Sleepless in Saskatoon

Ok, I fail

2010-03-16T09:04:00.000-07:00

I didn't do a very good job of getting my life together yet. But now it is becoming more and more important that I do.

I've started a small business. I'm still working full time. As a result, I really need to get back on schedule to find time for all this work. This should be easier now that the weather has improved, and sleeping in my car is an option again. So starting Thursday, I'll be hitting a full transition attempt again. I figure the heavy effects of sleep dep won't hit until later Friday or Saturday then, and I should be functional by Monday. Note that that is a schedule I would NOT recommend any first adapter's strive for. I know how my body works, and I know I can hit that. I also have enough holidays banked that come Monday, if I'm not functional, I will just take a holiday. I also have a ton of work I can do for both my jobs right now, so finding things to do to keep me awake should not be an issue.

For the sake of accountability, I want people to hound me to update this over the next week. So if you are a reader, email me! chkurz is my username, and I use the great gmail.com for mail, so put those together.

Catch you on the flipside!

New Year's Resolution

2010-01-04T09:26:00.000-08:00

Well, I've decided I need to resurrect this blog.

No post since July? That's horrible! I need to use this blog for it's original purpose again though.

Since I started my new job in October, I haven't been polyphasic. I was starting to fall off the wagon towards the end of my old job, but the change of environment and everything just worked as a catalyst to fully quit. And I hate it. I have so much less time, I'm more tired than I was while polyphasic, it just sucks.

Enter New Year's Resolutions.

1) Quit chewing my nails. Working on it. It's about time I kicked this nasty habit. So if you read this (which is no one) and you see me chewing my nails, slap me.

2) Get to the gym more. I've not been making it to the pool as often as I'd like. So I'm going to try to force myself into swimming twice a day during the week, before and after work. Step one is getting a pool pass... working on that this week.

3) Get back into Polyphasic sleep.
This will be hard. Winter here is cold (normally, it's only -20C today, which is quite nice) which makes it so I can not sleep in my car. This restricts my potential sleep locations quite a bit. Also, since I'm at a new job, I need to organize a nap location. I'll be discussing it with my bosses sometime this week. A nice side effect is my parents house isn't too far from work, but then I have to see my parents, which is an undesirable outcome. Also, an 8 hour stretch is just too long to go without a nap, if you are trying to be polyphasic.

This will mean setting up a schedule that works with my body, and work schedule, and pool swim times. This should be easier now that I'm not taking a class as well (one of the excuses I used in the fall for falling off the bandwagon. I had commitments on Tuesday from 8am-7pm, which made finding time to nap very difficult). I'll sit down and fiddle with the numbers sometime this week, shooting to start the transition next week. Hopefully it will go as smooth as my first transition.

I'll hopefully be keeping this blog more updated. It's a good item on my "TODO" list to keep me awake too.

Until next post!

Holidays!

2009-07-21T08:38:00.001-07:00

Holidays are over. This makes me sad. I did have a LOT of fun though.

For my vacation I drove to Maine, through various states to the South. I met a bunch of friends from online, and drank a lot of beer. So a very successful trip. I ended up traveling just under 9000 km in the span of a week and a half though, so I got pretty used to my car. Definitely worth it though.

I'll be posting more info on my trip later. I need to still go through all my pictures, and collect things together. Highlights include all the microbreweries I visited, the awesome lakes I hung out at in Maine, and the Creationist Museum.

One of the interesting side effects of my trip was essentially a huge upheaval to my sleep schedule. I think it was good though. While on the road I was getting bored fast, as driving is boring, so I was stopping for more breaks. This made my sleep schedule better for most of the driving legs. But I also traveled 2 time zones, so that messed with my sleep schedule... End result was a lot of craziness. It broke all my routines, which has opened me up to re-establish some better ones. Thus, over the next week or two, I'll be changing my sleep times. Plans are to wak3 up at 6am, swim, then head to work. Naps at Noon before eating lunch, and 5pm ish, before driving home. This will let me skip a lot of the traffic as well, which was something I liked back when my old routine was similar. I do have a family reunion this weekend, which may challenge my re-adjustment.

But I need to get back to work. I have quite a few things I need to finish up to catch up from my holiday. Hopefully I can make a post later this week, or early next with more trip details.

Excitement

2009-06-18T09:31:00.000-07:00

I'm am getting very excited.
I am laying down more solid plans for my road trip to Maine. People are getting confirmed, and making orders for things from Canada. It will be a great time to actually meet some of these good friends. Plus, two weeks off work is always a good thing. At the rate things are going too, I'm going to need that holiday.

This week is hectic. My mothers birthday was Tuesday, and my father is having a big retirement party tonight. My sisters are all in town now, so I've been doing family stuff a lot this week, and have more planned. It should all be fun, but sheesh. I'll get to unwind and recover a little over the weekend, then rehearsals and Jazz festival starts picking up. I have to help plan / prepare for our annual Canada Day party (that anyone who is reading this is invited to). I think we're doing it Sunday afternoon / evening. Wait... hmm... I think I'm supposed to be playing on the free stage... I guess I'll miss a bit of my own party. Then it's Jazz festival week, which I think I'll be taking low key this year. Less concerts, save money for my trip to Maine. But as Jazz festival wraps up, I'll be hitting the road. So for the next about 4 weeks, I guess I don't really have much free time in evenings.

And all that may be made more difficult if I hear back from any of the places I sent my resume to. Now that I finished school, I applied to a couple companies I'd like to work for. Some farther places, like LA, and Vancouver. We'll see if I hear anything back. There is a local place or two I applied to that I think would help me learn more than my current job, and have better potential for promotions and such. It's all in the waiting stages now though, as I have to see if any of these companies are interested in me. I don't like the waiting stage. I talked to some people at the local places though, and I should have a good shot at getting in. It's a bit longer of a wait right now though, as the main hiring person is on holidays...

I somehow always manage to keep my life very busy.

Well

2009-06-08T08:46:00.000-07:00

Summer apparently isn't here yet. What the heck. It's cold, miserable, and snowing in places. This is stupid. However, it has the nice side effect of my allergies being very minimal this year. It's been too cold for the pollens to spread. That is a nice thing.

So this weekend, my house had a big D&D session. It was quite a bit of fun. They finished up the Keep, and the last fight was very entertaining. We had people falling unconscious, some big hits, and it was very close. They did win though. On the way home, they got attacked by some Bandits though, and as I was setting it up, a friend stopped in unexpectedly. It worked out extremely well. The character builder had a example character that was about the right level, so I just printed him off a sheet, and setup the encounter as he was being attacked by the bandits, as the party came up to him. I think he had fun. But as the fight was wrapping up, something quite unexpected happened. The Rogue in the party decided to try to kill the newcomer, to steal his stuff. Everyone else in the party was against this. The rogue surprised him, and tried to use his daily power. He missed. He quickly started apologizing, and back pedaling. The Dwarf counterattacked, using his daily. He also missed, so it looked like it would be a stand still. Then I explained Action Points, and what the word "reliable" meant on his daily power. He got very excited, and used his action point to try to hit the rogue again with his daily. Critical Hit.

The attack had a max damage of a lot. The rogue is not known for his hit point pool. The rogue had also taken a couple hits in the fight, and wasn't full. He dropped to -20 or so, putting him fully dead, not just unconscious. It was awesome. They hauled his body back to town, and were very shocked to see how much it would cost to bring him back from the dead. There was a lot of negotiations going on at the table about if it was worth it. They hunted for black market temples that could put a curse on him as they brought him back too, so they could override his actions to try to prevent him from screwing up that big again. I thought it was a good idea, but didn't want to take that control away form the rogue, so didn't let it happen. He is in a fair bit of debt to everyone though, and it seems like they will be making him work if off for awhile. Very entertaining round. I have to prep some stuff tonight and tomorrow for the game this week though, as now that they finished that module, I don't know where I'll send them next. I have some ideas.

I said I'd let them adjust characters after the dungeon, as now they have some D&D experience in fourth edition, and can fix some of the things they didn't understand fully. They are jumping in deep though. One guy switched every single power and feat. One guy is debating just rolling a brand new character, of a different race and class. Next session will be pretty interesting.

So I might be having some big life changes happening soon. We'll see how quickly I hear back from some of my early week work here. I'll keep you updated.

It's been one week!

2009-05-21T15:00:00.000-07:00

Since I last posted. There goes my good record.

So I'm participating in a triathlon team. I'm doing the swimming leg. I have to swim 500m as fast as possible. It's currently not very fast... But as a result, I've bee hitting the pool quite regularly. I've been enjoying it. I feel like I'm getting in better shape, and there is a cute lifeguard there in the mornings. =) It's quite refreshing to wake up and swim though. Hopefully I can make it through the triathlon swim. An interesting side effect is I'm sleeping better now. Maybe it's just the addition of another routine thing, maybe it's just the physical activity. I'm getting back to a good core sleep. I'm currently exhausted by my afternoon nap, I think I need to move it a little earlier, as it's pretty late currently. So I'll be making those tweaks in the next week. It's nice to have my polyphasic sleep back on a good track again.

So due to weather, I still haven't gotten any of my garden in the dirt yet. I did till the ground, but we are still getting frost warnings every night... Maybe I can actually plant this weekend. It's supposed to be nicer. I want my plants to get going! Quicker they start the quicker I can eat them.

So on the weekend, I was vacuuming the lawn. Yes, you heard me correctly. I had to borrow a shop-vac, and vacuumed the lawn. It's the first I've ever heard of anyone doing it. The story is an interesting one. Friday after work, I turned a bunch of dirt, and did a bit of weeding, and found a hole in our hose. The key thing from Friday was the backyard was great. Then, Saturday morning, I look out the back window, and see our patio table overturned. It had a glass top. Our backyard now had a section that was just covered with broken glass. Awesome. I was planning to mow the lawn that morning. Alas, I had to clean the glass up first. So I tried to pick up some of the biggest chunks, but pretty much all of it was crumbling further when I went to pick it up. It was a mess. So I tried sweeping it up, and raking it up, and collecting it in a dustpan. Those techniques did ok, but there was still a lot of glass it was missing. Only thing I could think of to try was vacuuming. Which, for the record, worked great! I am intending to spread some dirt in the area too, after mowing, just to make sure no small sharp edges are left.

So we were trying to figure out how our patio table decided to smash itself on our lawn. All I could figure was a) The Wind, and b) Young Hooligans. I thought the wind was pretty unlikely, as nothing else in the backyard looked moved, and the neighbours stuff was all fine, so I was forced to blame young hooligans. Around supper time, I answered the door, and it was our neighbour. He apologized for breaking our table, and I was confused. Did he jump the fence and smash it? He continued to explain. Apparently his dogs, in the morning, decided to break through the fence, and run around our yard. They ran into our table, knocking it over, and making a huge mess. (The dogs were fine). It did however leave me with a bit of an uneasy feeling. If those dogs can trash a patio table, they could easily take out roomies. (As the heaviest of the roomies, I suspect I'd have the best chance at survival). Our neighbour explained that he has now lined the fence with chicken wire, so they will have to break more than just weak boards to do it again, and he is intending to buy us a new table, which is nice. I'm glad he was honest, but at the same time, frustrated at those dogs. They bark all the time, and now they are damaging our property too? Sheesh.

I'll let you know my thoughts on the patio table our neighbour picks to replace it. I might just ask him to pick us up like a home depot gift card or something for the value of it, then we can pick it ourselves.

D&D Adventure Update!

2009-05-14T08:22:00.000-07:00

So, my crew is having a blast.

They all took to D&D better than I even expected. Soeric started as the only one with a big backstory, and that hasn't changed, but Pamp, the rogue, has sure started to go crazy. As a rogue, he doesn't really get anything great on his minor action yet, so he constantly is trying to surprise people, scare people, and try crazy things. I've decided that I'll let him try to do pretty much anything he wants on his minor, as long as he can explain it to me. Then I'll determine what skill he has to check, and what the effect will be. I also don't let him do the same thing twice. So we have a little halfling rogue, running around trying to pants people, juggle, attempting comedic one lines, all sorts of interesting things to try to confuse the enemy. It's very entertaining.

The players just can't seem to have enough either. We were scheduled to play tonight (Thursday) after playing last Thursday, but on Sunday, Soeric suggested we play on Tuesday in addition too, and everyone was really into it. They also just got level 2 on Tuesday, and I caught my roomies spending easily a couple hours last night reading books, discussing feats, and strategies they want to try. They seem to be really enjoying it.

I started them in the dungeon delve book, just doing the first dungeon to see how they took to D&D. It quickly became apparent that they wanted a bigger story to go on. So I took the Keep of the Shadowfell adventure (which is free from Wizard's as a pdf) and basically replaced the first stretch of the adventure with the first dungeon delve. I swapped the young dragon at the end of the delve with Irontooth, and it worked out perfectly. So now I have them about to enter the keep, which I'm pretty excited for.

Should be a fun evening.

New Toy!

2009-05-08T08:04:00.000-07:00

SO I picked up an Asus Eee PC 1000HE yesterday. I haven't been able to play with it as much as I want to. So far though, I'm reasonably impressed. The battery life does seem to be pretty good on it. I'm trying to condition the battery today, with full charge to full discharge usage, so I'll actually get some more real world-ish numbers. I do like seeing 30% battery left, 2:40 minutes. I'm just finishing my Ubuntu Netbook remix download, so tonight I'll likely be setting it up to dual boot, assuming I can find time somewhere between the Carbon Dating Service show, and 1 vs 100 Beta on Xbox live.

I came with some useful apps I wasn't expecting. Largely Skype. I've been working to install a couple other important apps, like Firefox, Media Player Classic, and so forth. I think I'll end up using this little thing more than I was planning. I still need to try watching some higher def content on it, to see how it handles it. I'm going to install and try some older 3d games on it too. Might run not too bad. I'm pretty excited to use this on a big road trip, like my Maine one I'm planning. Then on rest stops I can watch TV, play games, do whatever.

I need a good wifi coverage map for the North Eastern States... or to find a decent WEP cracker for a netbook...

Holy Spring Cleaning!

2009-05-05T08:40:00.000-07:00

So I went on a cleaning binge. It was pretty satisfactory. I rearranged all the furniture in my room, and now have space to keep some of my music stuff up there. I'm hoping that will motivate me to practice more, as I really should. It also is now laid out to force me to keep it cleaner as well. Assuming I can keep up the habits I'm trying to form. I've decided I want to change some aspects of my life, and the organization / cleanliness of my room is one of them. It ties into others as well, as now I have enough floor space to do sit ups, and push ups, and potentially get somewhat back into shape.

My next goal, after the completion of my room cleaning, is to clean and reorganize our basement. It's not very great right now, and organizing it would open up a fair bit of space. We are planning to build a bigger gaming table too, for board games, and D&D, and it would likely go in the basement. It's too warm in the summer to not hang out in the basement. I essentially need to get permission from my roomies to junk a lot of stuff, then just have at 'er. I also had to wait until after today, as our garbage container was pretty full from my room cleaning.

All that said, I'm open to suggestions on a design for a good gaming table. We want shelves or drawers, somewhat light-weight, maybe modular? It would be great if we could put a cover on it too, to "pause" board games/D&D sessions. It might be quite the undertaking...

Adventure Begins!

2009-04-27T08:13:00.000-07:00

So we had a ton of fun yesterday. At least I did. I hope everyone else did too. I forgot to snap pictures as it was going on though. Opps.

First fight my newbie friends got into was a bit rough. They didn't know how to work well as a team, or what their most effective moves were when. They ended up spread out all over the map, with no one in range of the heals that were available. Soeric the Avenger was knocked out, and a couple others were quite beat up at the end. I think it was a pretty good trial by fire start.

Second encounter was way too easy. They decimated the crew of 8 or 9 minions, and the 3 Kobold Slingers were getting horrible rolls to hit. It was a ton of fun for the encounter though, as the Sorcerer climbed a 8 foot wall, perched at the top of it, threw 2 aoe's to kill almost all the minions single-handedly, then promptly fell backwards off the wall. It was very entertaining.

Third encounter was about right for the difficulty. Maybe a touch too hard. They ended up pretty battered, but no one collapsed. A couple daily's were used, but not all, and very few action points. It is definitely seeming like the group needs more healing. I'm going to try to push some people to multiclass into something that gives a heal. There is only so much that Ghost Bear can do.

Timewise, things moved a bit slower than I expected. The first encounter was very long. I expected it to be long, but it was 3 hours or so, which was a bit longer than I planned for. The other 2 encounters were closer to the 1.5 hour mark. They had figured out how a lot of their moves worked, and some better planned strategies.

Overall, it was a good time. They didn't finish the little story I wanted to get done, they have 1 encounter left. But I might attach another encounter on, so that next session, we will get 2 encounters. Then head to town and do some shopping and such. Keeps the next session maybe a touch shorter. Hopefully they can level too, and we'll do the leveling process as well.

Beginning of an Adventure

2009-04-24T10:20:00.000-07:00

So I'm pretty excited for Sunday. If you aren't geeky, you may want to stop reading now.

Sunday I'm starting as DM (Dungeon Master) for a D&D (Dungeons and Dragons) 4e (Fourth Edition) game. Man, geeks like Acronyms. I'm leading a group of D&D newbies. I think collectively as a group of players, they will have at most 20 hours of D&D play combined. I am a bit relieved because they are all video game RPG players, so some of the concepts they are familiar with. I should be pretty interesting.

It's also a wide mix of player styles. One guy has already submitted a character history, bio, and all sort of extra details that compete as one of the best back stories I've heard in D&D. One of the other players didn't even pick a close to appropriate name. Should make the group rather interesting as a group. I think a lot of crazy things will go down. It should be fun. I hope everyone has a good time.

I decided, since it's many of their first times playing, to not go too heavy into the story or role playing or anything. I'm intending the first session to be very combat heavy. I think they will connect to that quicker. After seeing how the first session goes, I'll decided if I want to hook them in to a bigger narrative, or just keep going with simple more one-shot style adventures.

I'll likely take pictures, and chronicle the adventure somewhat, as much for my own interest as any of my readers. So expect a summary next week sometime.

Progress!

2009-04-20T08:01:00.000-07:00

So I deployed my first deployable build to the Xbox. I have the first 720p test map displayed, and the grid structure behind it loading correctly. I have the playable characters represented with some placeholders. Tonight I'll be attaching some basic controls to move the placeholders, and adding collisions, for locations you aren't allowed to move (and maybe some places that just slow you down, like hills?)

I got some pretty good progress yesterday, but need to make a lot of progress this week too. We have about 2 weeks until the deadline for submissions for the PAX 10. Hopefully by the end of next weekend, it's a a demo-able state. I might be hitting up a couple friends to start playtesting sometime this week, so be forewarned!

Hopefully I get the first 3d model sometime today, so I can retrofit my classes to support it. I'm a bit nervous about that. Hopefully it's as easy as I've tried to set it up to be. That is definitely my focus for this week though. Trying to free up some evenings to work on it, and I'll have to enforce a strict "Butt in Chair, Hands on Keyboard" policy. Hopefully I'll have a successful week!

Frustrated

2009-04-15T07:30:00.000-07:00

So I write my final for my course in 2 days. I still do not know if they will be giving me my degree. I have been receiving invites to grad, and all that stuff, but no one has concretely told me if it's possible or not. So I'm studying, and hoping I'll be done school potentially forever come Friday.

