I have this rant that I pull out my backside every so often — well I have a lot of them actually, but this one in particular is a favourite — about how surely by now they would have invented the indefinitely sharp razor blade. The point of course is that the spare parts trade, the selling of disposable blades, would collapse over night.

The Gillette Company for example claim that they have 1.2 billion consumers each day, a fair majority I’m guessing are purchasing razor blades. They’re the guys who invented the 3 blade disposable razor by the way, which I’m sick and tired of telling people is a degree of magnitude more efficient than double blade razors. Are you listening Andrew? Gillette, in case you didn’t know, also own the Duracell battery brand.

Wilkinson Sword on the other hand, actually do make swords. But they also make razor blades and gardening equipment (under the brand Fiskars, which we don’t have in Australia, maybe because it sounds like fisters), and together with Schick, managed to nab the www.shaving.com domain name before anyone else did. Wilkinson Sword, Schick (named after Colonel Schick) and Fiskars are all brands of the Eveready Battery Company, who no longer make Eveready batteries, but serve as an umberalla company for these brands as well as their famous Energizer battery brand. Schick, by the way, are now bragging about inventing the first four blade disposable razor. Bit I digress…

So the rant goes like this, surely someone has patented the indefinitely sharp razor blade, and there’s a conspiracy amongst the blade manufacturers to keep it quiet and out of other companies’ hands, so they can keep on selling us disposable blades into eternity. You can take the conspiracy one step further if you like and suggest that they’re in cahoots with the cosmetics companies, who surely by now have invented the indefinitely dilapidating cream, but I’ll leave that one up to you to explore. So I went looking for razor blade patents, and boy was that… fun.

The first disposable safety razor was patented in 1904, by King C. Gillette (for his American Safety Razor Company, which was soon after renamed as Gillete), so they’ve had more than enough time to invent and forget. Anyway, there’s 257 U.S. patents with razor and blade in the title, so that doesn’t include patents pending, other countries, or where the title isn’t exactly indicative of its use. But the interesting thing is that this is only patents registered after 1976. Modern razor blade engineers have been busy!

Several months ago I spent a weekend reading pretty much every patent I could find on razor blades, and while there’s many thousands of ways to design and manufacture the head mounting and handle, there’s surprisingly few patents on a breakthrough chemical or metalurgical reconstruction of the actual blade. There’s a fair amount of blade patents, but nothing that gets close to the covetted holy grail of disposable blade shaving, the uber blade, the blade that will render the phrase “disposable razor” completely redundant.

Perhaps it is just too hard to construct the perfect blade? Now there’s a challenge for Gillette and Eveready. The perfect blade. Think of all the waste that would be saved. We tend to think that computers and technology will make the biggest change to the way we live, but friends, think of the indefinitely sharp razor blade, and a utopian world without unsightly body hair.

Stepping out the front door this morning, after a wonderful uninterupted sleep, I couldn’t help but notice, lying motionless off to the side of the garden under some at least to me unknown variety of shrub, a man with a length of 4 by 2 nailed to the back of his head. Ahhh, my partner left me a gift, how nice, and good to know she’s handy ’round the house.

Update: first…

Stop press. 7am. Richard wakes up to sound of roofers giggling hysterically in front yard. Having gotten back to sleep, at 9am he hears… the nail gun.

Update: prev… next…

What a strange start to what I assume will be a weird week. I woke up on Sunday morning to the sound of lions, as I was staying at Western Plains Zoo (turn your sound down) with extended family. I consider myself an animal activist to a certain degree, but these guys are doing great work for the conservation, protection and repopulation of endangered species. I know some people feel that any caging of animals is offensive, but I believe the cost is justified, and if you saw how Western Plains treat their residents, perhaps you’d also care a little more for their fabulous work. Personally, I sponsor the beautiful Cheetahs, currently classified as “vulnerable”, and my partner sponsors the hippopotamus. Say hello for us, next time you visit them at either Western Plains or Taronga Zoo. Anyway…

So I wake up on the Monday morning, sick with a head cold, to the sound of some guys ripping the roof off our house. The 6am sunlight blazing through the cracks between the down lights and the roof mounts was quite overpowering, but the nail gun attaching the aluminium waterproofing to the roof studs really made my morning. I’m a 9am kind of guy, but I figure by 8am they had most of the roof removed. It wasn’t until late afternoon that I learnt about the water leak next door, for which the roof refactoring was their saviour.

Tuesday morning, 6am, I once again wake to the rhythmic tones of nail gun and roof tile. This time however I delighted in filling the roof cavity with steam from a hot running shower. Spent Tuesday night audio engineering our new Theatresports^TM show, trying to mic up a disaster of a theatre venue.

Wednesday morning, what aural delights await me? If I hear another fucking nail gun…

Update: next…

The official U.S. government time site, accurate to within 0.6 seconds. Sponsored by the official world peace keeper, accurate to within 3 nations.

I don’t want to harp on about having blue hair or anything, but at least it’s something unique to bring to the blogosphere.

Anyway, I recently spent some time in our wonderful capital, Canberra, speaking with government I.T. people. When confronted with the blue hair, especially when it matches so well with my black suit, I often get the comments I wrote about here, but more often than not with work relationships, I get the more neutral:

So why the blue hair?

And when I reply with:

Oh, because I do part time theatre and impro comedy.

…they usually nod their heads knowingly. This wouldn’t be so strange if it weren’t for the theatre and impro comedy people asking the same question, and me replying with:

Oh, because I’m in I.T.

They nod, knowingly.

