Almost all the new stuff for the web site is finished. There are some aesthetic changes (I got sick of all the colours), but mostly I worked hard to implement some nerdy programming improvements using a web server module called mod_rewrite that make my URLs easier to use and remember. Not the most hedonistic use of my spring break, but I'm sure a few geeks know where I'm coming from. Besides, I did get out and rip it up in the bars a bit, too (much to the detriment of my early-riser program).

Speaking of which, I've blogged about my waking progress with the titles "The Making of a Morning Person." I've re-geeked stuff here to make it easier to find that for which you are looking, so let's use these posts as an example. Let's say you wanted to read everything about my attempts to get up early. You remember that the words "morning person" were in the title of the posts. You can see them all by using this address:

http://yoursinwriting.com/title/morning person
And if you'd like to read any of my "how to" articles, you can just type in:

http://yoursinwriting.com/title/how to
To read my attempts to win you over to the dark side on various issues, you could try:

http://yoursinwriting.com/title/why you should
Try clicking the links and see what comes up. Get the idea? It's just a search in the title for anything that matches what comes after the slash (/). Feel free to play around with it.

I've also changed how you scan the regular writing categories. For example, if you wanted to see everything in the poetry section, you would use:

http://yoursinwriting.com/poetry
That's pretty straightforward. The change is that if you want to see any writing for a particular time period, you just enter the year and month after the category, separated by a slash. For example, to read all articles from 2005, you can use:

http://yoursinwriting.com/articles/2005
Or for my blog entries in January of 2004, you can use:

http://yoursinwriting.com/blog/2004/01
Speaking of the blog, I've added a calendar on the left hand side with links to quickly jump to any year and month you like.

Finally, at the bottom of each post you will notice a series of links. The first is called a "permalink" which is the permanent address to that post (mostly used by other bloggers to link directly to a particular piece of writing). The last group of links are called "tags," which are keywords of interest in the post. If you click the tag, you'll see all of the writing on the site that was "tagged" with that keyword. (If you try it, you'll notice that it works just like the title search I described above, except with "/tag" instead of "/title.")

But the best new thing, and I hope you'll agree, is that I've created a comment system so you can post your feedback to anything I've written, and it will show up below the post. Just click the "Comments" link at the end of any post, then scroll down to the comments box and fill in your contribution. You don't need to include your name, but it helps create the illustion of accountability for what you say. Even if you just keep using the same fake name, it's better than nothing. Your email address isn't necessary either, but it will help me get in touch with you for any extended discussion or contribution to a post. As always, your email will not be displayed anywhere on the site, or shared with anyone but me.

I'm hoping the comment system will make things more interesting around here, and I'm always curious to see how people react to my ideas, and those of others.

Don't take it too seriously. Post your comments and have fun. For example, I'm guessing it will take my friend Angelo about 2 minutes to add "Josh is Gay" to every post on the site.

Well, the wheels have come fully off, it would seem. I was out late again last night (bedtime after 2am), and couldn't stay up after turning of my alarm. Worse, when I did wake up (7am), I decided to just have a quick nap and then start the day. But I accidentally hit the "alarm 2" button instead of the "nap" button; so I set an alarm for 6:30am (already past), and woke up at 11:30am. Back to my normal routine.

Boy, do I feel rested today. I also feel disappointed in myself; I started off so gung-ho and motivated, but now I've let all that energy trickle away. It hasn't helped that I've undermined myself by going to bed way too late almost every night.

OK, I think I've made enough excuses. I'm going to keep this up over the weekend, and come Monday, I'm going to get up early out of necessity. I'm not giving up. I can do this.

I'm waffling. Got up at 5am and then dropped back into bed without setting my nap alarm. So when I re-awoke, it was almost 7am.

I'm sure it's not helping that I'm going to bed really late: almost 2am last night. But that was because I had been out on a date with a charming young lady
and didn't get home until midnight, feeling restless, so I geeked out on the web site for a little while.

I'm trying to keep this in perspective. After all, I'm on holidays here, and only short months ago that would have meant my average wake time would be noon.

Sitting at my computer, I'm listening to iTunes in shuffle mode. Current song? "Sleeping In" by The Postal Service. Who says machines have no sense of humour?

5am. Tomorrow. I'm going to do this.

