Vimal can’t hack WHAT?

I’ve struggled with sleep issues for most of my adult life. The issues are all over the disorder map, so discussing them all would take a while, and would inadvertently give out more personal information than i’d like. (nah, Just kidding, I’m an exhibitionist of the nth order).

Observation 1: On the rare occassions that I go to bed on or before 11pm, like other human sheep-beings, I end up needing close to 9 hours of sleep to be satisfied.


Observation 2: Ditto for the episodes of sleeping between 2am and 4am. 9 hours seems to be my norm.


Obviously I’m not one of those freaks, who need just 5 hours of sleep to get by[no offense to said freaks].

But WAIT… there’s more.
Over the past 5 years, i’ve discovered that, its possible to hack/mod my circadian rhythms by sleeping later and later, and waking up MUCH later. My body seems to ignore ‘normal’ signals like, sunlight in my face and the birds chirping and screeching, that works on regular people. After weeks of this schedule, I was convinced I had a Vampire gene in me somewhere.

Sleeping from 9 to 5 when the world toils away is kinda cool in a creepy kind of way.
It gives the creeps to lots of friends when they realize that the world is asleep for the most part when my mind is most active. In the end, I decided to skip the Vampire meme and stick with ‘Geekus nocturnalis’.

All is well with the circadian world, until exam time approaches. Unfortunately, Kerala University is run by a bunch of boring ‘normal’ sheeple who work 9 to 5. Hence, the big spanner in my sleepworks. How do you write an exam, when your brain is just about ready to shut down, after a long night of uber-unProductive Internet surfing and trolling… It boggles the mind.

I finally had to put my foot down yesterday. Translation:By some miracle, I managed to doze off at 11pm. Then, slept lightly for 3 hours, wake at 2am; Then FORCE myself to dream about ‘brazilian hotties who are great cooks’ , and sleep another 2 hours. (I know, I must be getting old when I have to FORCE myself to do these mundane things) The short story is I’m awake and jumping much before dawn.
Things I’ve done since then: Took an hour-long stroll along the old-fashioned surroundings outside my lodge; walked past the village temple and marvelled at all the regulars who drop-by to make their peace with the maker at sunrise. This boggles the mind. But all in all, it was a pretty novel experience.

I wonder if I can keep this up untll my brain fails-over to my sun-safe defaults at noon. (<- notice the jargon overload; thats the sleep deprivation talking.)
No wonder…. I’m feeling sleepy already.

arghhh. FAIL.

o__0

I’m looking at a mountain of text in front of me: Roger Pressman’s “Software Engineering: A practitioner’s approach”. Yes, the seminal work in the field of Software Engineering. or so they say. Now the reason this feels like a mountain of text is because I have an Engineering paper by the same name in less than 14 hours from now. And i’m no practitioner whatchacallit.

I wonder if ‘brain freeze’ happens to everyone or is it just lazy nerds like me. In other circumstances(namely, in the pursuit of trivial knowledge), I would have picked up the book from a store, paid cash, just to check it out. But, when, it becomes part of my academic curriculum, I feel like puking all over it. I really need to see a shrink/therapist about this. Is this some kind of unconscious rebellion against enforced learning… I really love to learn new things; except when someone tells me I HAVE TO. Thats when the whole thing becomes an exercise in trying to read a single paragraph without being distracted.

“Excuses! Excuses!” (as a wise man once told me on IRC)

This is going to be one long night.

Signing off… with some nerdy stats.
hddtemp:49 degrees Centigrade
CPUtemp: 58 degrees Centigrade
uptime: 1:45
MOOD: dazed/distracted

Hardware design by BMW

Originally uploaded by vimalg2

I read that a certain design wing of BMW is responsible for the curvy black
and white design for my Acer Gemstone series laptop.
Ogle away, folks

Macbook’s got nothing on this baby. (yes, its flamebait, I know)

Nokia E51

Originally uploaded by joerg b.

One magnificently engineered telecommunications device.

A classic Nokia with all the attributes that made Nokia ubiquitous with ‘cell phone’ several years ago when I was just a kid.

Great battery life, excellent reception, a tactile keypad that’s a joy to use, and all the rest of the ‘features’ that today’s kids take for granted. This is not the mobile-camera for shutter-bugs or morons who cant tell a phone from a camera or an mp3 player. Its a true blue phone. It doesn’t hurt that it has a lot of Blackberry-esque features from its E-series pedigree. And the integrated Wi-Fi is something that no other vendor offers at this price point or this size. (can Blackberry or SE beat the 12mm thickness?)

The complete specs are available here [GSMarena]

Unfortunately, I’m still saving up for this baby.

um… er…

That’s just it.

This is the exact same thought process that goes thru my mind, any time I hit compose Post on any blogging/CMS platform. I’m not exactly an established writer or any kind of writer by a long shot. So, I can’t really bitch about having chronic ‘Writer’s Block’.

However, what I seem to be extraordinarily verbose about, is doing this woe-is-me routine upon not being able to do something. UNIX error messages anyone?. i.e No output if everything goes A-Ok.

So with a little creative captioning and a nice dark n moody Wordpress theme, the adventure begins all over again. I have no clue what I’m going to write about in here. I expect i’ll write more of these bitch-about-how-my-life-sucks-but-nah-not-really kind of posts, that anyone but myself will loathe reading a few months from now. C’mon Who doesn’t love a secret(not) diary?

Composing my thoughts and arguments into a structured format is something that I aim to learn from this endeavour. I want to make mistakes and I want the whole world to point them out to me.

Do I sound like a masochist just now? Well, that can’t be helped. I have a wee bit of all the various kinds of neuroses. Pick one. Bring it on…