I had an interesting Google referal the other day: Which state has the world’s largest chocolate factory, which came in to this post of mine on Nestl. Regular readers don’t need a heads up, but just in case, even if Nestl weren’t the world’s largest junk foodconfectionary company, would you assume that the world’s largest chocolate factory would be in the U.S.? Or am I the only one not assuming that state means a U.S. state? Maybe it has something to do with the World Series? Or is that simply assuming that baseball is the World Game?

Came across this post from Richard MacManus’ Read/Write Web, about Australian taxi driver strategies. Traffic works much like sand in an hour glass, if you know how the dynamics of sand works, and have an idea of the type of people travelling at that particular time of day, between those particular two points, you can have a pretty good guess at the optimal route. Drive it at least once a week and it becomes second nature.

I’m not sure if Richard is a driver himself, but this isn’t confined to taxi drivers. Most people I know that love to drive, including myself, have these same strategies. Driving the same route to work and back each day is a perfect example, but there are many other routes people take throughout the week that are equally optimisable.

The interesting thing about taxi drivers however, is that most of them have an innate ability to optimise their fares. For example, taxis have a driving rate, and a waiting rate. When the speed of the taxi drops below a certain threshold, the waiting rate kicks in, which is less than the driving rate. This is obvious, because it’s printed on the fare sheet in the taxi. To optimise the income for a fare, you’d think the driver would delay the trip as much as possible, choosing routes where traffic jams extend the time it takes to get to the destination. Lengthen the journey, and the fare increases over time. However, the driving rate is higher, so there is a speed at which the combination of fares and travel time is the optimal for the driver. In most cases however it is better for the driver to get you there as fast as possible, getting the initial hiring charge plus the driving rate, which may be less all up than having to wait several times at traffic lights.

This complex relationship between rates, time, speed, traffic congestion and initial hiring fee, seems to be completely subconscious for most drivers, yet if you question one about it, they usually can’t actually explain it.

So, at times cabbies do strange things, they’ll get you to your destination quickly or on time, but every now and again they’ll make a turn that ends up in traffic or they’ll accidentally miss a traffic light, but will still seem to get you there quickly. They can’t explain it, but it’s them optimising the fare.

So next time your cabbie makes a seeming mistake, just bite your tongue, he’s doing it for the fare, and the more you point it out to him, the more of your money he’ll take.

You gotta love the CIA’s attempt to reinvent themselves. Courtesy of the ever wonderful Boing Boing, the CIA has a web site for kids, complete with happy smiley faces of people that I assume are doing what they refer to as “intelligence work”, and at least one photo of what looks like a covert operative. How do I know? Well, they’re in a dark raincoat, with a 1950 cold war hat, under a single street lamp. I thought covert meant under cover, but of course I was unable to check the Australian Macquarie Dictionary to be sure.

Anyway, if you dig deep, you get to this classic description of “Who We Are & What We Do”.

We collect […] information from many sources: newspapers, magazines, and foreign radio or TV broadcasts, which are overt or “open.” Some sources are “covert”–that is, other people’s secrets. We persuade these people to tell us their secrets. The other way we collect information is …

Woah boy! Of course this is exactly what we need to be teaching our children, how to persuade people to tell us their secrets. You probably don’t need the definition of persuade, but here it is anyway.

To induce to undertake a course of action or embrace a point of view by means of argument, reasoning, or entreaty

Probably not exactly what the CIA uses as a primary persuation tactic, but amusing none the less.

“Look, tell me your godamn secret, or I’m going to have to continue arguing with you!”

We now turn to the page describing The People, with a lovely photo of the happy intelligence workers around the CIA logo. That’s where we learn that…

If you like to write papers, long and short, if you like to put puzzles together, solve mysteries and have the patience to go through a mound of different types of information to do all this, then the Directorate of Intelligence (DI) is for you.

Yes, that’s right girls and boys! Or of course unless you’re a child between the age of about 7 and 13, in which case, school and Nancy Drew mysteries are probably best for you. When you grow up, then you can start persuading people to tell you their secrets.

Finally, here’s the U.S. secret service in action, persuading interviewing a boy about his anti-war drawings.

The secret service in Washington DC had not yet commented yesterday.

Obviously the persuading is continuing.

I’ve been struggling these last few weeks over whether I should let fly at a well known market research organisation who have recently yet prematurely embraced blogging. Several of their management staff have blogs, yet seem to have no idea what to use them for, and more often than not simply throw mud at other bloggers they disagree with. I’m still reading one of their blogs, having cast the rest aside, and if it weren’t for the collection of material I’ve been saving for my uber anti-blog post, I’d have dumped them from my reader months ago.

Yet I haven’t yet written about them, and I don’t know if I will. I have no problem correcting other writers when they are wrong, but slamming an entire company for stupidity? When I was younger, in those torrid 1980s BBS days, I wouldn’t have bat an eyelid, abusive verbage would have streamed from my keyboard. In those days, it was give as good as you get.

But wouldn’t that just be doing what they’ve been doing? Where do you draw the line between correcting inaccuracies, and highlighting stupidity?

I’m still thinking it through, but it made me want to finally put together a manifesto for my blogging. I’ll have it up over the next few days, but for would be bloggers, jumping into this very public space without much thought, insist upon writing up your own guidelines/manifesto. Why are you blogging? What do you hope to gain from it, and what if anything do you hope to give to your readers?

Meanwhile, perhaps check out this piece (from my work blog) on the privacy issues of blogging. The golden rule, if ever there was one, is know why you’re writing, what you’re writing, and for whom you’re writing. Oh, and don’t forget to have fun!