Cleanup Post/Dvorak, Day Whatever (I really can't be bothered to count.)

You may have noticed a whole slew of older posts cropping up. It's just a bit of cleaning up that's long overdue; I had a bunch of half-finished posts languishing on the blog dashboard.

In Dvorak news: 42 wpm, 3 mistakes. This may not be an accurate measurement of my current typing speed, as the text was particularly difficult. It was taken from Bram Stoker's Dracula, which opens with Jonathan Harker's journal, kept in shorthand and therefore naturally staccato and full of numbers (dates and times), locations, and punctuation.

On the other hand, good choice! (Fie on you, Stephanie Meyer!)

Oh, and I can't believe no one got the reference in the title of my most recent post. The Great Hiatus refers to the three-year interval between Sherlock Holmes's "death" in "The Adventure of the Final Problem" and his reappearance in "The Adventure of the Empty House".

Polyphasic Sleep: The Great Hiatus

Summer break began yesterday. I will be home most of the summer -- that, and travelling with the family (currently in Los Angeles). Ergo, I am readapting to the monophasic life. I've had some experience doing so, certainly, over spring break, but not for any significant duration. This should be quite an adjustment.
Of course, not enough time has elapsed, so I don't know exactly how it will go. Thus far, I seem to retain my ability to fall asleep very quickly in pretty much any situation. I find myself getting mildly sleepy in the afternoon, but that goes away. I'm having a bit of trouble sleeping through the night; I wake up at odd hours (at multiples of 90 minutes, no surprise there), but I can go back to sleep. It's still a bit surreal, though, to get out of bed and find that it's light out.

P.S. Five nerd points if you get the title reference.

Polyphasic Sleep: The Finals Crunch

It's that time of year again: finals to take, projects to finish, half a room to pack. I am less than halfway through finals week; one down, two to go. With two such finals weeks under my belt, I have a fair idea of what to expect this time around. I will sleep no more than twenty minutes at a stretch the day before each final, studying (cramming, really) through the night and/or day until literally ten minutes before the exam begins, skipping whatever meal falls closest before the test, prevailing upon my roommate to bring me back a banana or the equivalent. I have terrible study habits, I know.
And then, after my last final on Wednesday, I will have to throw myself into packing; I leave on Friday. The storage service people come to take my stuff away (everything I'm not schlepping to my aunt's garage or flying home) Thursday afternoon. Hence, I will be packing through the night. I've accumulated more stuff than I had expected to, I'll reckon.
What does this mean for my sleep schedule? I'll be skipping a lot of core sleep, and will probably crash afterwards. By crash, I mean something like six hours, or seven and a half, or so.

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.