Ceaseless Student

I was really tired today. I stayed up till 2:30ish helping kids in SigSys and then had to get up at 8 so that I could do the reading for my 10 o’clock class. Long story short - I decided I’d take a wonderful 20 minute nap.

I figured it’d been a while since I’d done these, so I gave myself 25 minutes before a single beep from my cell and 30 before my actual alarm. I figured I’d be good to go with 10 whole minutes to fall asleep. Wrong.

I got maybe 3 minutes of sleep.

So it’s time to train. I should be able to fall asleep within a minute and wake up 30 seconds or so before my alarm rings. This is a skill worth having.

Practice is real easy, but somewhat frustrating.

1. Set two alarms.
1. One of them is for 21 minutes from now and is gentle. A single beep or something.
2. The other is f’serious and is 22 minutes from now.
2. Get in bed.
3. Relax. Meditate or whatever. Sleep if you can.
4. When you hear the beep: Get Up.

That’s it.

It’s annoying until you get good b/c you tend to just be in bed awake for 20 minutes. But one does get good with practice. After a bit, the second alarm will be completely useless and, for me, I started waking up about 30 seconds before the beep after some practice. This is what I did before starting biphasic freshman year and not losing half an hour from each time I went to bed was quite helpful seeing as how that’d be 20-something percent of my sleep time…

I just practice-read Stephen King’s The Gunslinger. Practice-reading is when you try to read faster than you can actually handle. You get pretty bad comprehension, but it helps increase your reading rate. It took me 57 minutes to get through its roughly 300 pages. The first time through I went a page a second (this is to just pick up character names, a rough chronology and a bit of the novel’s structure) and the second time I was going at around 1500 WPM.

This is actually a full 50% faster than my original goal for this whole speed-reading thing. w00t!
Also: it’s about 4 times the speed I read at going in. Hooray!

It’s hard to keep going at breakneck pace - having my computer yell at me every minute and louder every 5th minute helped a lot. I’d end up picking up the pace every time the 5th beep came along as I kept on falling about a minute slow. I ended about 3 minutes slow so I guess it was a bit shy of 1500WPM. Sadly, I don’t actually have many books that are short and easy enough for me to read in one sitting like this…

It looks like a trip to the library is in order.

PS - The gunslinger series is pretty awesome. Not my all-time favortie but certainly in the top 10 and maybe in the top 5.

So I pimped out my Firefox s’more and I wanted to show it off. So much screen real estate for holding my internets: teehee!

Here’s a link to my current userChrome.css if anyone cares for it.

<--And these are my add-ons if anyone cares about that.

For more details on my setup, check out my post on vertical tabs or just e-mail me. Or you could even talk to me in meatspace. Crazy.

RSS might be right to call itself “really simple syndication.” It’s certainly simple enough that I have accidentally gotten to the point where it eats more than 3 hours of each day. This is not acceptable.
Here’s a before screenshot. My subscriptions on the left have quite a scroll bar. You’ll notice the tabs on the right - those are things I opened for further inspection as I parsed my rss feeds (largely digg). All right. Before: 47 subscriptions…
Exhales… It’s a good thing I like radical change. I tore my list down to 27 in about a minute and then added one that I should’ve had on it before. Sweet. No scroll bar at all. Yay time reclamation!
I will miss you feeds…

Update: I find it kind of hilarious that one of the tabs I had opened while doing this was Steve Pavlina’s post about the 50-30-20 rule. The general idea is to do less of urgent things that aren’t really that important (*cough*rss*cough*). (In defense of rss, it does help me know things that are interesting to myself and others - goes well with ping-type e-mails).

Well. I’ve been told to get on with it, so I’ll continue the epic saga that started with anime, a recipe and a dream. OK. There was no dream, but I did think it’d be neat…

I started baking it and took my evening nap. Then I woke up to see that the rice cooker was all steamed up and the bread was smelling breadish. “Good,” I thought. I was wrong. You see, I had gotten worried that the rice cooker would switch to keep warm and not cook the bread enough. Dumb. Rice cookers always do that - this was a recipe for rice cooker bread. So. Maybe duct-taping down the cook button was not the smartest idea…

Anyhow, the results were tragic. After its first of three baking cycles the bread was more than a little bit burned on one side:

Washing the pot was incredibly difficult. It came out fairly well, but it will have marks of this day all the way to the grave:

I then did my best to salvage the situation. The offending portion of the bread was removed:
Then I went down to the kitchen and baked it for 20ish minutes:

The side that I’d removed a layer from dried up a bit, but it could’ve been far worse. While it wasn’t the fluffy goodness promised by the anime, it was more than tolerable. I wish I could say as much for the smell of burning that permeated my entire hallway. Tolerable is not the way I’d describe it.

But this does not end the saga fair readers - I promise a minimum of two more stories before this epic is complete. The next one will be about my discovery later that night and my quest on the following day.

These babies are sweet. They can hold your spot on a specific line instead of just a page. These aren’t bookmark replacements; they’re more like quote markers. It lets you mark notable parts in books in an externally visible way. Evidently librarians love them because they play nice with the books; no damage = happy librarians.

