Get off my lawn, business cards

I have had the intolerable joy of writing a response post to Thomas Myer's GOML about people who don't use business cards. If you've not seen Get Off My Lawn before, its content comprises of a bunch of old and grumpy curmudgeons complaining about the world. It's hilarious. I decided to post a response to myerman's submission, entitled "People who use business cards".

Check it out at Get Off My Lawn.

A Biphasic Sleeping Experiment

I've been trying to improve my sleeping pattern as much as possible; recently I've been experiencing insomnia, feeling stressed and becoming overworked. I've also been finding it incredibly difficult to get up every morning at a reasonable time. I've been missing school because of it, and honestly, it's not good for me.

So, over the past week I've been experimenting with various techniques. Getting to sleep on time has never worked for me: there aren't enough hours in the day and I have stuff to do. Additionally, I never wake up feeling refreshed and energised, quite the contrary. I've tried reading, not doing anything, resting for 30 minutes before going to sleep, having a bath, all kinds of things. None of them seemed to work.

In an attempt to solve my sleeping issues, I've decided to adapt to a biphasic sleeping schedule. I'm in the hope that it will allow me to spend more hours of the day awake while feeling more refreshed and energised throughout the day.

Biphasic Sleeping Schedule

There are loads of variations in biphasic sleeping; but the general rule of thumb is this: Sleep in multiples of 90 minutes. Human beings sleep in sleep cycles that last 90 minutes, so it makes sense to sleep with those cycles, rather than sleep randomly in and out of them.

I've decided to set my two sleeping periods as so:

• 2:00am - 6:30am (3 cycles, 4 1/2 hours of sleep)
• 5:00pm - 6:30pm (1 cycle, 1 1/2 hours of sleep)

Totalling this up I'll be getting 4 cycles of sleep, which is 6 hours. Much less than I should get on a monophasic cycle, and I'm sure I'll struggle to begin with, but I believe it to be an adequate amount of sleep.

My schedule is pretty unflexible: I have full-time school during the day - with my GCSEs beginning soon - and various other school responsibilities. This makes it impossible for me to get any sleep between 8:30am and 4:30pm, so I have to work around that. I'm hoping this sleeping schedule will allow me to sleep better and work better, while allowing me to stay integrated with normal society.

When I first mentioned this on Twitter, I got a particularly witty quip from good old Kyle Ridolfo in response.

@jamierumbelow That's called getting a nap in.

It's much more organised than that. Biphasic sleeping will allow me to experiment with different timings and lengths of sleep, and who knows, perhaps I'll end up sleeping three times a day, or even four?

Concerns and Issues

I've been discussing this briefly with a few friends, and I've drawn up a list of concerns.

• I'll probably be feeling awful for a few days. After researching this, a lot of people say it feels like having bad jetlag. I think I can cope with this. I'm pretty sure my friends and family can cope too :)
• Are there any long term health effects associated with biphasic sleeping? I'm not sure
• I also don't know if caffeine will negatively affect me. I should probably cut down anyway, but I just simply don't want to stop drinking caffeine.

It has begun!

I made this decision last night, fell asleep at 2:00am and woke up just shy of 7:00am. So, currently, I'm feeling a bit crap. Nothing worse than if I just had a late night though. When I get home I'll do an hour's work, relax for a while and have a sleep at 5:00pm.

I'll blog about this, probably daily, to keep everybody updated on my progress. I'm looking forward to the challenge and the new way of life!

More Reading

I'll keep this post updated with a list of each new biphasic sleep related entry I write.

• A Biphasic Sleeping Experiment
• Biphasic Sleeping - Day 2
• Biphasic Sleeping - It's not for me (yet)

The Problem With Google +1

Google have just announced +1, a new addition to Search that aims to "get you the most relevant results as quickly as possible." It seems all well and good, and the concept of using user recommendations to improve search results is something that really needs to be in Google Search, but it has one fundamental flaw.

How many times - when you're searching and come across something actually useful to your query - do you return to the list of search results? I only ever return to the listings page if I find the link unhelpful or irrelavent. Maybe Google should look at a system of negative feedback instead?

I'm not saying that this isn't a necessary system, far from it. I honestly believe that user recommendations are one of the best ways of conveying relevance. But I also think that Google should be putting more weight on social sharing; manually sharing a post is without a doubt the best way of stating "this is relevant to me in some way". I'm hoping that Google are doing a lot with tweets; parsing hashtags and keyword searching content to gain some kind of link context (and thus improve specific queries).

Now, if Google were to introduce a +1 into my entire web experience - through add-ons for the major browsers, or even a Google-backed proxy that injected the +1 button into the site I was viewing - I would be a lot happier and certainly click on it more. Until it's there, on the content with me, I just can't see myself using this.

Read more about Google +1 over at the Google Blog.

Apple sell out WWDC in under 12 hours

Apple's annual World-wide Developer Conference has recently sold out, after merely 12 hours of ticket sales. This year the event will host 5,000 developers from around the globe, and each ticket cost $1599. That's just under $8M in ticket sales. In 10 hours.

Last year, it took eight days for WWDC to sell out. 8 * 24 = 192, 192 / 10 = 19.2. So tickets sold out 19 times faster than last year. While this must seem like small change to Apple, who recently turned over $26.74B in one quater, it goes to show that developers are still as excited about developing for the iOS and Mac platforms.

If you're a developer and you've not got into iOS/Mac development yet, get involved.

Read More over at The Register - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/29/apple_wwdc/ 

New in MojoBlog 2.1 - {excerpt}

I have received an immensely high number of requests from users of my popular MojoBlog add-on to add an {excerpt} variable; to allow users to display a short, configurable excerpt of each blog entry's content.

As of MojoBlog 2.1, released last week, you can now use the {excerpt} tag along with the excerpt_words="" parameter to control and display your entry's excerpts. Here's an example of it in use.

{mojo:blog:entries excerpt_words="20"}
    {entries}
        <h2>{title}</h2>
        <p>{excerpt}</p>
        <p><a href="{url_title_path}">Read More</a></p>
    {/entries}
{/mojo:blog:entries}

The previous will display a list of all entry titles and excerpts (chopping off the content at 20 words), along with a Read More link. As always, do check out the documentation to see what else MojoBlog can do.