First of all, thanks to my cousin-in-law Curtis, for the phone call at 5:23am yesterday. It's great to have your support, even it is two hours later in your time zone. And despite your skeptical message, I was awake, but my phone was by the door with the ringer off.

So there.

But on that note, thanks to everyone for all the calls and emails of support and mockery. I had no idea so many people actually visited me here.

Strange news to report today. I was indeed up at 5am, but the problem was that I never actually went to bed. So I can't fairly claim to have gotten up, to have risen early.

I got playing with a bunch of dorky new features for the web site, which will appear in the next few days. My apologies if you experience any weirdness in the meanwhile; I'm working to try to keep all the links functional, and in the end, the page addresses will make a lot more sense.

Mod_rewrite is my friend. (I know, never mind what that means. Just shake your head at me.)

I think I'll go try a nap. Sun's coming up.

Had another minor setback today. My friend, whose house I helped paint the other night, was driven from his home by the paint fumes that resulted when the professional painters did their thing yesterday. "You shouldn't sleep here tonight," they told him, as they removed their industrial masks and left. He begged to come over and sleep on my couch, and bought dinner and brought Undercover Brother as recompense. Solid.

This morning, I popped out of bed when the alarm went off (I'm not prewaking yet or anything), but instead of wandering out into the hall and doing my normal thing, I got back into bed and stared at the ceiling. I recognized that this was partially consideration for the fact that my friend wasn't going to wake up for at least another 2 hours, but mostly it was an excuse to stay in the warm bed. The strange thing was that I didn't fall back asleep. I just lay there, thinking thoughts, and not drifting off. After about an hour of this, I did eventually trip into a short dream, but I woke up moments later, feeling like I'd been asleep for hours. Cool.

When I finally started the day, it was 6:30am. Still pretty darn early for me when I'm on vacation. This early riser thing is starting to feel inevitable.

So I finally had every song in my 4000+ collection stamped with album art. It took many, many hours, but it was very satisfying having the album cover pop up whenever the songs changed. Very cool.

One problem is that the beats-per-minute information had been lost when my last hard drive crashed (and I had to re-import all my songs... joy), and I have several playlists that rely on the BPM information. For example, I have a playlist with only fast songs (BPM over 180, for example), and another for slow songs (BPM below 100). I had previously used a free program called Mixmeister BPM analyzer to get this done automagically.
So I run the program, and while it's happily scanning and updating my enormous music library, I notice that some songs are suddenly appearing without their album art.
Turns out that the software mangles the tags of almost all of the songs it updates. Specifically, it strips the album art, so all my work over the last two days was completely wasted. The Mixmeister site has no mention of this bug, nor do any of the download sites. I did find a forum where someone posted a similar complaint.

Buyer beware: you get what you pay for. I am shakingly furious. I'm just not sure at whom.

I'm learning a valuable lesson. When I woke up, I was thinking about what I was going to write this morning. It was going to start with something like, "so... tired..." but as it turns out, as long as I can stay awake for the first 30 minutes, I feel pretty darned good for somebody who hates... hated?... the morning.

I also realize that my posts are incorrectly titled, as they suggest that I'll be writing about the day, when in reality I'm talking about the previous day...

Was I this anal when I got up later?

Yesterday, after a late start, I went over to my friend Steve's house to help him paint. Understand that I am a horrible painter; if there are paint stains on your ceiling, you remember how bad a helper I was. Arguably if a bit of touch-up work doesn't phase you, I am better than no helper at all (which is to say, it is an arguable point).

It was a good afternoon: we painted two bedrooms, watched some poker and stand-up comedy on his frickin' enormous TV, and I got fed twice.

As a bonus, during dinner the cute comic from last night called me back. We're going out Wednesday night (Mom, don't call to ask how it went).

One merciful detail is that I got home at 10pm, which meant that I could have gotten a reasonable amount of sleep. I say "could have," because I wasn't instantly tired, so instead of going to bed right away, I stayed up until 2am pasting album art into iTunes. This morning I got up to my alarm at 5am, feeling slightly foggy but not tired. I had several strange dreams, one of which involved me picking up garbage from the parking lot behind my apartment.

