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.

Currently on Woot’s homepage which is very likely to change:

Batten down your hatches and stock up on bottled water, because we’re about to hit you with a category-5 newsicane: Woot has been acquired by Amazon! This partnership with the 800-lb. gorilla of ecommerce is huge news for us, but probably won’t change much for you. See what our CEO has to say about it, then see what our monkeys have to say about it. The monkeys are a lot funkier.

Quoting Woot’s blog: Woot : Amazon, Woot, and You: But Mostly Woot

To be uncharacteristically serious for half a nanosecond, yes, Woot has signed an agreement to be acquired by Amazon. It shouldn’t change anything much for us or you after the deal closes, we just figured you’d like to know a few details. You see, when two companies meet over drinks and some light jazz and decide they’d like to get to know each other better… You know what? Our CEO said it best in his letter to us employees…

…

Information from Battle.net Real ID information page: Battle.net Real ID

One of our goals for the new Battle.net is to create the framework for an online gaming experience that is even more accessible, more engaging, and more entertaining than the previous Battle.net. Our new Real ID feature is an integral part of this effort, providing you with advanced ways for forming and maintaining meaningful relationships with your friends on the service.

Real ID is a completely voluntary and optional level of identity that keeps players connected across all of Battle.net. When you and a friend mutually agree to become Real ID friends, you’ll have access to a number of additional features that will enrich your social gaming experience in new and exciting ways.

Read the Real ID FAQ for additional details.

Real Names for Friends Your Real ID friends will appear under their real-life names on your friends list, alongside whatever characters they’re playing. Gone are the days of having to remember which of your friends is which. You’ll also see your friends’ real names when chatting, communicating in-game, or viewing their character’s profile.

Cross-Game Chat With Real ID, friends can now chat cross-game, cross-realm, and cross-faction across all supported Blizzard games. In World of Warcraft and need more players for your Icecrown Citadel raid? You check your Real ID friends list to see if anyone’s available, and sure enough, a couple of guildmates are playing a 2v2 ranked match in StarCraft II. Real ID makes it easy to ask them to come along.

Rich Presence See additional information on your friends list about what your Real ID friends are up to. Find out what your friends are doing and which games and modes they’re playing in real time. Invite that buddy just sitting around in Dalaran to play some StarCraft II with you without fear of interrupting a raid or a heated Wintergrasp match.

Broadcasts Broadcast a short status message for all of your Real ID friends to see, whether you want to issue a call-to-arms or let your friends know about an important change of plans. You can also read your friends’ broadcast messages on the “Recent Broadcasts” feed on the Battle.net welcome page — kind of a “corkboard” to leave messages to your friends when offline or busy.

Friend Once, See All Characters When you agree to become Real ID friends with another player, both of you will automatically see all the other’s characters on your friends list. You’ll even see any characters your friend creates in future Blizzard games, carrying your social network forward and helping you stay connected with the people you enjoy playing with most.

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

There’s a video “overview” of the new things on the post linked above. WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious” is a very exciting version with cool new stuffing in it.

Here’s the overview embedded

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.”

The songs, normally pop into my head or I listen to them on a commercial, on the radio, or are a suggestion that a friend made like a casual thing. Most of the time, I think of the song as if it could be a “soundtrack” for a said moment, and when they pop into my head it’s the “… hmmm, what’s the name of that song again? …”, as if it was in some kind of radio inside my head, sometimes It takes a lot of effort (and friend’s effort) to properly “tag” them.

Songs (you can listen to them via grooveshark, it’s awesome ):

• Toque Profundo – Cria Cuervos
• Tenacious D – The Metal
• Royksopp – Remind me
• Cake – Never, Never Gonna Gonna Give You Up
• Epica – The Obsessive Devotion
• The Prodigy – Poison
• Queen – Another one bites the dust
• Metallica – Eye of the Beholder
• Metallica – Am I Evil?
• Real Life – Send Me An Angel
• I feel pretty (West Side Story soundtrack)
• L. Carlton ft. Lee Ritenoir – Closed Door Jam
• A Perfect Circle – Pet (thanks to redzkull for sharing)
• Paul Simon – You Can Call Me Al

The words (or terms). Be them news, messages, forum posts, stumbled upon links, comments people say, I ALWAYS find an interesting word, be it new or known, if it’s still in my head by the end of the day, that was the word of the day . Sometimes a day has more than one interesting/awesome word, I use them as spares if the other day’s word isn’t as interesting.

Since I’m bilingual, I’ll have to apologize for the “mixed” words in english and spanish.

Words/terms:

• cochlea
• stem cell
• paranoia
• waffle : I ate wafflecakes (a mix between pancake and waffle; and btw, waffle > pancake)
• galantear
• acurrucarse
• cuchifrito : via a friend on twitter (mishyfu)
• groundhog : a friend at the office called another a marmot, a groundhog is a type of marmot.
• procrastinate : via two friends on twitter (redzkull and selene82)
• half
• snazzy : was mentioned in the ABCD’s (A Basic Course on Dvorak) first lesson.
• earthquake : sad day of the 7.0 quake near Port-au-Prince in Haiti, January 12, 2010.
• foster
• freno

Pictures are on my Project365 set on flickr (feel free to leave comments/critique there or here), some numbers are mismatched between the day of the year and the number of the picture, but that’s because I either didn’t take a picture on that day (for whatever reason), or I took a portrait or a picture that had a brand name in it, and I don’t wish to make free publicity OR shatter someone’s privacy.

The purpose of taking these “Project365″ pictures is to learn to do stuff with my camera or practice what I already know, and being able to produce one shareable picture a day sounded like a good challenge. The pictures in the set are at most just slightly edited (added the watermark, cropped, resized, and maybe some tint or hue manipulation).

Pictures:

My conclusion… hope is very ugly!

Esperanza/Katydid/Tettigoniidae on my ceiling