OK, I'm on Facebook

Here I am. Created the account two months ago, and got around to filling it out this morning. I used the Gmail invitey-tool to blast out 23 completely impersonal friend requests to people who were already on Facebook and whose full names I quickly recognized. Everyone else who knows me should feel free to friend me.

Kind bud for old hacks

Unix turns precisely 1.2 billion seconds old this afternoon at precisely 4:20pm Eastern time.

$ unix2local
Please enter the UTC time: 1200000000
Thu Jan 10 16:20:00 2008 (Boston)

(jhango and cnoocy discovered this.)

Resveratrol

Starting today, I am eating resveratrol supplements with my breakfast.

I feel good about this. After following anti-aging developments for years, and flirting with some ideas like calorie restriction, this is the first time I have applied a promising technology to myself. I do not mind saying that I went ahead and made a little ceremony of my first dose, eating the pills with cold water while standing under a hot shower. From tomorrow on, they'll just go down with my morning coffee.

Effects so far: some of my burps taste funny. Stay tuned for updates.

My plan, henceforth, is to continue following the news about anti-aging treatments and applying the single sanest-sounding one to myself, letting it complement a lifestyle of varied diet, frequent exercise, low stress, high friendship, and all that good stuff. I suspect, though, that there'll only be so many more candidates before one treatment really blows the lid off.

Still, I can't help but feel a little self-conscious about this. Many of my friends are apathetic about, or even resistant to, the idea of clinical anti-aging therapy. I can understand where they come from, because it's based on countless generations of the shared human condition, and that's awfully strong stuff. It doesn't help that decades of advertising have confused the definition of "anti-aging" with the promises of beauty creams or plastic surgery. This can make the desire to truly eliminate aging seem like a shallow pursuit, when really it's no shallower than wishing to eliminate any other debilitating, degenerative disease.

The meme that aging is treatable started working its way into the mainstream just as I was turning 30. I don't believe in fate, but I do believe in auspiciously timed opportunity.

Here's to the future, eh?

Edit: I'm shutting off anonymous comments on this entry because it's getting a lot of anon-spam.