Not worth it

Enough is enough, polyphasic sleeping is just not worth it, for me at least. Final decision came for me this morning. Admittedly this was the day following the previous days oversleeping screw up, but the everman schedule is supposed to be more forgiving. I went to sleep for my core at 4 last night and set the alarm for 8. Thought I’d give myself a nice phat core as I’d missed the morning nap and had such a big one the night before. I woke up exhausted and sat on the sofa, nodding off and waking up. This felt like it went on for about an hour, before I managed to focus on the clock and realised that it was only 6 am. Back under the covers again then. Eventually, I woke up properly on the alarm and got up. Felt pretty tired, but thought no probs, but be fine once I get the nicotine levels back up. So, begin the usual start to the day, by skinning one up. I do this on auto pilot now, as you can imagine. Put a filter in the corner of the gob (mine in the absence of another suitably available one), pull out a paper, line it with tobacco, transfer filter from gob to paper and roll. This morning, it didn’t work. At 8:02, sitting on the sofa, I put the filter in my gob, pulled out the paper and added the tobacco. At 8:04, I woke up and picked the tobacco back off the floor and put it back in the paper. At 8:48, woke up and picked the tobacco again. This time I completed the procedure and got to smoke the roll up. I pretty much recovered after that, but the bottom line is that I just don’t think it’s working out well for me, so can’t be arsed to do it anymore. Anything that interferes with the morning drag, has got to go.
So, can I take any positives from this, well the answer is yes. The only problem I’ve ever really had, was the need for a snooze in the afternoon. It’s always been a struggle to make it all the way through the day. I’m not sure why this should be the case. When I force myself through it, I’m fine for the evening and can stay awake till late, no probs, it’s just an afternoon thing. At least this experience has taught me how to nap properly. I can now drop off in sub 2 minutes, which open a whole new world of toilet cubicle naps and solves the wobbly afternoon head in the office syndrome. Job’s a good un, as they say, whoever the heck they are! Reality is, I can get by on 6 hours fine anyway and the only time I’ve ever stayed asleep/in bed for the full 8 hours in years, is whilst trying this polyphasic malarkey. I do still believe that it can be done, as I actually had some good spells on the uberman and may even have given up on that a little early, for me, it just wasn’t worth the pain. After having a few nights all to myself on the trot, I’m not all that sure I want them! I have to admit, I could see the novelty wearing off very quickly and boredom quickly becoming a factor.
So, what about this blog. Well, my last blog got fairly popular, but also became a drain, so I’m not going to do the same thing again. The problem was that people expect a daily entry and I really don’t like to be depended on, not by the masse anyway. Having said that, life generally presents you with much to write about. So, I’ll keep it muddling along, just not necessarily ever day.
Film review – atonement. In a word, good. It’s a period drama and with the unlikely exception of Pride and Prejudice (yes, I was surprised I liked that too!), I generally don’t like them. This film had a great plot, was well acted and generally got on with it well. Apart for some daft arty farty bollox for a while in the middle, it was a great film. There was a little too much of Ms Knightly in skimpy and wet attire, suddenly bring you to mind of the recent restaurant trend to abandon stocking tooth picks, but you have to give it to the girl, she does gives classic good english face. Is it worth going to the cinema for? Yes, probably. It’s slick and at several time throughout the film, I sat and thought, “I really don’t know what the plot is going to do next”, which was a refreshing change. Right down to the end, I really didn’t expect that either. So even if you don’t go out to watch it, well worth adding to the DVD list.
Global warming, I want my money back! Alright, I didn’t actually hand any money over, so can’t really expect to get any back, but I really did buy into it. I have been waiting (with very nearly baited breath) for several years now, for the changes to kick in. I was going to ceremonially burn the winter coats, have a nice potted palm tree on the balcony and start going to wales for my holidays again, with the expectation of getting several rain free days. Generally speaking, I was looking forward to global warming, making things generally, warmer. What has global warming actually meant to us? Floods, storms and a liberal plethora of worldwide disasters. That’s no good to me. Come on scientists, stop buggering about and make global warming, make things warm, or there’s just no point in having it, is there. Seems pretty obvious to me! Oh, hang on a minute, that’s the point isn’t it, it’s not actually meant to be a good thing. Bugger. Oh well, was a nice idea. Maybe it’s time we actually abandoned it and cut down on the whole pollution thing. Stop the whole global warming thing altogether, frankly, it’s just not working out the way we hoped...
Political comment of the day – Hain, you’re busted, bugger off. Seriously, if anybody would like to make any anonymous donations to my election funds, I not only promise not to declare them, but as a bonus, I promise not to stand for election either. Now that’s got to be a good deal. You have to wonder really. This government seem to have loaded the gun and I’m now wondering which part of their anatomy they’re going to point it at next! Really, if you wrote a sitcom and included this stuff, people would think it too farfetched and turn off. British politics at it’s most entertaining, second only to the Americans. (BTW – do I get an award for bashing our transatlantic cousins yet?)
So, I think a trip to the Tap for a couple tonight, to celebrate my return to normality might be in order. Anybody care to join me? Won't be a big one, prolly talking 7 - 9, so no more than a gallong or so of beer :-)
Now for the geeky bit, the coding. I’m really ashamed to admit this and am definitely putting it down to the lack of sleep, but I’ve been coding like a prat, or maybe worse, an American! I’m not talking about syntax here or even a particularly bad domain or object model. No, it’s much worse than that. I’ve been working on a little (well, not actually that little) app, to make job searching more productive and of course, being bone idle, easier. It started off well enough, with a decent datamodel, to under pin it, then a high level architecture, then it went horribly wrong. Instead of starting to write tests and begin getting the data in and making sense of it, I started work on the gui and writing pretty/fun user controls. Or rather playing around with pretty and fun stuff and actually producing very little. Ok, it’s not all bad, I now know a lot more about attributes and how they work with the properties window. I also know a lot more about SharpDevelop (look at the alpha for version 3, I’m now switching from VS at home, nuff said). However, my project has not developed a single jot. OK, I’m back on track now and am actually starting to pull jobsearch data off tut tinterweb and process it, but I should have been here a week ago. This is a classic example of how to bin a complete week, just geeking out and totally losing track of what I was trying to achieve in the first place. This is a pretty damned fine example of why having a more hours available, doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to get a lot done!
Laters...