You had plenty money in the dot com boom
You let all the startups make a fool of you
Why don’t you do right?
Go write a version 2.
Sitting there writing all those lines of code
If the Perl unfurls we’re going to
overload
Why don’t you do right?
Invest in Google too.
Get out of here and
make it for iPhones too.
I fell for your JavaScript and PHP
Now all that you’ve written is obscurity
Why don’t you do right?
Write me a version 3.
Why don’t you get out of here and
subversion check-in please?
Steven Petranek has some great points about where we should be putting defense money and how little Nasa has alloted to stop things that will (scientifically proven) lead to mass human extinction any day now:
One of my favorites is that in 1989, the 4581 Asclepius asteroid (300 meter diameter) crossed through Earth’s orbital field–the place we had been 6 hours earlier–which would have utterly wiped out the human race.
The Nursing Online Education Database just posted a list of 50 sleeping tips. It’s a nice list with some really great things to try if you want to experiment with your sleep in subtle ways.
Keeping in mind that I am not a nurse nor a doctor, I still have some comments based on my own sleep experiences. I find it necessary to comment because very little scientific research has actually been done on sleep. Personal experiences add a necessary supplement to the modicum of information out there.
#5. Don’t go to bed with a full stomach
When attempting to get an 8 hour night of continuous sleep, I think this is one of the most important factors of having a both a restful night of sleep and an easy awakening without feeling groggy. Food digestion slows with the rest of your body functions at night and if you have food in your stomach at all, it will sit there for as long as you do. I have always felt groggy and unrested, regardless of how much sleep I get, in times that I have eaten before bed. I have been in the habit lately of actually staying up later (and getting less hours of sleep) just to insure that I rid my body of all food before going to sleep. It has paid off remarkably.
#14. Never go to bed hungry
I have to disagree slightly with this one. While, in my experience, going to bed starving or even with a blatant hunger is not a good idea, being right on the verge of getting hungry and leaning on the side of hunger has been quite a good experience for me.
When I was working dinner shifts in the restaurant industry, going to school during the day, I was on a fairly strict schedule. I ate dinner a little after 5pm and had a small snack (and plenty of water) during my shift. My work shift was great exercise–resulting in plenty of sweat and sore muscles throughout the week. I was always incredibly tired when I got off work between 12:30-1am. I went to bed a little hungry at about 2am and I would always wake up at about 8am or 9am, jumping out of bed with energy and feeling very ready to start the day (stopping at the kitchen before the shower). For breakfast, I always had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich (every day for over 9 months). Being allergic to milk gives me fun alternatives to the normal American breakfast cereal morning.
I was on that schedule for about 9 months, sleeping 6-7 hours a night consistently. I remember feeling more alert, better rested and happier than I have on any other sleeping regiment–even than the year I spent working graveyard, sleeping a consistent 10 hours a night, in which I had the best, longest, most vivid dreams that I could ever remember and even experienced my first lucid dreams.
#25. Take Melatonin
I tried Melatonin once and aside from vivid dreams and feeling well rested in the morning, it wasn’t a great experience (read Melatonin or LCD).
Last November, Science Daily published an article called < a href="http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071115164438.htm">Hormone of Darkness: Melatonin Could Hurt Memory Formation At Night, which announces new sleep studies on zebra fish (grain of salt: they are not mammals, which may be important).
Now, there are other articles and research studies on mice (mammals) that show the opposite–that Melatonin actually may improve learning.
I decided to try Melatonin after reading the very detailed Melatonin Wikpedia article, which convinced me that it was worth trying and I may try it again since I still have a bottle of 2 stage release tablets.
Talk About Sleep has a great article on correct use of Melaton
I recommend to anyone wanting to experiment with it, to read all of the links within this post :)
It’s early in the morning, or late at night. You can’t tell if the sun is rising or setting from inside the drugstore. I’m way in back holding up a rectangular, silver box with a circular button on it’s side. It’s supposed to look like an external hard drive but I know it’s a weapon. It takes some time before I figure out that it’s just folded up and compressed in a few places. Some of the parts need to be twisted and turned like a Rubik’s Cube.
I’m standing there with my head down, fumbling with the gadget when I hear, rather than see, the buffer overflow. They’ve come in through the front entrance and already taken a few hostages. Looking up, I see the leader with a long black coat and sunglasses. Cute…[insert sardonic emoticon here]. The flyboys with him are Turkish squatters, leaking out into the aisles like waves of animated baggy corduroy. They move quickly but the aisles are long.
