I go working in my sleep
Over mountains of pain
To the river so mean

I must be looking for something
Something sacred I lost
But the river is wide
And its so hard to cross

I must finish the chapter I’m currently working on, before I go to sleep, otherwise I will probably not have it finished before lunch tomorrow. Even if I sleep until lunch (I wish I slept that well lately), it would be worth it to not procrastinate by going to bed first.

Now how to stay awake and alert, that is the question. Caffeine has a half-life of three to four hours in a normal person (many more in pregnant females or females on oral contraceptives, apparently). The point being, at night, caffeine is not an option. At least not until the last night or two, when one can pull an all-nighter. So I’m trying Berocca. I hope Vitamin B will give me some energy, and it isn’t a psychoactive stimulant. In fact, any placebo effect would do. Something that will help me stay awake, but not actually have any effect when I do eventually go to bed. If only I actually believed in it, there might have been some homoeopathic remedies that could have helped.

The other thing that could help, is the right choice in music. This is tricky though, and I don’t have enough experience. It depends on what I need to do. Certain work I can do quite well on Infected Mushroom, I’ll try that now. Earlier this evening, I did some work on Jacques Loussier Plays Bach, and then some Michael Bublé. Before that, I even experimented with Cold for the hell of it (I don’t know them very well yet), but that likely only works for very specific tasks/chapters/sections.

Too late to get advice for tonight, but maybe for the upcoming week then: what music would you recommend? What do you like working on? (When doing what kinds of work?) I’ve heard some people work on heavy metal… Oh, and hey, if you know of good Jazz for the Jazz n00b, let me know. I know I like Oscar Peterson, amongst others.

I think I’ll try Infected Mushroom for the rest of this chapter. If it doesn’t work, I’ll revisit my extensive classical music collection. (Yes, the good old The Gathering and Classical Mushroom. I don’t have any of their later stuff.)

ps. Maybe I should revisit my tagging strategy. Thirteen tags seems quite overkill, no?

“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the over-abundance of information sources that might consume it.” — Herbert Simon, who received the Nobel Prize in 1978 for his contribution to organizational decision making: It is impossible to have perfect and complete information at any given time to make a decision.

I will now go and completely misrepresent his life’s work, by applying this to each and every thing it seems useful for. Dealing with the rats on my ceiling, for example. I have a headache, I had a very bad night’s rest. Yes, I am procrastinating, I should maybe have dealt with them (poisoned them) last week already. I still don’t know what to do though, and my mistake is hoping to first find “perfect and complete information” on how to deal with it, instead of just using the best method I currently have at my disposal? Maybe I should just ask the people that do this for a living (pest control) what they would recommend…

Oh, and today was the first time I heard someone suggest I might have ADD. What an interesting notion.

A brief summary: it is a political thriller set in a dystopian United Kingdom. There is of course some graphic violence, but this isn’t your run of the mill action movie. Here is a link to V for Vendetta’s page on Metacritic.

At some point during the movie, this thought crossed my mind yet again: humans have been dealing with more or less the same issues for millennia, just cast into new contexts, new settings, performed with new props and new backdrops.

Now, with reference to my post about my priorities, this was supposed to be my one social gathering for the week. This week didn’t exactly turn out that way… My conclusion? It’s planning a little too far ahead (I blogged about it on 27 March). I think I should rather rely on short-term planning, allowing more flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances. (Got too little work done, or other “more important” social events occurred during the week? No social gathering then. A very effective, hard working week, with no distractions whatsoever? By all means, relax on Friday evening, planned maybe Friday morning or on Thursday.) Saving time now: not adding any pic to this post, even though it really ought to have one.

This week was somewhat productive, but not even close to productive enough! I’ve started writing down what I spend my time on, as inspired by scarily strict auditing practices.

I find post-grad study to be a tricky thing. I work well under pressure. With post-grad study, however, the deadline is too far away, there really doesn’t seem to be that much pressure. That is the problem though, there is so much work to be done, by the time the deadline is close enough to feel pressure, the workload is too high. So now I’m juggling. I must allow myself to stress enough to remain extremely productive, but too much stress is also deadly. (Weekly deadlines help, but it’s really too late to be concerned about weekly deadlines.)

This blog, then, will likely fall rather silent, for a few months. A pity. I discovered a friend that has converted to Islam (or “reverted” as some apparently like to say), and another friend has taken the path of Buddhism. Add that to the other good old friends that are at various places amongst the agnostic, atheistic, pastafarian and humanist perspectives, and the friends that are more conservatively Christian, and then the fundamentalistic and literalistic ones… The scene is set for some rather interesting discussions, don’t you think? But, that will of course all have to wait until, uh, September?

I do hope to build up some basic fitness, and take part in the CapeStorm Extreme-O on 20 May. That’s now all that is left of sporting plans.

I nearly considered announcing a halt to all blogging for the next few months, but I still can’t bring myself to do that. I will however place all the posts I had planned, on an indefinite “pause”, and remove any pressure I had on myself to blog often. I might end up blogging about just as often as I have until now, the only difference being that I will be satisfied with it. I hope.) Posts may be shorter (which may be a good thing), or more unattached to the “greater scheme of things”.

If all goes according to plans, when the thesis is finished, I might do some “serious” daily blogging to shorten my little list of things to blog about. I even considered more than once daily, but I’m too concerned of causing indigestion amongst my precious couple of readers, so I hope to restrain myself to once a day (or less), maybe. Well, here I am making promises again. I must stop now.

The one outstanding post (as in, promised but undelivered, not as in brilliant) that I do hope to make, within the next, uh, ok, let’s be realistic, month?, is a little “review” of “An Inconvenient Truth”. (I have already started on it. As in, I’ve collected the links I intend to include.) And then there’s the “About page”, which should rather not exist, considering its current state. I’ll have to think about tackling that one next, I’ve slowly started forming some vague ideas of what I might mention there. Don’t bother checking it (right now or regularly/later), I will likely make a post when I do get to it, it will be a cause for celebration! Hehe.

Oh, by the way, I did create an “open event” on facebook titled Watch “V for Vendetta” in April, as an experiment to see if that might work as a way to find friends who have yet to see it, and are interested in joining me for a movie night. So now you know about it, even if you aren’t on facebook. Drop a comment and I’ll take you into consideration as well, date has yet to be decided (between 10 April and 30 April, probably).

As another possible avenue of procrastination, I can start browsing wordpress themes. Yay!