And then, oh boy, do I get even more busy. I have a game project, Project Instant Ramen, that we are hoping to have in reasonable shape to submit to some competitions. The deadline for most of the competitions is the end of the month. We have quite a bit of work to do to make that deadline. The good thing is almost all our art assets, including 3d models and everything, sound like they are almost finished. Our script is past first draft, but by no means finished. A lot of the libraries I intend to use are somewhat built up. I have a lot of the pieces done / ready to go. It's just waiting on me to finish my course, so I can sink a lot of time into it, and get it going. My plan is to sink quite a few hours into it this weekend.

My other goal for the weekend is to get my sleep schedule adjusted for the summer. I get "trapped" in various requirements during the school year to allow me to attend class and work, and my body doesn't like all of them. It works still, but I know I could do better. I'll have to work it all out, and likely re-adapt somewhat. Done it before, and it'll be good to get back to a better schedule. My plan is as follows:
Up at 4am. Yoga, Breakfast, Shower, and so forth. Drive to work around 6:30-6:45. Nap at work, before starting anything, around 7am. Work, breaking for a nap around 2pm. More work, Drive home. Eat supper. Nap around 8pm. Up till 1am. I'm hoping I can lock in the 9pm to 1am range as time to work on Project Instant Ramen. My biggest concern with it, is for the next 2 or 3 weeks, I'll be logging roughly 13 hours of programming a day. I need to, as I have a lot I need to get finished, but that might be a bit stressful. That does leave my weekends code free. I may say like Tuesday Thursday, evening work on PIR, and Saturday Sunday, and take the other evenings as entertainment time to keep my sanity.

I'll keep you updated with how well it pans out.

Happy Broken Internet Day

2009-04-01T07:50:00.000-07:00

April Fool's Day is one of my least favourite days in the world. You get exposed to pranks, that typically aren't funny, and are just annoying. Main annoying factor, the broken internet. Normally you should be thinking when you read anything on the internet, as nothing is guaranteed to be true, but on April Fool's Day that problem is magnified tenfold. You have to filter through so much crap to get to any nuggets of truth today, that it's easier to just give up and disconnect for the day. Now for a tech junkie like myself, fully disconnecting for a day is pretty hard.

But too much work to do, so this post is very short. I will update more after finals!

These are the days of my life

2009-03-13T07:55:00.000-07:00

Oh boy. I was SICK.
So I missed 3 days of work, lost some weight, and had a very crummy start to the week. Feeling much better now, actually ate a normally sized meal last night. Things seem to be on the up and up. However, now I am behind on everything important. I have a big assignment due on Tuesday I've barely started. I have to make a Demolition Derby game. Currently it loads and displays the background... Obviously I have a little ways to go. So that will likely take most (if not all) of my time this weekend. Also, I need to get more work done on Project Instant Ramen (one of which tasks should be actually finding a name...). We are setting some targets for full demo versions. To enter for the PAX 10, we need to have a full working demo submittable by May 9th, which gives us just under 2 months to essentially finish. That means a lot more work. We have another one we're shooting for too, IndieCade, with a deadline of April 30th. Once we're closer to that date, we'll see if there is a Beta or something we can make publicly available. Don't hold your breath.

I'm still very very excited for this project. I would love nothing more than to have it play like we want it to. Getting it on XBox Live Arcade, or Greenhouse, or something would be nice, making money with it would be even nicer, but just for the experience and practice it is definitely worth the effort. I'm hoping that I can sink some time into it this weekend, but assignment has to take priority.

But I should get to work here, I'll be keeping you updated.

Summer Plans

2009-03-05T06:58:00.000-08:00

So I have been trying to decide what to do with my holidays this year. I've put some aside for the Penny Arcade Expo, as I always go, and it's a great time. This year I may be taking resumes too. But last year I took two full weeks off, and spent 1/2 a month on that coast (and loved it). This year, I don't think I'll be spending near that much time, which gives me a few holiday days to use up elsewhere.

As that was sitting in my mind for a couple weeks, I was contacted by a friend in FFXI, the MMO I play. There is a crew of folks, all of whom I know in game, who all live (somewhat) on the East Coast. They get together every summer for a BBQ to hang out and have fun. I was invited this year. They haven't locked a date in yet, but with some rough estimates I determined that it would be a decently cheap flight ($400 round trip? nice) and I would have no hotel or anything to worry about, as I can crash at friend's places. I think it would be a lot of fun, and a good chance to meet these people for real. So I'm pretty excited for it.

That sort of event always brings up debates. Some people, like my sisters, and parents, think it's crazy that I would have friends that I consider really good friends, that I have never met face to face. They thought it was very weird last time I had some online friends share a hotel room with me for PAX (which was 3 years ago now? And Ruben still owes me money for!). I think many people in our society think along the same lines. Sure, I have never met these people face to face, or even seen pictures of some of them, and constantly forget their real names (I don't even know how many of them know I'm a Cody), but friendship isn't based off that. I DEFINITELY talk to these online friends more than my Parents, and my sisters (likely combined). I know what they do for a living, I know of some of their interests. I know about the good and the bad things that happen in their life. I trust them with things like my account numbers for my game characters, which gives them access to years of effort on my part, and virtual goods worth thousands of dollars. That's more than I trust some of my local friends with.

I just find it an interesting generational divide. Making solid connections over the internet is just a foreign concept to many people. To those of us who have done it though, it just seems natural.

Allergy Season!

2009-02-24T06:38:00.000-08:00

Its not here yet. We've been getting quite a bit of snow lately. But I have started my pre-season treatments. They have created an interesting dilemma. They put me to sleep. Something about injecting with pollens makes me sleep. Maybe I just need to time this better. They sure knock me out. Worth it though. I can't imagine doing through a spring without my shots. It's bad enough with my shots. My allergies are definitely one of my biggest concerns about moving to the coast. In more temperate climates, I suspect I will have allergic reactions much more frequently. I'll be constantly on meds. I think it'll be worth it though, for the nicer weather.

Due to demand, I'll look into posting a version of my assignment here for people to try out. It's definitely not perfect. I should have started working on it earlier than I did. I think over the summer, or maybe after Project Instant Ramen (the code name for Monoclesoft's current project) is done, I'll come back to it, and improve it. I'd love to get it more so to a quality product I am willing to use to supplement my resume for job apps to the industry. Although with the economy the way it is, the Games industry seems to be laying people off left and right, so that may hinder my chances there. You never know until you try though.

So I'm in the process of correcting my sleep schedule still. I really need to just buckle down, and re-adapt the the changes I want to make. I'm been getting to work between 7:30 and 9 ish, which takes a lot of the pressure off in the morning, which has turned into me sleeping in more regularly. I really need to be very rigid with my schedule for a bit to correct this. Hopefully as weather warms up, I can go outsied more, which will help provide more tasks I can work on. I'll keep you updated with how that all pans out.

Holy assignment Batman

2009-02-12T07:57:00.000-08:00

So I'm taking one class this term. It's a Computer Game Development course. I'm really enjoying it. It's a very informative. But it is a very heavy class. I just recently finished the first assignment, which was create a version of SpyHunter. It was a touch harder than I expected. As a result, I ended up not getting much sleep (even by my standards) the couple of days before the assignment was due. This was the first time I'd really cut my sleep down further. It was rough. I don't recommend it. I will definitely start the next assignment within a day or two of it being assigned. That said, I think I'll get a decent mark on it. I hit 19 of the 20 main requirements, which I think was the most anyone in the class did. I paid dearly in my sleeping though.

Due to lack of sleep, I slept a lot the day following (like 6 hours at night). It has damaged my schedule pretty good. So I am going to have to work at it this weekend to get everything back in order. I think I'll take this chance to move back up to 3 naps a day, instead of the two I've fallen into. It'll help that the weather is starting to warm up again, so I can start napping in my car if I'm trapped somewhere. I think I'm going to try moving my core. I'm thinking of changing it to 1-4am, nap around 10am, 3pm, 7:30, or 8pm. This means I'll have to find some new good tasks for early AM, as I won't be going into work at 5am, so I have an extra hour to kill. Maybe I'll actually try to get in the habit of a morning workout or Yoga session.

That's my goal for this weekend, and next week. I don't have classes next week, and it is a long weekend, so hopefully it'll work out well as a transition time.

Dreams

2009-01-27T11:39:00.000-08:00

Been awhile since I've posted about many of my dreams, and lately they have been very messed up. If you don't enjoy hearing about my oddities, feel free to skip this one.

So a couple nights ago. The dream involved me grocery shopping with my Dad. For some reason, I had to help restock a cooler, because I complained about there not being any bacon. So I got in the cooler and helped this little midget restock the cooler, which ended up taking hours. The store closed while I was restocking the cooler. So when I got out of the cooler, it was all dark. But there was still a ton of people there, just all employees of the grocery store. It was like they all lived there. I got them to let me out, and my Dad was gone. So I started walking home. This was where I realized the grocery store was by itself, miles away from the city. I walked for a bit down the highway, and my Dad eventually picked me up (not sure how he found me). After he picked me up, we drove off the highway and went off roading. And that was the end of the dream.
OH! I should mention the great products that were the main point of the grocery store trip. Apparently aside from the bacon that wasn't there, the main thing I wanted from the grocery store was Ramen (ichiban noodles). But the flavours I was looking for were Fruit Punch Ramen, and Castle Crashers flavoured Ramen. I have no idea what a video game flavour of ramen would taste like. The Fruit Punch Ramen also came with like gooey gel things you were supposed to add that were supposed to simulate soggy fruit rinds.
So yeah. That one was pretty weird.

My other weird dream lately was shorter. Much shorter. It involved my whole family moving into some large castle. It was this huge mansion, but was laid out on the inside much like a high school would have been. We were just moving in, so we were doing some large scale renovations to make it more like a house. This involved converting a lot of the space into bedrooms. Not that weird yet? So the space I end up getting as my room was originally a Men's washroom. BAM! Weird! So I the rest of the dream was about the changes I was making to this Men's room to make it a livable bedroom, and people's reactions to me living in a bathroom. Let's just say non of the changes I made involved moving anything connected to plumbing. So I ended up with this decent bedroom that just happened to have toilets and urinal's somewhat all over the place. The main area the bed was contained shower heads. No idea why I was in the bathroom.
As I remember, we all got our own wings too, so I had a bunch of other rooms in my wing. Not sure if using the bathroom as the bedroom was an order, or my idea. It was definitely the weirdest / creepiest bedroom I had ever been in though. Although there was a bit of convenience in not having to leave bed to have a shower.

And those are my creepy dream updates. Hopefully you found them enjoyable / haven't decided I am a lunatic yet.

I have Returned!

2009-01-14T05:24:00.000-08:00

So due to various complaints, I figure it's about time to write something here.

First of all, my blog is seeing less activity. If you didn't notice, then you need help. One of the reasons for this is I'm on twitter. I can use twitter from my phone, so I update it MUCH more regularly. Then I find when I get to sit down to write on this, I've already talked about a fair bit of it. I'll find something to talk about though.

So December was hectic. I only had one final (which went well. I ended up with a 90% in the class) but I had a fair bit of work I needed to accomplish as well. For the most part I'm caught up now. Started my new class (Video Game development) which is awesome. At work I'm shifting into testing mode, so I'm writing lots of test apps, and just using the stuff I made last month. Things are starting to settle down.

I had a good Christmas holiday. The whole family thing was a bit weird. My oldest niece was at her father's house all day, and the next oldest (only one old enough to know what was happening) is very resistant to change. She was definitely NOT excited to open presents or anything. So we ended up drinking, Hot Tubbing, and playing Boom Blox on the Wii pretty much all day. My mom was so excited she could beat me at a video game. My parents caught on to Boom Blox quickly, and I''m not very good, especially when I'm drinking.

New Year's Eve was a lot of fun. We ended up having people over. It was good times. Got a loaner projector, as mine was in for repairs (sigh). Played some Rock Band, lots of drinking, and general just hanging out. Had a pretty decent turnout. We even got to count the leap second. We went with counting zero. Then there was a fair bit of drunk dialing a friend in Vancouver. We were calling from the future. It was quite humourous, but I imagine you a) had to be there, and b) needed to know the guy. So I'll save stories about it for others to tell. There might be a video floating around the internets somewhere...

After New Year's (New Year's Day, in fact) I took off to Jasper with 2 friends. Got 3 days of skiing in. Had a ton of fun. Spent maybe a touch more cash than I should have. It was totally worth it though. I had a blast. I realized how much I actually love the mountains though. Now that I have a sibling living closer to them, I might have to start making more trips. Probably not this winter, as I have some debt to clear off now, but next year!

So that's essentially the update for my December, and first 1/2 of January. Eventful, Fun, and great. I'll make another post in a week's time or so to talk about how that month has hurt my sleep program (which I'm slowly getting back on track for) and maybe leak some details on my latest (video game related) project.

School is Done!

2008-12-02T13:37:00.000-08:00

At least for the term. I have another class next term, then it's still unknown if I'm done or not. I'm quite excited though. My class next term is Game Mechanics. I think it should be very interesting. It also lines up with my Nintendo DS memory cart coming in, which allows me to finally start playing with development for the DS. Also, my 3d Artist friend apparently is just leaving his job, to a more part time position, to focus more on getting a portfolio together. Which means I can likely suck an artist into some projects.

My class next term is a good time as well (4-5:30 Tuesday, Thursday) which means if I keep my current work hours, I can bank a lot of flex time. I'm intending to flip that flex time into working on some video game related development. I might talk to my boss to see if I can take a Thursday afternoon off, and just head to the University and do some work on game related code before class. That would give me like 4 hours a week, minimum. That would be nice. I'll have to get a laptop to develop on in that case, but I'm intending to pick up a MacBook after Christmas anyway. (At least after Christmas shopping... So I may end up with one in the next couple weeks)

So video game season is almost done. Tomorrow I can pick up my last pre-order. I've done better than I was expecting at completing a few of them before getting new ones. Not that I'm done them all, but at least a few. I'll likely be slowing down now though, as I want to focus more on programming. I'm hitting the time in my life where I need to start my move to the career I want.

Look at me, all growing up and stuff. Weird.

Hey, I have one of these

2008-11-20T09:23:00.000-08:00

I should make a post. Time for lots of updates!

So I went for academic advising. It was a bit frustrating. They couldn't really tell me for sure if I need 1 more class that what I'm currently registered for, or not. So I'll maybe finish in spring? I was talking to the Dean of the Department as well, so I don't really know how I can escalate it to get any better answers. I might just take the class over the summer or something, if I have to. The longer I take, the less I'd have to pay work back if I leave. Not that big of a deal. Just very frustrating that they couldn't give me the answers I wanted.

I also finished my Bass project. Got all the electronics done, and have it strung and everything. I need to do some setup tweaking, like raising the action a bit, lowering the pick ups a bit, real minor things. I've been playing with it a bit though. The low B string is LOW. and with the drop trigger, it sounds pretty awesome. Definitely pushing the edge of audible tone. I have to retrain my hands though. I have some neat 3 octave things I can do now that my hands just can't find comfortable. I just have to start practicing with it more. Hopefully I can find a group to play it with. Nolto, get a live band together. We need to jam more.

Attached to that, it's still been crazy video game month. I hate that everything gets released to try and get in on the Christmas rush. As a result I have about 10 new games I've bought, and not finished. I have a lot of work to do, but I'll enjoy every bit of it. The one I want Nolto to rock with is Lips. It's a karaoke game, bu tyou can import songs from IPods, or network shares or whatever. I think it'll be a fun way fo rhim to learn his lyrics before a show. I have to start a binder of lyrics though for my basement, as it's not very good at finding them. Yet anyway. It doesn't help that some of the songs I'm doing are a bit obscure. (First song imported: Rain, from Cowboy Bebop)

I've been pretty busy at work too. Our biggest customer does this tech blackout thing all December, where they don't change anything for the month, so we've been rushing to try and get things done before that. Makes for hectic times.

On the sleep front (Don't know how many of you come here for that anymore) things are still good. I've moved my sleep setup inside to the server room, as it's colder here now. My morning nap has also slide a hair later, to closer to 9:15. Not a big deal. Due to time though, I'm running more of a 2 naps throughout the day, 23 minutes each, and about 4 hours at night. I have my afternoon nap around 3 or 3:30. I sometimes take an evening nap, if I'm getting worn out. It's still working well. I'd like to tighten it back up to 3 regular naps, and 3 hours, but I just seemed to miss my evening nap too much.

And that is all I can post. I have to head out to get lunch, and head to class right away here. I'll post some pictures of my bass later.

Entertaining Videos

2008-11-03T10:59:00.000-08:00

I'm too lazy to embed these, and you know it's good to give credit where it should go. So I'm just going to paste a link.

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/e062d7b4d5/take-on-me-literal-video-version-from-dustfilms

It's music videos, with the words replaced with what is actually happening in the music video. The first one has been around for a bit so you may have seen it. And maybe I'm just behind the curve... But I just saw the other two. I'm excited for the series to continue. Hopefully you enjoy them.

School

2008-10-29T07:52:00.000-07:00

I am trying so hard to make it work.

Once I finish the class I'm currently taking, I am 2 comp sci classes away from finishing my 3 year Comp Sci degree. I am already registered for one next term (A class on Video Game Design, sweet). So I'm going through my work schedule plans to see how many extra hours a week I'm spending at work. Currently, if I work 6:30-5 everyday, except Tuesday Thursday, when I'd leave at 3 (for nap, and travel time to class) I'll log about 46 hours a week. Which means I have 6 hours to work with. If I make a better effort to always get to work by 6, that bumps me up over 8 hours to squeeze one more class in. Then I can get my degree in the spring. Which would be awesome.

The hard part is finding a good time of day to fit a class. Monday Wednesday Friday classes suck, because I have to allot for travel time 3 times instead of 2, which is an extra hour a week.

Wait. Looking into it, I see that I may be able to change one of my EP classes to a CMPT equilvalent. Which means I may not need another class... That would be awesome.

So I have now booked advising next week. We'll see what the prof says I need to do to finish my degree. Maybe I can already apply to graduate.

I'm excited.

Interesting

2008-10-20T11:19:00.000-07:00

First off, a new post! Celebrate!

I've noticed, as I monitor my traffic, that I seem to get more hits when I don't update, than when I do. I guess it's more exciting to not hear my thoughts? Maybe just as it's longer since my last post, people check more often, hoping for a new post. Maybe I'm just making it all up. Who is to say!

Ok, so today, I want to share a meme. I was quite surprised at how mine turned out. It works like this. First, you go here. It's a random wikipedia page. The first article title, mentioned in the page you end up, is your band name. (I got "Passenger Train"). Make a note of it. Then, head to here. It's a random quote page. The last 4 words of the last quote listed becomes your album name. Here I got "cannot be reasoned out". Finally head to here. It's just some interesting flicker images, somewhat random. The third image is your album cover. Now for the fun part. Take all that information, and make your album cover.

Mine all strangely worked out. I didn't load any random page twice or anything. This was the result.

I didn't alter the photo pretty much at all. I felt that to connect Passenger Train to the image, it pretty much needed the full image. I suggest all you folks with blogs do the same, have a bit of fun, and see what you come up with. I may do another one...