If nothing else, this experiment is making me starkly aware of my dreams. A few months ago, I read a bit about lucid dreaming (where you become aware you are dreaming during the dream). I've experienced this before, but haven't had a lucid dream in months. In fact, it has been a long time (not counting this last few days) since I've even remembered a dream. But I guess it makes sense that engaging so invasively in my sleep cycle should somehow get tangled up in the dreaming process.

Yesterday was amazing. After getting up at 5am, I was able to do a lot of reading and writing, churn through a tonne (metric, not imperial) of household chores, and still go out with an old buddy later in the evening. I did need a nap about halfway through the day-- I did the 30 minute nap with alarm, and woke up feeling really good.

The evening was a bit of a cock-up. I completely mismanaged my plans: a couple weeks ago, I had agreed to go to a surprise party for a friend of mine, but in the meanwhile, another pal who I hadn't seen for ages asked if I wanted to go for drinks. I agreed, as I had forgotten about the surprise party already. (Sorry Phil! Happy Birthday!)

We went to a comedy night and I drank a lot of beer. And a shooter of Jack Daniels (with one of the female comics). I closed the bar with the crew and walked home slightly inebriated. It was very hard to get to bed, and while my alarm was set for 5am, I don't remember getting up to turn it off, and when I came to, it was 8am and I felt like garbage. So I drank seven litres of water and went back to bed. I tried the 30 minute nap thing for a couple of hours and finally felt human around noon.

An interesting side effect of this 5am wake time is that it seems to necessitate a certain lifestyle; not that you can't stay up late (I went to bed after 2am the first night), but rather that you have to give your body a fighting chance, which I failed to do by adding alcohol in with the late bed time.

I am not giving up! 5am again tomorrow!

Got home from poker at midnight, and went straight to bed. My alarm went off at 5am, and I groaned out of bed and started the day. I was worried this wasn't going to work.

I remember several dreams I had during the night, and I actually awoke, feeling pretty alert, fifteen minutes before my alarm went off.

It is now only 30 minutes later, and I feel awake (reasonably) and alert enough to get some blogging done. One hilarious by-product of this experiment is that I'm going to have a lot more spare time to fill.

I'm going to go start by washing some dishes, and then having a nice, long, hot shower.

You are still in bed right now.

I hate the morning. Somewhere in high school, I started despising the AM, and now I'd prefer a timetable to 11-7, staying up until 2AM reading, writing, and chilling. But then I read an article by Steve Pavlina, who turned himself from a night owl into a morning person.

I recognize the value of this; many times I have risen so late on the weekends (and when I was self-employed) that I couldn't run errands because shops and services closed at 5pm. And it's a self-perpetuating cycle: getting up after lunch leaves you wide awake at 2am, meaning you stay up later, and get up later yet again.

This Steve fella managed to get up every morning at 5am, regardless of when he went to bed. My goal: to try the 5am wakeup for 30 days, and see if it sticks.

This is day one. The ironic thing is that I was up until 2am last night reading about this, and some of the Steve's other exploits. Then, I got up a few scant hours later, at 5am.

I treated myself to a breakfast of bacon and eggs, listened calmly to the news, had a nice long shower, got ready for work, read some internet feeds, and left the house with lots of time to spare. It was very civilized. Perhaps too civilized....

When I got home from work (the last day before March Break-- woo-hoo!), I tried a technique from Steve's documentation of his move to polyphasic sleep: 20 minutes naps. I set my alarm for 30 minutes, and got into bed. I crashed almost instantly, and woke 4 seconds later to the sound of the alarm. Hm. That doesn't seem right. But 30 minutes had definitely expired on the clock. I tried it again. This time, I had a great dream, and woke to the alarm feeling much more rested, but still not entirely rested-- remember I was working on three hours sleep. So I repeated this technique until 7pm, and by that point, I was refreshed, alert, and had several very vivid dreams.

Then I went and played poker. To give you some idea of how interesting Texas Hold 'Em is, consider this: in four hours, I played fewer than 10 hands, winning only three and still finishing 3rd out of nine starting players, which meant I got my entry money back. (Better than usual.)

I got home, and left my alarm set for 5am. On a Saturday. Part of the deal is that you must get up at 5am (or whatever specific time you pick) every day in order to build up the habit. I'm going to keep this up for the entire break (10 days, including today) so I'll be ready to implement it on work days, too. You can follow my experiment here.

Wish me luck!