One human feature raised to cultural phenomenon on the Internet is trolling--posting material to a mailing list or newsgroup just to get a (usually overreacting) response. Kibo is an ancient Internet personality of great wit, who apparently has trolling down to an art form. It might not make sense if you've never watched too much Star Trek.

To get myself out of the house this evening I trucked myself up to O'Neill's, a relatively nice little bar up in San Mateo. Well, it was nice. Then the mediocre cover band started in, at a level that actually hurt my ears. So I abandoned the pair of women I had been talking to, declining the invitation to persuade one of them to sleep with me, and meandered off. I wonder if I only need the attention.

So the eminent late physicist Richard Feynman had these theories about women. Well, he was an old-school chauvinist jerk in a lot of ways, but he applied logic and iterative improvement to womanizing as to everything else, and he discovered it really only made sense to buy a girl drinks if you're already sure she's going to sleep with you and she's said yes. I can't vouch for this, as it's not really how I do things, but I've discovered it's not hard to get women to be startled...in addition to not buying them drinks, apparently asking a woman if she's a cheap date (noting that she's loopy and on her first drink) is shockingly forward, at least to the woman's less-charming friend. Go figure.

For more socializing, I went to the BAFUG meeting last night, which was a good talk about esoteric operating system internals that I only partially understoof. The attendees in general had an amusing lack of social graces: most of them, if you didn't interrupt, would just keep talking, probably for an hour or two, and they're not bothered by being interrupted, and they'll just interrupt you without prejudice. Really. It's just how they converse. They don't seem to know any other way.

More training this weekend, more training this week. I'm torn about next weekend, because there's a seminar at Aikido of Fresno I'd really like to go to, but then there's also Storm Sessions, and the topic this year is relationships and I feel like I could use some help with that.

And then more training.