Well this would be fun

2008-10-09T09:09:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I know I'm a huge geek. I'm fine with that. When I was reading Wil Wheaton's blog today (Wesley, from Star Trek... I said I was a geek) he was mentioning this event in Illinois. For those who want a quick summary, It's essentially a large game of D&D where you use yourself instead of mini's to act it all out. Very geeky, but for folks who enjoy D&D, it would be a lot of fun. They got a 40 000 square foot warehouse, and are building a medieval city, and dungeon for people to play in.

I think this is the sort of thing that would be very well suited for Saskatchewan. We have lots of space. Prairieland Park has like 200 000 square feet. And you can rent smaller divisions of it. So I started thinking of all the logistics of getting something like that setup and running. Things like props become a concern. Getting a variety of weapons for people to use, building the buildings, and dungeon. So I thought, what untapped labour sector can I exploit? My first thought is always Kids, and Elderly whenever I need to exploit labour. Maybe I could contact some high school art teachers, and part of their program could be making props that are appropriate for a medieval D&D theme. To get the Elderly, I thought about using a small town instead of Prairieland. If a town of say a hundred residents all got on board, it could be a tourist boom, for a weekend anyway. Take a town like Clavet, get a hotel deal in Saskatoon, and setup a shuttle to go back and forth. Convert the downtown area into a medieval street. Setup booths on the street, a bit of prop work in the hotel to make it more like an Inn, and you've got your medieval town starting point. Find a nearby field, and pop up some temporary walls to make a dungeon, and you are pretty much done. Then just get volunteers from the town, or sponsored workers to staff the medieval town, and DM the dungeon rooms. I'm sure I'm making this more basic than it really is.

Attendance is obviously the hard part. I wonder how big the community is in town to support that, and how many people from say Edmonton, Calgary, and other major centers nearby would be willing to travel for something like that.

Just something that sounded interesting, and has made me think. I have some time to kill at work here, as I'm waiting for a co-worker to show up to fire a question at him, and he's awfully late today. Let me know what you think about it.

Opps

2008-10-06T12:18:00.000-07:00

My how time can fly.

We had a release at work last week, so I've been pretty busy testing and fixing last minute bugs before that. Then last weekend a friend was moving, and I helped her move, and well, I've just been busy.

Well the 3 night gig I mentioned last post was the worst gig I've ever played. It was so poorly organized. The first night, Thursday, the room started as a private function, and was a public lounge when we started. No one mentioned that it was public though. And all the private people went upstairs to try the wines, and snack. So we had about 5-10 people come all night, through our 2 sets. Friday wasn't any better. There was no signage or announcements, and people just didn't know we existed. Awesome. Then Saturday, my parents came. They were told by the staff that there was no band playing anywhere. They weren't allowed to bring their drinks to the lounge, and the bar they had setup the previous 2 nights down there had been removed. Great. So end result was 6 hours of playing, over 3 nights, to a total of about 30 or 40 people. It felt far too much like work.

We discussed an album though, and it's sounding like sometime over the winter, or early spring we'll be laying down some tracks. Hopefully we can get something good done before the Jazz Festival pitch season, so we can get some bookings a little further away. Should be good though, I haven't been on a full album in a couple of years now. You will continue to get updates as things progress, largely so I can take your money once it's done. =)

I started the actual assembly steps of my bass. I have the neck attached, and all the tuning pegs hooked up. I dropped the pickups in, but I haven't wired them yet. I got held up because I need a screwdriver. All the PC based tool sets in our house just don't work awesome with the instrument work. I should be able to get something from work here. Hopefully I can finish it this week. It's looking pretty hot. I'm pretty excited to see how it sounds and everything when I get it all finished up.

My gospel group met for the first time this season, and played our first Sunday morning show. It went well. We're learning a bunch of new tunes this year, which are going to be a lot of fun. I was starting to get a little sick of our old material. I know some of you are thinking, "Toad? in a Gospel group? Isn't he an Atheist?" I get that a lot. I know there isn't a god, but some people believe there is. I can still enjoy making music, and they can interpret it as they want. I just enjoy making music, and entertaining. If they see divine inspiration from it, all the power to them. As long as your incorrect beliefs aren't hurting me, go nuts. Maybe it'll help me catch some nice christian girl to corrupt. I'm not holding my breath though. The crowds we play to are often out of my age range. And my parents age range.
If Hell exists, I'm definitely going there. (And I learned today that Hell is Exothermic! http://www.bash.org/?301963. Of course the flaw in his argument is ignoring the equilibrium condition of Hell expanding at exactly the same rate of soul increase, but I digress)

I got more invites to Halloween events this weekend too. Looking like I'll spend the 31st at a Nolto show (The Halloween Breakdown, Macguires), and the 1st at a techno show (Jeepers Creepers After Party, Walkers). Makes for an interesting weekend. Should be a lot of fun though. I should start thinking about a costume... Feel free to post ideas.

Busy week

2008-09-25T06:17:00.000-07:00

So I am now starting a very hectic couple days. I have a gig that starts tonight, and is 2 sets a night for the next 3 nights. That adds one element of busy. Then Friday night, in the middle of it all, is a work keg party. I really want to go, as it'll be a lot of fun, and free beer! But I can't go until after my gig. Hopefully I can get there around 10, which isn't too bad. Then, because I'm a huge geek, I have a raid (2 actually) I'd rather not miss Saturday morning. So I'm going to get pissed drunk Friday night, and hope I can get home, and log into Final Fantasy XI before 9am. Why do I do these things to myself. And to top it all off, I haven't been feeling very good lately. Hopefully it's just stress from my upcoming hectic couple of days. No matter what I'm shooting for beer to solve all my problems. As per usual.

On a side note, work parties are super fun. We have no bosses going this time. The plan, as far as I know, is a keg going, a fire in the back yard, a Wii with games upstairs, and a full rock band setup downstairs. While I am NOT excited to have one co worker belting out tunes (he gets a touch annoying) I am stoked anytime Rock Band is involved, as it is killer fun, and it helps that I'm decent at it.

Roomie-N picked up the wireless Rock Band 2 drum set (got the last one at our EB) and it is much better than the old one. Add on my Bass I ordered (which is in transit, so I hope to get it today or tomorrow) and we have 2 drum sets, 4 wireless guitars, 2 mics. Which means we can play Rock Band on both TVs, with full bands. We're discussing setting up a green room, or warm up room upstairs, then the real show goes on downstairs. We probably won't. But it does open up some cool options for Rock Band Parties and such.

I've started the work on my Bass project too. I've got 3 coats of oil on now. It's taking a bit longer than I had planned, just because I haven't had a chance to get to it every day like I had hoped. Things keep popping up. Hopefully I'll be done Oiling by the end of next week, and can actually put all the electronics and such on. I'm excited.

And that's the update into my life.

Regularly Scheduled Update

2008-09-17T09:23:00.000-07:00

So I picked up a Neti Pot from Shopper's Drug Mart. It was pretty cheap. I'm trying to get in the habit of using it every morning. I'm doing pretty good so far. As for results, it's hard to tell. I feel like I have clearer sinuses, but not drastically so. I think it will have a much larger impact on me in allergy season.

Rock Band 2 came out. It's pretty much the exact same game as Rock Band, with new songs, and some slightly improved interfaces. Since we played Rock Band a fair bit before, the slight improvements were greatly appreciated. I do want to get some of the new instruments. The Mad Katz Fender Bass especially. My one biggest complaint so far is the note boards look stretched. Maybe it wouldn't look as bad on a smaller display, but when something is slightly stretch, then magnified to 110", you notice. Our band (R-man on Drums, N-dog on guitar, me singing, and playing bass) is now playing all songs on hard, and easier songs all on expert. I need to learn the melodies to the tunes though, as I'm currently having problems. I did get props from the roomies for singing Alanis Morissette on Hard, getting 100%, AND singing the album version instead of the radio edit they have. I was swearing up a storm. Finally the exposure to three older sisters worth of chick music pays off, in Rock Band singing skills. hmm.

I picked up tickets for the Trans Siberian Orchestra concert this fall. I'm pretty excited. Should be a rocking show. I bought 8 tickets, and I think currently on 3 or 4 are taken, so if anyone has interest in joining me for the show, let me know.

I think I'm finished with my test finish for the bass I'm building. I ended up just applying Tung Oil to it, and it really darkened the wood. I think I'll finish the sanding on the body this week, and hopefully get the first coat or two on the bass this weekend. I'll try to take photos throughout the process to share them.

What other news is worth talking about? Hmmm. Nothing is coming to mind. Until next update!

(I think I'll start adding these things, so you all can be exposed to my crap)
Watching: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Venture Brothers, Six Feet Under.
Listening: TSO, Rock Band 2 Song List (gotta practice), Shiina Ringo (on recommendation from readers)

Widgets?

2008-09-09T09:47:00.000-07:00

So Blogger seems to have added a bunch of new widget plugin attachment things I can add to my blog. I guess they are trying to compete with the social networking aspect of successful web apps like Facebook. I might try a couple in the next stretch here. Let me know if there is anything you guys find annoying that I should remove, or something you'd like me to add.

I also removed a couple of the dead links I had in my link section. But now it's looking a little bare. If you have a polyphasic sleep blog, send me a link, and I'll check it out, and maybe add it. If you have any other blog or anything you think I should check out, do feel free to send it as well. I'll offer to buy a beer for anyone who sends me something new I like.

Also, I'm looking for a way to send beer via mail. Anyone know the shipping restrictions on that? If I want to ship like a 6 pack of cans, can I just toss them in a box? We need to find a way for me to make good on my offer to international folks. Maybe I'll just skype a delivery order for a beer joint nearby?

I'm back!

2008-09-05T05:58:00.000-07:00

I am back home after my long holiday, which was awesome. Let's go over some of the exciting points.

The first weekend of my holiday started with a Friday night wedding rehearsal, Saturday morning final, Saturday afternoon wedding performance, and Saturday night drunken festivities. It was a pretty fun, but very busy, way to start holidays. There was a lot of liquor consumed. A couple people came over to continue the party after the hotel kicked us out. It was a good night. The next day, I slept, packed, and rode to Edmonton with the Edmonton House folk. I had lunch with the newlyweds, and they were kind enough to drive me to the airport to catch my flight to Vancouver.

Vancouver was great. I spent a fair bit of time at Six Acres, in Gastown, as I have a buddy who is a manager there. It's a very cool little pub too, so I had no complaints. I went to a Radiohead concert, which was super awesome, and Beck a week later, which was also super awesome. I visited the Aquarium, met up with a couple friends for drinks various nights throughout the trip, and met some very cool new people. I do really like Vancouver. I could see myself moving out there after I get my degree, if I can find work.

I spent a weekend in Victoria, visiting some friends there. Victoria is also very nice. We had some beautiful weather, so I spent some time on the beach, and walking. There was one rainy day, during which we stayed in, played Monopoly (where I had hotels on Park Place, and Boardwalk, risking all my cash to set them up, then got 2 very unlucky rolls in a row... forcing me to sell everything) then went to the movies. It was also a friend of my friend's birthday weekend. As a result, we spent a fair bit of time dancing at the bar.

The weekend after Victoria was PAX. The attendance this year was apparently 58500 people. It was pretty crowded. They had estimated I think 45000, so they didn't quite have enough space for everyone. As a result, there was some panels I missed, as the theater was full, and they wouldn't let anyone in. Also Saturday, the busiest day, the exhibition room floor was packed. It was rather difficult just to navigate to where you wanted to be. It was not helped by Darth Roadblock, a very big guy in a great Darth Vader costume that had an amazing talent to cause HUGE traffic jams. I got to check out some sweet games though. Rock Band 2, Guitar Hero World Tour, Fallout 3, Starcraft 3, Resistance 2, Gears 2, and my new favourite, Ninja Town! I am mad excited for most of those, which sucks, as I'm somewhat poor from my trip, and now I have to buy a lot of video games in the next couple months. Sigh. It's a tough life.

I started school again, first class was yesterday. I'm only taking 1 class this term, which, when finished, will leave me with 2 more classes for my 3 year degree. It's a little sad to think after about 8 years of school, I'll be walking away with nothing but one 3 year degree. At least I'm finishing something though. My class is a computer security course, and it sounds pretty interesting. The prof is quite a character. I'm looking forward to some good discussions. The class is smaller than I expected, only like 30 people? It reminds me of my Physics times, which makes sense, as that was the other degree I took to around this point. The course workload seems pretty decent too, not too much, but interesting stuff. We'll see what I think of it later on in the course. The prof also said he'd likely google me, so he may end up reading this post. I better not say anything too incriminating then. Although the first hit for my name isn't this blog, but instead the video Ryan did, but I think it's pretty easy to end up here. Hopefully he doesn't hack into my blog and make me sound like an idiot. At least, more of an idiot than I actually am. Is that possible?

Final Note! I am restarting the 100 pushup plan. My holiday really screwed me up on that (As well as sleeping). I'll be getting everything back on track this weekend.

Oh other note: I'm debating picking up a Neti Pot, and trying that out. PureDoxyk swears they are amazing. Allergy season usually hurts my sinuses a lot, and I'm curious if something like that would help. Plus it works me closer to my true life goal, to be as much like PD as I can. Next up, Sex Change, and moving to the States.

week

2008-08-11T06:41:00.000-07:00

Hey.

This is a quick note to tell you to go away.

I won't be making another post for likely a full week. Likely not until after Radiohead. (Maybe if I'm bored at the airport, I'll make an iPhone post) I am just a touch busy.

So Friday is my last day of work before my holiday. Friday night, I have a wedding rehearsal, Saturday morning I have a final, Saturday afternoon is the wedding I'm playing at, and Saturday night is the wedding dance. Sunday morning, riding to Edmonton in a friends car... Oh, and a big project at work I'm supposed to have finished by Friday. Sweet.

So I have to study / learn an entire course in 4 days, while learning 4 songs for the wedding, and getting all my ducks in a row before my holiday. Awesome.

So yeah, I won't be wasting much time with any blog posts. I'll catch you on the flipside.

Seatbelts

2008-08-08T10:11:00.000-07:00

You should wear them. They protect you in the case of a major car accident.

They are also a kick ass band from Japan. Yoko Kanno is the Keyboard player, and main composer, but it's essentially a super group of Japanese musicians. I very highly recommend them to everyone. You can find some of their live shows on YouTube. I recommend starting with Tank! It's Jazzy, but they play the crowd and songs like Rock songs. Freaking awesome. I may or may not have spent the last 45 minutes here at work watching a whole bunch of videos. Blue is also a freaking amazing song.

I always find it interesting when I listen to Japanese music (or other locations as well) that they have so much English in their songs. Morning Musume is another example. They use English regularly. I understand that quite a few people there speak English, but in comparison, our second language is OFFICIALLY french, but I never hear any English Canadian songs that use French as well. American music is similar. I think I'll make it my goal to start writing music that uses more languages in it. Nolto(apologies now for the MySpace link, I died a little inside doing it. I don't think he has anything better for a site...), get on that. (The better site, and the Non-English verse). I want your next song to have at least a full verse in not-English. We took that intro to Japanese course for a reason! Also, you need to do more concerts with a live back up band. I know a extremely attractive, single, awesome, humble, friendly, kick-ass bass player. I'm sure he'd play in a heartbeat with you, any time. Maybe after his vacation you should jam with him?

7 More days until my vacation! Couldn't get here fast enough.

Dreams

2008-08-07T09:53:00.000-07:00

After reading a friends blog, she was talking about crazy dreams. I've shared some of my crazy dreams before, and this is no exception to that.
Recent weird dream I had, a Hockey Game. Nothing really that excited. I guess I was feeling very Canadian? We won. Actually, my team dominated. It was kind of a joke of a hockey game. I found it very odd that that was the entire dream though. Nothing building up to a hockey game. Nothing after the game. Just like a highlight reel of me playing hockey. What the heck is that supposed to mean? It didn't really instill any feeling in me either. It was like watching a hockey game on TV, except that I was in it, and I didn't really care which team won. Maybe it's a sign that I need to watch more sports?

I do agree with Ruby's statements though. I'd reply, but I have no livejournal account. I know she reads this occasionally though, so she'll likely see this. One of the side effects of napping a lot, is more situations to dream in. Some I remember, some I don't, but they always have a huge impact on how I feel for the rest of the day, or at least until next nap period. I don't remember the dream at all, but I know I liked it, and that puts me in a good mood. Now I can get all philosophic, and say does the dream exist, and what not, but that's not my style.

At least not when I'm sober.

8 Days until holidays.

Pushups Day 2

2008-08-05T10:38:00.000-07:00

I did my second scheduled day of Pushups yesterday.
It was 12, 12, 10, 10, Max (13).
It's still very exhausting. Fortunately, my arms don't hurt as much today as they did after day 1's pushups. Maybe I've improved my form? I had 90 seconds between sets, so I tried to do some stretching as I was waiting, which may have helped a bit. If I can get my regular Yoga going, then things will likely be even less painful.

Reasonably uneventful weekend. Starting to get a bit nervous on how I'll manage my nap schedule over my 2.5 week trip to visit friends. Hopefully things will be laid back enough I can just lay down wherever I am for 20 minutes. We'll see.

pushups day 1

2008-08-02T11:16:00.000-07:00

so I did my first day of pishups today. My initial test was about 25 pushups. Today I did sets of 10, 10, 8, 6, 15. I was reasonably happy with that. The downside is I am not in shape, and my body is sore. From just a reasonably small amount of pushups. I guess that is why I'm doing them.

So my iPhone was having problems with time lately. Today, now, it has the right time, but it was totally an hour off yesterday. Weird other than that I am super happy with it so far. I'm actually making this blog post on it. The first time I types on up though it crashed safari (the web browser on it). This time seems to be a little smoother.

Well I want to go now though. I reading watchmen, the graphic novel, and I'm intendingto hit the fringe yet his afternoon. Hopefully the weather stays enjoyable for it.

sick

2008-07-31T05:49:00.000-07:00

Well, shortly after I made that post, I ended up quite sick. Thus my great plan to start doing pushups and Yoga did not start. I'm just now getting back to 100%. Not entirely sure what it was, but it sure kicked my ass.

So now that I'm finally feeling better, I did my benchmark pushup set yesterday. I got 23 pushups. Today, my arms feel rubbery. I intend to start the actual workout schedule this weekend. Maybe tomorrow.

I slept brutal last night. I think it's because I was working on a paper for school, which is extremely boring. My arms also were tired, and I had missed my evening nap due to a gig (which was a lot of fun, and went quite well). When I alarm went off I actually reset it for 30 minutes later. I still feel exhausted though. Hopefully my morning nap will correct that.

For folks to just can't get enough of me, I have recently created a twitter account. Largely so I can play with twitter from my iPhone. My account is Toad008. Feel free to start following me and make me feel popular. Adding that to my Facebook account, and Last.FM account, you can know stalk every aspect of my life! YAY!

Also as a heads up, you should watch Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-long blog. It is entertaining. I quite enjoyed it.

100 Pushups

2008-07-22T07:11:00.000-07:00

Well I was checking some of my usual blogs, and one jumped out at my eye. Oh God, The Chicken! is a polyphaser who is doing a 100 push up program he found online. Now I am not in great physical shape, and I know it. I think I might try this program out too. Tonight I think I'll do my initial test to see how out of shape I am. Hopefully this will become a good habit of doing some pushups everyday. Back in university a friend claimed that if you could do one thing, every day for a month, it would become a habit. I wont be doing pushups every day for a month, this plan is 3 times weekly, but hopefully that logic will still put me on a schedule where I continue maintaining my fitness. I'll post my push up counts and results here so you can all publicly humiliate me.

