Author: Miriam

Polyphasic Sleep

MiriamLeave a comment

Colin will laugh when he hears this but I’m thinking about giving polyphasic sleep a try.

Polyphasic sleep is (according to Wikipedia)

a sleep pattern intended to reduce sleep time to 2–5 hours daily. This is achieved by spreading out sleep into short naps of around 20–45 minutes throughout the day.

The upshot of which is, of course, that you get a whole lot more awake time. Apparently once you get the hang of it you feel more alert than before you started. If I do this (and its a very big if because I’m not exactly known for following through with things) then I’m thinking that 11pm, 3am, 7am, 11am, 3pm etc sleeps will be the go (based on my timetable). I’ll also obviously have to figure out a way of doing this without bothering Colin.

The next couple of days will tell whether I actually start this and from then I’ll blog my progress.

This has, of course, been inspired by reading Steve Pavlina’s log outlining his marvelously successful attempt. He’s switched back to sleeping normally now but he kept it up for several months and only switched because of social reasons. If you’re interested in polyphasic sleep its well worth a read.

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my coffee is too acidic

Miriam1 Comment

I’ve been having a go at doing things properly when I make coffee over the past couple of days and my problem seems to be fairly consistant. My coffee isn’t bitter enough, it tastes a little acidic and with the one sugar I am used to having tastes a little sickly.

So I’m after some advice, coffee snobs. What is the likely cause?? Bad coffee, not fresh enough, wrong temperature, what?

On the other hand I seem to have a natural talent for making the foam. It consistantly has a lovely texture and body to it.

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Intelligence and Talent vs Hard Work

Miriam2 Comments

The most recent episode in G’day Worlds “Melbourne’s Leaders” series – Brian Watson, Investment Banker – is fascinating for a number of reasons and everybody should go check it out, however one thing in particular got me thinking. Early on in the show they get talking about luck in business and Cam mentioned a lesson he’d been teaching his boys: “Being intelligent is terrific but being intelligent in and of itself doesn’t get you anywhere you need to work hard as well you can’t just coast on the fact that you’re intelligent”.

I am an intelligent person. I’m not telling you this to boast, and I’m not making this statement without anything to support it either. I have several learning disabilities and in the course of diagnosing them I’ve had more than a few IQ tests and its right up there, but that’s not the point.

I’ve been coasting on my intelligence my entire life. Throughout high school I did virtually no homework and I payed minimal attention at school. I was far more likely to be found reading a book under my desk than taking notes in class.

My reports always went along the lines of “Miriam’s natural linguistic ability has allowed her to achieve high results in her listening and speaking exams; however…” (that was my french teacher) and “Miriam has the ability to top the year in maths; however…”

In year 12 I was diagnosed with ADHD which sort of explained my difficulty concentrating and studying and once I got on my Ritalin things picked up a bit. I did hundreds of past papers and achieved fairly well in the HSC.

But the really stupid thing?? I’m not on my Ritalin anymore. I ran out of scripts almost two years ago and haven’t gotten around to getting another one. So here I am again, riding on my intelligence, and when you have 12 weeks to learn all the content for four subjects, intelligence doesn’t cut it. So my uni results went from good, to mediocre, to poor… and then I failed a subject last semester.

So here’s my advice to you. If you’re fairly average, remember that hard work will get you 90% of the way; and If you’re intelligent, keep in mind that even if intelligence has taken you this far by itself it will fail you eventually. Most of all though, if there is a barrier to your success and you know about it, do something about it!

Now perhaps if I’m very lucky, I might be able to take my own advice this semester.

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Blogging with Flock

MiriamLeave a comment

Over the past couple of days I’ve been playing around with Flock. Quoting from their website:

“Flock is an amazing web browser built on fast and secure Mozilla technologies. View and share photos with an innovative new photo bar in the browser. Subscribe to your favorite websites to get the freshest content automatically, in summaries that are easy to save and blog.Search more quickly, more effectively, and more richly with the innovative Flock Search Toolbar“

So that’s the sales pitch. I’ve had a bit of a play around with most of these features so I’ll give you a quick rundown.

Photo Bar: This is actually a handy little feature. In essence you can click a little button up next to the ‘Home’ button and a bar appears across the top of the webpage with your photostream from flickr or photobucket (whichever you elect).

You can upload photo’s using the inbuilt inbuilt photo-uploader which brings up a new window with a drag and drop interface from your computer and simple crop and rotate tools. From here you can title, describe and tag your photo’s, set public/private and also select which album the photo’s go in.

The photo bar also allows you to add friends flickr streams so that you can view their photo’s on the bar instead of your own. There is a simple drop-down interface to swap between accounts.

My favorite feature of the Photo bar, however; is the ability to drag a photo from your Photo Bar to the blogging tool. Like, for example, this photo I took last year at Bright.

RSS Reader: The RSS Reader in Flock is based on the Sage reader in Firefox. I’ve actually used Sage before and to be honest it’s not really to my taste, so I haven’t really played with this much.

Blogging Tool: I’m undecided on the blogging tool in flock. It has some very useful features. I am able to open a new blog post with a simple keyboard shortcut and I can comment on a webpage, image or piece of selected text by right-clicking and then clicking ‘Blog this’ from the drop-down menu. There is also a ‘Web Snippets’ tool which allows you to drag text or images from a website to a clipboard for future use and, of course, the drag and drop interaction with the Photo Bar.

However there are also several missing features which bug me. The tagging feature only enters Technorati tag html at the bottom of the post rather than the inbuilt labels in blogger which I prefer and text formatting is a little harder with no alignment options, text colour options or ‘quote’ buttons which I have become accustomed to.

On the other hand the spell-check is very well implemented and you can save drafts to your hard drive.

I think opinions on the Blogging Tool are likely to be mixed and its rather a matter of individual taste and usage. I’m not sure whether I will use it regularly, but its certainly useful for when you want to write a quick blog comment on something.

Search Tool: The search tool is, well, just a search tool really. I’ve heard some good things about its features but I haven’t really noticed a significant difference.

Overall I’m quite impressed with Flock. Anything you can do in Firefox will work with Flock and it has a couple of extra features which are kinda fun.

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Blogged with Flock