Inchoate

Google & Gillette

I've just learnt (ok, been told, and not bothered to look it up since its only mention here is as a lead-in to the main guts of this blog, but anyway...) that Google & Gillette were voted best places to work for. This got me thinking of an old The Onion story, one of their, IMO, best: Fuck everything, we're doing five blades. Fantastic!

Funny fare

Just booked a day (and night) in Paris on Valentine's Day and the fare came to £69. I dunno, I thought it was amusing...

Polysleeping update

I've been going on & off the polyphasic sleep schedule as needs must since Christmas. I have maintained the naps during the day only skipping the evening ones due to a hectic social life. I've fallen asleep in London pubs but it really isn't that cool and kinda freaks people out... So evenings now I'll stay awake and hit the mattress for a few hours at night.

Anyway, so yesterday I tried a full day awake - 8:30am to 1:30am last night, rising at about 8am this morning. This is less sleep than I used to have but not dramatically. I have no problem with sleeping too little for a single night; it's only when it's compounded it starts to get to me. What was interesting was that when I woke I felt qualitatively different from my previous mixed schedule - I came 'round with an aching tiredness that I'd more or less gone to sleep with. I had all those "just woken" symptoms like stuffier nose, red eyes, feeling groggy, all despite having made a point of hydrating before bed. So with my single datapoint to form a hypothesis I'd wonder whether it's actually the staying awake for a long period that is the factor or a factor that contributes, rather than or as much as volume or type of sleep.

I do realise this is only one datapoint but quite frankly I have no real intention of repeating this as an experiment... Back to naps for me!

Impressions, a month in

I'm finding the hybrid model entirely workable. The naps during the day, even when taken in less than lavish environs (cold marble sink in a toilet) are really refreshing and enable a useful night awake as & when needed. I'd like to spend more time awake and fewer nights asleep. It's about a 1:1 ratio at the moment I think but even at this point it's definitely a success: I'm getting more done, feeling fresher during the day, and have eliminated all traces of insomnia.

10K Day

Emir came up with the idea of having a 10000th day party on your 10,000th day alive. A bit like a birthday but far less frequent, and much more decimal-centric.

Curious when mine was, since I knew it'd long since passed, I wrote a little calculator: find your 10K Day. If like me you're older than 27.5 you can check your 20K day. I don't think anyone's made it quite to 40K days...

Kettlebell Eagle Loop deadlift

I need to strengthen my back and legs for the heavier weights I'm working on. This got me thinking...

Sub-talar joint strength

Look Ma, no hands!
(This is on my right foot which had the surgery. My left foot can do this relatively easily.)

Woohoo!

The act of balancing on a beam (or kettlebell in this case) directly targets the subtalar joint, the one that got hosed by my climbing antics in both my feet. Still a little unsteady as you can see by the blur but I was holding it up there easily long enough for the 10s camera timer to fire. It's also on a slightly long exposure so any wild waving around would've been caught too. But there wasn't any! Well, ok, not much ;-)

Gym logs fixed

Down the side of the blog here there's a couple of links to my training log. A rather empty log that's for sure. So I've restarted training in the last week, and luvvin' it.

Also, the links were actually broken as the London Kettlebells guys revamped their site. Anyway, they're all fixed now. My day-to-day sport logs at workdiary (and anything major I'll brag mention over at LKB blog).

Crazy dating

Couple of amusing stories about the quest for love (or lurrve).

``A parrot owner was alerted to his girlfriend's infidelity when his talkative pet let the cat out of the bag by squawking "I love you Gary".''

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4619764.stm
(Thanks Claire for that!)

This came up last month,

``MARSEILLES, France -- Skirt-chasing playboy Daniel Anceneaux spent weeks talking with a sensual woman on the Internet before arranging a romantic rendezvous at a remote beach -- and discovering that his
on-line sweetie of six months was his own mother!''

http://entertainment.tv.yahoo.com/news/wwn/20051209/113414040002.html

This one is staggering. Just mulling it over and how it would affect a family's dynamic blows my mind. Imagine what the father must think. Not a good one!

Paul

About paulm.com

A couple of years ago it occurred to me that one of the first pages I hit on finding an interesting website is its "about" page. Not always being the quickest on the uptake, it just occurred to me 'I'¹ don't have a specific "about" page. Thanks to the power of polyphasic sleep and procrastination of more important tasks (i.e. all of them) I now do: about paulm.com.

Google start date: 20th Feb

Spoke with Google today and we made my start date official, it's 20th Feb, a couple of weeks after my originally proposed date (didn't feel like I could fit everything in). It's amazing the shift in perception when there's a firm date to aim for versus a vague provisional figure as there was before. Now to box this place up... *slits wrists*

Message from the Underground

One for the BDSM crowd,

(Southfields, northbound, 2005/11/30. I think it's still displaying that.)

Discharged from physio

At 08:25 this morning my physio decided there wasn't much more she could do for me long-term and that I was fit to take care of my own care.

(The irony of being up at 2am the night-before-starting-work doing experimental cooking with tabasco, popcorn, and whisky wasn't lost...)

I'm at a stage where I can walk pretty much like a normal person biomechanically. I say "pretty much" since I still have to avoid full heel impact so there's a bit of difference in my gait in that I tend to land flat-footed. It's also still uncomfortable walking generally so I try to avoid long distances. That said, with the aid of some mulled wine I managed to stay on my feet for much of the day during Santacon this year finally needing to be carried across a bridge after about 7hrs or so.

So my discharge form physio has occurred seven and a half months after my original accident. What's been interesting over the last few months is that each time I've been into physio I've had the impression I haven't improved too much and then when I've done the reference exercises it's clear there has been some improvement, sometimes marked.

For the physiologically curious, those references exercises are as follows...

Hot popcorn

Random late night food idea that panned out : popcorn with tabasco. Cover the bottom of the pan with oil (try stir-fry oil for an extra smoky nutty twist) and add a tablespoon or so of tabasco. Boil up and add the popcorn. Make as usual. That's it really.

The kick is deceptive: the cayenne pepper has a mild mid kick, a pause, then the whammy. Nice. A little sugar and a few whisky shots didn't seem to go amiss either.

Have fun!

discontinuity of civil time

A discontinuity of civil time occurred this morning at midnight on New Year's Eve... But that's not the reason for the number of police out in London last night. As the clocks struck 12 (or 00) there was a leap second inserted to correct for the time getting fractionally out of step with the Earth's rotation, thus causing a momentary discontinuity. The last time this happened was seven years ago.

How this happens: the same second happens twice, represented differently,

  2005-12-31 23.59.60 <-- leap second
  2006-01-01 00.00.00

Those are both the same times (00.60 is 01.00 so 59+01 = 00.00 and so on). More technical background on the Network Time Protocol leap second page.

Unfortunately for some computers that implement the time shift by going back in time by a second (as opposed to say holding the time for that second or "slewing" [sliding]) this can cause problems. Whose idea was it to risk computer bugs on the most hungover day of the year?

PS Have a great 2006!