I might do a bit of research and see if there is a similar plan for sit ups. Good easy exercises I don't have to buy anything to do, that will hopefully improve my physical well being.

Or an even better idea. I'll allot 30 minutes every morning (showing up a touch later to work than I do now) before my shower to exercise. I'll do this pushup plan 3 times a week, and actually get back into Yoga for the other 4 days. Yeah. That sounds like a good plan. Maybe I'll actually do it outside too on nice mornings, and do my Sun Salutations to the rising sun.

How fast can I make the neighbours think I'm crazy? Although I guess none of my neighbours will be up at that time in the morning... I think I will start tomorrow.

iPhone

2008-07-17T09:21:00.000-07:00

So I think I'm getting an iPhone today? I'm pretty excited. I have an appointment at 1:30 where I think they are going to get me all set up. It'll be nice to actually have a cell phone and move into the 20th century. I'm a little concerned that I'm going to get all sorts of calls I don't want now though. My privacy is going to be invaded, in a big big way.

So I expect to have a flicker account soon, to post all the random gps tagged photos I'll be taking. I'm excited to see if I can write blog entries from it without too much hassle, as that will help me maintain this blog. It'll be a big change.

I've been having weird dreams in my naps lately. I think a big part of it is the heat. I sleep in my car to get away from the office, and to get a bit of fresh air. I do leave my windows open for a breeze, and have window blocks and such to try to reduce the heat in my car, but it very often is a couple degrees over room temperature, especially in the afternoon. I still usually sleep fine, I Just wake up a touch sweaty, and have weird dreams.

Case in point: Yesterday, during my afternoon nap, I dreamt that I woke up, and walked upstairs back to work and sat down at my desk to get back to work, then I realized, in my dream, that I was dreaming, and woke up. In my car. So I had to get up, and go upstairs to work. It was the worst part of waking up, twice. My brain likes to torture me like that apparently.

I was going through my traffic numbers the other day, as I am inclined to every now and then. I have been getting a fair bit of traffic lately from a source I hadn't noticed before. http://jorel314.wordpress.com/contact/adventures-in-polyphasic-sleeping/ He's got a pretty decent collection of bloggers and other decent information. He's been doing a pretty decent job of keeping it up to date as well. I recommend it as a good starting point to gather resources if you are thinking about trying polyphasic sleep. PureDoxyk's book would be the other great resource I highly recommend. According to him, I'm the second longest sleeper he's found, second to only PureDoxyk. So I think that means I can say I'm the longest Canadian Polyphasic sleeper. That's kinda cool, in my books anyway.

Still waiting to hear from Ryan my photographer friend with the Edmonton Journal who did the video on me last year. He mentioned at my Canada Day Party that he wanted to do a follow up, but hasn't given me any details yet. Maybe it's because he has this whole wedding thing to worry about. I'll let you all know if / when the follow up goes live.

That's abou tit for today. In the future I'll be trying to seperate my posts more. There's a feed (Jorel's) which I might start contributing to, but I don't want to bother all the other polyphaser's with my useless drivel I Often post. So all sleep related posts will become their own seperate post. We'll see if I can actually get in that habit...

WTF?

2008-07-08T07:45:00.000-07:00

So I saw this article yesterday. The first thing that came to my mind was a song from the Jerry Springer Opera. I can't quote it here, as it involves a couple swears.
So I read the first 3 bullets, Electronic boarding pass, that's convenient. Personal info? they have all that anyway on my passport, so I can live with that. Position tracking of myself and luggage? If it reduces lost luggage, they can likely get most of that info from my boarding and such, well that's nice.
Oh Wait. Taser? Shocking me and making me immobile. Wait. I don't like that. Or do I?
No. I don't.

Here is an article where they talk about Dog Collars that shock being cruelty to animals. Now, I've tried those dog collars out (long story) and the shock it administers is not very big. For a big dog, that likely surprises it and nothing more. That was considered cruelty to animals. Now let's take the same technology, up the shocking aspect to the point where it will immobilize a person, bingo! That's not inhumane, or cruel or anything!

If this comes into law, in the states, I am not flying there anymore. Hopefully I can get some cross ocean flights out of Canadian territory. I refuse to fly while being treated lower than a dog. I am shocked this is even being considered. Have humans in the United States lost all claims to any sort of rights?

Sorry for the op-ed, political piece. I just saw that article, and was PISSED off. If anything remote close to this starts it's way into Canadian Legislation, I'll update you all, and find resources to fight it.

Survived

2008-07-04T06:06:00.000-07:00

I'm alive!
I survived Jazz Festival. My schedule is just now starting to slow down a bit. A little anyway. I still haven't cashed any cheques from it, but they are all in my wallet. I should be able to hit the bank tomorrow. I ended up only attending two shows this year, as I just couldn't find time for more. I caught Ivana Santilli after my Broadway opening gig, and watching Kellylee Evans. I also caught Dave Brubeck. Both were pretty awesome shows. I preferred Ivana with a full band though, like last time I saw her, and not this keyboard based trio. Dave Brubeck was weird because the band was so old, but just rocking. He could barely walk, and talked extremely slowly, but then he just played like a madman. So very good.

My sleeping is pretty much back on schedule now. Only took me a day or two to get back to normal. I'm still hitting the snooze in the mornings a bit, so I'm getting closer to 3.5 or 4 hours in my core. Hopefully this weekend I'll correct that. I think I need to update my TODO list, of things to keep my extra time busy. I've not been productive with my time at all lately. One of the catches is just a lack of a good place to keep the list, that's always accessible to me. That problem will very likely go away in about a week.

I'm intending to pick up a 3g iPhone. I figure it's about time I move into the Cell world. Although the cell aspect is extra to me. More important is the calendar, and being able to check my email. It'll also be a convenient way to keep an extra copy of my nap mp3's, and a fun toy. It will likely end up being an expensive toy though. I'll write up some sort of boring review for it once I have had it for a bit. I'm reasonably excited.

Ryan Jackson, my friend photojournalist who did that piece on my a year ago, was discussing doing a follow up with me sometime soonish. I thought that was a pretty good idea, but I need to get some big things accomplished soon then to make it seem better. Hopefully the parts for the Bass I'm building arrive soon, and I can work on that. I think I'm going to re-edge the garden sometime in the next week or two as well. Those are likely some not too shabby accomplishments. We'll see.

But I should get to work, I have a bunch of things I really need to accomplish in the next month, before my very long and super awesome holiday.

Jazz festival

2008-06-23T06:57:00.000-07:00

It's been awhile since I have had a chance to make a post. Writing for this blog is just not as high a priority as other aspects of my life. Sorry!

Big news items since my last post.
I have changed all my fall travel plans. I now work Friday August 15th, then I'm attending a wedding, which will be super fun. After the wedding weekend, I'm catching a ride to Edmonton with one of the folks heading into town for the wedding. Then I think I'll spend a day in Edmonton, maybe two. I need to be in Vancouver by Tuesday the 19th though, as I have tickets to Radiohead that night, which will be awesome. Then I hope to hit Victoria for the weekend to visit some friends up there. I have to be back in Vancouver for Thursday the 28th, as I am attending Beck that night. Then I'll catch an early morning shuttle to Seattle from Vancouver, to get to the Penny-Arcade Expo. Then it's September long, and I think I booked off the Sept 2nd too, as a recovery / cushion day. The end result. 18 days off in a row. I hear that's awesome. I am pretty excited.

It's Jazz Festival time! Which means I'm busy. Today is my day off, no gigs tonight. So I'm hoping to get a bunch of yard work done and housework to prep for the Canada Day party we're planning for this weekend. I'll have to get a hold of Visions too and check the status of my projector. We NEED it for Canada day... I think I'm going to pick up Karaoke Revolution: American Idol Version some time this week, and start getting some DLC for it. Then we'll have like 200 songs in Rock Band for people to jam on, and if we get ambitious, we can set up some singing competitions. Should be fun.

But I have to get to work, I have to find and fix this bug asap apparently. I'll try to post another update closer to the end of the week.

Heads-up: I'm playing at the Free Stage by the Bess on Tuesday night, 7pm. You should come out.

Return

2008-06-11T06:01:00.000-07:00

So I'm back.
I gave a brief explanation of my hotel room. It was pretty nice. Good wide screen, plasma tv. Good stuff.

Conference was pretty interesting, at times. There was a couple panels on Federal Rules that were boring, as I'm Canadian and the US federal initiatives are useless to me. A panel or two turned into essentially ads for a company as well, which was a bit of a downer, but the conference organizers are aware of that, and are trying to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Trip back to Saskatoon sucked though. I got to Ohare around 3 hours before my flight, due to when the conference ended, and shuttle times and such. Not that big a deal. Then my flight got delayed by 30 minutes. No big deal, I had a 2 hour layover in Calgary, so I wasn't to worried about time. Just meant I had an extra 30 min to kill at the airport. Then it got delayed another 30 minutes. And another 30 minutes. All said and done, my flight was delayed 3 hours. Looks like I won't be making my transfer.

Sure enough, I get to Calgary (around midnight), and there is NO ONE around. My plane is gone, I run around trying to find someone from Air Canada or United Air to help me. I finally, after about 30 minutes of hunting catch a Air Canada rep, who lets me know I'm already booked on a flight in the morning, and gives me a phone number for some company that will help me find a hotel room in Calgary. I call the number. No hotel rooms, but try again in 15 minutes and we'll try to find something. So I start calling some hotels while I'm waiting 15 minutes. Now I need a shuttle or a cab or something too, and since it's already 1ish, I want something close, and preferably cheap. I can't find anything. The company that specializes in finding hotel rooms can't find anything. Awesome.

So 2 rolls around, I'm tired, as that's when I usually have my core. I'm still at the stupid airport. I say screw it. It'll just sleep here. Bundle all my bags up as a pillow, and find a decent bench to crash on.

I don't have an alarm clock or anything, but I figure I'll be ok. When I don't have a clock, from experience, I get up around 7 at the latest. But I wasn't comfortable. It was an airport bench, so I toss and turn a fair bit before falling asleep. No idea when, but it was late. Well, I must have been tired, as I woke up, and the airport seemed busy, and lo and behold, it was 7. My flight was scheduled to leave at 7:40. I was on the wrong side of security. I at least had my boarding pass from Air Canada the night before. But I hadn't checked any luggage. So I look at my bags, and figure, I can get away with taking it as carry on... I hope. And rush to Security. Security was actually really fast, faster than Saskatoon security going to Chicago. So I get to my gate in about 15 minutes, they aren't even boarding. Sweet. I start jamming my bags into that carry one check metal basket thing to see if I can get away with it. I barely can. I cheer quietly inside.

I didn't get to do any of the touristy things I was intending to in Chicago. The day of the White Sox game I was thinking about attending was rainy, and I didn't want to sit in the rain to watch baseball. It also didn't help that at the end of everyday at the conference there was a sponsored cocktail hour or two. That meant I wasn't ready to leave the hotel until 7-8ish, and usually reasonably intoxicated from the free drinks. SO I watched the game 5 in the playoffs at the hotel bar, and spent a fair bit of time there. Wasn't too bad. There was a couple cute bartenders I had some good chats with. Enjoyable.

Chicago

2008-06-02T05:08:00.000-07:00

So I'm in Chicago.
I found out of Friday I was going. There is a electronics and trucking conference thing here that one of my co-workers was signed up to attend. However, that co-worker forgot to pick up his passport and was unable to leave the country. Thus I was sent in his place. I had never been to Chicago, so I thought it would be fun.
Had a long day of flying. Had a 3 hour layover in Edmonton. 4 hours in the air, and some very long lines to wait in. Saskatoon was even busy, and took almost 30 minutes to get through security. I didn't think that was possible.

The hotel I'm staying at is pretty nice. I have a corner room, which is a bit of an odd shape, but my windows overlook a golf course. It looks like a pretty nice course. Looks nice and expensive enough that it's not worth me playing it, as I will lose too many balls.

Due to a mix up though, I've already spent a lot more money than I was expecting. Everything was supposed to be left on a work credit card, and it seems like it wasn't. Now I know a little better how it was all set up in the first place, so hopefully I can get it all cleared up today.

But I should go, breakfast starts right away, and I want to hit the front desk first.

Rush

2008-05-29T12:01:00.000-07:00

I had a freaking awesome birthday.
I went to Edmonton to visit some friends, and go to a Rush concert. It was sooo gooood!

Rush should be considered a super group. It has like some of the best players on their instruments. The concert was just overwhelming. I had an extra ticket too, and was able to sell it with NO effort at all on the street just before the concert started. I had just kind of assumed I'd be eating the price of the one ticket. Worked out awesome. Our seats were great too, 16th row. But there was an aisle in from of us, so we had a ton of space, and no one directly in front blocking our view. Couldn't have asked for much better. Big downside now, is I have to learn a bunch of new songs on Bass, which are pretty difficult songs. Should be fun though. Maybe I'll try to wait until I get my new kit and put it together.

Also did some shopping at Ikea. Picked up some new glasses, which are nice. I also bought a new Sofa Bed, as I needed a new bed, and with my sleeping schedule I don't use a bed too often. I'm pretty excited to get it all setup. I had to clean my room out though, which was long overdue. I ended up getting rid of an overflowing garbage bag of clothes. Downside is now I'm a little low on clothes, but I needed to get rid of a lot of them. Next paycheque I'll end up picking up a couple pairs of pants, and some new shirts. I could use a decent pair of shorts or two as well, now that allergy season is dying down, I can start going outside again.

Started some of the planning for our intended Canada Day(ish) party we'll likely end up throwing. If you know where I live, your invited. Not entirely sure what day(s) we'll be partying, but no one in our house has any plans. Might discuss picking up a keg with the roomies, and set it up Friday or Saturday, and hopefully finishing it off before Tuesday night. Shouldn't be too hard. One roomie is out of town until Sunday, as he has a cousin's wedding or something lame like that. Might delay the festivities a little.

Latest obsession: American Gladiators. A lot of the shows we usually follow have very recently ended their season. American Gladiators is taking over. It's very enjoyable. So far all the new gladiators are pretty cool. Phoenix is a babe, Jet and Rocket have bulked up a bit from last season. Crush still rules. I like most of the new games too, although the new game Vertigo is a little lame. No direct competition with the Gladiator? Plus Phoenix just worked the two contestants in the only time I've seen it so far. I'm pretty excited to see the rest of the new gladiators, and how the rest of the season shakes down.

Also very excited to get my projector back from it's fan repairs. That should make American Gladiators even more awesome!

And I'm trying to embed more links in my posts. Let me know if that's something you like. Takes a little more effort, but then people can actually look up more info when they want to, a little easier anyway.

New Day

2008-05-22T09:12:00.000-07:00

Yay!
Pollens are down to Moderate today, almost 1/2 as high count wise as yesterday. Which means I can see again. And I can trim my pill intake to closer to the recommended dosages. YAY!

Saw this today: http://dearjanesample.wordpress.com/2008/05/19/fun-with-brands/
It's someone how made a image of all the brands she used / was exposed to in a day. I thought it was very interesting, but also reveals maybe a little more about the person than you wanted to know. I disagree with some things, like showing a logo more than once in a time period. I'm not interested in how much starbucks you consume for instance, it's just interesting to see when you are exposed to it. Also putting weed in as a brand isn't true, as it's not a brand. I'm thinking about doing something similar. Maybe I will for tomorrow. I'll try to make a record, but after I finish, we'll see if I post it. It is a Friday, and I don't want it to be too incriminating. Hopefully I remember to start it in the morning.

Dying

2008-05-21T07:53:00.000-07:00

I am.
I hate allergy season. I am typing this with my rrs pinched shut except for brief moments. I hope spellcheck can fix most of the words. My eyes are killing me. I definitely shouldn't' drive. and as a result, I haven't made it to work. I's only 9am, and I have already hitten the recommended max dosage in a day.
Now I'm torn between do I walk to the drug store to get some anti-hesitamines with a different active ingredient? or do I just wealk to minor emergency and try to get a presciption one that is much stronmger? he catch being, of course, walking means outside, which is where the bad stuff is, which means I will likely have an evenworse reaction.
I think I'll just ice my eyes while I'm trying to decid.

Any suggestions on what to do all day without using my eyes? I can only listen to music for so long beore I want to do something else, but being blind sucks.

FRIDAY!!!

2008-05-16T06:38:00.000-07:00

Yay! it's the Friday before the long weekend!
So we had a big code lock yesterday, which made for a somewhat busy week. I've been a little ahead, so it hasn't been too bad. But as a result, and to welcome the 2 new employees, and to usher in summer, we're having a BBQ at work today. We also got Rock Band approved as a "Team Building Exercise." I'm pretty excited. I suspect that this afternoon will be spent playing Rock Band, and somewhat writing off the day. Due to the Xbox returns we had to do, and the fact all the bonus songs are on N's tag, we don't have access to all the songs we have off line, here at work. It is a reasonable amount though. I checked last night. While playing my band. I need more practice singing and playing guitar at the same time. I'm a little rusty.

My sleep schedule has been a little off lately. I haven't been sleeping well, because it's nice out now, and places get hot. Also, it's allergy season. So I have to open windows to cool of the far too hot places, which lets all the pollens in, which makes me cry. Hopefully the main pollen season is ending soon. Some very nice weather this weekend. Hopefully I can get some yard work done. I'd like to hit the water too, and get a bit of kayaking in. A friend is in town from Edmonton too, and an old co-worker is having a BBQ Saturday for a wedding anniversary party. It also should be very fun. I suspect the meat I take will be awe inspiring. There will be lots of beer consumed and likely even more Rock Band played. Shaping up like a great long weekend.

Movie Theater

2008-05-12T05:48:00.000-07:00

I went to Iron Man this weekend. It was an awesome movie. But the entire movie experience was ruined by the Theater. I don't intend to go back. Ever. Through the entire movie, the bottom half of the screen was out of focus, and shaking. Text on the bottom of the screen was painful to read. There were times when it was making me nauseous. Oh top of that, I paid $10 each (with 3 other friends, that's $40) to get in, and can't get food because it's too expensive. So, for that amount of money, I can BUY the Blu-ray, watch it in my basement, where I know the projector is focused, and not shaking, Make whatever I want to eat, and drink whatever I want, while relaxing on extremely comfortable Bean Bag chairs.
To me, it's a no-brainer. The only improvement is I can see a movie in the Theater usually before it comes out on Blu-Ray. That said, the quality of Iron Man on the weekend I'd say was about as good as my projector looks upscaling a DVD. So I can download a DVD rip usually a couple weeks after it comes out in the theater. Save tons of money, enjoy it more, What's the selling feature?

My Corsica finally sold! So I'm getting a cheque that I wasn't budgeting for. Means more spending money at the end of the month when I'm going to Edmonton for Rush. I'm also intending to buy a new electric Bass guitar, but that was in the budget. Now I might get a couple more options I was somewhat sitting on the fence with. We'll see. I'm intending to get a kit, so I can assemble it myself, and customize it a little. Should be fun.

