, saying "whoa!" before stepping forward again to kiss her hello, literally taken aback by how beautiful she was. This reaction was so uncharacteristic of my brother that it took me a few seconds to work out what he had been reacting to. My brother, always so cool, was so deeply in love that he couldn't contain his reaction. It was a side of him I'd never seen.

I'm sure there have been lots of other times when I've seen a couple in love and not noticed; but when for some reason I think about love, these two little moments are the ones that come to my mind as the definition of the word.

Update: corrected artist for Lady in Red, it's not Julio Iglesias.

I started to write this a couple weeks ago, and then forgot about it. Better late than never, eh?

Over at TechCrunch, Brian Solis has a post about blogs losing their authority on Technorati to what he calls the "statusphere". It's based on an observation that Technorati's "Authority" index of blogs, which is based on incoming links to those blogs, has remained largely unchanged over the last few months, but the number of actual links measured has been dropping sharply. His conclusion is that authority is moving away from blog-to-blog links to other sources -- like Twitter, Facebook, and others.

I couldn't agree more, and I think in fact he doesn't go far enough. This isn't just about blogs. This is a sea change in the measurement of authority, relevance and popularity of online content, and the company that should really be worried isn't Technorati (which was kind of screwed already). It's Google.

Google's single, gigantic, all-powerful insight that saved and changed the web and the business of web search is this: the importance of a website can be measured by measuring how many the other sites link to that site, and how many link to them, ad infinitum. That's PageRank: like all the best ideas, it can be explained in a sentence or two but is enormously powerful. It is even relatively easy to implement a first-pass solution but it is very, very difficult to perfect.

PageRank has never been perfect, and the cracks are beginning to show. People are demanding more and more accurate and real-time information. Conversation moved from websites to blogs, and is now moving from them to even shorter, faster forms like tumblogs, twitter, and Facebook shared items. All the while, there's been a steady tidy of information moving in email and instant messages that is also poorly indexed.

Pure-web PageRank is losing its claim to be the real authority on the relevance of information. This is a market opportunity. To usurp Google's place as the way people find information, you have to use PageRank as just one piece of the puzzle. You have to find a way to index email, instant messages, social network activity, twitter feeds, SMS, phone calls -- all the ways we share content. You need to meld those together to form a new authority. There are signs that Google wants to do all of these things, but nothing practical has emerged yet.

But the day of a unified information authority is a way off. The more immediate opportunity is that of real-time search. Google's news search covers only things that news outlets cover, and only as fast as the relatively glacial newspaper organizations can publish it. Their blog search is no faster than blogs. Twitter on the other hand can find things that happened just a few seconds earlier, and more importantly Twitter's trending-terms tech can tell you what's happening right now without you even needing to look for it.

There are signs that Twitter is beginning to work this out, although the pace of change within the company given its size is pretty slow -- one wonders if they really are just sinking everything they've got into staying up and scaling to their ever-growing user base. If they don't do it themselves, somebody else is going to start indexing the twittersphere and they'll blow this enormous opportunity. (Note, however, that I'm not going to trot out the old "this could be their business model" chestnut. Twitter already has a business model.)

My point? Well, it's a blog, so I don't need to have a meaningful conclusion, but I guess it's just that the world of search is due for a big change, and Google may be unprepared for it.

My Technorati Profile

Update: faced with a firestorm of criticism, the Express has pulled the article, but you can still find it in Google's cache.

Update 2: better yet, an enterprising blogger has found Paula Murray's Facebook page and written an insulting and misleading article about her based on it. Turnabout is fair play! I do hope her journalistic reputation is forever stained.

To whom it may concern -

Regarding your recent article on the children of Dunblane 13 years later:

This is a disgraceful, embarrassing and shameful story -- for the Express. Faced with having to find something to write about a story dead for 13 years, Paula Murray has lazily decided to trawl Facebook for details, rather than attempting to speak to any of the children themselves, none of whom are quoted for the story or given a chance to defend their semi-private profiles. Instead we are given a piss-poor collection of thoroughly ordinary quotes that could have come from the profile page of any teenager, carefully selected to try and portray these kids as toughs and louts.

Never mind that children who went through such trauma at a young age should be expected to act out in later life. Never mind that boasts of drunkenness and sexual prowess are the staple of conversation of all 18-year-olds everywhere. Instead of any real reporting, any real insight into what it's like to be a survivor of tragedy at a young ago, we get a quote from the sweet old grandmother of one of the dead children, thus given immunity from the teenager her own grandchild might have turned into -- doubtless because the parents and grandparents of the children still alive are so deeply grateful simply that the children are still around to misbehave that they refused to give Ms. Murray any usefully damning quotes.

This is a disgusting, offensive article for which your paper should apologize, both to the children of Dunblane and to the public.

Yours sincerely,
Laurie Voss.

Hat-tip to Adrian for pointing me to this article.

I apparently take long showers. In my family I'm famous for it. I've never been clear whether this is because I really do take too long, or if my family are just worryingly slipshod in their personal hygiene. In order to help resolve this question, I present below a minute-by-minute log of my typical morning shower. Please compare and contrast to your own ablutions in the comments.

0:00: shower begins
0:01: start hot water running
0:05: scald hand, overcompensate with cold water
0:10: much fiddling to find correct tap positions
1:00: water now at right temp
1:01: begin getting hair wet
2:30: water finally penetrates to scalp
2:31: enjoy feeling of hot water
3:00: consider current state of personal project
3:10: resolve to do more work on personal projects
3:11: enjoy hot water more
4:00: find soap
4:05: soap face, ears, neck
4:30: inspect face for acne, by touch
4:40: be briefly irritated that one still has pimples at 27
4:45: rinse face, ears, neck
5:00: adjust shower head to direct water away from self
5:05: soap arms, chest
5:30: complicated maneuver to soap back
5:35: realize age is robbing arms of flexibility for this maneuver
5:40: be mildly depressed at this realization
6:00: soap groin, butt
6:15: briefly wonder about size of penis relative to world average
6:20: soap thighs, feet
7:00: worry about falling over on soapy feet, hitting head, dying alone in shower
7:05: consider own mortality, life achievements
7:10: resolve to do more work on personal projects
7:15: readjust shower head, begin rinsing body
7:20: consider tricky design problem in latest personal project
10:00: realise track of time has been lost
10:05: step out of shower, find watch, check time
10:30: relieved, step back into shower
10:31: hair has got too dry. Re-wet hair
10:50: debate whether there's enough time to shampoo
11:00: apply shampoo
11:15: employ vigorous head massage in superstitious belief that this prevents baldness
11:45: begin rinsing shampoo
12:30: consider conditioner
12:35: note for 1000th time that same brand shampoo and conditioner bottles are different shapes but equal volumes
12:36: wonder for 1000th time if this causes tesselation problems when packing
12:40: become briefly irritated by memory of lies in shampoo commercials
12:45: mutter to self that "up to 50% more shiny" is meaningless drivel
12:50: apply conditioner, more head massage
13:30: begin rinsing conditioner
15:00: become irritated at way conditioner never seems to rinse out properly
16:00: give up on getting all conditioner out of hair
16:05: forget that face has already been soaped
16:10: repeat face-soaping procedure, inc. acne inspection and irritation
17:00: get idea for blog post
17:05: start trying out interesting phrases for blog post, talking to self
19:00: realise track of time has again been lost
19:05: get out of shower, begin towelling hair
19:50: complete towelling hair, towel rest of body
20:00: shower complete.