How polyphasic sleep is preserving my life and sanity

This week has been absolutely insane in terms of workload. I won't bother to enumerate all the various items on my to-do list; they would interest no one but myself, and barely that, at times. The relevant consequence, of course, is that I have taken to cutting core sleep.
I have never before been so thankful I went polyphasic; without it, I would not have survived the week, methinks. (And I'm definitely not adapted to Uberman anymore, I've found.) I've seen four sunrises for work-related reasons this week (I usually take core sleep right around sunrise.) and breakfast has replaced dinner as the one meal I eat consistently (from the "wrong" end of the night, so to speak); it used to be Late Nite (a little after midnight), and before that, dinner.
And then, after an absolutely crazy work week, I decided to play the Game. No, you did not just lose the Game. At my school, the Game is a scavenger hunt type of thing, where teams of three to five students drive around campus and the city in the middle of the night solving puzzles (clues to the next location). It runs from Friday evening to Saturday afternoon -- about a continuous eighteen to twenty hours (though I did snatch a twenty minute nap along the way). I'd played the Game organized by my dorm complex two weekends ago, and I'd been asked to join a team playing a different dorm's Game. It was probably a monumentally bad idea, but I'd caught the Game bug -- I was hooked. I crashed afterwards, of course.
I'm going paintballing in a few hours.

Dvorak, Day 59

40 wpm, 4 mistakes.

Today's passage was from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sign of the Four. It brought back a small piece of my childhood. I grew up on Sherlock Holmes, so that canon in particular makes me happy. I actually recently acquired a Complete Sherlock Holmes for Kindle, for all of sixty cents (It's wonderful how the e-book versions of classics cost so little -- the miracles of public domain!). I could have gotten it for free off of Project Gutenberg (which is a miracle in itself), but the smooth formatting and table of contents are worth sixty cents in my book (no pun intended).

Dvorak, Day 47

37 wpm, 5 mistakes. I am making an effort to touch-type, hence the increased number of errors.

Today's text was taken from The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. Huzzah for early SciFi!

Dvorak, Day 38

33 wpm, 0 mistakes. Today's excerpt came from Shakespeare's Henry V. It was the "once more into the breach" part -- a great bit, methinks. This typing test has good taste, I must say.

Dvorak, Day 29

30 wpm, 2 mistakes. Today's passage was excerpted from Thackeray's Vanity Fair.

I'm posting increasingly infrequently simply because there isn't much to report with this sort of experiment, except for the relevant data point. My apologies for... well, being boring, I suppose.

Polyphasic Sleep: A Reflection

It has been a full quarter since I embarked upon the polyphasic sleep experiment. Overall, I would say that it was a good idea. I liked it enough to resume Everyman this quarter. (I went monophasic over Spring Break, to avoid suspicion, and it was quite a surreal experience!) Some thoughts:

• Uberman is not for me. It's not that it's physically too difficult (I had enough consecutive successful days to demonstrate otherwise); rather, my schedule simply doesn't accommodate such a rigid sleep cycle. Between my extracurriculars (such as debating in a different time zone a few weekends per quarter) and my classes, it was getting impossible to fix my schedule such that I had the same twenty minute periods free every day.
• For the sake of a good roommate relationship, I need to time my core sleep such that I wake up at a relatively normal hour every day. While I can go to bed as late as I want to, I can't set alarms for 7:00 am, because my roommate would not appreciate being woken at that hour.
• In retrospect, I probably should have kept to a slightly more rigid schedule of naps. By the time I switched to Everyman, I had gotten a bit lazy in that regard. I took naps whenever convenient, so long as I got in the right number of naps.
• I seem to like lunchtime, right before dinnertime, and between 11:00pm and 2:00am naps.

At this point, I don't think polyphasic sleep is an experiment anymore; it has become more of a lifestyle choice. I shall soon be readapted, and I don't plan on resuming regular posting on the subject -- I'll post if anything out of the ordinary happens.

Dvorak, Day 14

My apologies for the hiatus. It is Spring Break, and I am home for a few days, since I am conveniently debating in the area this weekend. I have spent most of my time with my parents and sister -- it is good to be home.

My typing speed is now 25wpm (3 mistakes). Today's passage was an excerpt from Winston Churchill's "We shall fight on the beaches" speech (delivered before Parliament during the Battle of France). Churchill was a wonderful speechwriter, a personal favorite, and this is one of his best, methinks. It calls to mind the valor of such men and women as Leonidas of Sparta, Boudica of the Iceni, and Roland of France, battling valiantly against insurmountable odds -- the stuff of legend.

Dvorak, Day 4

19 wpm, no mistakes. Huzzah for linear improvement! (Actually, it's not really linear, seeing as it's day 4 rather than day 3. We can call it linear with regards to taking typing tests, as opposed to day-by-day.) At this rate, I'll be back at my old (QWERTY) typing speed in a little over a week's worth of typing tests. Of course, that's tremendously optimistic; the curve will flatten, I'm sure.

Dvorak, Day 2

As you may or may not be able to see, I have taped a very small diagram of the Dvorak layout right next to the camera of my Macbook (the camera itself isn't visible), which should help quite a bit with touch-typing. One of the small benefits of the old black Macbook -- the screen of the new aluminum one (Caradoc uses one) extends all the way to the edge, and one probably wouldn't want to mar the glass by taping anything to it.

Today's speed is 14 wpm, no mistakes. An interesting aside: the typing test text was excerpted from Jack London's The Call of the Wild. Yesterday's was from Romeo and Juliet ("But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?"). I hope my familiarity with certain texts in the public domain doesn't artificially inflate my measured speed.

I do hope this learning curve keeps up. I had to write a two-page assignment today, but I will not have much time to practice in the coming days, as I have finals.

Dvorak, Day 1

First of all, a very happy Pi Day to all my intrepid readers!

This is my new keyboard configuration. The picture quality isn't great, so perhaps you can't see it very well (click on it); I wrote all the letters and symbols in the corners of little clear stickers and affixed them in the Dvorak layout. (By stickers, I really mean the adhesive portions of those sticky bookmark tabs -- they're sort of like Post-its, but plastic -- that I cut into squares.) The A and M stickers haven't fallen off or anything; those letters are in the same place in QWERTY and Dvorak.

Now, Caradoc just popped all the keys off his keyboard and rearranged them. I am hesitant to do so for several reasons:

1. Tampering with the hardware can void the warranty. (My computer is a year and a half old, so any warranty is probably out, but if I ever have to take it to the shop again, I don't want any trouble on that score.)
   
2. Having both layouts visible is more user-friendly for anyone borrowing my machine.
3. Eventually, I hope to be able to touch-type in Dvorak on a QWERTY (essentially a blank) keyboard. Not only will I be able to avoid the first consideration, I would be able to tell if anyone tried to use my computer. Anyone who wasn't well-versed in Dvorak wouldn't be able to do anything at any speed, including changing the keyboard settings back to QWERTY.

My Dvorak typing speed today is 10 wpm, no mistakes (that's looking down at the keyboard, though). You can only imagine how long this post took!