Other, and final, thing I want to discuss. I just recently finished a great book. It's called "Little Brother" by Cory Doctorow. It's a book somewhat inspired by 1984 (the book not the year... I had to make that clarification with a roomie). It's about a terrorist attack and a teenager who gets wrongly accused and mistreated because he is assumed to be a terrorist. This leads him to essentially start up a rebellion. It's quite entertaining, I've been trying to promote it as much as I can. It's released on the Creative Commons license, so you can get a copy online, for free. (http://craphound.com/littlebrother/) One of my favourite features is the technology used in the book. It's all real technology. The website gives some explanations, and how-to's to use, or make, a lot of it. Highly recommended.

But back to work, Setting up a lot of tests today.

Day 360

2008-05-07T10:23:00.000-07:00

So I checked the math to see what day I was on for my sleep schedule, and I was a little surprised to see it's been 360 days. I'm getting very close to a full year. I have lasted a lot longer than I suspected I would, and I think longer than most people thought I would too. I see no reason to quit this sleep schedule. Until work decides I have to, or a girl appears with good reasoning to stop, I don't see myself stopping any time soon. I still like it.

My projector has a fan dying, so it's been out of commission for the last couple of days. I need to take it in to get the warranty work done to check it out. Makes me sad though. I've already conceded that it's going to cost me about $500 a year to keep it running, due to replacing the bulb... Just one of the sacrifices I'm willing to make for a sweet home theater setup. Hopefully this fan issue isn't something that occurs regularly.

Not much else new with me. Getting pretty excited for my trip to Edmonton at the end of the month. Rush will be fun. I got a "new" computer at work today. It's really Krystian's old one, but it's a significant improvement for me. Now I'm just working on getting everything on it working as well as my old piece of crap. It's pretty amazing how much crap I had built up on the old one. Lots of folders that aren't moving machines. I look forward to having sound, and a machine over twice as good as my old one.

That's about all I can think of on short notice for this update. Hopefully something really exciting will happen in the next couple days I can post about. I somewhat doubt it though.

GTA4

2008-05-01T06:16:00.000-07:00

Sorry to bore you with more of these posts. I'm just in love with that game. I wanted to relate a conversation we had at home last night. Both myself, and one of my roomies are playing through it at the same time. If you aren't as into Video Games you may want to move on now. We were discussing missions to see how far the other was.

We quickly determined that we both had fully finished Vlad's missions, as he's the first main mission guy. So I started talking about the cool part of one of his missions where you are jumping between buildings chasing him across the rooftop. Nathan looked at me like I was on crack. He never did that. At all. So I was dumbfounded. How do you finish Vlad's missions without doing that? That's part of one of Vlad's missions.

SO we went through the whole mission. So you chase a guy in your car, yeah, we both did that, then he gets to a construction site and takes off on foot. Yup, both did that. He runs up the site using some ladders to get to the top. Yeah, we both did that. Then he climbed up a crane. Nope. Not for Nathan. Apparently Nathan is a sharpshooter. Once Nathan got to the roof, he took him out with his pistol. I however, can't hit the wide side of a barn with my shooting, and my spraying the area with my sub machine gun did not take him out. Thus after following him up the crane, we jumped roof to roof, until he slipped, and I got to stomp on his hands to make him fall to his death (AWESOME!!!).

I was very surprised that this game allowed for that flexibility. We both had the same mission, at the same location, but very different means of getting to the end result. Both worked. Mine also had a choice to save him, and let him go free, but I'm an ass, so that never was really an option. Nathan never got that option. Makes me wonder about a lot more of my hits. How many of them am I just killing before I get to the point where they surrender? What sort of impact will that have on the future parts of the game?

The whole Nathan being a better shot than me wasn't news though. That's how it pans out in all video games. Nathan is the slow guy, takes him forever to get anywhere, extremely extremely cautious, takes a day to set up his shot, then snipes them. I slap on some armour, grab some sort of automatic, and charge all over town guns a blazing. Makes us a pretty good team, as I attract attention and gunfire, as he cleans things up. It'll make some interesting online team game dynamics. I'm excited to see where some other friends fit in the mix.

Done Finals!

2008-04-30T06:00:00.000-07:00

I am done finals! I wrote my last (and only) final yesterday. It went OK. Not amazing, but I'm pretty certain I will pass. So I'm glad to be done school, for a little while anyway. Yesterday I also got my correspondence package in the mail for the course I'm taking over the summer, via Independent Studies. They sure don't let me have a break. So I'm taking one! No school related stuff for the rest of the week.

Unless there is some sort of school related mission, or side quest, in GTA4. Then I will be doing it. That game is pretty great. The lighting, and the changes during the day, from sunrise to sunset, the weather, the tons of things to do. And I'm not even very far into the game. I just unlocked weapon stores. I can finally buy my own gun. I have also already played like 20 games of darts, 5 games of pool, only gone bowling once, because I suck at it. And I'm in love with the radio stations. It's a little humourous watching me play (I'm sure) as I steal a car then drive maybe 1/2 a block away, just to get far enough from the guy I stole the vehicle from to make sure he's not trying to get it back. Then I usually park for 2 or 3 minutes, picking a radio station, and making some phone calls. Once I have my relaxing Jazz music pumping out the stereo, it's off to cause some chaos. I'm pretty excited to try some of the multiplayer modes.

Planning is well underway for my birthday trip to Edmonton, to see Rush. I'm getting pretty excited, and I am glad I finally have some people who are willing to come. Hopefully I can find enough space for everyone to crash. I might throw a tent in and pitch it in a friends backyard. I'll run that by the people who's house I'll crash at.

Finally, to wrap up this post, I feel I have to link to this comic. I found it quite enjoyable.

Fire and Ice

2008-04-21T06:16:00.000-07:00

"Some say the world will end in fire;
Some say in ice." - Robert Frost

I had a crappy morning. It's just after 7am, and I already hate today.
I'll elaborate, with a long back story that I doubt many of you care about. Too bad, it's my blog, I'll ramble about whatever I want. You don't like it? Here's a video of a fat guy, a geek, and a midget dancing. It seems to be like the Mac arena, but not english.

OK so the weather this weekend was stupid. I ran some errands Saturday morning. swept the snow off my car, it wasn't too bad. The Garden Center was empty, which was nice. I picked up a nice window box for my herbs, and some more mint seeds. So I transplanted my current herbs (hopefully they transplanted well) and added a couple others. My living room window is now reasonably crowded with plants. It's nice. I can't wait until some of the herbs are usable.

After that batch of errands, I didn't leave the house again until this morning for work. I walked out to my car at the usual time, and found a good thick coating of ice covering my car. Awesome. So I start my car and start scraping. After 5 minutes, having made no progress, I give up, and figure I'll let the defrost do most the work. I come back 15 minutes later. I am now later than I like to be, but since I start so early, I'm still reasonably sure I'll beat everyone else to work. After 15 minutes, I still have a coating of ice on my car, but there is a crack at the bottom, where the defrost hits, so I can spend 5 more minutes scraping an area clear enough to see out. Awesome. I hop in the car. I can't really see behind me, or to either side, but I can see where I'm going. I just won't change lanes. Was maybe dangerous, but I know there is no traffic Monday mornings at 6 am. I should be OK.

I was. There was next to no traffic. I moved a little slower than I usually do, but I was also unsure of how the roads would be. If my car had ice on it, I'm sure the roads would have some spots too. So I get under the Warman Road bridge and there's a big 5 ton truck with it's hazards on ahead of me. It's still moving. It looks to have a lot of exhaust coming out. But it's cold, so exhaust is more visible, and he had his hazards on, so I just assumed he was way overloaded, and straining to move it's load. Not to worried. So I pass the truck. Now my visibility drops to 0 through it's exhaust cloud. All I can see is my windshield turning black from the oil that was mixed in the exhaust. Cool.

So I get out of the exhaust cloud. I try my wipers to remove some of the oil now coating my ice coated car. They don't do anything, as oil repels water, and they have some ice still on them. Sweet. I pull over, and grab the shammy I always keep in my car, and spend a min or two wiping the oil off my little ice cleared spot. Get to work with even further reduced visibility. Spent another 5 minutes at work wiping as much oil as possible from my windshield. I'm hoping that the rest of my car had enough ice on it still to protect it from the oil. Hopefully the ice melts off, and takes the oil with it. Well see come this afternoon.

End result is I got to work a good 30 minutes later than I like to be there (was still the first one there, by about 30 minutes or so), and I likely will have to wash my car today. I hate Mondays. Definitely was a very bad start to the week. At least I'm taking two days off next week. Unfortunately it's for my final...

Arg.

So on to lighter things. Those who know me, should (maybe?) know that I'm a pretty big tower defense fan. So when my Roomie was playing around the new PSN store on his PS3, and found a demo for a tower defense like game, with local co-op, I was pretty excited. We bought the full version after about 10 minutes with the demo. That was just before supper. We didn't stop playing until midnight. We didn't know it was midnight. The game is pretty fun. Here's some screenshots. It's reasonably cartoon-ish, and pretty basic and straight forward. Makes it easy to get into though. I think I'll have to make my own tower defense game soon though. I'll add it to the list of projects I want to make.

Well Work time. I'll keep you updated on the progress (or lack thereof) of my TD game.

Last Week

2008-04-18T05:33:00.000-07:00

So the pending post about why the break in blogging. I was doing really well, and bam, week off.

Well, The first bit was just me being lazy. It is quite challenging to find something to write about every day. Sometimes it takes a couple days for something to come up worth writing about. That held me up for the first couple days.

I was hit pretty hard with the flu on Wednesday. Missed work Wednesday through Friday (inclusive). I'm a little confused though. My boss seems to insist I went to work Wednesday morning, then went home sick around nap time. I don't think I did. If I did, I was sicker than I thought, because I totally don't remember it. Come Friday I was feeling better, not 100%, but I could have maybe gone into work. However, I had 2 gigs booked on Saturday, and a wedding party that evening. I decided to stay home and get closer to 100% than to push it, and potentially be sick at the gigs. I think I made the right choice.

The gig's went well. The first, a wedding ceremony, was smooth, and I have heard nothing but good things. The second, an Art Auction, was a little more frustrating. I wanted to get out of there as early as possible, which I was told would be 8-8:30ish. I didn't get out of there until after 10. They were a bit behind schedule. That meant I missed a lot of the wedding party, but still had a good time.

Spent all of Sunday trying to get my sleep schedule back on track. It wasn't very successful, but by Monday, things seemed to be normal. We had beautiful weather that weekend, and I had intended to get some yard work stuff done, and just ended up not having time for it. So I was going to postpone it to this weekend, but our forecast says snow. And lots of it. I'll likely end up just lounging around the house. I do want to repot my plants inside. They are doing great, but I need to move them to a bigger container. I'm thinking about picking up a nice window box, about 10" wide, and 3 feet long, I figure. I'll probably pick up some new seeds while I'm at it, and start some more things in my current pots. Try to get a mint plant going again (stupid dud seeds) and get some things sprouting to transplant outside in my garden.

Maybe I'll get ambitious and take some pictures of my growing garden. I'll add it to the list after projector pictures, which are also a wee bit overdue. Someday.

Weird dreams are creepy

2008-04-16T09:04:00.000-07:00

April 16th morning nap.
Weirdest nap ever.

I was at my parents house, except my grandparents lived there. No idea if it was their house now, or they lived there with my parents or what, that wasn't the important thing, it was just odd.
Then I went to the new basement, as there was one below the current basement. It was just like a unfinished concrete basement, but still had linoleum on the floor.
I curled up and had a nap, conveniently there was a sleeping bag there. (If you nap in your nap, does that count as two naps?)
When I woke up, there was a box beside me, and I knocked the box getting out of my sleeping bag, and a ton of mice ran out.
Then I noticed the small field of bamboo starting to grow in the basement. I kicked a couple and the cut cleanly with my foot, but then I noticed a little pile of dirt, so I proceeded to kick it.
It was an anthill, full of the hugest, fastest ants I've ever seen. Bigger than the mice. They were pissed off, and started coming after me, so I panicked and ran. They chased me upstairs, but gave up once I was around the front door.
So I was going to tell my parents about it, who conveniently enough had just pulled up and were loading some car I had never seen before onto a trailer.
Then as I was about to tell them, I woke up.

Weird dream.

Then, to make it even more ominous, there was a huge Raven sitting on the hanger right behind my car, caw-ing at me. Which of course, has bad symbolism.

It was a great nap... I physically feel very refreshed. Mentally taxing though, as I'm a little shaken up.
I am just having a warm glass of tea to calm my nerves. No alcohol to help unfortunately.

A Post about the previous week, how busy I was, and being ill to follow. Feel free to analyze my mental state from this dream. Post about it in the comments, We'll see how crazy I really am.

I hate April Fool's Day

2008-04-03T06:10:00.000-07:00

It is the dumbest day ever. Seriously. What good is doing a prank when everyone is expecting a prank? Why do we have a day specifically to do that? So essentially we make it so no one can get any reliable news for 1 day, just so people can be tense and especially attentive for a day? And why April 1st? I might have to start an elaborate day of Hoaxes in 6 months. I'll call it October Fool's Day. Give me 5 years, and I'll make it as big a holiday as Meatfest!

Played some Rock Band yesterday. Tried out the new GladOS song from Portal. It was most enjoyable. I was only on Hard, playing bass and singing, like I usually do in our band. I feel I did OK, like 90%+ on both. We actually set it up as the middle of a pretty fun 5 song custom set. It was most enjoyable. Then after that, the roomies headed to bed, and I tried to work on my solo guitar career again. 2 songs away from finishing it on Expert. So frustrating. I failed out at about 0% on Green Grass and High Tides. That song just goes on far too long.

Looking like no Road Trip for me to Edmonton this weekend. I'm thinking of rescheduling it to mid month. Hopefully that works for others. I suppose I should remember that I will have finals eventually too. Stupid late finals.

PureDoxyk is getting close to finishing her book on Polyphasic sleeping. I'm pretty excited to get a copy. That's currently a weak area of the field, and I think it will be a well written resource for all people interested in Polyphasic sleep, even those of us whom have been doing it for awhile. I'll update you all again when it's released. Let me know now if you are interested in a copy and live near me, maybe we can make a combined order and save some on shipping.

Busy Weekend

2008-03-31T07:49:00.000-07:00

So I had a very busy weekend. Friday night I missed my evening nap, since I was out for drinks after work, and at a Kaiser Tournament with Point 2. My team ended up in second place over the weekend, and I won a $30 or $40 gift certificate to Galaxy Cinemas.Which is great, because I like free stuff, but I haven't been to the galaxy in a couple months. My basement is just too awesome, cheaper, better food, more comfortable. I'll have to find someone to take on a date to the theater to use it up (applications will be accepted).

Saturday was Meatfest, making me miss my evening nap again! But I ate a lot of meat. It was a lot of fun. A little upset Jason couldn't make it, as I was looking forward to meeting his girlfriend, whom is now bearing his child. Lots of good company there. We had a whole pig roast, and a lot of the meatfest staples (Rib O Pork, wings, bacon, burgers, sausage, lots of good stuff). Got home no too late, hit the sack around 2 as per usual, and slept in until 6:30.

Sunday, I didn't nap at all. 6:30am till 11pm. Boy was I worn out. But I got my cow, and we now have an extremely full deep freeze. Cooked up some steaks last night too. They were delicious. I think I will definitely be doing this every year from now on. So I went to bed Early, since I hadn't napped, and was exhausted. Got almost 6 hours of sleep, with just a couple times of getting up through out the night. It was weird. I'm a little concerned about how it will effect my naps today, but I'm feeling really tired right now, and I am due for a nap, so I think I'll be able to bounce back to my schedule pretty quick.

I think it's just like a normal person. Anyone who did all the stuff I did would be worn out. Was a fun weekend though.

Roomies Sleep / Cow

2008-03-27T07:43:00.000-07:00

So I found it interested how dead my roomies were yesterday. They stayed up "late" and it killed them. They were up until 12:30 ish or so, which was surprising to me. But I enjoyed that it killed them. I was up at 5am that day, with only 2 naps, I missed my evening one, and I stayed up until 1:30ish, and was fine. They, with their normal Monophasic sleep we up like 7:30 or 8 ish (not sure exactly when, I'm long gone) and dead by just after midnight. I really hit home how much more functional I can be on much less sleep, which I think is a good thing.

This post is taking forever to make, silly work, making me do stuff.

My Cow is ready. I'll be picking it up this weekend, or more likely, make my mother pick it up. I'm pretty excited to have a ton of meat. However, I am broke. Probally not for too long, as roomies pay me back and we sell some of the excess meat.

If anyone has any advice on how to get a coworker to talk less / sing badly less, I would greatly appreciate it.

Weekend

2008-03-24T06:12:00.000-07:00

Wow, two posts in a month. You guys sure are spoiled.

Had a fun weekend. A friend from Edmonton was in town. We tried out the multiplayer in Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, on DS. It was a ton of fun, but we made the cardinal flaw when playing RPG's. We played for a couple hours, doubled our level, unlock a bunch of cool looking new armour, and didn't save. Then we hit a communications error, and lost all our progress. Turned us a little off the game. We'll likely play again, and get those same levels when we head to Edmonton next, and can cut another friend in.

Other than that, reasonably uneventful weekend. I started watching Big Bang Theory, due to a recommendation at work. I thought it was very funny, but very geeky humour. I can't imagine there is a large crowd who finds a father scorning his son for not knowing where to use a derivative versus and integral funny. But I do.

Also started watching The Riches. I quite enjoy it, I'm on episode 7 already. I like the premise of essentially faking their way into a decent chance at life, then working their butts off to keep it. It also helps that the two main female characters are quite attractive. I'm quite curious to see how the show progresses.

No news from my cow yet. I was a little dissappointed that I haven't heard from them yet. It'll make it more difficul tto get it, as this weekend coming up is Meatfest, which ties a lot of it up, and the weekend after is a planned trip to Edmonton. Hopefully I can sort something out.

But back to work. Short day due to school, so I should probally accomplish something now...

I do post, occaisionally

2008-03-20T12:00:00.000-07:00

So I decided to write another post here. I might just take some advice, and post boring normal day to day stuff. The Grateful Dead song pack for Rock Band IS fun! It also exposed Roomie R as a musical Fraud, as he apparently didn't know any Grateful Dead. Like come on! Truckin'? Not ringing any bells? He is a disgrace to the house.

Tyler IS THE BEST! No idea why yet. But according to my comments, that is the case. Maybe he should get a prize for being the only person who still checks this blog occaisionally? At least the only one who hounds me about not updating it. Although I'm sure Ash would, if I saw her more. So Ash IS ALSO THE BEST!

Let's see. Other cool things in my life lately.

-I haven't mentioned it in the blog yet, I bought a new car. It's a '08 Matrix. I quite like it. New cars are nice.

-I got a raise last performance review. Raises are nice. I'm not allowed to talk about it though, due to confidentiality in those matters.

-I'm on day like lots of my sleep schedule. 315ish I think? Last couple days I've been sleeping a fair bit extra. Tuesday I napped from my normal 8:30ish until about midnight, which was unexpected. I did miss my afternoon nap due to a meeting at work, and had a couple beers after work, which I think combined to make me sleep. When I got up midnightish though, I stayed up until 3:30 or 4ish, so it was reasonably close to just moving my core earlier. Lastnight I sleep similar though, which is bad, I'll have to crack down this weekend and adjust back to schedule.

