Life

[marcmagus]

I'm still alive, and I swear I post things other than memes. Honest. To prove it:

I've started cooking again. I think I'm going to set myself a goal to cook one pot of curry/stew/soup/etc. per week. Something which cooks in large batches, stores, and can be reheated without too much difficulty. That should help me stay better fed more consistently and maybe help me (re)learn to do necessary but not necessarily appealing tasks regularly. (I love cooking, but I don't always feel like doing it, so I'm hoping that's a good in-between on the way to relearning to do tasks I dislike, but need to do. This is the real difficulty in my life...I'm very bad at regularly doing things I don't want to. I can do something with a big push, but I don't have the energy for that every day.)

One of my current projects (as of yesterday) is working on learning the Dvorak keyboard layout again. This one was triggered by my discovering that X can have multiple keyboard layouts active in memory (up to 4) and switch between them easily with a single keypress. I've mapped it to the otherwise useless Menu key. I think I like this typing tutor. I'm going to try to take it slowly...when I feel like it, or am sitting around looking for something to do and think of it, I'll do a lesson or two. I won't advance to the next one until I'm confident in the one I'm on—or bored. I'm up to Lesson 5: ON comprehensive. It covers UHETON together. I think one more time for some confidence before I move on. No rush...I can keep using QWERTY elsewhere until I feel like switching to Dvorak primary, QWERTY when I need to type quickly is reasonable.

I'm seriously considering trying polyphasic sleep, thanks to that nifty link, provided by muppetk. I may be insane, and this could possibly drive me there, I suppose. I think it's a neat idea. The plan is to do it for, say, a month as an experiment to see what it's like. I was thinking I'd start at the end of the month, right after Vassar Commencement/Balticon (which I'd like to attend if I can figure out how to make it practical). I mostly have more time then, depending on what sort of a time commitment I'm giving to "The Ocean is Big and the Sky is Blue" . . . I'm not really sure what that's going to look like. The idea is to use the time between now and then to train myself to wake up to an alarm, store up some food for eating, and the like. I'm hoping that even if the experiment fails overall, I'll gain some new tools for life from it. If I go with it, I'll be posting very regular updates about how it's going—probably approximately daily for the first week or two, then tapering off if things seem to balance out comfortably. Now's the first opportunity for you to try to talk me out of this as a bad idea. I think I have some good ideas for how to make it work in a way that's valuable. I may post more about it soonish.

Most of my other productivity has been in playing around with the computers. I did a world update a couple weeks ago and I've been playing with settings and things. I also got a DDNS account set up. I may start running a little BBS (anybody, particularly old-timers, interested in joining NSO BBS in exile?) off the desktop, throw Nethack and a couple of other games on there, have another toy to fool around with that maybe encourages me to hone my programming skills a bit. Lots of little customizations that make things a little more comfortable. Which is what led to the Dvorak thing I mentioned above.

Comments

[iamyourgoldfish.livejournal.com]

I'm seriously considering trying polyphasic sleep

nooooooOOOOOOOOO

[marcmagus]

Want to elaborate? Or should I post more about what I'm thinking first?

[iamyourgoldfish.livejournal.com]

This is a substantially uneducated opinion, however based on what I've read of polyphasic sleeping (and Uberman specifically), I feel good about making the following claims:

1. REM is not the only important phase of sleep.
2. This *will* result in extended sleep deprivation, with all the accompanying badness, including but not limited to lack of focus, irritability, and decrease in cognitive function.

Don't let me rain on your parade, though. If you have a lot of uninterrupted time to try this as an experiment, go for it - the key word being 'uninterrupted'. If it's going to wind up being inconvenient to drop out every 2 hours for a nap, it won't go easily for you.

[marcmagus]

Well, if your rain were going to be, "here's some literature which makes it clear this is a really bad idea to even try", I'd really want to, ummm, see it. In any case I'd like to see any sources you have, because I plan to research further before I start.

The rough plan is to start on pure Uberman to get through the adjustment period (as it sounds like that's more effective), then seriously consider using a core sleep variant as I'm also somewhat dubious that REM only is healthy in the long term, playing that part by ear and maybe experimenting with it.

[myloveisrobotic.livejournal.com]

omg nethack forever

[muppetk.livejournal.com]

:) Somehow I just knew you'd find this as neat as I do. I was wondering though, did you read the link he posted way back in the begining, about where he heard about it?
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/4/15/103358/720

It's giving me the impression that you really do need to allow 2-3weeks to adjust rather than the 4-5 days that Steve Pavlina had. I got the impression that Steve Pavlina did better than most on it. So I'm thinking you might want to officially set your experiment duration for 5-6 weeks, so that you have some time past the adjustment period to really see if it works for you, physically/emotionally/etc.

Also, did you catch his article on training your body (through muscle memory, more or less) to wake up and get out of bed the instant the alarm goes off? I think doign that kind of thing with normal sleep prior to polyphasic would be helpful.

(Can you tell I'm thinking about doing this myself? So very tempting. I want to make my goal of 100 days in a row of qi gong first so that I'll be in better shape and a lot better will power. And I'm totally loving the rest of his site too.)

[marcmagus]

Yeah, I poked around a bit reading up on it elsewhere, as well as everything he posted about it, and some other stuff on his site. I was thinking two weeks at the estimate of the earliest to expect to be adjusted...but you're right, that probably means a month isn't long enough to have a good sense of it. I think I was thinking more a month as the absolute latest I'd attempt to push on if I felt like I'd only partly adjusted physically (like if I'm no longer constantly sleep-depped, but I'm tired all the time).

Which reminds me, I do have the advantage over Steve Pavlina that I know what sleep deprivation feels like and can identify it in myself! I figure that should help me keep tabs on whether I'm adjusting.

Yeah....that was what I meant about training myself to wake up to an alarm. I'm not going to do exactly his early waking thing because I think it's impractical to my life and not really applicable. Instead, I plan to start setting an alarm every time I go to sleep with the rule that I wake up with the alarm and stay awake for an hour...but I don't have to wait a whole day before I sleep/nap again. Then start training the alarm time down...maybe end up on a two four-hour cycle thing (I've done that before for a couple weeks). The idea being to get used to getting up with the alarm no matter what with the promise that it doesn't have to be a whole day until sleep. Then, before I start, I'll stop using the alarm for a couple of days to make sure I get enough sleep before I try to start, so I'm not going into it sleep-depped from stupidity. (Especially if I'm starting after Balticon...I'll sleep normally a day or two first.)

[penguinkraft.livejournal.com]

Funny you mention that, I think that's similar to one of the medical trials for which I've been screened recently.