thoughts

On sleepless parenting

One of the most frequently repeated things that people preparing for parenting read is that there will be a huge lack of sleep during the first months after the baby is born. Most of the parents remember this time as the hardest time of their life.

Indeed, sleep is a very important part of every person’s life. Cutting the sleep is, I guess, similar to eating less. People get sad, depressive, and all psychodelic when denied the recharge of batteries. Brain needs rest or it will get fried, overwhelmed with information.

During my last few days as being non-father I am trying to imagine how bad can that be. One of the thoughts that sort of calms me down is that most people (of those who call the first few months the hardest time in their lives) have to go through a major change when the baby is born. Most people sleep during the night and stay awake during the day. With the newborn baby this changes, as do a lot of other things, and the young parent gets a lot of stress due to these many changes. I myself don’t use the night for sleep. With my work in the NOC, I get all sorts of shifts. I regularly switch between night shifts (from 23:00 until 08:00) and office work (from 09:00 until 18:00). I don’t always go to bed in the morning after the night shift. In fact, I don’t sleep that much anyway. Sometimes I can sleep for just 2 or 3 hours and go for the next 24 hours without sleep. Sometimes 5 hours per day (broken into pieces) make me feel recovered. I don’t have any problem falling asleep at any time of the day. And I don’t have that big of a problem waking up. I think that not that many people sleep in this way. That gives me hope that the first few month won’t be as hard for me as they are for most parents.

Not that they will be totally easy, but just easier than for most. I will still have to deal with the stress of responsibility, huge amounts of information, and a bunch of new tasks. We’ll see how it goes…

On speeding

The other day I was listening to the discussion on radio about lots of people speeding in UK and police trying to have matter under control. Many drivers were questioned and their answers provided for some interesting feedback. I don’t remember the number exactly now, but roughly more than a half of them said that they were speeding repeatedly in the past and that they will drive faster than laws allow in the future. When asked about the methods to stop them, the answers were pointing at drastic measures, such as extremely high fines, prisons, and license nullification.

This discussion reminded me of my own thoughts on the subject that I had about six month ago, but never wrote down. Needless to say that a new storm of ideas happened in my head. I am taking this chance now to write it all down and get it out of my system.

Continue reading On speeding

4th dimension

Today I have been preparing both bedrooms for the painting and bleaching session tomorrow. One of the things that I always get surprised by is how many things are there around me that I don’t notice. Computer room didn’t have much stuff at the first glance – just a couple of tables with couple of computers and a cubboard. It took me few hours to move everything to the living room. Fan, chairs, kilometers of cable, books, penguin toys, CDs… The funny thing is that living room was totally filled with stuff. That’s pretty impressive considering the fact that I have given away one of the tables, sold one computer, and thrown away more than 100 kilos of crap.

For years now I had only one explanation for this wonder – 4th dimension. When all the space in the 3rd dimension is occupied, things start to fall into the 4th one. When I try to bring them back, they take much more space.

The tricky question

I was reading this post (NOTE: not for kids) by Joe Rogan. He asks the old questions and pretty much repeast everything I’ve heard before. But while reading his post, a thought crossed my mind…

Imagine that you are the one who has been offered 10 billion dollars to have one hour of gay sex. Exactly the type of dude he is talking in that post. But there is one small condition. If you would like it and, say, will try to have another gay experience ever, you will have to give away all that money. And than you have that hour and you like it. More than that, you are totally blown away and feel that your life is finally complete and you just realised who you are. The situation you find yourself in is to either give all your earned money away and have as much gay sex as you wish, or to enjoy the money and never have the greatest pleasure of yours. What would you do? I mean giving away all the money seems logical, since it will end you up at the level you were before that one hour of gay sex. You’ll still have your job and will still have to make your living. On the other hand you don’t have to work ever. Your life, your family lives, your friends’ lives are all totally filled with every possible pleasure, except for one that you desire most. That sounds like a lifetime torture to me. What about you?

On smartphones in general and Motorolla A780 in particular

Via this post in Hazard’s blog I found this reivew of Motorolla A780.

It looks like Motrolla A780 is indeed a decent smartphone. If I was to buy my first smartphone, Motorolla A780 would be a perfect choice for me (nevermind the fact that I still cannot buy it anywhere). But, I already had my first smartphone – Sony Ericsson P800. Getting and using one for more than a year slightly altered my requirements list. Things that I care about now are:

FM Radio. It turns out I can spend a lot of time listening to FM radio rather than to silence or mp3s on the memory card. MP3s eat up a lot of space, and listening to them eats battery like a car with no petrol. FM radio reciever must be built-in into my next smartphone. It is a good option anyway, since it is cheap and small, but with a lot of use for many people. It seems that Motorolla A780 does not provide it.
Recoding and playback of voice calls. I never thought that I would want this feature in the first place, but in the course of the last two years I foud myself in the situation where I badly needed it more than once. Luckily, Motorolla A780 has it.
CompactFlash memory. Although I am yet to see any good phone with CompactFlash, I still want it. CompactFlash is the best memory option for a smartphone I can see out there. It is cheap. It is open. And it is huge. CompactFlash cards and microdrives are in the GByte area already and not only that, but they are relatively cheap too. Memory Stick Pro 1 GB is roghly 3 times more expensive than a 1 GB Compact Flash card.
High level of integration in PIM. Personal Information Manager is an important part of the smartphone. I, therefor, expect it to be properly done. Sony Ericsson P800 has an average one. It provides all the important functions for calendaring, addressbook keeping, TODOs and notes. What it lacks is a good integration between this parts. For example, when I creat an appointment or a reminder for a phone call in the calendar, I cannot use contacts from the addressbook. I have to retype everything. Similarly, I cannot attach notes from the notepad to the contacts in the addressbook. Addressbook allows one to type in a single note for the contact but that’s it. I cannot attach any graphics (like a map of how to find someone’s house) except for one single photograph. P800 has a photocamera, but I cannot organize my photos properly with contacts or notes attached to them. All of these require user to dump all data to the computer and do all the organization there. Bad. Unfortunately, I don’t know how good Motorolla A780 in this regard. But in the worst case scenario, I guess, the same solution as for P800 will work – install a third party organizer.
GPS. Global Positioning System allows one to always know exactly where he is. Not only that, but it can provide this information to all sorts of software. When taking pictures, location coordinates might be saved into the image. This way you will always know where you took the picture. Alarms and reminders can use the coordinates to go off only when you are in the area. Coordinates can be used with a number of mapping services to suggest a better route through the city or to help you find your way back to civilization. Or to the nearest petrol station. Or hotel. Or good restaurant.

One of the things that I have noticed in the review is that Motorolla A780 does allow you to have both a ringtone and a vibrating alert. This is really odd and I don’t see any reason of why did they make it like this. I hope they will fix the behavior in the next generation of this phone.

One thing that I stopped worrying about is battery life. If the phone can live one a single battery through the day, I am satisfied enough. I realized that there is no way that I will find myself away from power for longer than a day. As long as the device can be recharged from a socket, or a car, or a USB of a computer, it is good enough for me.