Powernapping is a practice of having a short sleep which terminates before the occurrence of deep sleep or slow-wave sleep (SWS), intended to quickly revitalize the subject from drowsiness. as per wikipedia. Somehow I’ve never been one for powernaps, but last night I was so knackered and still had so much to do that I decided to go and try have a powernap. Knackerness came from having walked to and from the gym in cold weather, it’s a thirty minute walk each way … anyhow.

Because I remember my past experience with powernaps I’d decided to try doing it with a movie on, that should keep me focused and get up soon enough right? Well, no, I woke up this morning, six hours later. Some powernap! And so I found that gambling didn’t work out at all this time and I probably won’t try having a powernap ever again.

However, I do remember once making good use of a technique much similar to powernapping, the so called meditation. I used to push myself into REM every midnight like clockwork, stay in REM for about ten or so minutes and then get back to work. Doing this I could sleep for an average of three or four hours a night without much trouble at all, but somehow, over the years I’ve gotten less and less punctual with my meditations until they finally became quite sporadic and to the current point where I’m lucky if I meditate three times a week.

This has got to change, as @gregbrand said, “just do it”. And he’s right, I should just stop whining and go fucking meditate every midnight when the alarm goes off. NOT pushing the alarm forward two hours and then just turning it off. No, I WILL meditate and I will get my previous ability of instameditation back. It’s going to take a lot of practice, but I’m gonna stick with it. Hell, if I can go to the gym every day for two hours, I should be able to take 20 minutes a night and force myself to meditate right?

Tags: improvement, life

Creativity is rather awesome, I’m certain we can all agree to that. Creativity drives the world forward, it opens our eyes to new scientific discoveries that sometimes help improve our lives, but mostly just make it more difficult for the average joe to understand. Hell, creativity even opens our eyes to new artistic discoveries, even though I don’t think much progress has been made on that front in the past century, regression even, but we’re picking up from even that in this new millenia that’s slowly getting old so much we might even stop calling it new.

But creativity has a dark side, a very brooding, very dark, very difficult side, a side that is almost unbearable, a side that gives “come to the dark side we have cookies” a whole new meaning, a side that … oh shut the fuck up, you get the picture right? It’s a very dark side.

Everybody creative, for the sake of argument I include myself in this crowd, will probably agree with me when I say that the biggest problem with creativity is the creativity itself. Anythign and everything constantly makes a creative’s mind give birth to new wonderful ideas,w hich all seem spectacular and awesome at the time. But when push comes to shove, you suddenly realise you’re already working on so many ideas you couldn’t possibly start working on another one. So you shelve it.

Once you have time for this wonderful idea, which might be ten minutes later or ten years later, you suddenly realise it’s turned cold and damp, very boring, moronic and even, dare I say, mediocre. In short, most of the ideas we come up with never get realised, never come to life and, quite simply, if someone less creative came upon one of them they would cherish and nurture the poor thing until it became … something.

So if you think you’re creative, slow the fuck down, write down everything you come up with no matter how small, and as soon as you find somebody uncreative give them some of your shelved ideas you’ll never have time to get to. Perhaps we can make the world a better place one uncreative person at a time.

Tags: commentary, food for thought, improvement

New year’s resolutions are a fairly popular phenomenae right about now and since I can’t remember ever making any and probably even if I had done them I forgot since they weren’t written down, I’ve decided to once for a change give you a normal blogpost. I will write down my very own new year’s resolutions without cynicism, without criticising others for making them, without even calling the population at large stupid for taking this time out of the year to make ground breaking decisions instead of revising their daily lives on a daily basis. No, that will come tomorrow or the day after that. Perhaps.

So, in year 2009 I will …

… do my best to achieve the target weight I’ve set for myself quite some time ago and haven’t managed to achieve. Despite what you might be thinking this isn’t about losing weight, I would like to put on ten more kilograms, but of muscle rather than fat. Fat is too easy.

… do everything in my power to make the next few steps to becoming filthy rich. No silly “oooh rich people be dumb because they take our money durr” from me, no, I will be rich. Rather sooner than later.

… do everything I can to make Twitulater the next best thing since sliced bread and at the very least as popular as TweetDeck. So far it’s looking promising, mustn’t fuck up now.

… buy a beemer because I’ve promised mum I’d save up for a vehicle and buy one instead of paying rent at home. But I’d also promised myself my first bought car would be a beemer. Saving up looking promising so far.

… become even more cynical and convoluted than I was so far. Why? Because I love fucking with people and there is no better way to fuck with them than not caring about most of the things you say and being completely reliant on your ability to repair any damage your words do.

… buy a cane because I’ve wanted one for ages.

… finish first year of uni. I have to, I must stop being so stupid about this whole thing and even though I don’t believe in formal education, the rest of the world does and if I ever want to have a backup plan in case all my become-filthy-rich schemes fail I need to have some sort of formal degree.

… try my best to screw with my girlfriend and learn as much as I can about the female psyche from her.

… not push my mental experiments on the girlfriend so far as to damager her or our relationship.

That’s it for now I think, have a lot of work to do next year, best get cracking right away.

Tags: funny, improvement, life

When I was redesigning my blog I had the marvelous idea of adding a reBlog widget to the sidebar on the left. The main reason behind this idea was that since my readers hopefully enjoy what i have to say they might also enjoy giving a glance or two to the things I read myself, seeming as how when it comes to authors of published works people are always interested in seeing where the influence and ideas come from. Therefore I decided to simplify this process for people and a conventional blogroll simply wasn’t enough.

Why it wasn’t enough, though, is a complex reason. Mainly I find them to be overly static, quite boring and rarely attracting any sort of attention. My reBlog feature on the other hand is useful to make my website a tad more dynamic, which is something google and other search engines love very much. it also serves as a simple way to be quickly involved in any buzz going through the blogosphere … also raising hits.

The most profound change in my life coming from adding reblog was that it suddenly made me realise how awesome feed readers are. I was probably wasting several hours daily on making sure I kept up to date on everything from slashdot to different blogs and more often than not I’d simply forget about a blog or two and then be happily surprised when I found them again later. This is why I promptly installed Akregator on my home computer and Vienna on my mac.

Vienna I don’t like so much, it’s better than others but I do have my qualms. Akregator is rather awesome though and now my life is simpler. So here’s to a simpler life via RSS feeds!

Tags: blog, feeds, improvement, life, time