The American Way of Marmalade.

Yet again, I'm looking for a job. The contract position I was in will end next friday and the additional projects they wanted me to work on didn't get approval from the parent company in time, so here I am. If anyone knows of any programming positions, preferably in web development, please let me know.

Obama swore to preserve, protect, and defend the constitution, and then no more than 10 minutes later he indicated that he would violate it.

The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works — whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public's dollars will be held to account — to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day — because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.

The constitution says nothing about giving the government the power to enact programs at taxpayer expense to create jobs with "decent" wages, make health care affordable, and maintain the dignity of retirees, as if any of that were possible in the first place. It does however prohibit those and all other actions that are not explicitly granted to the federal government. If Obama follows up on this assertion, he will have violated the constitution and his oath to preserve it. How long do you think it'll take?

If anyone reading is interested in history, or even just looking for some good stories to listen to, I wholeheartedly recommend Hardcore History with Dan Carlin. (http://www.dancarlin.com/disp.php/hharchive) I've listened to several episodes so far. Dan Carlin can really tell a compelling story. In particular, the three part series on the Punic Wars was fascinating. I had no idea what the Punic Wars were before listening and I was hooked the whole time. I've also listened to Bubonic Nukes, Desperate Times, Nazi Tidbits, and Apache Tears. All of them were very good stories well worth listening to.

On election night, like many people, I went out with some friends to watch the election coverage. Unlike those people, I had a little map with numbers and McCain/Obama predictions on it. I was playing the swing state drinking game that Dan came up with a few days earlier. We took the list of swing states from pollster.com and bet on which way they would go. For each one we got wrong we took as many shots as they have electoral votes divided by ten. My bets were:

Montana	Obama
North Dakota	Obama
Missouri	Obama
Indiana	McCain
Ohio	Obama
North Carolina	Obama
Florida	McCain
Georgia	McCain

I didn't know how to pick. The obvious way to go would be on racism, states with a lot of good old boys probably would never vote for a black person. I went a different way though. I took the list of states with paperless voting systems and gave those to McCain, and the rest to Obama. In the probably misquoted words of Joseph Stalin, "It's not the people who vote that counts, it's the people who count the votes."

My guesses turned out ok. I got Georgia, Indiana, Montana, and North Dakota wrong. As the night went on and our states weren't being called we just went with the current poll numbers. The only problem with the game was it was too slow paced to do by itself, you need something to take up the time between poll closings.

In other election related stuff, Dan pointed out the following wikigroan:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumbing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_the_Plumber

Edit: I remembered what it was I forgot about. Politicians always make sure their family is dressed in red white and blue whenever they're in public, and especially on tv. When Obama's family came out after his speech on Tuesday, they didn't follow this unwritten rule.



His family wearing black and red, the colors of the anarcho-syndicalist/communist flag! Also, the colors of the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Federation! Finally, the truth comes out!

Congratulations on surviving doomsday. If you're looking for clever and insightful quips relating to the LHC, I recommend you check out the slashdot thread. My favorite comment, and one that would make the end of the world worthwhile?

Alien species are certainly going to take pictures of that (the black hole that swallowed the planet) and add the words EPIC FAIL on top.

And to keep you up to date on whether the LHC has destroyed the world yet, go to http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/. (rss)

If you haven't heard of miracle fruit on your favorite social news site, you should check it out. It's a berry native to Africa, and when you suck on it for a while and then eat sour fruits like lemons and grapefruit, they taste sweet and delicious. I recently ordered some miracle fruit tablets from here and tried it out. I had all kinds of foods; lemons, grapefruit, grapes, 85% cocoa chocolate, mustard, peanut butter, marshmallows, jalapenos, gin, whiskey, angostura bitters, cheese, and probably more I can't recall at the moment. My roommates all got miraculized and ate all these things. The effect was as advertised for sour and citrus tasting fruits. Lemons were lemonade, grapefruits were just delicious, and the mustard also tasted like honey mustard. Most other things weren't affected at all, or had their flavor slightly diminished. It was a very interesting experiment, and I would do it again for fun with other people, but it's not convenient enough (yet) for this to be a sugar substitute like some people have talked about. We thought that it would make sense in a gum, since you hold that in your mouth like you have to do with this. So whoever out there makes that product, you owe me a dollar.

5 months to the day after I was laid off, I have a new job. I'm developing for a social networking site in PHP. The office is less than a mile from my house, and while I liked having lunch with the LUG people once a week it is convenient to be that close. I also have to use Windows on my work computer, which is annoying, but I'm working around it. I think it'll be an ok gig, and I'm glad to have a serious job again.

This summer I'm going to try and grow some food. I've planted a few things, as you can see here:




In the small planter is basil, oregano, mint, and rosemary. In the big one is a tomato plant and an onion.

