Pilbeam Engineering

Yesterday inaugurated my first ever official paid vacation! This post also inaugurates the 100th post of this blog, both very exciting events.

Anyways, day one was spent with the nitty-gritty work. Typical mopping, vacuuming, and the rest of my Saturday cleaning items. I also finally installed the windshield washer reservoir in the car, so it is now fully functional again, which is good. This coming week I’m taking it in for an oil change, inspection, tire installation (getting the snows off a little late), and having the brakes checked.

For Day 2 of the vacation (today, for those keeping count), I blasted off this morning for Chittenango Falls State Park, which I visited last year and took some pictures (with my film camera). I’ve repeated the trip now with my digital camera, and the lovely results are available below.

It’s an outstanding park with a few miles of hiking trails available, a picnic area, and of course the waterfall which make for a reasonably full couple of hours. I always enjoy dropping in there, and as it’s still relatively early in the season the waterfall was in full swing.

[View with PicLens]

More hiking is on the docket for the rest of the week, probably a couple of longer trips once the car is given a clean bill of health. Up for consideration are Kane Mt. and Bald Mt., but I’m not ready as yet to tackle any Adirondack high peaks.

On the home front, I will probably re-arrange my monitors – it’s irking me that they’re not symmetrical – I have two 4:3 19″ LCDs on the left and a widescreen on the right – I will be trying to center the widescreen and make it the primary monitor soon. I will also (hopefully) be playing more with the Arduino, and hopefully post the results of that here. I have also ordered a kit-based AM transmitting unit, so that once its built I shall be able to transmit music and programs to the old radio sets (of which only one is currently operational). The computer selected for this honor will be running Foobar2000 for the playback, and I hope to be able to script it to run more like a REAL radio station as autonomously as possible.

In keeping with the craze on “plants in the home and office” that’s been cropping up, especially on Lifehacker, I now have quite a few plants making up the jungle in my bedroom/office, 10 plants in fact, with the Philodendron Selloum currently qualifying as the largest…and my reading indicates it will only get larger, which is fine with me.

I’m trying a new visual layout on my desktop as well, making the wallpaper and system theme monochromatic as much as possible. This has the pleasing effect of having any window items or icons “pop out”, and so far I’m very pleased with it. Last week I had a moonlighting affair with Kubuntu on my main computer, and I’ll be posting on that soon.

That’s it for now, I’m off for a walk before it gets too dark or cold…

-Adam

So, in my journeys across the interwebs yesterday, I stumbled across this blog post, which discusses (and journals) an experiment with a polyphasic sleep cycle. Since I am somewhat attracted to new ways to give myself more time for my projects, I’m hoping to be able to do something similar.

Essentially, polyphasic sleep is a process wherein an individual will break up his/her sleeping pattern from a single large chunk overnight to several short chunks (of about 20-30 minutes) during a 24 hour period. As it works out, a successful polyphasic sleeper can gain several hours per 24 to tackle projects, or work, or whatever.

It operates on the principle of training the body to begin REM sleep almost immediately. With small amounts of REM sleep built up over the day, an individual can remain invigorated to perform operations as normal.

Since my own schedule is pretty flexible, although I don’t have the luxury of working at home, I hope to carefully ease into such a cycle. It may involve initially breaking sleep down into several chunks per night, and then phasing over to the final product. The goal is to avoid being so tired that I can’t drive, since that is a vital part of going to work in the morning! Nevertheless, work doesn’t mind one or two naps…I can always stay an extra half hour, and since most of my work involves compiling on computers, when they’re busy there’s not too much else to do anyways.

Since I have no immediate family with me, and my social schedule is extremely flexible, this project has a decent chance of working out, I think, so I am hopeful – if nothing else, to gain more time to work on this blog as well as my other projects!

Ideas and thoughts are welcome…

-Adam