Demon, Get Out of My Spine!

I’m writing this while I’m in the foulest of moods. I’m stricken with stabbing pains in my lower back, so much so that I’ve been rendered mostly immobile since yesterday afternoon. The occurrence of this was so freakish and ironic. Despite all the chances to acquire this by walking and slipping on ice within the past few days, it didn’t happen that way. Instead, it happened in the gym. Between the track and treadmill, I did 7.7 km of running activity, and then decided to do some core training: with special focus and intent to ‘strengthen my back’. The stupid bench that I sat on wasn’t secured properly. The wild scene that resulted was me losing balance, twisting sharply, and abruptly flipping backwards onto the floor. I think that the effort in trying to correct myself in “mid-flight” did more harm to me than the actual damned fall itself. So now, I’m stuck at home, using ice compresses, and gobbling up Ibuprofin and anti-inflammatory pills like they were Halloween candy. I went to the office at work today to attend to a duty there briefly; even that brief visit there became too excruciating, and it feels like I’m drained from anymore activity for the rest of today. So, I’m retreating into writing: to do something that forces me to sit still, and to drain myself of this negativity, which hopefully will result in also easing some tension in my strained back muscles.

Speaking of Halloween candy, if I’m getting trick-or-treaters coming by tomorrow knocking periodically, I’ll definitely be in no comfortable shape even to get up and off the chesterfield to answer the door if the pain keeps on persisting, like the way it is now, on through to tomorrow. If I did dress up, the only option I feel like I have now is to be Quasimodo.

Before my lucidity becomes too compromised by pain, or by the junk I’m using to stop it, I thought it would be fitting to share what is really scary to me about this Halloween. It’s the realization about how aged I’m feeling, and how old I’m probably starting to appear. It started when I peered through the TV listings this weekend, and noticed that The Exorcist was playing on one of the movie channels, along with the other scary movies for this season. I remember that this was the first horror movie that I ever saw as a kid, and because I was a kid, and perhaps because all this crazy possession business was happening in a kid, this movies was the one that freaked me out the most for a long time, so I researched it a bit. I looked back at the casting through IMDb, and noted the stats in the biography of Max Von Sydow, the actor who played the character of the frail, old priest, Father Merrin. It turns out that Von Sydow was only in his mid-forties when he was cast as the old priest . . . around to the same friggin’ age I am now. Jesus Christ! When did this bullshit start happening? I know that life expectancy was a bit shorter in the early seventies (when this film was made), but regarding people in their forties as old is ridiculous. Maybe I’m over-reacting, and this is just a revelation of either the brilliant acting skill of Von Sydow to play a character who looked thirty years older than he actually was, or a glimpse of just how badly Von Sydow was a victim to pre-mature aging (even worse than I am), if he didn’t use that much make-up for the role. Whether it's the one case or the other, it's still disheartening to know that I'm at that age where I could probably appear as, or play, the role of an aged senior so convincingly as well.

I’m trying hard not to be a victim of my age number. In fact, I must admit that the reason I went back to the gym (before this miserable outcome happened) was that I was (re)inspired by another guy, around my age, who’s a movie star. Daniel Craig is at it again, playing James Bond, Agent 007, in the upcoming movie Skyfall. It is coming to cinemas here soon, and I can’t wait to see it on big screen. Daniel Craig was the guy who served as a fitness model for me, and got me directing myself into getting into fitness mode, at a time when I thought I was doing more decaying than thriving health-wise. If Daniel Craig played the old priest in The Exorcist, he would have made that demon his bitch within a minute. Once I recover though, I have to make it a point to not be so zealous in trying to get back into Bond-form.

I feel like I need yet another role model, this time for the sake of my learning objectives and personal standards of productivity and efficiency. The meds and muscle relaxants are kicking in now; maybe I’ll have a vision as to who that might be, in a dream as I drift. . .off to . . .sleee. . .zzzzzzzz.

Early Snow, Combo-Abundance, and the Hell of Clothes Shopping

As I mentioned in one of my postings, I'm finding it a bit of a downer after the dump of snow we received a couple days ago; knowing that if it remained until spring thaw, we would be having nine more weeks of snow coverage compared to last winter, when we didn't get a lasting snow until sometime between Christmas and New Year's Day. Of course last year was an abnormal winter in its lateness, just as this year is abnormal in its earliness. Nature, I guess, is just balancing itself out. Normally, for this region in Canada, the snow that lasts through all the winter season arrives in mid-November, and remains until around the end of March. There is a small chance that this recent snowfall might still disappear, but with the temperatures predicted to drop to minus 15 ºC overnight this weekend, I highly doubt that it will.

The coming of this early snow is prompting me to think and do several things that work interdependently and consequentially with each other:

1. I dig through my closets to switch over my clothing for the season (also see point #10).
2. I pitch out, or put aside to donate, clothes which are overworn, or which don't fit or suit me anymore.
3. I'll be taking my clothes to one of local thrift stores, which would be having a higher business volume now due to Hallowe'en coming next the week.
4. While there, along with contemplating the irrationality of having a traditional observance in the year where we celebrate the supernatural, superstitions, and stuff that scares us, I calculate the degree of waste occurring when we buy 'ceremonial' clothing or costumes that we only use one day within a year (or in our lifetime) to wear. 
5. After donating my old stuff, I'll be forcing myself into the arduous task of shopping for the list of clothes and winter gear that I may lack.
6. I think about how much of a pain in the ass it is for me to shop for clothing (leading to point #9)
7. With the coming of the snow, it triggers me to wonder how close to Christmas it actually is (exactly two months from today I realize), and hence make it a point to try to procure some extra savings for the holiday.
8. I monkey around with figures more to avoid depriving myself before and after the Chistmas holiday.
9. I'll willingly opt to stay inside more, giving more attention to my home environment (convergence at point #12).
10. After digging through my closets, and knowing running outside isn't very safe anymore, I pull out my home gym equipment, and try it out (more to ease my guilt about buying this stuff, and yet not using it on a more regular basis). Also serves as a reminder to not let myself balloon out of the few well fitting pants I have because of more physical idleness during winter.
11. Thinking back to point #7, I spend more time thinking about what practical things I could use around here which I could get on the Boxing Day sales. Skip to next point.
12. