mDuo13

Ah, sleep. One of the great mysteries of life. A state in which we spend a third of our time, doing seemingly nothing. A necessity and yet the first thing to get trimmed from our schedule when push comes to shove. Wild plans exist for those who want to do more with less. But nothing can do away with this essential dead spot in every day.

I think it was about 4 or 5 years ago, around my freshman year in college, that I noticed how my sleep schedule worked. No matter what time I went to bed, if left unattended, I spend about 9 hours, including the time it took to fall asleep and to get out of bed. If I cut that short with an alarm and something to do, it would come back later. I would get out of class feeling hazy and end up dozing off for just about long enough to make my total sleep time 9 hours. I read that the best way to reduce wasted time sleeping was to stick to a consistent schedule, but with the dorm experience, that was not particularly viable. There was one up-side to this, however; I discovered that when my sleep schedule is broken and insufficient is when I have the most interesting and memorable dreams, a fact that remains true today. (Last night's, or rather, this morning's humdinger involved a huge condor, nearly getting attacked by a wild tiger, $5 gas, and a prototype 17-inch iPad. Go figure.)

→ Read the whole thing

I built my current computer, Trace, in November of last year (2009), which means that it's now a grand old age of 10 months old. This day, as I upgrade Trace's hardware for the first time, I feel somewhat nostalgic, and I'll take this opportunity to reflect and memorialize my last computer, Arcueid -- not even because of a special letter I received today from 5 years ago. Along the way, I'll talk about my experience migrating to Linux, the odyssey of driver support leading me to the eventual concenssion and purchase of a new nVidia GTX 460, and I may as well do like all the cool kids are doing and chat a bit about StarCraft II before it becomes passe.

→ Read the whole thing

It's funny how long simple things take. I had been upset with the way my room was arranged for ages (especially how my computer was in the corner behind the door), but I never really was able to do anything about it. Now, recently, my grandmother died (she went peacefully and in good spirits) and that means that our family's patio is currently overflowing with furniture and things. I happened to come home one day earlier this week and spot a particular round table that had spent many years in my grandparents' living room, which prompted a nostalgic, affectionate feeling. So I decided to take the opportunity and use what furniture I wanted to improve my room.

→ Read the whole thing

Well, yesterday was a thoroughly unproductive evening. I got home to find the back patio cluttered with furniture from my late grandmother's house, including a particular round table of which I have more vague but fond memories than I realized. That got me thinking that I would like to rearrange the furnishings in my room, whose layout has frustrated me for a long time. I ended up puzzling over it for quite a while without coming to a conclusion, and without getting anything else done, either. Which means, I forgot to blog yesterday's kanji practice (the entry yesterday was for the day before). Thus, I'll be going through an extra large portion today:

→ Read the whole thing

I can't fully explain it, but lately, I've been going to through this thing fairly often where I just feel disinclined from doing anything. I wake up with a bit of a headache, get up to do something, maybe make it through an episode of anime or something else not too trying, and end up laying back down to sleep for another couple hours before repeating the process. I have things I want to get done, but somehow I have a lot of trouble working up the effort. I blame it in part on the heat. Nobody can get anything done when it's so hot out. But the rest of it, I dunno. All I can say is, it took me a long time to write this post because I kept having to take breaks.

→ Read the whole thing

It seems I've unintentionally continued a trend in this website, where I post a lot one month, skip nearly the entire next month, and then return. I dunno what the deal is with that, but I at least have a pretty good excuse for not posting in the past month: I got a new job. I am now an employee of social gaming startup Playdom, where I'm documenting internal processes and things like that (in the hopes of making the company more efficient and less confusing). So that's been taking a pretty big chunk out of my week, and besides that I've been keeping up with a reasonably large number of anime and hanging out with friends about as often as not... this blog kind of fell by the wayside in between. But I'm not satisfied with that, so here's a brief rundown on what I've accomplished in the last month.

→ Read the whole thing