Sleep, damn it!

I should be sleeping right now, but I'm not. Went to bed a couple of hours early and immediately fell asleep. Waking up a corresponding couple hours early would be fine, but no, I wake up after 4 of my normal 8 hours of sleep. Damn it.

Rather than lie there and try to fall back to sleep, which is what I normally do, I decide to get up. Felt fine going into the shower but sleepy afterwards. Ok brain, make up your mind, damn it.

Tried to go back to bed and had once of those waking sleep experiences where it feels like you've been lying there for 10 minutes and haven't slept, but it's an hour later. Brain felt awake again so up I got. Don't feel like going back to sleep but I feel tired and no where near the top of my game. Guess I won't be doing any Nobel price research today. Damn it.

Still, if I can stay awake till my normal bed time I can't imagine this happening tomorrow. Ok, at least there's hope. This would be so much easier if I could store sleep like electricity in a battery. Then I'd know where I stood, damn it.

At least it's a nice day out there, which is some small compensation.

Starbucks Karma

I like my Starbucks espresso drinks. A lot. And I think I've collected a lot of Starbucks karma in the cosmic bank (they've certainly collected a lot of my money in their bank).

For well over 10 years my work place has never been more than a 5 minute walk away from a Starbucks. A situation I took great advantage of. That all changed with my new job where the closest Starbucks clocked in at a 10 minute walk!

Starbucks Karma to the rescue.

After 7 months of exposure to my karmic caffeine distortion field the empty space across the street from work has morphed into a Starbucks. Walking distance, 2 minutes. 3 if I hold the door open for someone.

Now, if they were only open at 2 in the morning . . .

I Like My Mac, But ...

I'm really enjoying my PowerBook. It isn't perfect, but if I had it to buy again I wouldn't hesitate. But you know . . . it's just a computer. Visually more elegant than a Wintel or Unix system, and far more secure than any Microsoft OS, but just a computer.

I simply can't relate to some of the "fans" that comprise a segment of Apple users. At Overclockers.com they joked about gutting a G5 Mac and replacing the insides with a PC and they got death threats! A new store just opened in San Francisco and you have a magnified version of the A&B Sound boxing day sale. Too bad someone from Overclockers didn't show up at the store opening offering conversion kits to the people in line. It's San Francisco, they could have called it performance art. Mac users are all about the art, right?

At work, where I support a web based course delivery product, a Mac user flamed us because of a bug (er, issue) that affected a small segment of our Mac users on specific versions of Safari, an unsupported browser. It wasn't like he couldn't use a supported browser. Never-the-less, we were "derelict" and he would push his Institution to move towards "one of the many alternatives." Ah, retrain an entire Institution's teaching and technical staff and endure the pain and cost of product turnover because less than 1% of their user base is having problems and are too inflexible to switch to a supported browser. To borrow a phrase from A Cute Toaster, "Jeebus". Turns out we'd issued a patch that fixed the problem 2 days previous.

I like my Mac, and hope Apple has a long future of providing their computing vision - perhaps even at a reasonable price - but it's just a computer.

Books:
Thief of Time - Terry Pratchett