-Work is busy, as per usual. My "department" is severly understaffed. I don't enjoy it immensely. At least it's keeping me busy.

-We started planning our annual trip to Seattle for PAX. Anyone who is interested in coming down this year should get more info at www.pennyarcadeexpo.com and contact me. I've got space in the hotel for 2 people Thursday night, through Sunday Night. Looks like Pax pass is about $45, and airfare is shaping up to be about $250. Lots of Fun!

-I've started doing Yoga. I find it pretty relaxing, and good for my body. My back is bad, and it's somewhat humourous how flexible I am, as long as my back isn't involved, but as soon as my back needs to bend or spin, I can't do shit. Hopefully that improves with time.

-School is going well. I was very concerned when I saw I got a 64% on my midterm, but then I learned the class average was like 42% or something, and I felt better. I was still in the top 25% of the class. That confidence was boosted when I got the lab exam back, and saw a nice 100% on it. I haven't found any histograms or anything on it, so no idea how well the class did. Typical of my performance in a lot of comp sci stuff though. The programming / practical parts I do very well on, and the stupid memorization of definitions or whatever, not so hot.

-BOONDOCK SAINTS 2 IS GOING TO EXIST!!!!! I loved the first one, so I'm reasonably excited about a sequel. Not sure how it will work out, hopefully they don't screw it all up.

-I'm going to have to cut my work hours back in the fall. If I keep my schedule as it is, I will bank an estimated 200 extra hours... That's a lot of overtime (5 weeks vacation?). Maybe I can do a 6am to 3pm work day. That would be nice. For stick with 6am to 5pm, and take every friday off? I'll have to talk to my boss about it. That said, with the lowered hours, I'll have to find some projects to work on this summer. Maybe I can get around to starting a game to put in a portfolio. Between me an dother friends who are also interested, we've fleshed out some decent game designs I'd like to make, maybe I'll actually start one this summer. Or right away...

-I bought a cow. I'm pretty excited to have a lot of meat just in time for the BBQ season to start. Might have to have a end of term BBQ early April. We'll see if I get the meat by then...

That's a reasonable update... I should get back to work... And I am getting close to nap time.
Feel free to comment / email me. Hopefully (like I always say) I'll start checking / updating this blog more often.

Ok, Ok

2008-02-04T06:08:00.000-08:00

Fine, I'm write an update.

I never update this blog anymore, as my life is just too boring. Wake up, eat go to work, sleep, continue working, eat, sometimes go to school, sleep, continue working, go home, eat, sleep, play video games or watch tv / movies, sleep, repeat.

Sure sounds like I sleep a lot when it's phrased like that.

My schedule is not really any sort of static schedule anymore. I just go to sleep when I'm tired. I wake up at 5 everyday, usually go to bed between 12:30 and 2. I always have 2 naps a day (usually my 9am, and 2:30 pm ones) and sometimes 3 or 4 naps. I'd say my average sleep per day is at about 4.5 hours.

I've pretty much sworn off drinking. It makes me sleep too much. I have a single beer, maybe two, every now and then. I still binge drink on the occaisionaly weekend, but only maybe once a month, and I usually end up sleeping most of the next day away. Still Caffeine free though. I have maybe 1 can of coke or something every 2 weeks? If that. And boy that can of coke can hit hard now. Not sure if it's the sugar, or the caffeine (I think caffiene, because Slurpees don't keep me awake) but I end up bouncing off the walls.

Other life news. I bought a car yesterday. I'm now the owner of a 2008 Toyota Matrix. It's currently just getting it's final inspection before the lot will let it go. I should have it to start cruising around by mid week. It's pretty exciting. My first brand new car. I's coming to me with 12 km on it... As long as those bastards at the dealership haven't been cruising around on it much. It also has a ton of space, and tinted rear windows, which will make it a pretty nice sleep area for me. Hopefully will save me some money on gas too. I'm going to have to plan a road trip to Edmonton to visit friends there, and get some highway km's on it to try it out.

What other big things happened.. hmm... We lost out media server at home, due to a faulty power supply. We lost I estimate 600-700 gigs of data. Which sucks. Also means I haven't been watching TV at all. So I am far behind on the Daily Show, and the Colbert Report. Might have to invest in cable after all. Or at least get a new raid controller, and build a new array... It's going to suck to rip all my cd's again. Sigh.

That's about all that comes to mind for now. Plus, I need to get to work. I have a huge project that was somewhat dropped on my lap, and needs to be done by a couple months ago. The contract guy who was supposed to be working on it spent 3 months on it, and has nothing to show for it. We brought him in to reduce my workload a little, and all it did was delay it, and then increase my workload. Sheesh. When's performance review time again? Might be due for another raise.

Christmas

2007-12-27T06:55:00.000-08:00

Well, Christmas is ending. I don't want to be back at work.

I had an issue with my sleep schedule over Christmas. It was holidays, and I wasn't as motivated to actually get out of bed. I just wanted to lounge around and do next to nothing. As a result, I slept more than usual, which made me suffer from Sleep Gorge (a phrase coined by PureDoxyk, that I'll willing to steal). She talked about it here. I think her opinions on the matter are very true.

I will definitely confirm that the same has happened to me. It is a tough cycle to break too. You are more tired, thus think you should get more sleep. Sleeping Polyphasically is never an easy task. You have to work to keep your schedule. It is not something to be attempted by the less than motivated. Keeping that motivation can also be a challenge.

Another thing that post from PureDoxyk did was made me excited for her book. I have no idea when it will come out, or how to get it, but be sure I'll pass that information on once it's confirmed. I suppose she needs to finish the book first.

Other brief holiday notes:
- I am the favourite uncle. I gave my eldest neice a Nintendo DS for Christmas. She wouldn't put it down. Take that sisters!
- Rock Band is awesome. Took it long enough to come to Canada. I'm almost glad it did. The download content makes the game way better, for all the random song sets, and options when making your own. I have now downloaded the soundtrack, and am trying to learn all the songs, as I'm the band vocalist, and somewhat pinch guitar player.
- Rock Band on the Projector is super awesome. Cranked surround sound, so the crowd starts singing along behind you. Soo cool!
- Christmas is great! I've already seen a couple friends I haven't seen in months. So nice to be able to catch up with all of them. I have high hopes for the new years season as well.
- Did I mention Rock Band is fun?

But alas, I should probally get something done.

lack of updates

2007-12-14T11:15:00.000-08:00

I haven't updated in quite some time. I've been busy.

I had end of term projects, and finals. Those took up some time. everything went reasonably well though. I was a little less happy at my CMPT 260 exam. 214 went well.

Other big things that kept me a little busy was my latest project. I, with the help of the roomies, redid a lot of the basement. Largely so it would fit my new projector! YAY!
SO I now have a 120" screen in my basement, with a new surround sound system, and a 1080p projector shooting at it. It looks amazing. I was really happy with how everything turned out. We built the screen from scratch, with fir 1x2's and some blackout cloth, and some black random stretchy fabric. It looks great. But now I'm pretty broke, so I need to save some money to afford CHristmas presents... Should have maybe set my priorities a little different. No regrets though, you have to see this screen. I'll post pictures when I finally get around to taking some. If you're in town this Christmas, you will have to call / stop by and check it out.

Sleep has been going well. I'm a little under the weather currently, so I'm sleeping a bit more than usual, but not too much. I need to adjust my schedule a bit again now that classes are changing for term 2. Make sure I have all the times lines up right. Shouldn't be too bad. I've done that shift before.

I posed a question to the Polyphasic google groups about subliminal learning during sleeping. I'm curious as to if it works, but I haven't been able to find any good scientific articles on it. I keep getting people who want to sell me cd's. Anyone who reads this know anywhere I can get information on it? I figure since I listen to my ipod for my naps anyway to drown out ambient noise, I could probally set up some sort of sibliminal messages to maybe help me learn Japanese or something. I may experiment a bit with it.

Crazy!

2007-11-23T04:22:00.000-08:00

I had my first odd encounter over this blog the other day at school. There's a friend in one of my comp sci courses whom I see very seldom, and haven't really talked to in quite some time. We're working together on a project now. Anyway, we were trying to determine when would be a good time to work on it, and I brought up that I usually have lots of time, because I sleep weird, and he said oh yeah, I've read about that on your blog. Yay! People are stumbling here somehow. His brother apparently found it, and asked if he knew me, since I'm a jazz guy in Saskatoon, and the community here isn't too huge, and somewhat close knit. Started me wondering though. I've seen all my traffic numbers, and they definitely aren't anything special, so I've always just assumed it was largely my family, and a couple close friends, who are trying to keep tabs on me, since I never talk to my family.

Now I'm starting to wonder how many people from Saskatoon who don't know me have read this, or heard about it via some other people. Am I going to start having a reputation as the crazy guy who sleeps weird that some people don't know what I look like? Can I work up to Urban myth status? That has quickly become one of my goals. To become an urban myth. Not sure how I'm going to accomplish it though... Suggestions are welcome.

party

2007-11-20T14:51:00.000-08:00

Wow, due to just sheer coincidence, my 200th day of polyphasic sleeping (Which is November 29th) also is the last day of classes for me! So I might have to have a bit of fun that day. It's also (I think) the day after a code release, so I may have a lot of good things to celebrate.

My sleep schedule is getting almost back on schedule now. I do have a sinus infection, from a complication from my wisdom teeth extraction. All these medical related things make me feel more tired, which means I sleep more. However, more is still only about 5 or 6 hours. Immediately after the surgery I had a couple days of a long 8 hour sleep. That was odd. I felt like there was just no time during the day to get anything done.

I also need to move all my sleeping things inside. It's starting to get cooler outside. Below freezing, and it's sure hard to jump out of my bed when after jumping out of bed I can suddenly cut bread with my nipples. I just want to stay huddled in my warm sleeping bag. I'll likely get to that tommorrow, or the day after. I need a good system to move things around. Maybe some good habits about packing up my sleeping bag, and so forth.

Maybe I'll have to fire an email to PureDoxyk to ask her what she does in the winter. I think she lives somewhere where the climate gets a little chilly. With the gas prices too, it's just not economically feasible to run my car to warm it up. I'll let you know what I find out / try.

Ok

2007-11-14T05:32:00.000-08:00

Time to get in some better habits over this blog. I still think it's valuable to me, to get some of my notes down somewhere, and just to vent a little. Time for another big update.

PureDoxyk, one of the longest Everyman sleepers I know of, had a good post on her blog today. Talking about essentially don't give advice if you aren't qualified to do so. I think it is a very true complaint, and one I think really plagues Polyphasic sleeping. I'll leave the rest of the discussion to her arguements.

I have now been polyphasic for about 185 days? I still don't like giving out a ton of advice, as I don't think my experience is really going to be a representation of everyones experience. We all sleep differently, we all live differently, and just because something works for me, doesn't mean it works for everyman (what a bad pun).

So lately my schedule has been a mess. I got my wisdom teeth pulled on Thursday, after writting my last midterm. Not a good day, although I did get 100% on that midterm, so I can't complain too much. I think that was my widsom teeth's last shot, trying to prove that they actual did something. Back to crappy 50%'s from here on out, without those teeth. I've been really weak on my schedule enforcement, knowing that I should be a little messed up due to the drugs, and so on and so forth, but I think I'm going to have to crack down right away here. Yesterday for instance, I woke up at 5, like normal, after a 4.5 hour core, which is a little long, had a 30 min nap around 9, like normal, was exhausted at my class, so I had a 1.5 hour nap from 1-2:30, got back to work, and went to bed around 9:30, and slept until 5. I woke up once or twice, but I didn't have any painkillers nearby, so I went back to sleep to try and get rid of the pain.

I'll likely let this crappy schedule keep up for the rest of the week, and try to push everything back to my normal come the weekend. Hopefully by then I'm more healed up, and in less pain. I might have to resort to a bit of caffiene to help with that too.

SO back to my plans for this blog. One of the reasons I don't post very often is I feel like there's nothing interesting to post about. By now, I have enough logs of my sleeping stuff to amuse some people. There's a 100 day summary too for people who don't want to read too far back. Now's it's just part of a normal routine. I'll have to figure something out.

Day 164, Major overdue update

2007-10-24T05:26:00.000-07:00

I am so bad at checking / updating this blog.
It's largely because I feel like my liife is so normal and uneventful now. I'm approaching the 1/2 a year mark of my polyphasic sleeping. I'm still enjoying it. I'm finding I'm wasting a lot more of my extra hours lately, because I just am running out of things I want to do. That said, I am still working 40 hours a week, and taking 2 university courses, and playing about a gig a week with various musical groups, and I've starteed playing hockey about twice a week. So I guess considering how busy I'm keeping myself, I'm doing quite well.
I'm finding now that I have fallen into a somewhat variable pattern. I NEED my naps at 9am, and 2:30pm. I get extremely tired like 5 minutes before those. My evening nap is a little more variable. Sometime I'm not tired at all, and I skip it, and sleep from 12:30 to 5, and sometime I take it and sleep 2-5. Depends what else I need to get done, and what's going on around the house. The nice thing is I can seem to flip between those two schedules without any bad effects.
I'm also finding on some weekends, I like to "sleep in". I essentially just take an extra 30 minute nap whenever I feel like it, or extend a nap by an hour or so. I find usually it's my 9 am nap, as I've been up for awhile already, and not working, and thus somewhat getting bored of myself around the house. It's as much to kill time until my roomies are up to entertain me as it is for resting purposes.
I still very seldom feel tired. I still think I'm getting more productive hours in a day. I'm still loving it.
And that's another rare, major update.

I have a blog!

2007-10-10T06:24:00.000-07:00

and I realy suck at updating it.
It's been exactly 2 weeks now. I apologize.
Lately I've been busy though. It's hard to work for 40 hours a week, while attending two classes. Now that labs and assignments have started, I'm sinking a lot of time there too. Add my required weekly tv shows (Survivor, Beauty and the Geek, Heroes, the Office, My Name is Earl, Naruto) and I don't have a ton of time, even with my crazy sleep schedule.
I've also felt a little under the weather for the last week and a bit. I've been trying to get a bit more sleep than usual to help recover from that. There's been a bunch of bugs going around work though, so I'm still sitting in better shape than a lot of my co-workers. As a result though my core sleep is closer to 4.5 hours most nights now. Which kind of sucks, but I'm still down to about 5.5 hours of sleep a day, which does give me some more time than a normal sleep schedule. Hopefully I feel back up to 100% soon, and can drop back down to a 3 hour core.

New Radiohead album came out today. I've been enjoying it. And the Orangebox came out, which is a package deal of like 5 super awesome games. So I'll have to find some time to play through those... May be challenging.

Alas though, I need to get to work. I have to set up a test to run for a week straight, and need to confirm a feature works by the end of the day today. Sigh.

Day 136

2007-09-26T05:14:00.000-07:00

Ugh, I suck at updating.
One of my favourite webcomics did a strip on odd sleeping habits. It's not my sleep schedule, but suggests one that may work for some people who like trying to mess with their sleep schedule. It's Here.
Nothing really too big to report. I've been busy lately with school assignments, and work. I don't know how I used to do this much stuff, and have time for everything, when I slept normally. Even with the couple extra hours a day, I'm not getting everything accomplished I want to.
Sleep-wise, I've been finding some evening I just can't get away for my 8:30ish nap. I had a dinner on Monday that I didn't get home from until close to 10, and last night I didn't have time to catch a nap either. I was rreasonably tired, just an opportunity never presented itself. I've been dealing with those days by crashing around 12:30, and sleeping until 5, instead of 2am. It seems to be working ok, but I'm losing some of my awake active time. For the record though, any extension of my core seems to need to be in bunches of 90 minutes. Anything else just makes me tired. Those results are close to what some others have found too.
But I should get to work, I have some large bugs I'd like to fix here before anyone comes into the office. One of the best times of the day to accomplish things.

Day 127

2007-09-17T05:37:00.000-07:00

So I had a rough weekend.
My nap that happens at 8:30pmish now is bad. i'm finding when I eat late, which is most of the time, I'm eating just before that nap, which isn't very good. It also makes me sleep. It's really hard to get up from that nap, and this weekend I laid down for that nap twice, and woke up an hour later, almost 10 ish, which really throws off a lot of my weekend plans.
I'm going to have to experiment this week to see how I can tweak things to still work with school, but make that evening nap a little easier. Maybe it's as easy as trying to nap before eating. That's likely my first change. that will likely move the nap a little earlier too, closer to 5 or 6.

Currently discussing a ski trip with Kyro from GnoSchitt, I haven't travelled with him before, and he hasn't worked with me since I started this odd sleep schedule. I wonder if he's aware of what he might be getting into by thinking about travelling with me. I hope wherever we end up staying has some sort of all night lounge? or at least a space I can sit and play DS without having to worry about waking him up. Should be fun though.

Day 121

2007-09-11T06:14:00.000-07:00

Hello!
So this morning, in about 20 minutes time, I'll be doing my interview on CBC radio. To anticipate that traffic boost, I would just like to say welcome. If you are interested in learning about my first 100 days, read this. That link is also present on my sidebar, under polyphasic links, so that once this post gets buried a bit more, you can still easily find my first 100 day summary. I also recommend most of those links for anyone wanting to do more research on Polyphasic sleeping. I do need to update it, as I think some of my links are going to people who have given up on their attempts. Maybe those are still valuable resources too, I'm not sure.

As per usual, if there are any questions, or anything, feel free to leave a comment, or email me, at chkurz (at) gmail (dot) com.

Day 120

2007-09-10T09:48:00.000-07:00

Hurray! 120 days of my odd sleep schedule.

I was contacted today by CBC news. Apparently they try to match some of the stories of the Morning Show, and I might be doing a TV spot Tuesday night, on the 6pm news. I'll let you know tom morrow if that's happening or not. We still need to work out some times to actually do it. Hopefully I can slot it in before returning to work after class.

Of course it won't be as good as the awesome video the Ryan made to start this whole media parade. I'm glad people find my life interesting enough to talk to me. Maybe I should start a class or something. "How to Change to Polyphasic Sleeping" or "Step One in Becoming a Vampire: Turning Nocturnal". I think the only class I could stand teaching is one where I could sleep for 20 minutes during it, as a teacher, and have that be expected. Maybe I'll pitch that to the university.

On a sleeping note: Everything is still great. I felt a little under the weather on the weekend, and as a result, have one or two naps that went a little longer. I'm feeling much better now though, so hopefully it was just a very short lived illness. I'm a little behind on my walks. I haven't had a good long walk in almost a week now. So tonight, I'ma walking baby!

Also, I would just like to say, Roomie R has proven yet again that we can't leave him alone with anything that cooks without supervision. He microwaved some hot dogs into a lot of black smoke, a horrible horrible lingering smell, and two chunks of charcoal. I didn't think a microwave could make charcoal like that. I was proven wrong. On a side note, our new microwave is pretty nice, and it has a dial, so he can't screw up anymore. Never expected to have to make our house him-proof.

Radio coverage

2007-09-07T09:24:00.000-07:00

So I just got off the phone with the associate producer for CBC radio's morning show with Sheila Coles. They are interested in interviewing me on the morning show, so if you're interested in hearing me talk about polyphasic sleeping, tune into CBC radio one, Tuesday morning, around 7:45 am. I do believe they have a web stream too, for anyone who is located further away.

