Ceaseless Student

I think I figured out why I feel so tempted to make this blog far more structured. It’s because I read things like this.

I would even take it one step farther. My bog is far more than my resume; it is my online identity. This blog especially. I have other things online (2 websites, 1 other blog), but this is the one that gets my opinions on it. This is the one that gets the little bdieseldorff badge at the bottom. This is my avatar. I feel similarly when I post on anything as bdieseldorff. Lifehacker (LH), Wikipedia, Wikibooks, other people’s blogs; if I care about it and I post, I am bdieseldorff. (Some might find this amusing because my brothers both have names that start wiht ‘b’…)

I can Google bdieseldorff and look at my dormant Flickr account, my unused Flagr account, random comments I made on an Olin forum. I can see my LH comments and my blogs.

I got interrupted for a sec there. I was Googling bdieseldorff and it turns out that I got flamed so I wanted to take care of it. I countered with a patronizing stance and thinly-veiled sarcasm.

So yeah. I blame Lifehacker for making me care too much about this sort of thing. <3 Lifehacker!

So. You know what’s interesting?

When you sleep less you need more calories. I eat so much already. This is tough.

So I’ve been looking at my reading rates for four different drills since is started my new mode of sleep. All the scores have plummeted. There’s been close to a 30% loss in speed.

Unfortunately there are confounding variables. Here’s a few reasons I might be going slower

-I am sleeping less; therefore, I’m more tired
-I am drilling at 6:30 AM; therefore, I’m not as effective
-I am understanding more; therefore, I can’t go as fast

The more I think about it the more it feels like that last reason is the big one. Today I read a passage at nearly 1400WPM with a comprehension that felt comparable to what I get when I go at normal speed. It’s worth noting that this isn’t a difficult book and that I’ve read it more than once in the past. On the other hand this is about four times faster than my original reading rate calculated from the same book.

If there is an effect from the first two, that will hopefully go away as soon as I start actually uhmm…. sleeping?… during my naps. Yeah…

Sometimes I have a tendency to take blogging too seriously. I’ll check my stats more than makes sense. I’ll ping. I’ll check out Technorati. I’ll see where I show up on a bunch of Google searches. This is unfortunate because I write mostly for myself. It makes me solidify some thoughts and it gives me an audience for random stories I’d like to tell.

I’ll be on lifehacker and link over to problogger and soon enough I’ll be all like “Y’know what? My blog has no f***ing focus. I mean it’s ridiculous. How is something like that going to maintain traffic?”

Answer: it’s not. Duh, self. But that’s not what it’s for. I’ve had 208 unique visitors and I have 81 returning visitors; not very large numbers. This is probably a bit low due to rss, PlanetOlin and the fact that Olin IPs probably show up as the same visitor (?). Man. I’m silly. Part of me really wants to come up with something to seriously blog about. And part of me thinks that’s dumb. Oh well. This particular blog refuses to be consistently useful or informative.
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I’m having a not-so-fun time transitioning my sleep pattern. I have yet to get more than 10 minutes of sleep from any naps. This means that I’m pretty much just operating on my core sleep of 4.5 hours a night. Oh well. At least I decided to do a 4.5 hour core instead of a 3 hour core this time around…

When I did biphasic last year it was actually after a month or two of normal sleep with a 20 minute nap at noon. By the time I got to doing biphasic, I was awesome at falling asleep nearly instantaneously. I’ll have to redevelop that skill. Hopefully soon.
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Barnes and Nobles didn’t have the kind of Moleskine I wanted. *sigh* Tim to order online…

Ooh! Speaking of ordering online, I just ordered some book darts. These are neat little line markers. They clip onto books without leaving any marks. Word on the street is that librarians absolutely love these things. I have a plan that involves these. If it turns out not to be dumb, I’ll post about it at some point in the future.
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Now I remember what biphasic was like. There’s just not that much to do this late on a weekday… it’s OK. I have some books to read. I’ve also been considering being a wikipedia badass…
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OK. I’m done for now. Hope you enjoyed random stuff.

Boris out.

I’ve decide to mess with my sleep schedule again…

This time around I’m doing a variation on a couple of themes. Last year I did a biphasic schedule with three hours of core sleep and a ninety minute nap. (I slept from 5-8 and 19.5-21).

At the time it worked fairly well, but there were a couple of issues:
- I had too much time and I got bored
- I would get tired around 3 or 3.5 and feel pretty lethargic until I went to bed at 5
- The nap interfered with events

I listed them in order of annoyance. The third one wasn’t a big deal because I simply skipped or moved the nap if I needed to do so for an event. This helped make me more tired, of course. The first problem was the really annoying one though…

My plan for this time around differs a bit. First I’m killing the 90 minute nap and replacing it with one or two 20 minute naps during the day. Then my core sleep is being extended to 4.5 hours between 2 and 6.5. This early start will let me be productive in the morning which, for me, is more efficient than the evening or night. I was unable to do this with my other schedule b/c there was a recommended 8 hour gap between the nap and the core sleep and moving the nap earlier made it interfere with more things. This time around I’m free of that restriction
and the mornings are mine! I’m not actually sure how well I’ll do, but I’ll keep y’all posted…

Anyhow, this should be less interfery and give me a bit more sleep at more convenient times. Hopefully I’ve come up with enough stuff to keep me occupied without breaking my brain or any thing…

If you see me looking messed up for the next week or so, it’s because the transition is annoyingly tough. Oh well. Gradual is lame.

