Another of the adverse effects of sleep-deprivation (on me) is that it alters my basic-bodily-functions’ schedule if you want to call it that, in short, it makes my head think the night is for being awake and the day for sleeping, screws my meal-schedule by altering the times at which I get hungry, etc. creating a jet-lag-like effect, which I honestly don’t like.

So, before I head to try to sleep during this night, I’ll share with you some tips to help you sleep better (except in cases of emergency work-related situations):

• When you feel you can’t sleep (i.e., insomnia), keep your eyes shut, stay in bed and breathe deeply, release your muscles, focus on all the sounds that are around, and try to keep your mind blank; helps me a lot, and even if I don’t get to sleep, at least I rest.
• Organize yourself, you should have time to sleep (except in cases of emergency), for more on that, you can check out this previous post of mine . Always try to go to sleep at the same time and wake up at the same time every day, helps maintain the rhythm.
• Having a reliable alarm clock for waking you up helps avoid those “should I be awake yet” wake-ups before time.
• Use your bed for sleeping and sleeping only (when you can help it), try not to read, watch tv, or other things you can do out of the bed, so that your head has an “as soon as a pillow touches my ear I shut down” pattern in it. For other things you can’t do out of bed, well… figure that out yourself.
• Try not to drink too much water or eat a lot shortly before going to bed, that way you won’t need to wake up during the night. This includes alcohol and coffee which might work as diuretics.
• It helps me to have the room totally dark and with a temperature from cool to cold, and as quiet as possible.

And there you go, I’ll now go to sleep the best I can before going to work tomorrow again.

Lenneth

I wasn’t lacking reasons to live, but here’s just a new one, and a strong one at that. This is the daughter of two of the dearest and closest people to me. Her parents gave me the title of co-parent a couple of months back, which I received with honor and with intention and decision to fulfill the role. Now that I see this beautiful child here, I can only feel much stronger in that position.

I’m posting here just to share a little bit the joy of having her in my life now.

I feel her like a little spot of pink in all the see of green that’s my life (I like the color green). And even if I can’t fully describe what I felt when I first saw her with words, I know I felt that all in the world will be safe and well if I can continue to see her well. I felt I could stand there by her side seeing her sleep for hours, and I felt the most tremendous burst of joy and tranquility that has ever filled me when I saw her and both her parents well after childbirth.

One of them (His Last Lecture), I saw because it was a featured video on YouTube, and the one on time management was recommended to me by a good teacher (and later showed in class). I’d like to share these things I learned, as well as the lectures I learned them from.

Check them out on YouTube, they’re there, in complete length:
His Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams (1:16:27)
His Lecture on Time Management (1:16:22)

So my recommendation is, take 2h 32m 49s of your time and check them out. I think that you, like me, will get more than that time back in “savings” with the stuff you learn from them .

If you’d rather see them embedded and/or want to read some points I learned from them, check out the rest of this post.

Some stuff I learned with these videos, and some other things I “knew” before but had not internalized until then are listed below, and I’m no genius, some of these might seem trivial or too basic for you, but these are concepts that changed how I looked at things:

• It’s important to have dreams/goals, and specific dreams/goals at that.
• You *can* get stuff by not accomplishing a dream.
• Fundamentals are key, or else the fancy stuff isn’t going to work.
• Barriers are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something.
• Don’t complain, just work harder. Do something, some actions change stuff, maybe not all of them do, but no-action doesn’t change anything.
• Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.
• If you’re not going to have fun, why do it?
• There’s stuff you don’t need to do, do the things that’s really important instead.
• When you can have computers do the “remembering” for you, it’s better and most of the times more reliable.
• Sometimes all you have to do is ask (nicely), and when you don’t know how to do something, ask someone who might know.
• Always make time (and schedule it) to eat, sleep and exercise.
• Opportunity Cost: Briefly put, time spent doing something “not worth it” or just doing nothing for a period of time, has very high opportunity costs, and hence it can be said that such time was squandered (spent carelessly), except those “nothings” that you need to do, e.g. rest.

Here are the videos…

Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

Randy Pausch Lecture: Time Management

1. Feeling bad and not doing anything won’t change the status quo.
2. Doing whatever you do (up to my knowledge) won’t change the past.

And, if feeling bad won’t change anything, why revolve around that feeling? Not everything happens as you wanted or planned for. Don’t get stuck in a moment when something happened and isn’t under your control, because the world will keep spinning, time will keep flowing, and life goes on. Continue living and moving, working with the knowledge you now have to evade future situations as the one you are feeling bad about at this very moment.

So, is there a difference between your current reality and your desired state? Work to change it, and if you can’t by any means change it, accept it. It’s WAY harder than it sounds, but it is a great “skill” to learn to incorporate in your M.O.

Note: The following text is a quote of the article on Roger Ebert on Wikipedia (see the original text here).

The Boulder Pledge is a personal promise, first coined by Roger Ebert in 1996, not to purchase anything offered through email spam. The pledge is worded by Ebert as follows:

“Under no circumstances will I ever purchase anything offered to me as the result of an unsolicited e-mail message. Nor will I forward chain letters, petitions, mass mailings, or virus warnings to large numbers of others. This is my contribution to the survival of the online community.”