My adaptation for school has been going reasonably well. I missed a nap before classes yesterday, just due to a meeting dragging on a bit, and uncertainty when buses run and such. I had to resort to a little caffeine. No ill effects from that though. It was a little surprising how much that woke me up though. Since I have so little caffiene now, it hits me quicker and harder it seems when I do have it.

Day 116

2007-09-06T05:23:00.000-07:00

Today is my first actual day of classes. I'm here at work, early, getting some stuff done, so I can be gone through most of the core part of the day. I'm somewhat excited. My adjustments to my sleep schedule seem to be going very well. I'm now somewhat adjusted to 2-5am core, with naps around 9am, 2:30pm and 9pm. I might move my core back another hour yet. Haven't decided.

So this video I had made about my sleeping for the Edmonton Journal seems to be making me more popular. The traffic here on my blog has increased. It's not a huge jump (well it was the day the video went live), but it is noticable. The more apparent difference though is just recpetion from the media. I've got a preliminary meting with a program director from CBC radio for an interview. We'll see how that pans out, and there is a journalist from Ontario who is also expressing interest in an interview. As per usual, I'll keep you updated with how those pan out. I knew when I started this I was reasonably unique, but I was not expecting as many people to show interest in it as they have. I'm glad that people find it interesting.

But I should get to work. Stay tuned for the next update.

plug

2007-09-04T12:01:00.000-07:00

I thought I would try to help out a little here.

My grandmother, who is 92 now, is participating in the Terry Fox Fundraiser for Cancer. This is her 14th year walking for cancer, she thinks. She has been the oldest participant for the last 4 years, again, she thinks. She has also lost 2 sister, a brother, a brother-in-law, and her husband, my grandfather, to cancer. One of my cousins has set up a online based donation form, as our family is rather large, and spread out. It's located Here. If you are interested in donating, my whole family would appreciate it. Her goal is a very reasonable $500, so I'd like to see that get blown out of the water.

Back to regularly scheduled blogging,
It's just after lunch, and I am tired. I have definitely not made the adjustment to my new schedule yet. I did get to finish a whole bunch of errands on campus today. My nap around 9am went great too, I had a good nap. Hopefully I crash real good for my 2:30 nap too, as that will help a lot for adjusting my schedule.

But I should get back to work, thanks for your time.

School is Starting

2007-09-04T05:22:00.000-07:00

I spent the weekend adjusting my schedule, as I have classes starting on Thursday, and my previous schedule was not going to work with my new time constraints. I have revised my schedule to work. I've started adjusting to it, but I'm not quite there yet. Hopefully come Thursday, I'll be fully adjusted. I now sleep a core sleep from 2am to 5am, with my 3 naps at 9am, 2:30 pm, and 9pm. At least that's the plan. The only nap that can really change around at all is the 9pm one. Everything else I'm pretty stuck with due to the timing of my classes, and what I'll have to do to get some hours in at work.
But short post. I have too many things I need to get done before work here, and I'm hoping to get to work early too.

Welcome, and day 110

2007-08-31T08:34:00.000-07:00

Welcome everyone who is coming to visit due to the coverage I have gotten in teh Edmonton Journal. For those who aren't here from there, Here is a link to the story.

I posted my summary of my first 100 days yesterday, so I recommend reading that if your interested. Also Check out some of the links on the sidebar, I recommend the Google Group and PureDoxyk's Blog. When I last read it Wikipedia also had a decent article on it.

Hopefully you find this informative. Please feel free to comment here or email me (chkurz (at) gmail (dot) com) with any questions. I'll try to answer all of them.

Summary

2007-08-30T03:02:00.000-07:00

I have finished it. (And posted here a lot more regularly in the process. hopefully this is something I can keep up). So here's a long post with my Summary to date.

I started May 14th. I began with a normal night of sleep, then took a nap at noon, and 5pm. The goal at this time was a core from 4am to 7am, with naps at noon, 5 and 11pm. I did not start napping at 11pm until day 3. Around day 3 was when I started doing more productive things in the night as well, like cleaning, making buns, and some light reading.

The first discovery I made was I needed a white noise track. Due to my place of employment being based at the airport, I needed something to drown out the planes. It also would prove to be exceptionally useful in maintaining consistent nap lengths, and has since helped me nap in many different locations.

I found out on day 3 that I was already reliant on my naps. I tried to drive home before a nap, and ended up feeling very tired during the drive, and it was potentially unsafe. Thus it is not recommended you drive during this period, unless you have woken up recently.

I was already close to the schedule I wanted by day 6. My core period at that time was about 3.5 hours That was about it. I had gradually reduced my core sleep throughout the week. having my naps, somewhat forced, then staying up as late as I can before crashing for my core. I always woke up from my core at 7am. On day 7 I tried sleeping just the 3 hours at night, and I was not quite ready yet. Day 7 was also when I started flexing my naps a little.
I was able to flex my noon nap by 1.5 hours, without any bad effects. I was quite tired by the 5pm nap.

On day 10 I had some complications with my cd player dying on me. Without the white noise cd my naps weren't very good. this was a slight setback. I recommend ensuring you have enough power to get you through the day, and carry extra batteries. Since I have gotten an Ipod, this is less of a concern, but do moniter battery life, and try to keep it high enough to last a full nap or 2.

Day 13 was the start of a busy weekend. I tried skipping a nap while I was out, to disasterous results. At a house party the next night, I caught my naps, which helped, but the liquor in my system made me oversleep. I've since discovered anything more than a drink or 2 will cause me to tend to oversleep.

On day 16 I had a rough adjustment period. This was when I had started cutting caffiene from my diet, which I had been using to try and help my sleep cycle change. For adaptation, caffiene helped me wake up after a nap, or core, but in the long term I recommend it be cut. Try a hot glass of water to wake you up, or really ice cold. Around day 16 is also where I speculated that during adaptation at least, the nap location is likely important that it remain consistent. Lately (post 100 days) I can nap anywhere, on my vacation I slept in some irregular locations, but during adapatation I would recommend trying to be consistent in your nap location. While adapting the less that changes the better, so your body just has the odd hours to get accustomed to.

I got sick around day 21. I think it was something I ate. I slept a lot more during that period to try to help me recover. I discussed maybe adding a reset day (which I never did).

Day 22 I skipped a noon nap, and it wasn't overly deterimental. I just felt more tired closer to my 5pm nap. I've since stopped skipping naps, and force myself to nap no matter how late it is. My body often will still get tired for the next nap, and I found that to work better than just flat skipping a nap.

On day 29 I started trying a more consistent wake up routine, as I still found that to be difficult. I was too physically active in it though, as I started getting too stiff. I also had some really good naps at that time.

Around day 44 I became extremely busy and was forced to miss nap, move nap times, and other bad things. I ended the week feeling extremely tired, but made it. It took me a day or so to get back to a regular routine after a messy week.

Day 53 temperature really became an issue. We had a heat wave, which made sleeping in my car difficult. I now always ensure I park in the shade for as much of the day as possible, which usually means moving my car after my noon nap. I also recommend windows open to get a breeze, maybe a fan to help with that. I also use ice packs on the floor of my car to try and smooth the temperature curve. It's helps but not drastically.

On day 57 I overslept my 11pm nap, but overslept it to exactly 3 hours. This is when I first tried a nap at 6:30 am, and a core 11pm-2am. This felt great and would end up being my normal sleep schedule. My body just liked it better. Finding those times when your body actually wants / needs to sleep in interesting. I have no hints to help you find them, just if you feel groggy after a nap consistently, to maybe try shifting it around a bit.
Day 64 I tried sleeping without an alarm. My body no longer lets me sleep more than 4 hours without the aid of Alcohol. It also reinforced the 11pm core, change, as that's what my body naturally tried to do. Making that change to my sleep schedule was exceptionally easy.

Around day 80 was I not getting as much accomplished at nights as I wanted to, and as a result started feeling like I might as well sleep. I wasn't tired, I didn't need the sleep, my body just saw it as a reasonable thing to do to kill the bored time. Thus I recommend you try to stay on task, and keep yourself working on something at nights. Those are the toughest times to stay awake, and distractions to prevent you from sleeping are vital.

I had a vaction around day 105. During the vacation, to closer match the sleep schedule of the people I was staying with, I cut my noon nap, and slept longer at night. It worked surprisingly well for the first part of my trip. The Seattle part I was actually able to find corners to crash around noon, so I started doing that again. Still kept a longer core. I didn't feel like I needed it, but it was to not disturb the people I was sharing a room with. It worked quite well.

And that Summarizes some of the big point of my first 100 days of the Everyman Schedule. Hopefully that has been a useful, enlightening read. Any questions or comments, please contact me at chkurz (at) gmail (dot) com.

Day 108

2007-08-29T07:47:00.000-07:00

Just so you all know, I had every intention of making my polyphasic experience summary last night, but I started doing some laundry, which I really needed to do after my vacation, then I figured I'd watch one episode of Death Note. A MAJOR plot twist happened, and I ended up watching more than 1 episode. That show is just too good. Hopefully I'll get something created tonight.

End of Vacation

2007-08-28T06:28:00.000-07:00

My Vacation is over. I am back in S'toon, and heading back to work.
My sleep schedule got a little out of whack for the weekend, Hopefully I can correct it back to normal without too much effort. I have been missing my noon nap, although I have been very good with my supper nap, even though it moved a bit. I might take this chance to readjust my schedule to be more accommodating of my school schedule, which I will need to start following by next week. I guess I'll sit down today and do the math to figure out what good sleep times are. I re-recorded the audio for the video story my friend is doing. I'll be working on a summary version of this blog very shortly in anticipation of that video coming out. I'll let you guys read it once it's done. I might end up being a little more sleep related too, as a result.

I had a great vacation. PAX is always a lot of fun, and this year was no exception. I bought some T-Shirts, met a bunch of people. Got to see some games that aren't coming out for awhile. Nothing quite like last year though. Last year had games that are just coming out now, but almost everything I saw is due out in the next couple months. Still really excited for a lot of them though. Should be a bunch of good You Tube videos of the concerts I went to there, and hopefully some footage of some of the panels and such. I'll try to find some and link them later.

Not excited to go back to work. I have to move my desk today, back out into the rest of the world. there goes my nice little private room. but now maybe I'll be in the loop. I should pick up some better headphones though, as now I won't be able to use my speakers.
Well, off to the shower.

Vancouver

2007-08-23T10:13:00.001-07:00

Well, I'm currently i Vancouvr, and having a great time. It's been great to see some people I haven't seen in quite awhile. Plus this city is very pretty. Went out and wandered around vancouver all day yesterday, and covered a ton of ground. My feet are a little sore yet today for all the walking we did. I was totally worth it though. Wnt for dinner with 3 fiends and had some very tasty sushi, n dgot to catch up on a lot of their lives. It's been prety wicked.

When I was in Edmonton on Tuesday, I recorded my narration for the video that is being made. They had some very low qualitymics before, so now that they have something better, we redid the audio. That video is coming along, and I'm excited for it to come out. I do however, need to go through this blog, and make my summary page. I'm expecting a bit more traffic to flood in once the video goes live, as we do mention he blog address. I'll be makin that summary a very high priority probally monday or tuesday, when I'm back from my vacation. I'm looking forward to making it, because it will force me to go back through all the archives and remember where it all began. Should be a good exercise, and remind me of how far I've come, and ow much has changed.

But we're heading ou for breakfast pretty quick here. I'll post again later, hopefully.

Day 99

2007-08-20T07:27:00.000-07:00

wow. 99 days of polyphasic sleeping. Neato!
So today is my 1 day work week before my holidays. Makes me very very excited. Do some training today to make sure the office doesn't fall apart while I'm gone. Then I might play some Multiplayer Tower defense online, as I got accepted into the beta for it. Those who don't know, I like tower defense. Check out the casual collective for the best version out there, and the multiplayer version. You need an invite to play, so let me know if you want one. I might upgrade my account type come the beginning of next month, after PAX.

Which is coming up. I am so very excited. I'm currently planning to do laundry, and pack tonight, and hit the road early tommorrow. I hope to hit Edmonton in time for lunch, then visit C at work, and wander around Edmonton. Massage at 5:15 or so, and then dinner with a bunch of friends. Should be a good day. Then I get to spend a couple days in Vancouver! Yay! Visit one of my good friends there. Enjoy the city. Hopefully it's raining less there than here. Then on to PAX, which will be a ton of fun. I'm hoping to place reasonably well in the DS tournament. They are doing a pretty cool 1v1 all weekend "distributed" tournament. You register for it, and you get 2 buttons, then you can play ANY DS game with anyone with a button. The two people just decided on rules, and play. Winner gets to take the other persons button. I'm hoping I can convince a lot of people to play Tetris against me, 1v1. Hopefully that goes well, and I can diversify, and start risking my now large stash of buttons playing like Jump Ultimate stars, or so Ouendan!

But I must get to work. I'll try to make some posts here throughout the week, and PAX summaries, but no promises. Check out like 1up's coverage. I'll try to get in some of their pictures =)

Day 92

2007-08-13T14:22:00.000-07:00

wow. 92 days into my sleep schedule. That's pretty great. I still love it.
Work trip ended up being long. I was stuck away from home for pretty much a full week. It also was hard on my sleep schedule, as I had very little to amuse me at night. Thu I'll admit, I went a little lenient and slept more than usual (like a long 4.5 hours a night! plus naps still!) but as soon as I got home, I ended up cheating a bit more, but those were liquor induced. But for today, with work, back on track, going great. I got sucked into an extra episode of Death Note, which made my morning nap a little later (didn't hit the sack until abuot 6:50 or so...) but I feel great today.

Getting pretty excited for my vacation coming up. Decided today that a massage would be a kick ass way to start it, and talked to my world famous massage therapist (edit: sorry for the previously used term, which is apparently bad) friend (well, famous in my word anyway) and she had the perfect opening for me. Hopefully my boss is ok with the slight change in plan to accomidate that. It'll be such an awesome week. I'll be writing about it when I get a chance, but I don't know how often that will be... It will be an expensive week though. Good thing the Dollar is doing so well, makes the Seattle portion of the holiday good, but I'm still anticipating spending a reasonable amount of cash... That's what holidays are for though! I can't spend too much though, as there is like a billion games i need to buy in the next couple months.

So after my post about tetris, it got me missing that game, so I ended up playing a fair bit of it while travelling. I still have most of my touch. first couple rounds were rusty, couldn't pass the level 16 stack 5 mode. But about 5 or 6 loses, I remembered how to play. I also suck at that catch mode. I don't do making big squares, I make lines! SO hopefully now that I've practiced a bit again, there will be a Tetris tournament at PAX. I didn't do that bad last year, but I think I could do better. I had a poor strat for the setup. setting up the triple Tetris from the get go jsut doesn't work when items are involved. Also I might enter the Guitar Hero Tournaments. I don't think I'll win, as I'm not as good or hard core as some, but I finally finished Expert, so I feel like I won't be the worst there (especially if Roomie N enters, ZING!) There's team tournament too, so I might have to ask Roomie R and train a little this weekend.

Other Part of Pax I'm really excited for, is dragging other friends along! I'm working on convincing a friend from Vancouver to come, and some of the Georgian's are coming. (which reminds me, I should call and confirm numbers with them) Hopefully we haven't out grown 2 hotel rooms yet...

But I should get back to work. Another post in the future!

Long Weekend

2007-08-03T08:28:00.000-07:00

So I'm spending my long weekend out of town, working. Which somewhat sucks. At least I have some friends where I'm heading, and can hopefully have some time to visit with them.

This will be my first business trip since I've changed my sleeping habits. It makes me a little nervous. I hope our customers are understanding when I have to take a nap break throughout the day. I'm also worried because since I'll not be home, I won't have access to a lot of the stuff I normally do to stay up at night. So hopefully I can find something in the hotel to keep me busy, or read or something. The other catch is I'm going with a co-worker, who doens't really know anyone in Edmonton. So I need to keep a somewhat normal eating and sleep schedule plan with the customer. It shall be interesting. Also likely good practice for my trip to the Penny Arcade Expo at the end of the month. PAX will be harder, because I'll be sharing a hotel room with other people who are hibernating.

Other odd part about this business trip, I'm the senior going, which means I have to pay for almost everything, which sucks. I of course will get reimbursed, but I can technically approve my co-workers expenses. Of course, I'll get in trouble if I approve anything bad, like beer, but still. I might have to abuse that a little, just for fun.

Well, I should probally make sure I have everything ready to go.

day 80

2007-08-01T08:35:00.000-07:00

Man o Man, I suck at regular updating. I am soo sorry to both of my readers who are still reading.

I've been working quite hard lateely. I spent a lot of last week working overtime trying to get one of my devices finished. Then this week, not as bad during the week, but I'm spending my entire long weekend out at a customers location. My holiday at the end of the month couldn't come soon enough.

That said, it's been a huge headache lately too. My flights are getting jerked around, and the people I booked through, CheapTickets, absolutely suck. My flight got changed by the airline, so I called them to get it changed back to an evening departure. I spent about an hour and a bit on that call. I was told it was fixed, and I'd get a confirmation email shortly. I never got a confirmation email, so I called them again, and they told me they couldn't even check the status of those flights anymore. Awesome. SO I had to call Air Canada directly, and talk to them, who then informed me that my flights had not been changed to the evening at all. Thus CheapTickets actually did absolutely nothing. So I paid the surcharge, and got the Air Canada rep to transfer my booking to Air Canada directly, and change my flight times to the ones I wanted. Now I'm filing a complaint against Cheap Tickets, and I'm going to fight to get my $25 surcharge back. It's gotten me very concerned about the rest of the trip, so now I'm checking everything, and making sure all my shit is confirmed correctly.

Sleeping has been going well. There's been some days where I just haven't been motivated to do anything in the evening (between like 4am and 6 am) so I've been reading, and sometimes if I'm reading in my room, I get really sleepy again. Not tired, just sleepy. it's an odd feeling. I don't feel like I need the sleep.

But I should get to work. I'll post again sometime this month =)

Day 73

2007-07-25T07:21:00.001-07:00

Been a busy week. I put in about 8 hours of work on Sunday, and 15 or so Monday, and 11 or 12 yesterday, so I'm getting a little worked out. The nice part of it all, is my house doesn't have air conditioning, but work does, so I've been able to spend most of the hot snap in comfort. We hit a record breaking 37 degrees C (like 100 Fish) on Monday, I think it was. I didn't sleep well that night, as my room was just too bloody hot. My 2 roomies had already called the two places you can sleep in the basement though, which sucked, as it also meant I couldn't do anything in the basement while I was up. Not like I've really wanted to, Spending like 18 hours a day on a PC is probally not too good. So I've been reading a lot. Working through Dracula, and The Gospel of the Flying Spagetti Monster. I think I'll have both finished byt the weekend, or shortly into the weekend.

I finally got to talk about Harry potter with someone, between work, and everything. I have a conversation via Facebook with a cousin who had finished it, and Roomie N finally finished the book. Only took him 3 days, which for him is pretty impressive. He's a pretty slow, methodical guy. I always find it interesting to compare our play styles in various puzzle games. I think that really shows a character. His favourite puzzle game ever is Money Idol Exchanger, which is good, but takes a lot of thought. He's good at it too. I'm more of a max speed drop tetris player. it's alll about fast reflexes and instinctive placing. No time to regret a decision either, you just have to work it into the grand scheme. I'm not super hardcore like some tetris folk, but I know all my T-spins and some of the actual terminology, and have rule preferences. (I like Naive Gravity, even though it makes it impossible to play indefinitely) Also Easy Spin is key. you gotta have some play once it hits the ground, or things just aren't fair. Especially when you get to the fun speeds where peices just start on the bottom.

