As mentioned in the entry before this one, I fasted for 16 hours before the time I wanted to wake up; it successfully reset my sleep cycle! I was up at 8 the next day (I’d been getting up around 10), the day after, and then successfully got up at 7:00 on Wednesday. I’m now making it a habit to eat an early, light dinner on Sundays, with no desert or snacks afterward. Helped me get up early again this morning, after sleeping in over the weekend.
I’ve been reading Entrepreneur & Inc. magazines for several months now. I’d like to expand into some more diverse magazines, but the others that are most interesting to me aren’t available for cheap subscription via eBay or magazine discount sites. So I’ll have to increase my income before I can really indulge this goal.
Unless anyone has any tips for getting cheap/free subscriptions for magazines that don’t normally offer them?
Moving to Boston was one of the best decisions I’ve made. Although the cost of living went up substantially, the number of opportunities that opened up for me have been tremendous.
I’m currently in the process of founding News Armada, a community-driven news commentary site that will offer news & analysis to consumers and publishers. My co-founder Andrew is developing our prototype, while I’m architecting our plan; we hope to present to investors over the next few months and get funding to accelerate our progress and increase the size of our success.
I found a LiveScience article that says by fasting for 12-16 hours before your desired wake-up time, and then eating a large breakfast, you can trigger an internal ‘mealtime clock’ that overrides the circadian rhythms we usually operate on. I’m trying this out for the next couple of days; couldn’t hurt to try.
I was looking over my last entries, and it’s been so long (3 years), that I don’t even remember writing them.
The good news is that I’m now living in Boston, where photography is much more common and accepted as an activity. The bad news is that it hasn’t done much for my own participation. :-P
I also have a camera phone now, which I’d like to get more proficient with. It’s obviously not the ideal tool for photography, but it is extremely convenient; I want to make the best of it.
I finally re-designed Social Strategist, my communications consulting blog, from scratch. But it was primarily a face-lift rather than a true redesign, and I don’t think I’m done yet. I have design goals that are specific to the purpose of the site that I need to implement, though they require me to produce the content first. No good to have a pretty, functional box with nothing in it. :-P
Still, I’m satisfied that it looks much better, and much more professional, than the previous version. Adding a photo of myself is, I think, I big improvement. It makes me a lot more confident handing out business cards with my URL on them, since I know the recipient will be able to connect a face with the name, and site, as often as needed.
My next re-design goal is focused around my personal site, which already holds a huge amount of diverse content, and really needs a good design to tie it all together.
When I first moved to Boston, I spent most of my time looking for an ‘ideal’ job. Not finding one, I ended up falling back on the ol’ college student standby, retail.
I ended up moving on to a job that gave me much more freedom with my job, allowing me to accomplish more work in less time. But while I had some ability to use my remaining scheduled time for personal projects, it was still rather limited.
Eventually, I ended up being offered freelance work (copywriting, and then, consulting). As I pursued more freelance projects, it was very clear that it was much preferable to having a set job. Almost all of the external costs of having a job(commute time, restricted scheduling, wasted time on the clock, etc.) disappeared when I switched to doing freelance projects.
So at least for someone of my circumstances, working as a freelance writer/consultant was much better than getting a job.
One of my other goals is to have a nightly routine, and I’m trying to help myself get in shape by doing pushups in between other tasks as I get ready for bed. In the last half hour before sleep I’m doing a set of pushups, brushing my teeth, set of pushups, preparing things for the next day, set of pushups, taking off clothes, etc., set of pushups, final e-mail checking and such, then sleep. So at least 4 sets of push-ups, sometimes more if any one task takes me a while, and increasing the number of pushups in each set as I get in better shape. I’m also using pushup extenders, to make small sets worth more.
Although I was able to change my password on most services to something stronger, I frequently ran into the difficulty that even though I was changing to a stronger password, it didn’t meet the sometimes random requirements for password strength the service had since come up with. In addition to requiring a certain number of characters, passwords often also had to be alpha-numeric, contain capitals and lower-case letters, not contain special punctuation, and actually be lower than a certain length.
So essentially they’re saying that a 16-character all-letter password is weaker than an 8-character alpha-numeric password, which is simply not true. It was very frustrating to have to deal with this, and sometimes instead of using a stronger password I simply changed to one of my original passwords that fit their requirements. On some low-risk services, I didn’t change at all.
Companies need to learn that frustrating users is not the way to improve the way users handle their security.
The easiest Fallout 2 costume to make would probably be the Vault Dweller outfit. Blue pants, blue longsleeve shirt with 13 in yellow on the back. The best/hardest would probably be Advanced Power Armor.
After talking with Caleb about the making of his Darth Vader costume, placemats sounds like a great material to use. I can probably get a bunch cheap from WalMart/Apple’s $1.00 Store/Goodwill. Instead of or with that, I’m thinking of using a wire frame with cereal box cardboard on top of it, or plastic, and then painting that.
