Ceaseless Student

So remember how I said I’d gotten 208 unique visitors to date on Tuesday? It’s more than 275 now. Blue is the unique visitor count. Check it out for the entirety of this blog’s existence:

I use StatCounter. It’s free, easy to use (add an html element to your blog) and has decent visuals. How accurate is it? I don’t know. I recently started using FeedBurner (when Google bought FB and it became easy to use with blogger) which can do some site statistics too. Hopefully comparing them will be interesting.
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Last night at around 01:00 I was doing some reading drills and had a monstrous headache. I thought “Maybe I should do an extra nap tomorrow…” At the end of the day though, I think it was a blood sugar thing. I ate some pie and felt much better and much more awake.
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Evidently the Stop & Shop on 9 is open 24 hours. I’m also told it’s closed Sunday. But seriously. 24 hours? Around here? Hooray places that are open after 20:00!
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As part of a NASA project, I’m using a PIC as a prototype circuit. I got to be all nostalgic and literally run through a good portion of the labs we did for POE. Awesome. For my money, the hardest thing to do with a PIC is get your computer to believe it’s actually plugged in.

I’m actually doing better than I would’ve expected. I’m generally untired (except of course now that I’m writing about it my body is whining). My proof that I’m doing OK is that I had originally planned on taking 2 or 3 naps but have voluntarily only taken 1 each of the last few days.

I tend to be most off my game for about 20 minutes after my lunch-time nap and when 1AMish rolls around. That being said, there’s some circumstantial evidence that I’m not actually that much worse off at 1AMish - I seem to do just as well with the whole speed reading bit.

On a related note, I think I’ll be adding an energy drinky thing to my diet every day. Apart from having enough calories to satisfy that extra bit of hungriness brought about by my quirky sleeping, it also has more vitamins than you can reasonably shake a stick at. Once I drink it daily I’m pretty sure I’ll be invincible. That is how vitamins work, right?

I called my mom in Peru with Skype. Skype has such a reasonable rate for Peru $.03/minute. So hot. Here’s the sad thing, I had to call her on a cell phone; $.30/minute. Oh well.

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…

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.

Oh man. Highrise is yummy. Thanks to the people who suggested it to me!

I’ve got only like 20 contacts up so far, but I should get much faster at this as I get a bit more practice and actually establish a system. I’ve had to do every single entry like 5 times because I keep adding things when I think of them. “Oh yeah… photos!” also phone number formats, labels, and, this one is key, birthdays.

This works really well as a tickler for birthdays or, hell, anything. I’m going to chuck all of my single task to-dos here and keep Mindmeister for projects and other more complex things. The ability to have tasks linked to people is rather awesome.

Complaints: Well I do have a lot actually. Inputting people is slow. I can’t add a photo or put on a label until after the initial creation.When I add a label I have to click OK instead of pressing enter. Little things, but things that shouldn’t exist in a serious site. I mean, I have on my list of to-dos for Olindocs “make OK pressed by enter.” Honestly. Not pro dudes. Oh. I also wish I could label contacts en masse. But I can’t. Lame. This requires much more forethought. Or going back to fix things. Or both.

That all being said. This is one-time. I can more than deal with it. It’s notes are awesome. I’m not sure if i talked to anyone who reads this about one of my original plans when I first got a Moleskine. It went like this:

I’d meet someone. I’d get their name. Then I’d pull out my Moleskine and scribble something. I’d then have a normal conversation with them; except for the part where I’m writing stuff in my notebook every 5-15 seconds. Well. Highrise gives me a reason to do something like this. Except not until after the conversation and only with people I don’t see all that often. Not quite as cool but hey.

The free version of Highrise has this limitation about having a single case. This means you can only have 1 foldery thing that keeps different things related. OR. I could use either labels or an additional contact to keep a project together. Pretty hackable.

In short: Highrise = cool. I will report on any changes in my opinion if it goes to pretty good or less or OMG this is the mostest awesome! or more.

All right.

So some of you might’ve noticed that I’m pretty organized. This is because organization doesn’t come naturally to me. As a result, I’ve worked on it all of my life and I’ve gotten very good at organizing any specific thing I choose to organize. I chose a new one today. I’m going to organize the people I know.

The sad part is, I’m not quite sure how I should go about it. I’m taking suggestions on any system you think would be interesting. Or even parts of systems or vague ideas; I love trying things out…

Here’s some of my thoughts up to nowish:

Put it in Outlook - What happens if I stop using Outlook? Also, I don’t know if Outlook has some way to have ticklers (reminders w/dates) attached to contacts for birthdays and such. Another con is that notes can only be seen once you open the contact; I hate slow.

Put it in Stikkit - This is nice b/c it’s online. The whole thing is a note, it’s very searchable, and it can have reminders. This is really quite awesome. The only reason I can think of to not use Stikkit is that it’s an internet thing. As such it could cease to exist or be rendered obsolete. Also, I tend to be big on switching programs around… In response to my concerns, I could download everything as a bunch of text files and do a variation on my next idea.

Make my own system - Use one .txt file for each person. Then have a python program that goes through and makes a database in whatever form I want. I certainly know how to make this searchable and navigable due to my experience from OlinDocs. It’s very customizable, but not necessarily pretty. And I can toss it online with security if I want remote access… Problem: takes time to make the program. Also, unless I write a gui or something for quick updating, going through lots of files could be annoying. I guess this is a problem with Stikkit too.

Use Excel - This might sound a bit under-powered considering how much I want my system to be able to do, but it can be done. With liberal use of concatenation etc, this can look pretty awesome and be nice to look stuff up in. Issue: inputting stuff would suck. A lot.

Use a Moleskine - Get a Moleskine address book. Or, more Borisly, get a normal Moleskine and do one person every 2 pages. That way, I can have a lot of updates before anything fills up. Also, it’d be easy enough to carry it with me whenever I meet someone new. Issues: Not searchable at all. Losable. Not very dynamic.

After writing this I have a bit of direction. Yay typing! That being said, it is only an inkling. What do you think? Comment or hit me with an e-mail (boris at students).

Lifehacker (among the cooler sites ever) is currently having a “show us your Firefox” contesty thing. I figured I’d send mine in since it’s a bit unusual. For those of you who haven’t been following this for a long, long time, my Firefox has a vertical column of tabs.I described how to put them there a while back. Anyways, I’m super-excited about this. If anything of mine gets on Lifehacker I’ll be really happy. I’m such an internet fanboy… I almost disgust myself…