Why I Can't Get A Massage

I've never had a massage. It's not something that I'm really missing, but I've been told it's a wonderful experience and that I really must try it some time. I'd like to give it a try, but never seem to get around to it.

Last weekend, we went away for a short trip and stayed in a resort hotel with a semi-famous spa attached. As I flipped through the 'menu' of 'treatments' available to me, it became clear that I would not be getting a massage. My reason? Reason.

I'm perfectly willing to believe that having someone pound me on the back for a half hour is somehow going to feel good. But seriously: Aromatherapy? Reiki? Reflexology? Again, I'm absolutely willing to believe that 25 minutes of foot massage is going to ultimately feel good enough to be worth $60, but why do they have to dress it up as if it were some sort of mystical experience? "A non-invasive method of working the pressure points on feed and/or hands that reflect all points of the body. Excellent to release stress and restore harmony." Non-invasive? Does that mean they have invasive massage?

Reiki. The National Council Against Health Fraud has this to say:

There is no evidence that clinical Reiki's effects are due to anything other than suggestion, or that they are superior to massage or any other healing ritual. Reiki's metaphysical beliefs may be in conflict with an individual patient's religious beliefs. Full disclosure of the belief system should precede its use in any setting. An investigation of proponent literature casts serious doubt as to whether Reiki practitioners can be trusted with such full disclosure. Reiki literature presents misinformation as fact, and instructs practitioners on how to skirt the law in order to protect themselves from regulation and accountability.

Of course, the spa isn't claiming to heal anything, just to release stress and restore harmony, whatever the hell that means. Who knows, the people who administer these treatments might even believe that they work better than a run-of-the-mill massage, which would make them simply deluded instead of fraudulent. Still, I'm not about to offer up my own coin to a company connected with that kind of quackery. I guess I'll keep looking.

Welcome, Ceres!

I, for one, am delighted at the IAU's proposed definition of a planet: something round that orbits a star but is not a star or a satellite. It's a good definition because it relies on physics (i.e. gravity) to define what a planet is, while keeping everything that is currently a planet a planet. Plus it actually adds some new planets, including Ceres, which has always struck me as more planety than asteroidy and is cool because it's right in the middle of the solar system. Pluto is still a planet, and not only that, it now becomes part of the possibly most exotic arrangement possible: along with Charon, it's a double planet! All those Pluto-haters who wanted it demoted to a "Kuiper Belt Object" must be fuming. Finally, with this new definition there are a dozen or so candidates for new planets, so the list will continue to grow. Exciting!


This redefinition of the term planet could be the best thing to happen to Astronomy in a long time: it gives the field a sense of being dynamic and changing, which it is anyway, but something like this might get some more people interested in the subject.

Update: But, of course, this didn't happen and Pluto's now been demoted to a 'dwarf planet' or somesuch. Pity.

WWDC 2006

When I started working for Apple, I was pretty sure that I'd attended my last WorldWide Developer Conference, but I got a happy surprise last week when my manager asked me if I'd like to attend this year. "Sure!", I said, and off I went.

Attending an Apple keynote is always an exciting event for someone like me whose life has been so massively influenced by Apple and their products. Attending as an Apple employee is slightly less so, because Apple folk are in some ways second class citizens at WWDC. That's sensible, of course. Paying customers should get first crack at the best seats in the house and the food at lunch time. It was just a slight adjustment for me after attending so many times as an external developer. We Apple folk watched the Keynote from an overflow room.

From my perspective, the keynote didn't hold much that got me personally excited. That is, except for the 'todos' framework, which I heard several people snickering about and slamming as a nonfeature not worthy of a major OS release. Well, I disagree. I've got to-dos all over my email, to-dos in my address book, to-dos on sticky notes in both the dashboard and that sticky application, to-dos in my Mori documents, as well as entire omnioutliner documents dedicated to lists of todos. Plus another set of all that on my machine at work. Hell, yes, I'd like a unified scheme for managing them, and a little OS support and .mac syncing will be a very nice thing. Little things matter.

Not being able to talk about what I'm working on didn't present much of a problem, because virtually nobody asked. It was great to reconnect with folks from my past, and really nice to meet some folks who I've been working with remotely, and some 'celebrity' developers whose names I've heard of.

It's a tough week though -- a full time job, plus a lot of walking and sitting on not-so-comfortable chairs. I made a decent effort to get some 'real' work done, but it was pretty challenging with everything that was going on. The sessions themselves varied in usefulness. I find most of them aimed either too low or too high for my liking. The "What's New" and "State of the Union" type sessions are the most interesting to me because I already have a lot of the background, but many of the other sessions I got to spent too much time on the basics to be very attention-grabbing.

Still, if you're a Mac developer, there's no place like it. You can meet a lot of cool people and learn some interesting stuff. And if you're lucky you'll also be able to sample a Moscone Special....

Homopalooza

I had the opportunity to attend "Homopalooza" the other day -- a Pride Week music festival at the Plaza of Nations. Not the sort of thing I'd generally do on an average weekend, but a friend of mine was going to go and asked if I'd like to come along. I'm always up for doing something I've never done before (within reason), so off we went.

$10 cover charge and $6 drinks. A "Dungeon". Mini-doughnuts. A piercing booth. Various bad musicians on stage -- not my sort of music anyway. Some kind of audience participation thing which I think had to do with trying to pick the straight guy out of a group of three men up on stage, but it's really anyone's guess because the acoustics are so lousy in the Plaza of Nations. That could explain the badness of the band too. Interestingly, the whole show was interpreted in sign language.

Basically, just a party. I drank some rum drinks and played hanger-on as my friend chatted with his friends. It was a lot like any other party, which, I suppose, is the point.

Gotta love the name, though.