That's a lot of talk about Tetris. I'm sure most of you don't care. Let's just summarize by saying I like Tetris. And I was robbed at the last tournament I played in. Ok, a bit more tetris talk.... I had 3 tetris lined up, and 1 I peice in my storage (it was tetris DS) Then I got hit with 3 (THREE) banana's withing about 2 seconds! 3! so that left me with a insane mess to work out of, and I got rid of about half of the mess before 2 other players made tetrises and sent me 8 lines of garbage. then I was hooped. Maybe this year at PAX I'll be able to place a little better. (Hoping there is another tournament)

Ok ENough Tetris! Actually, that's close to my blogging time quota. I need to get some work done now....

SO do you prefer these blogs where I talk for a long time about 1 specific thing that no one is really interested in, but me, or no posts at all? hmmm. I'm sure not going to keep any sort of readership for very long.

Day 70!

2007-07-22T14:05:00.001-07:00

I'm finally on day 70. wow. I've been doing this for a long time.
My adjustment to a 12-3 core instead on a morning core seems to have gone quite well. I think it works better for me. Nothing else really eventful in my sleeping habits. People who are looking for info on that are likely not even reading my blog anymore. It just seems so natural to me now, that I don't even really think about it.

Harry Potter came out Friday night at midnight. I got my copy, and home by about 1am. Took my core sleep. Then started reading. I should have likely gone into work to get a bit done, as I have a big deadline on Wednesday... but Harry Potter!

So I read fast normally, but I just couldn't put the book down. It was pretty good. I did manage to put it down for my required naps, at 7ish and noon. I didn't sleep very well though, as I was worked up over the book. I finished it around 3:30. I thought it was pretty good. Very action packed. It's somewhat frustrating now, as I want to talk about the book with someone, but I don't know anyone else who has finished the book yet. Curses.

I guess now I'll get around to finishing Dracula. And I did pick up the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, so I'm looking forward to reading that. I really should finish the God Delusion too.

I have to register for some classes pretty quick too. I should make up a list of the classes I'm taking and a schedule, and submit it to my boss. Let him see what I'm intending... I really hope trying to work full time, and take 3 classes (Which is technically full time student) doesn't screw me over. It'll be a good thing I don't sleep much...

Day 66

2007-07-18T08:48:00.000-07:00

SO my adjustment of change the core sleep from about 12-3 is working quite well. I think my body likes that time a little better. we'll see how I hold up over the weekend, as that will be a little harder to sleep those hours away.

I'm a little sad I had to change my sleep imes. I quite liked heading to bed as the sun was coming up. It made me feel real vampire-like. Now I'm sleeping away some of the darkest, quietest part of the night. Although it's also kind of nice to not have to try to fall asleep to the squacking of many many birds.

Looking to be super busy at work for the next stretch here, as in I might start coming in very very early. It's somewhat interesting that I can think about putting in 12 hour work days, but still plan on having a couple hours every evening to hang out with my roommates, or relax, or whatever. Sure helps keep the sanity up.

Day 64

2007-07-16T07:46:00.000-07:00

Epp. Almost a week since my last post? I'm bad!

This weekend was hard. I've been trying to sleep without an alarm to see how well I've adapted, and how my body is responsding ot the new sleep schedule. It has been very interesting. I have found out a great deal about my sleep.
I can no longer sleep for more than about 4 hours straight. Going to bed, with no alarms, or anything at MOST gives me 4 hours sleep. I also found out, with my body left to it's own schedule creation, that it prefers my 11pm nap to be my core. I spent the weekend using minimal alarms, and just going to sleep when I was tired, and I ended up closer to a 12-3 core, with naps around 6:30, noon, and 5:30 ish. I think I will try to follow a schedule more like that for the next week.

Going to be a busy week at work, so not too sure if I'll get a chance to update much. So I know I suck, but patience!

Day 59!

2007-07-11T08:55:00.000-07:00

Yay for being allow to make titles again.

Last night, I over slept on my 11pm nap again. I sleep about 3 hours instead of the 25 minutes I'm supposed to. So again, like last time that happened, I just treated it like my core, and took a nap around 6:30 or 7 or so. Maybe my body is trying to tell me that my core sleep should be around there, and I should just nap before work. I might try to do that. The catch will be on weekends, as I like staying up past 11 then, as others are too.

I wonder if I could train my body to follow a weekly schedule. Weekdays core from 11-2, and weekends core from 4-7. Or maybe I should split it into two 1.5 hour naps. Like 11pm-12:30, and 5:30 to 7. I may experiment a little.

That said, I am now accustomed to the point where I can experiment like that. It's great.

2007-07-09T07:33:00.000-07:00

Hmm for some reason it seems Blogger doesn't want me to enter a title...

I'm on day 57. Today I feel great, although very stiff. I was expecting to be a little more our of whack, since I had a odd weekend. On Friday Night / Saturday morning, I made a large change to my schedule. When I laid down for my 11pm nap, I ended up not waking up until about 2 ish. My headphones fell off (Which won't happen anymore, since I bought a new IPod!) I was mad I overslept, but then I thought I'd turn it into an experiment. My oversleep resulted in a sleep period that was the same length as my core usually is. So I just used it as my core, and took a nap at 6:30, so I'd wake up at 7 like I usually do. It worked surprisingly well. My Saturday was like a normal day. It's good to know that if I really need to, I can switch a nap and my core reasonably easily.

Sunday Morning I was out paint balling, which is why I'm so stiff. 3 hours of crouching really exhausts the legs. It was a ton of fun though. I picked up a couple reasonable welts, and I thing I pulled my knee. However due to the timing of paintball, I didn't get to my noon nap until about 2 or so. Which is a lot later than usual. That nap went fine, but I was still exhausted for the rest of the day. Not sure how much of that was from paintball, and how much was from the very late nap. I was able to get on schedule reasonably quickly though. I did cheat a little and slept for closer to 45 minutes at my 5 nap.

Yet everything is good today. 11pm nap was great, core sleep went well, and total I feel as energized as usual. I think it's a sign that my body is quite accustomed to this new sleep schedule. I can make large changes occasionally, and bounce back. Although for the last hour of paintball, I was likely an easy target, as I was a little drowsy, although I was an easy target most of the game...

In other news, I had a BBQ at my sisters place for her birthday this Saturday, and I think my family is running out of sleeping jokes to poke fun at me with. I am still noticing that due to my different sleep schedule, everyone default "insult" is always about me sleeping, as if I am asleep all the time, or should be. I find this odd as I sleep less than all the people making those comments. I just find it interesting as an interpretation of how society reacts to behaviours outside the norm (read as crazy).

Oh and as an Editted Addendum:
The hot snap is over. High today is a perfect 19 C, with overcast skies. Great weather to sleep in my car. I am very excited as the balmy mid 30's temperatures were very difficult.

Oversleep

2007-07-06T07:50:00.000-07:00

I overslept this morning, by a good hour. Which sucks. Things have been going great, I have no idea where this oversleep came from. Maybe I need to start scheduling a "reset" day every month or so, where I just sleep the day away? I've heard of some people needing to do that, although I'd really rather not. Maybe it's just the freaking hot temperature.

Day 53

2007-07-05T10:27:00.000-07:00

Sleeping is hard. It is too hot! We don't have air conditioning, and everything is just broiling. It is hurting my schedule somewhat. So I'm considering not using my bedroom. It's on the top floor of our house, which is the hottest. I might sleep in the basement on a couch instead. My alarm clock runs on batteries, so it's easy to move, and given when I sleep, I don't think my roomies would even notice.

I need to by some screens for my car, desperately. For my noon nap, it's not too bad, as I can park in the shade all morning, but come the 5 pm nap, My car is an oven. I have set up a thermometer / clock thing I got from a client in my car, just for a clock to see without turning the car on, and the temperature. When it sits in the sun, so slightly skewed, I've been trying to sleep in temperatures over 50 degrees C. Usually when it's in the shady parts of my car it's still registering close to 30 degrees. And we are just starting an even hotter snap (It's supposed to be +36 tomorrow!)

So the experiment I'm trying today is following: I froze a 4 liter milk jug full of water, so it's a reasonably large chunk of ice. I pulled it out of the deep freeze before work, and it has been sitting in my car all morning. When I go out to nap in 20 minutes, I'll see how much it's melted, and hopefully it'll help keep my car at a more reasonable temperature. I'm fairly optimistic. Except that I'm realizing I left it on the passengers seat, so I might be sleeping in a bit of a puddle... Opps.

I am extremely angry at the Canoe Club in town. I showed up for my Kayaking lesson Monday night, and met the other 4 people registered for the class, but the instructor never showed up. I haven't had a chance to talk to Mark, the coordinator yet, but I'm a little irate. Also, none of us could get the doors open either. They just put a new lock on the door, but it seems to be jammed, or somethings broke. Hopefully I can get a hold of Mark tonight to ask about rescheduling, and the door.

So I've been hunting for some contacts of polyphasic sleepers in Alberta. I can't find any. Why doesn't anyone in that province sleep funny? If you're an Albertan, and a polyphasic sleep, please let me know. I need some contacts there.

I think I'm starting to get more and more people interested in trying this crazy sleep schedule. I fully expect Roomie R to start it as soon as school starts up again. At the BBQ we had on Canada Day too, some other people were sounding somewhat interested in more information about it at least. I fully expect too, once this Edmonton Journal thing finishes to have some interested parties here in Saskatoon, and likely some Edmonton connections that will want some advice as well. Maybe I should look into co-ordinating a poly-phasic conference. I may want to start with an online conference format, as we're all fairly spread out all over the world. Try to get some people to speak about their experiences, network with other poly-phasic sleepers... May be good... Plus I could be scheduled to be Poly-phasic friendly! 30 minute breaks every 2 hours, so hopefully you can take your naps when you need them. And we could have panels going all night!

I think it's a good idea, but I really don't see it happening before Christmas. The sheer logistics of it all is a bit of a deterrent. Maybe I'll suggest that to the polyphasic google group...

Day 50

2007-07-02T12:22:00.000-07:00

So I'm now on a nice big round number.
50 Days on this sleep schedule, and I'm still really loving it. I got in a bit of trouble last night from one of my regular readers, because I've not been updating recently, but I'm been super busy.

I have played about 6 shows in the last 7 or 8 days. Jazz festival is Fun. Plus I've attended 3 or 4 concerts in that time. I also found out last Saturday that my Great Grandmother passed away. She was 99. That just added a day of travelling for the funeral in the middle of my busy week. It worked out ok, because the funeral ended up planned for a day that I conviently didnt have a gig or anything booked, so I didn't have to scramble to re-organize anything.

Ryan's been here this weekend too, and we're are actually filming some footage as I type this for the documentary thing he's working on for the Edmonton Journal. It should turn out ok. My one qualm is I had my headphones die on me a couple days previous, so I'm currently using "Head-Set-Superhero" which is an amazing headset. It has been around for about 5 or 6 years now, and it is a mess. There is very little foam left on it, and a wide collection of tape holding the entire thing together, so it's not the most attractive thing, but pretty comfortable. It also has a mic though, so I may look a little crazy with a mic in front of my mouth while sleeping. Oh well, I'm sure Ryan will make it all look amazing anyway.

But I should probally wrap this post up. We need to get some other footage today too. I'm going to start work on the summary of my sleeping experience tonight, after my 11 nap. So hopefully I can post that in a couple days.

I'm going to try to get back to a reasonable updating schedule too. So keep your eye'shere, and hopefully you can enjoy more updates.

Now I am just pretending to type more, so that Ryan can get a bit more footage, hould I leave this in the post? I think I might, just because I am too lazy to remove it. hmm. may be a little odd, but oh well. Hes still egging me on the keep typing, so I shall. This is a little tedious, as what the heck to type, while being forced to?

Excellent

Day 44 Update

2007-06-26T07:38:00.000-07:00

I really need to get around to making a post here.
I have had a super chaotic week. With the Jazz Festival going on, I have been extremely busy. I've been flexing my naps a lot, to accommodate all the things I need to do this week, like gigs, and attending concerts. It's starting ot have a toll on me. I'm getting worn out, but I think I'm as worn out or tired as I would be normally if I slept like most people. Totally worth it though to see Jeff Healey, and Herbie Hancock though. I have another 3 concerts left, then it's the long weekend, so hopefully I can rest up a bit there. I also have a funeral to attend on Friday, on one of my few days off jazz.
This weekend too, I'm performing Saturday, and Sunday is Canada Day, and I have a kayak lesson on Monday, and I have to be somewhat available to do a story for the Edmonton Journal. Sometimes it's hard being famous. Although it's not hard to inflate my own ego, or pretend that I'm famous.
I'm quite certain if I can successfully survive this week while being polyphasic, I should be good to continue indefinitely. After this week, I'm not worried about forced nap shifting or anything until August, when I go on vacation. I'll have to explain to the Friend in Vancouver I'm visiting what my sleep schedule is like so he knows what to expect.

On a side note, I have found a rip in my napping blanket. That makes me very very sad. It's a custom made "Grandma Quilt". I'll have to get my mom to patch it before the tear gets too large, and I'll have to get in the habit of folding my blanket after every nap, so it doesn't get snagged on anything anymore. Those are the sorts of things I worry about more now with my sleeping pattern... It's great.

EDIT:
Do to a request, I am intending to write a summary of my Polyphasic experience to date. I've had complaints that it's a little difficult to go through all my blog entries to get to the meat of it. I am intending to do this, but it's not going to happen until next week. I just don't have the time to spend on it currently.

Exciting News!

2007-06-20T21:02:00.000-07:00

So I got a call from a friend in Edmonton today. He works for the Edmonton Journal (I think, that or the Sun). Anyway, he's been following my sleep experiment and has discussed it with his boss, and got approval to do a video short about me. Very Cool! He's planning to be in town on the Canada Day long weekend, and he's going to take some pictures, and compile some footage. I thought that was very neat, and I am looking forward to it. I might have to clean my car up abit, so when I'm showing off my napping quarters, it looks a little more hospitable.

I talked to C, my Jazz trumpet friend, about it at our practice tonight. She showed her usual support of exclaiming, "You're that weird!" She does have a point. This odd sleep schedule is weird enough to be an interest piece. It probably didn't help that as I was mentioning that to her, my fly was open. I guess that just emphasized the weirdness.

So now I have to plan out what sort of things I need to show / explain. I'm sure he will help me with that though. But Exciting!

Day 38

2007-06-20T08:18:00.000-07:00

For those of you who wish I'd do more productive things during the night, Yesterday was a good night.
Our house hadn't done dishes in a couple days, and as a result we had to use the last 3 plates left in the house for supper last night. So I spent the night cleaning the kitchen up a little. I washed pretty close to every last dish in our house, which took a reasonable amount of time. But now the kitchen is cleaner, and we can actually continue eating.

Then I cleaned out my keyboard. Like actually cleaned it, removing all the keys and everything. It really needed it, and I was able to make my spacebar work like a normal space bar again. I might take my work keyboard home sometime this week and clean it out too. It's starting to look a little grimy.

Alright, time to get to work I guess.

Curses

2007-06-19T06:26:00.001-07:00

I had a super oversleep. My discman, that plays my white noise, and has my alarm at the end, ran out of power in the middle of my nap last night, and with no alarm I slept until 5am, basically taking my core sleep at the end of my nap. I feel really tired today.

This just shows an even better reason for me to buy an ipod, or some sort of rechargable portable music device, or maybe run a power adapter to ensure that doesn't happen again. It sucks.

Day 36

2007-06-18T07:55:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I'm getting worse and worse at updating this blog.
It's because there is not much to write about sleepwise. I'm still going strong, and loving my extra time. Still not really accomplishing anything spectacular in the new time, but it's there.
This weekend was quite fun. Didn't get up to too much. Roomie N stayed up though on Friday until my usual bed time, at 4. When I woke up at 7 though, he was still out. And stayed that way until I woke up from my 12. When things like that happen it really make me appreciate my new schedule. I "found" a 5 hour period more than Roomie N, and all it costs me is about an hour later in the day.

So as this blog continues, I see it moving further from my ssleep schedule, and more to just what I feel like talking about. Of course I imagine I'll have little updates occaisionally about some of the projects I complete during my night hours. So what topics should you expect to see here? Well, all the things I'm interested in. From Video Games (Team Fortress 2 release date announced, awesome), Politics (Want guns? Just attacked US troops, then say you won't anymore. That's apparently all it takes for the Americans to hook you up...), boring odd facts about my life (I just got new phones! And got a great deal on them! Went in expecting to buy some phones I saw in a flier for $140, and walked out with a set better for our house for only $75), and other things that come to my head (Watched Pan's Labrinth finally last night. Good movie. Makes me extremely frustrated at the people I've overheard at movie stores and in theaters saying they would never see it, because it's subtitled. I didn't come to the movies to read! Sometimes I get scared for society).

So if you find that boring, then take off eh! If you still care to hear about it, feel free to stick around. Or if you want me to do something different, post a comment, and I'll think about it.

Day 31

2007-06-13T07:42:00.000-07:00

One full month into this experiment!

I need to change my wake up routine. I am starting to get really stiff from it. I guess I could start doing less sit-ups and push-ups, but I think that will counter-act the usefulness of it. Today I didn't do anything, I just jumped out of bed as soon as my alarm went off. I'm feelig alittle tired right now, so we'll see if that fades away.
I also had difficulties getting to sleep last night. Now that summer is getting here full swing, the sun is starting to rise as I'm heading to bed. That just surprised me. I need to be a little more accustomed to falling sleep with the birds chirping. Maybe I can make a modified white noise cd, that's just 10 or 15 minutes of white noise, with no alarm sound, and use that at night for my core, and let my usual alarm get me up.

So I booked all my flights for my holiday in the fall. Really glad to have that out of the way. Unfortunately now my credit card is maxed again. I had to Pay for N-Roomies as he's a bum, and doesn't have a credit card or something. He has to use my card for everything online, which kinda sucks. At least he's good at giving me cash before charging anything to the card. The problem is just getting that cash onto my card.

I also joined the Saskatoon Canoe Club yesterday. I'm pretty excited. I didn't get out on the water last night, but I'm hoping to get a chance to on Thursday, or Saturday morning. I figure if I head out there when I wake up at 7, and am bored because my roomies don't get up until cloer to noon, I could enjoy the river. We'll see how I feel come Saturday.

Sleepwise, I had two awesome naps yesterday. I don't know exactly why... for both my noon and my 5 I fell asleep really fast, and woke up at my alarm feeling great. Hopefully I can do that again today. I've also found lately that my appetite has gone down. I still think I'm eating a lot, and somewhat healthy. My bills at McD's are down to a more affordable $10 a meal though, which is nice. I think I'm maybe not eating less, I'm just taking food like I've been taking naps, I eat a little here and there, instead of a couple large meals a day. I do keep forgetting ot take my vitamins in the morning htough, and often remember as I get to work, then take them with supper. Not a big deal.

But alas, I should get back to work.