Evidently the librarian-pleasing people who run the company know how to please their customers and expand their fan-base. I ordered a tin of 50 - they sent me my tin with 50 then (this is from memory so it could be a bit off) an envelope with 3 more, a card with three more, a pamphlet with three more and maybe one more thing with some bookdarts stuck on it. Clearly the goal was to get people to be like: “hey check this out!” And then you could give them an envelope with a booklet inside that explains bookdarts and sings their praises. And, of course, you’d include a few of the extra bookdarts they sent you. Good plan. Nice thing to do. I have bonus bookdarts. I’m not going to be handing anyone an envelope, but if you want to check them out, find me and I’ll give you some.

I hope I’ll be reading enough good books to make a dent in that tin’s worth of book darts. I wish I’d had these when I started reading “The History of Western Philosophy.” That book would be littered with these things. While I’m at it, if you are at all interested in philosophy, I highly suggest this book. It’s by Bertrand Russel and it gives you textbook content in a less dry form. Not that it’s riveting or anything, but considering the amount of info that’s in there, his book is shockingly readable.

Bookdarts make me feel like such a bibliophile…

So. This story starts with me watching anime.

There was this one episode of Yakitate Japan where Azuma shows you how to make bread (namely Japan #2). The neat part of the bread is that it’s baked in a rice cooker. In the show they describe the bread as “fluffy, fluffy, fluffy” and “so easy that even the producers can make it.” Judging by this: I suck…

So I started by making the dough. Here’s the recipe translated to American units (roughly).

———————- ———————-

• 3 Cups Bread Flour
• 4 tsp Butter
• 5 tsp Sugar
• 7 tsp Milk
• 3/4 Cup Water
• 2 tsp Dry Yeast
• 1 tsp Salt

1. Add to rice cooker: flour, sugar, salt, yeast dissolved in water, water, milk. Knead
2. Add butter. Knead
3. After you’ve kneaded it enough that it sops being sticky, let it sit somewhere warm for 1 hr (first fermentation).
4. Drop the dough from about 2 feet to get rid of the gas. Thn, let it sit somewhere warm for 1 hr (second fermentation).
5. Bake it for 1 hr in the rice cooker.
6. Flip it, and bake it for 1 hr.
7. Flip it and bake it for 1 hr.
8. Eat.

———————- ———————-
Ao things were going well for a while.

I made the dough…
I let it sit…
It fermented…And then things went downhill from there. I started baking it and took my evening nap. Then I woke up to see that the rice cooker was all steamed up and the bread was smelling breadish. “Good,” I thought. I was wrong, but that is a story for another post. Or probably more than just one more - this is a long story.

In case anyone from LH ended up here, this is the vertical tab how-to I was talking about.

If you didn’t get here from lifehacker, check out my Firefox!!

As a really big Lifehacker fanboy, I don’t really recall the last time I’ve been so excited while on the internet!

Woohoo!

I just retired a Moleskine and got a new one that I have to set up - I figured I’d take you guys along for the ride.

Numbering:
This is the first thing I do is number the pages in my notebook. This allows you to reference previous entries (eg Jane seems to be saying similar things to what John said when I talked to him [p.34]). You should do this as soon as you get it; it takes like 5 minutes. I know it’s tedious, but just do it. NB - you only need to number the odd pages or the even pages. I do the odd ones and then just flip through pages on the right side to find what I’m looking for.


TOC:
Leave some pages open for a table of contents and metadata information. The table of contents can be used in a variety of ways. One can put every entry into it, just the entries that are particularly meritorious or even no entries until the notebook is retired. How much space you should leave at the beginning depends on what you want it to do; if you’re not sure, leave 10ish pages and there should be no problem at all. I like putting in only things that I might look up again and doing it as I go. My TOC has the page, tag, title and date of entries.

Metadata:
This is a great tip I found somewhere I can’t remember right now. The idea is to tag every entry with both a date and a topic in an easily visible place (B is for blog). I like to have a key for my tags at the beginning. I also use tags in my TOC. See TOC pic.

Tabs:
These are awesome for me. My notebook has three threads going most of the time. One is just whatever I’ve been writing and the other two are time and expense tracking. In order to do all these simultaneously, I use three markers. The stringy bookmark thing is used for whatever I’ve been up to in there recently and the other two get tabs. These are little Post-it plastic sticky things that are awesome. As I use up pages, I move the tabs so that they’re always where they should be for me to open my notebook to the right page.


The tabs are also useful for bunches of other things from being bookmarks in other things to leaving small notes to holding sheets of paper up on a wall. That’s why I always have some extra handy

So. That’s my set-up. If you want a pen that can go along for the ride, I suggest a Fisher bullet. These are space pens that are used as normal size pens, but store small enough to fit on the top side of a Moleskine (you can hold it there with the elastic). Since I always carry a normal pen with me at all times, I don’t carry my Fisher anymore. I’m a fan of the thin (.05) G2 gel pens - sooo smooth.

If you have any cool tips, leave a comment. Experiment and enjoy!

So I was looking at this article and it occurred to me that my first name has no online presence. Honestly. I don’t show up in the top 500 results if you Google “boris”. This is unacceptable.

I’m doing all of the things this suggests (LinkedIn, Ziki and Naymz), but I’m wondering if I should edit all of my profiles so that my first name is included in their description or something… that would be a lot of work. The list of places I’d have to change has just exceeded the boundaries of my brain.

I think I’ll just deal. But we’ll at least be able to see what happens with these sites going at it no?

Sweet.