I hope this works. Two 20 minute naps are super easy to work into my day…

I’m going to repeat something Mel wrote b/c it’s part of a big “I don’t have time for this post” post.

Mel is in a sweet competition. If she wins she’ll be helping out the world as she is wont to do (she’ll be doing OLPC stuff).

People should hit up this site and vote for her. It’s super-fast. Really. 3 clicks and you’ve finished voting. Oh yeah. Or you could read the list and see if there’s anyone who’s doing something you consider more awesome. Then vote for them.

Sweet.

Yay! I can use the title box!

Anyhow, I did the first treview test in my speed-reading book. I was rather dissapointed with my results. I got about 536 WPM (words per minute). I got about 240 WPM the first time I tested. So. I’ve more than doubled my speed since June 16th. This should feel nuts, but here’s the catch:

When I’ve been calculating my WPM after practice and such I tend to get things around 700-800WPM when I’m getting full comprehension and up to around 1400WPM when I sacrifice some understanding for speed. I think I might have wanted to make sure that the speed increase I saw wasn’t simply due to understanding less of the text. That seems like a Boris thing to do for a test.

Anyhow, I’m now completely confident in saying that I’ve more than doubled my reading rate in less than a month. That’s pretty sweet. Also, I missed like 7ish days in there due to assorted visitors and other things that occasionally kept me busy. I’m pretty impressed.

But I was expecting to be far more impressed. I might test again tomorrow just for the hell of it to see if my result was a fluke on the low side of things… I’m not a very graceful loser sometimes.

This is interesting… I can’t seem to title this post… I’ll see if it works from a different browser after saving a draft…

Anyhow. Today was pretty sweet. Some of us were laser-cutting parts that we need for NASA out of thin plastic film for quite a long time. The way the machine works is rather neat; it just burns whatever lines you give it. One sets the speed it goes at and the power it uses. That’s it. Then the laser goes along burning what you told it to burn and the ventilations system attempts to pump out all of the toxic fumes you generate. It doesn’t fully succeed, but I’m going to go ahead and imagine that the smell would’ve been far worse if it weren’t for the ventilation system.

So anyhow, one of the sheets of plastic we were cutting was really thin. I mean we had one that was five thousandths of an inch thick; that was the fattest one. The small one was to thousandths of an inch thick. We set power and speed lower for the thin piece of Kapton and then we started up the laser. It went along the bottom edge of the shape we were cutting and then promptly proceeded to miss the Kapton entirely.

This wasn’t the laser’s fault; it was positioning itself perfectly. The issue at hand was that the piece of plastic was really thin. Thin enough, in fact, to get sucked into the ventilation system. We had to shut everything down.

Eventually, everything was fixed and the now-wrinkled piece of Kapton was recovered from the ventilation system. Hooray!

…Something’s being silly. I can’t seem to get into my account from Opera. It wasnts me to switch my blogger account to a Google account. Oh yeah. It’s always been a Google account. wtf.

OK. I got in. (I needed to tack on the @gmail.com). When I look at my post in Opera I can access the test box for the title, but I can’t touch the bod. Also what I’d already written disappears. How odd. My hand is force. I will use the scourge of worlds: IE.

AH good. IE can’t access the text box for the title either. Whatever. This shall henceforth be known as “The Post With No Name.”

Haha. So. Here’s the setting: it’s the 4th of July. I’m bored. So are other peeps. We decide to adventure…

We start by heading towards Needham, but we’ve got very little gas. We turn to go towards Eliot and fill up on gas at the full service station right before route 9. We then head east on 9 because it’s easier to get on the highway in that direction and we really have no plans. We try to get me lost by heading north and west. I keep on knowing where we are. Finally, I get lost. Then we cross 16. Damn. We work at it some more. OK. I’m lost. we stop to eat a snack at a Dunkin’ Donuts.

We head out more or less randomly again still trying to go more or less northwest. Eventually we come to this sign.

I call a halt. This is where we adventure. It’s raining, it’s dark, it’s perfect. WE head into the woods…

and come to a body of water. There’s a bench next to it. Interesting. We wonder if it’s a river or a pond or whatever so we decide to go along it for a bit. We pass a massive log and an almost climbable tree. We come to a place where there’s something like a sandbar but with lots of sticks. I suggest going out to the middle of the river. They laugh at the idea, but I go ahead and try to see how far I can go without freaking out because I’m carrying my camera and cell phone.

I use a large piece of wood I found to help cross. One of my friends makes a snarky comment
about stepping on a shield. As it turns out, she was right! Incredible. I went on an adventure and picked up a quest item. Un. Be. Lievable.

I carry it with us the rest of the way. We eventually discover that we’re on the Charles in Newton. On our way back to the car some guy asks if we were sword fighting. I answer that we weren’t; I’d just found a shield in the Charles. He laughed and agreed that it was awesome.

Content.

Man. You know what’s frustrating?

It’s frustrating to want to talk to someone who doesn’t speak your language.

You know what’s possibly even more frustrating?

When they do speak your language except they’re at this language immersion camp and they can’t speak anything but some foreign language.

You know what might be even more frustrating than that?

Having taken enough of the aforementioned foreign language (albeit a long time ago) to try to talk anyways. Talk? Not really. Listen? Sometimes I can understand some things. Ish.

Most frustrating telephone conversation ever.
*exhales*
I needed to get that out. Thanks for feeling obliged to read b/c it’s showing up in your rss reader or Planet Olin or something.

I promise a more upbeat post tomorrow. In fact, I’m pretty sure I know the topic. It should be fun!