I have a few questions for the gardeners reading this. The basil, and to a lesser extent the mint, don't look like they're doing to well. Is this just the cold weather? It gets down to the low 40's sometimes at night and I figure it's just not liking that. The onion's wierd too. You can see light brown parts on its shoots. They started doing that when it was living in a bowl of water in my living room (that plant started out as food and sprouted before we ate it, so we planted it). It got worse while it was in the pot you see in the herb picture. I trimmed the tan bits that got hard. Is this an expected behavior? I don't know what to make of it.

According to this article, employees for the Zappos call center are offered a bonus to quit after their training period is over. The $1000 to quit is supposed to get rid of people who don't care about the work and just want the money. That doesn't make sense to me. If I worked in a call center, it wouldn't be for my love of fielding angry customer calls every day, it would be for the money. And given that, I would not take this deal. By staying on the job and being good at it I can make much more money in the long run than this $1000 one time payday. It seems to me that this works better at filtering out dummies.

It doesn't matter if you've never heard of what is being reviewed on zero punctuation, check it out anyway. This is the funniest review I've heard in a long time.

Zero Punctuation reviews Army of Two

It's been a while since my last post because I still don't have internet at home. It's getting ridiculous and I'm going to have to take charge on this issue soon. But anyway, I'm able to post now because I have a new job! (kinda) I'm a contractor for the IIT Institute of Design to build their new contact management (aka "spamming") application. It's low pay, but at least it's money coming in.

PyCon was two weekends ago, and it was great. I learned a lot from the presentations there, and practically every company represented was hiring for python jobs. I had an interview for a full time position last week and it's looking good, but nothing's final on that yet. It'd be a great job, I hope I get it.

Someone blogged a whole series of Garfield cartoons in which they removed Garfield. The cartoons were greatly improved, which may or may not be due to my intense loathing of Garfield. My particular favorite was this one, hopefully you take it the same way I did:

I think I've learned everything I can from this experiment. I just made it through the most backwards days without much of a problem, so there's no reason to keep posting "slept as scheduled, nothing new to report" every day. Since I am posting today though, I went to bed on Day 8 and woke up on schedule. I was a bit tired yesterday morning and got tired early last night. I went to sleep at about 2:30 pm instead of the scheduled 4pm and woke up at 11 pm on the morning of day 10. I'll continue 28 hour-ing until I get back to sleeping at night, but this is the last post on the subject.

As I said before, the experiment was a success. I definitely think it's possible to do this schedule long term. The social impact was the major problem for me, and that could not matter or be abated more easily by other people. If you're curious about it and have a flexible work schedule, you should definitely give it a try. At the very least you have another story to tell people at parties. :)

This blog seems to be getting mighty boring. No more drama* of "Will he be exausted? Will he be wide awake?" I've been doing pretty well the last few days. I shifted my sleep an hour last night, 9am to 5pm instead of 8-4. I woke up tired, but no more tired than a normal day. I was still a little tired through the night but daylight woke me up pretty well. I imagine there's some degree of wakefulness that comes with daylight that would be hard to shake long term, but I think it's safe to say that the 28 hour day is definitely doable at this point. Today and tomorrow are the most backwards days and I don't foresee any problems. The only thing that will cause me to stop this experiment at the end of two weeks, and I will be stopping, is the social impact. It's hard to attend events or meet with people when you're asleep for large chunks of most days and awake all night. Especially when you consider that I'm giving up all that in exchange for only 8 extra wakeful hours a week, it's not worth it to me.

* If you use the term "drama" very loosely.

Eleven hours of uninterrupted sleep has never been sweeter. After last night, today was no problem. I was about ready to give up yesterday morning, but if it's anything like this the rest of the week it'll be no problem to finish. The only thing that won't go away though is the social difficulties. It's hard to get out and go anywhere with anyone when you have to do math to make sure you'll be awake then first. That's what will probably cause me to give this up if anything.

Today was a lot like yesterday. I didn't get to sleep until 2:30 or 3 am, and I woke up at 6 am. This time though, I didn't take a nap. Hopefully I can be tired enough to break my internal alarm clock. If I'm up and doing things then I'm not tired, but if I laze about or lie down then I'll be ready to fall asleep pretty quickly. Does that mean my body is willing to believe that any time during the day is bedtime if I tell it so? Or am I just sleep deprived? Nothing else noteworthy happened today. Since this is day two of insufficient sleep I'm going to bed at 2 am instead of 4 and still getting up at 12 pm tomorrow. I can't deal with this 4 hour nonsense anymore.