Ebert coined the term during a panel at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Conference on World Affairs in 1996. He wrote the text which appears above and encouraged everyone to take the pledge. It was subsequently published in the December 1996 issue of Yahoo! Internet Life magazine, where Ebert had a regular column, under the title of “Enough! A Modest Proposal to End the Junk Mail Plague.”

Tartan pattern on one of my favorite shirts

A friend reminded me of my comfy-wear today. Here’s a short description of what I call comfy-wear.

• Tartan long sleeve shirt (pattern shown in the picture), preferably in full cotton or similar soft cloths, with the sleeves rolled up to just above the elbows and not tucked in, with a white full cotton t-shirt under it, and normally one pen and a permanent marker on the pocket.
• Thick and semi-loose cotton pants with big pockets, or soft loose jeans.
• Brown thick leather two-strap sandals with a back strap, these had a very comfortable-like-a-sneaker-shoe feeling to the straps, not the usual leather-to-your-skin sandals.
• All these in dark colors, wine-red, green, blue, brown, black.
• No rings, watches, bracelets, or other jewelry-type thingies.
• My backpack with all my stuff. I have, over the years learnt to consider it part of my clothing.

So this is how I used to go to school, and I loved it. I have had to stop using it because now I have a job with a big business/corporate atmosphere and go to school from work.

So, I was this guy, going around on those clothes, long hair worn loose and beard, with glasses, and on bad-hair days a simple loose ponytail, and/or a baseball hat without any logos in the same tartan pattern or plain, same dark colors mentioned before.

Yes, I’m a geek, and that’s how I like to dress since it is as comfortable as it gets, and no crummy/crufty/untidy aura that might be related to such loosely worn garments, needless to say I always remain clean good smelling.

And yes, I like tartan/plaid/checked-patterns on clothes.

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This post is about something I find interesting, something I have experienced over and over in life… the “second wind” effect.

During hardships one goes through some stages (I have not done any reading about this, but I will; so if you know a good read, let me know). I refer to hardships not as challenges you put yourself, but about something that goes the exact opposite of what you wanted it to go, and hurts a lot. Here are the stages I have gone through each and every time something has happened.

Please don’t question the logic, it’s my head after all…

1. Perception and shock. I become aware of the situation, and sometimes I’m paralyzed and can’t take any action related to what has happened, any action whatsoever for a second, a minute, an hour or even days.
2. Denial of what has just happened, my conscious knows, but my subconscious doesn’t accept it. I know it has happened, but still talk, and think as if it hadn’t.
3. Awareness, right, so now it has happened, and I know I have to deal with it, but that’s about all I know at this point, don’t know what to do.
4. Gloom, at this moment, I’m having a mix of emotions of anger, sadness and what not… I don’t know what to do, but at this stage, I’m more focused on my emotions than on the situation itself.
5. Despair, right after being sad/angry/<whatever else>, I start kicking and moving (figuratively speaking), but I keep sinking into those emotions, I can’t organize my thoughts, less can I organize my actions, I still don’t know what to do.
6. The halting, knowing that I don’t know what to do (haha, ok I couldn’t put it on other words), and seeing that my past actions didn’t have any effect, I lose hope and slowly start not doing anything at all whatsoever, and start to give up on the situation, and think I won’t be able to solve anything, and can’t go on. This is when anger fades away.
7. The drag, right after I think I can’t go any further I keep taking steps realizing that I was underestimating myself, note, this realization is silent. The “distance” I go “dragging” is probably as far as all the other stages mentioned above. I’m still not solving anything, just going along.
8. Solace, somehow without a solution I find solace in my steps, somehow I’m not “dragging” anymore but haven’t stopped moving. I realize that everything is clean and clear, at this moment is where acceptance takes place.
9. Solution, so, when I have ‘peace’ solutions come either by themselves, or made by myself.

So, what happens in (7) is more or less what is described here: Wikipedia; Second Wind.

I’m at stage 9 of a recent event, and now that I can think I can ask myself this question. Why do solutions come AFTER all that? haha.

Sometimes the only thing that can contain a my thoughts sometimes, is a piece of paper that is later scrapped after writing, and thrown away, to be found and read a long time after it has become irrelevant.

Something interesting happened today, I got a headache because of being angry at a situation. Yup, only a headache.

This headache/situation is because of a common practice, actually the MO of a lot of companies, they just expect you to be ignorant, and treat you like you are. So here I am, semi-ranting.

What would be the best sort of container for my thoughts? (I sometimes wonder).

• Music, I have been working on learning how to play guitar (classical/nylon strings).
• Prose, well, this blog is one, notebooks and journals are other ways of it.
• Verse, the fact that I stopped writing these long time ago, doesn’t mean I have forgotten.
• Code, yes… sometimes I can store my thoughts in programming languages… sue me for being geeky.
• Drawing, I’m not very talented at this, all I do is doodle most of the time.
• I know there are lots of ways more, care to suggest any? and or support any of the previous?

The question would actually be, coming from me… what would you pay attention the most? (leave comments, if you put [private] anywhere in the message, I wont publish it).

Such posts are called by me puddles of ink, mere blobs of (could be virtual) ink, that have no meaning, unless you’re a likeminded person. Please bear with me when all I have to write is that, like now. This puddle spree is definitely going to end, and this blog will meet its purpose soon enough when I start writing what you guys want to read.