2014 change number one: A little facial hair experiment

Me, at the time of this writing.

In advance of a couple of other changes that will take place soon, I thought I’d see what I looked like without the goatee and ‘stache I’ve been sporting since 1998. My beard’s had been getting increasing grey and course, making every kiss I gave the girlfriend an increasingly stabby proposition. I lopped off the goatee Saturday morning, and despite my reservations about going moustache only — a look that I associate with either cops or creepy guys parked in white van near playgrounds — I didn’t mind the look.

This morning, I thought: Hey, while I’m still in experimental mode, why not lop off the ‘stache, just to see what I look like? The photo above is the result. The girlfriend hasn’t seen it yet — I wonder what her reaction will be.

Me at the “office”, circa September 1998.

The goatee was an accident. Back in 1998, I was one-half of Datapanik Software Systems, a custom software development shop. We worked out of the brownstone apartment of Adam P.W. Smith, Datapanik’s other half, as it had plenty of room, with an office for Adam, and a makeshift office for me in the guest bedroom. We put in some pretty long hours, and I often crashed there.

Me at Club Havana in Manila, circa October 1998.

We were working on our biggest project, an application for National Research Bureau (NRB) in Chicago called Shopping Center Directory on CD-ROM. NRB was a research company specializing in data about shopping centers across the U.S., and had collected data on most of the 50,000 or so malls that were in the country at that time. They charged top dollar for this information, which was available either in four very large phone-book sized volumes, or as raw, poorly-normalized (for you non-computery people, think of this as “poorly thought-out”) database files. They hired us to take their databases and turn it into an easy-to-use product so that their customers — custodial services looking to make money off all the floors to be mopped at a mall, or researchers at The Gap or Starbucks who wanted to find new malls to occupy — could find information more easily. For two guys working out of an apartment at St. George and Dupont, it was a pretty sweet deal.

We had a particularly vexing bug in the application, and it had to be dealt with. In a fit of programmer bravado, I told Adam that I would stay at his place until it was fixed. I thought it would take a day or two to fix completely, but quashing that bug required fixes to a host of other bugs, and before I knew it, I had been at his place for eight days. The one thing I’d not brought with me was a razor, and over the week, I’d discovered that yes, I could actually grow a beard. So I kept it.

This is me using Photo Booth to take a picture of myself while reading.

Without the beard and ‘stache, I can see a lot of Dad in my face. I’m still thinking about whether to keep the look or go back to just the ‘stache, and I’m curious to see how the girlfriend reacts.