I messed up a bit today. Last night I didn't actually get to bed until 9 pm or so, and I woke up at 2 am and couldn't get back to sleep. Then I stayed up all day without much trouble until about 3 pm, when I fell asleep until about 5:30 pm. I didn't think I was that tired, the day seemed pretty tolerable beforehand. It seems that my internal clock still hasn't figured out this 28 hour business. Hopefully it gets it together soon so I can sleep through a whole night. This probably isn't too big a deal, if I were doing this long term stuff like that would happen anyway. You can't stay so regimented all the time.

In stark contrast to yesterday, today was a breeze. I went to sleep at 4 pm thursday, and woke up at midnight. I was really tired yesterday so I was literally in bed and on my way to sleepyland at 4 pm exactly. I figured I would be a rock until midnight, but I woke up a couple times in the night, at least at 6 and 7:30, possibly once more at 9 but I'm not sure. I find the timing of those awakenings interesting because it is evidence for what I read a while back that a sleep cycle takes about an hour and a half to complete. The conclusion of that article was that you'd wake much more rested if you woke up at the end of a cycle instead of as you go into one, which is where 8 hours would be.

I woke up a little tired today, but not nearly as much as yesterday. I got over that pretty quickly and was actually pretty normally awake all day until about 2 pm. I took my shower at 10 am and biked out to find some internet, so that probably helped my wakefulness. I went to a coffee shop at 3:30 or so to keep myself going until bed time, and that worked like a charm. Considering that some people need multiple cups of coffee and need them in the morning to get going, I'm going to call this an acceptably normal day.

Today could be a false positive though. This is the first day where I had a relatively normal schedule - sleeping when it's dark and awake for mostly daylight hours. I wouldn't be surprised if that's behind how easy today was. Tomorrow is even better in that regard, awake 4 am to midnight. I wonder if I could have made this transition easier by moving these days closer to the beginning. If any of you spectators try this out, keep this in mind and see how it goes.

It's 8:15, looks like I'm a little late to bed tonight. Oh well, I'm not too tired yet.

Today was tough. I had plans this "morning" at 8 pm Wednesday so I had to shift my sleep a bit. I slept from 11 am to 7 pm Wednesday, and I woke up tired. I stayed that way until about 11 pm or midnight, and then I was satisfactorily awake until about 5 am. from then on I was counting the hours until I get to sleep again with only a small reprieve when the sun came up. Then I met some people for lunch downtown at 1 pm and I biked there to avoid parking difficulties. Either the biking or the cold air woke me up pretty well, maybe I'll work in more biking for the next few days.

One thing that makes this a little easier is my alarm clock, the Neverlate 7-day Alarm Clock. I have it set up to go off at the right time each day so I don't have to think about the clock at all. But wait, you say, that's a 7 day alarm clock and your week only has 6 days! Yes, I have both the Thursday alarm and Friday alarm waking me up tomorrow morning at 11:59 pm and 12 am. Even outside of this crazy 28 hour experiment I like that clock so if you're in the market, it's a good choice.

I don't know if this is significant or if it's just the weather, but I get cold as I get to 16 hours of wakefulness. I think I read about that being something the body does to prepare for sleep, so if that's true then I'm not adjusted much if at all. I guess I can't really expect that by day 3, but I can hope.

I got some response from my day 1 post, so I'll continue posting updates publicly.

I haven't researched anyone's experiences with the 28 hour day, so everything I do will pretty much be guesses. It didn't seem like there was much information about it online anyway when I did look, but I'll undoubtedly get bored tomorrow night and check again. I intend to give this a fair shot for 2 weeks and then review if it's worth continuing.

I went to sleep last night at 8:20 am Tuesday and woke up at 3:40 pm Tuesday without my alarm. It was surprising that I didn't even sleep the whole 8 hours. I was a bit more tired than usual shortly before bed, but today I was very tired from about 4 am onward. I'm still getting tired at about 1 am and 4 am specifically, both times that I've been going to sleep normally lately, and then generally throughout the nighttime. As I write this it's daytime again and the tiredness is subsiding a little, but it could be that my roommates are awake to talk to.

One thing to make sure of before you start with 28 hour days: make sure you have enough to do to fill those 28 hours, or else you'll be very bored in the middle of the night. I have plenty of web projects I can work on and a few household things I can do, but my home internet doesn't work at the moment so I spent a lot of today at Dominics using their wifi. That's probably a good thing anyway; I tend to get more done when I get out of the usual environment. So far it seems like if you're going to be doing anything that requires much brain power you should do it earlier in the day and reserve the time before bed for catching up on TV or whatever entertainment you want to do. Yesterday I would have said the last few hours would be my work free zone, but today I was feeling spent since 4 am or so (8 hours before bedtime). I don't know how it'll be in a week. Since I write this at the end of the day I guess you'll be able to judge for yourself by how coherently I'm writing. :)