I see another like me, with a weapon like mine. He smoothly launches it in the air where the box unfolds against the air resistance, mechanically recompiling itself into a firearm. As he begins his assault, I give mine the same treatment. It doesn’t work for me the first time because I don’t throw it high enough. I have to launch it into the air a couple of times before it completely unfolds. On the final spin and catch I pull it close to my face, careful to aim at the leader. Through the circular lens in the front I can see him closely. My left hand steadies my right arm but he’s too far away. I can’t get a dead lock but I fire anyway for practice. It’s the first time I’ve used one of these contraptions. It misses, spraying a payload of half a dozen holes in the wall, several meters from my target.
The activity alerts the pack of my location and I tally ho, back and forth, unsure where to maneuver. The flyboy rats are descending quickly and I decide to make a stand. The weapon aimed, I fire right at the adrenaline infused miscreant mass. The gun does nothing. Not even a click, click, click as I frantically and insanely try again and again to riddle with holes the scurrying forces of ill intent.
“Hey man, if you get this mod, it adds a 1/4-inch jack to your computer so you can record the instrument with no prob. It also has this 1/8th-inch jack that receives bootleg radio–all the music shows going on right now in the world, man, all there for you to record with a simple turn of the dial. It’ll tear up your available storage, man, you’ll run out in no time. You’re music collection is dust compared to what you will capture with this baby!” The music shop boy laughs in a semi-maniacal technolust.
“Well,” I waver, “I don’t really need to add anything else to my music collection–that’ll just suck up my time. I’ve already got so much I haven’t listened to.”
“Get the instrument, man. For a hundred bucks you can’t pass it up. You’ll never find another like it. Say it with me man, Electric-Guitar. Nobody has seen one of these things in forever man! It’s claa-ssic, man! It’s got strings and all.”
He tempts me with the antique but I’m here looking for some new tech–something I have never seen. But this guy hasn’t got anything like that. I was syncing musical DNA before this little terminal stain was suckling his first drop of Infojuice™.
I walk out into the bright Thai sunlight and met up with my friends. “Let’s swim through this mess,” I say in the cool vernacular of my day. My friends agree, but we need a map. We’ve never been to this part but Lena knows a bookshop in the area where we can get a secret map.
“It’s hidden in the cover of The Beach. I put it there last summer. Nobody will find it.” She assures.
“What if someone bought the book?” I query.
“Don’t worry, I had some cheap labor make copies in all the versions of the book–but even if someone finds it, they won’t understand it :)” She points at the air making two dots and a swish. She doesn’t need to smile anymore, her hands can do it for her. It’s the new rave that all the kids are doing, gestures for emotions. They say it let’s you stay young by never needing to wrinkle your face. Emote with your hands and never need ironing.
When we get to the bookshop, there’s only one copy of The Beach left. I fish under the cover of the book and find it. “Is this it?” The map doesn’t look all that special. It’s like a theme park map, something you would pick up at Space World with all the attractions in big cartoon pictures.
“That’s it. Let’s run.”
We literally get lost so we can test out the map.
“OK, 3rd and Franklin, look it up.”
“There is no 3rd on this map, it’s 10 years old. We’re standing on a dirt road. This was obviously built recently.”
“Let’s walk up a block then.” She suggests. We get up another block and end up in a stream, swimming with guppies and huge schools of little round fish. I snap photos while the tide carries us downstream.
“Hey, check out the walls around the river, they look like gargoyles.” I point and click. Around the mountains, half way in the water are midget sized gargoyles with octopus tentacle hair and huge alien eyes. Their bodies are fish like but they have little arms, no bigger than the tentacles on their heads. As I photograph and float on by, they start to lift their heads and watch us. One heads over and I realize it has a humongous head. “Does it speak telepathically,” I ask, to nobody in particular.
“How did you know.” My friend answers.
“Just a lucky guess, it doesn’t have a mouth but obviously they have bigger brains than we do.”
The creature swims around me. It’s not threatening, just curious and eventually we exit it’s domain. The water carries us far.
So my doorbell rings while we’re watching a movie and I run down the stairs with ambivalence. It’s either someone with info about my lost cat or another newspaper salesman. I start mentally preparing my speech, which I’ve given a few times and always results in a quick end to the sales pitch. It’s simple and to the point:
“Newspapers are old technology. I read the news online, the day before it goes to print. It’s a waste of resources and it’s not as good as the free alternative.”