For the helmet, I’m certain I can find some cheap sunglasses with reflective lenses to pop out and use.
I know I’ve at least made some progress at this, considering yesterday I encountered a friend jogging along and on the spur of the moment decided to jog with him. For what would have been probably at least 10 laps around your average sized track, I jogged with him while talking. True, I was sweaty and tired at the end of it, and I did take a brief walking break somewhere along the way, but it’s something I would have felt a lot worse after doing if I were still in the same shape(or lack there-of) as when I first came to GSU.
When I first came, you see, for orientation, they bussed us from the dorm we stayed in down to the recreational center, the RAC. After a couple hours of dodgeball and such, the RAC closed and we all went outside to wait for the busses. The busses came and went with the first load of students, and it became apparent by the mass of people still waiting that it would take several trips.
Two guys standing near me I noticed having a conversation, they seemed to come to an agreement, and then started running the way the busses had gone. Looking at the crowd still waiting I thought, “Not a bad idea.” and went after them. I caught up pretty quickly, they didn’t seem to mind the company, and I kept pace for a while as they talked. I noticed words like “team” and “season”, and it wasn’t a big deal that they were athletes until I heard the word “track”.
Shit. Of all things, I had to take off running with a couple of track athletes. So of course, I was struggling more and more, until I waved them on ahead and assured them I’d be fine, and stopped to try and catch my breath as my lungs screamed at me, “JAY! YOU IDDDDD-IIII-OT!”
So hey, at least I’m not still there, even if I’m probably still not were the track athletes were.
This has been on my list for a while, and will probably stay there for quite a while, unless my some miraculous twist of fate lessons are offered here in Statesboro, GA sometime when I’m free from work.
But I’m wondering, what are the physical requirements to be able to belly dance? Do you have to weigh a certain amount? Do you have to have certain muscles toned? And how is a guy supposed to be able to do this without looking like a complete moron?
Things to find out…
It’s who you know. My friend got me a job at the place he had been working at for a few months. And by got me a job, I don’t mean he hired me. All he did was mention that he knew me, and he thought I’d do good. That’s all it takes. A personal recommendation goes much farther with employers than a lot of other things that might show up on a resume.
Once I got a decent paying job, I was able to accomplish this in a few months. And that’s even without working full-time, only about 30 hours a week. I’m moving to a different department and getting more hourse, so things should get easier and I might be able to even start making some progress on paying off some debt now.
Student loans are a god-send. 8 AM classes followed by a 10-6 job will be worth it for that if nothing else.
I played a ton of volleyball last summer, and while I was never the best I was almost never the worse(everyone has a few bad days) and I always had a good time. This summer I’ve just started playing again, with today being the 3rd or 4th time or so. Out of 9 people, I was the absolute worst. I kept brushing the ball with just the tips of my fingers, or just standing there as it dropped within my reach.
I don’t feel bad about being the worst of the group I play with – they’re all athletes or athletic. I feel bad about just plain sucking. I know I’m going to end up dragging whichever team I’m on down for a few more games, but I’ll be damned if I’m not trying.
I’ve got some specific goals in mind:
1) Be able to place my serves. 5 minutes practicing before the rest of the group got there one day improved this. If I keep it up, I know I can get consistent.
2) Always get 2 hands on the ball. I’ve pulled off some crazy saves with just one hand, but there have been just as many times when the ball’s gone flying off in a random direction. I’d rather have consistency.
3) Start moving, even if I’m not sure I need to. There have been so many times when I think one of my teammates has it, or that it’s definitely going over the net(or visa-versa from their side), or that it’s going out. I’ll either stand there or take only a single step, and then when it’s too late realize I was wrong. I’ve got to get in motion.
4) Learn to hit backwards. Half of my “it-couldn’t-have-been-better-setup-how-did-you-fuck-that-up” moments today were me trying to hit the ball backwards over the net. I either only brushed it with my fingertips or sent it straight into the net. I’ve got to make this work.
It took me a very long time to start doing this consistently, and I won’t claim to have mastered it with an iron will. I’ve learned that setting more than one alarm clock, one 5 minutes after the first, is a big help for nights when I won’t be able to sleep that long.
Keeping the light on and turning away from it to fall asleep helps, because inevitably I’ll roll back towards it in my sleep, giving my body another cue to rise when my alarm goes off.
I’ve sometimes had to stick notes to the walls where I’ll immediately see them, reminding me of things that absolutely have to get done, written in a stern tone and usually ending with “Do it!”
And on nights when I wouldn’t get more than an hour or two, I’ve learned it’s generally better for me to just forego sleep altogether rather than risk oversleeping through my alarms.
I was wondering if anyone had any experience with services like BlogExplosion or other services that help users mutually grow traffic? Do you think they provide valuable traffic, or just numbers?
I’ve been using tips from the following site, and they’re working out well: http://www.paperpenalia.com/handwriting.html