Although I’ve been tempted, I’ve never offered what I suspect would be a catchy and accurate new slogan for the printed press, “Yesterday’s News, Today!”
My goal is never to make enemies, just to make them go away.
Opening the door, I’m shocked to see a guy holding a black cat.
“Hey, I saw the posters up.”
“Is that…” I reach out for it, pulling the cat in for a closer look. “Oh, is that… it’s… wait…. it’s not him. He’s too small. A little young. But he looks so much like him…”
I set the cat on the ground and meet my neighbor, who’s name I instantly place wrong in my memory, later calling him Jake instead of Dave.
I thank him for bringing the cat anyway, “I wonder who’s he is, anyway…” I watch the cat as it sniffs around my porch.
After closing the door and running back upstairs, I tell Lena about the encounter.
“Are you sure it wasn’t him? Maybe he just lost a lot of weight.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t him, he was too young and different. It looked a lot like him though… Like Thor 3 or 4 years ago. I’ll go back and get him so you can see.”
I run back outside and see the cat across the street, sniffing at a tree. I pick him up and bring him inside. “You aren’t Thor. You’re too small and young. You smell different, too.”
I show Lena and she almost convinces me that it might be Thor, traumatized and different, lighter and more spry from the shock and activity of stray life for four days.
Cassiopeia hisses and the new cat is way too playful to be Thor. He smells around the house and doesn’t understand the cat door leading into the garage without my help, holding it open for him. He eats and plays, very friendly and looking comfortable but unfamiliar the whole while. It’s not him. But what do we do? He doesn’t have a collar. He might be a stray. He might be someone’s lost cat, just like our Thor. Maybe the people who lost him took our cat in by mistake. They look remarkable alike. We could take him to the shelter and tell them if nobody claims him to call us… then we could figure out what to do with him… damn, it’s Sunday and the shelter is closed. Why do they make it so difficult?
“Maybe I can take it outside and follow it around back to it’s house…”
“OK”, Lena is too tired with an ear infection.
I take the cat out and for a while he doesn’t do anything but circle a car parked in front of our house, weaving in and out of the tires and occasionally coming back to our porch to sniff around some more. Eventually, I urge him to follow me away from the car. He strolls over noncommittally to the fence across the way, exploring all the while, battering rocks and sticks, chewing on twigs and doing Parkour around the fence and telephone polls. Several times he leaps onto a phone poll, straddling it with his forepaws outstretched and jumps to get higher in little bursts of bear hug furry. He’s certainly wild. He knows how to work the outside. Darting in and out of a hole in the fence, he shows me around the area. I lose him for a while as he travels the other side of it so I run around the block. Maybe he lives in that house. I could ask them. When I get to the house, there is a man coming home.
“Do you have a black cat?” I ask.
“No, there are some posters though.”
“Yeah, that ones mine, but I saw another one that’s too small and doesn’t have a collar. I just want to make sure he has a home. Oh, there he is.” The little cat runs from the back yard of the neighboring house up to me.
“Where?” the man looks around, not seeing the cat.
“Right there.” I point to it as he runs up into my arms.
The man still doesn’t see the cat around but congratulates me on finding it and says “good luck” finding my other cat.
I thank him and take the cat back. Every few houses, he makes a curious sound and I set him down to walk alongside me. He doesn’t run away, just along. We get back to my house and he comes inside when I open the door. He plays with yarn and we wonder how we can manage taking him to the shelter since they close at 6pm. After a while, I decide to take him out again.
It’s darker so I bring a flashlight and a laser pointer.
This time, the cat heads over in the other direction. I follow him to the back parking area of the townhouses behind us. He makes a daring jump onto a high fence and I follow him with the flashlight as he goes to0 far for me to follow. After losing track of him, I get a little worried and run around the block to the other side of the fence. There’s a lot of space back there and I circle the houses around that area until I’m sure he must have gone back to where we started. Again, I run around the block, this time exhausted as I approach my house.
Out of the corner of my eye, behind a fire hydrant, next to the hole in the fence, I see him.
“puuRreow”, I call but he begins to retreat into the hole as I approach. “Hey, come on, where you goin’?”
I get closer and I notice he looks a little tense and scared. He’s different. He looks bigger, bigger eyes, different meow. I reach down and pick him up and I’m fully certain. This is Thor. The other cat is nowhere in sight and I take my cat home.
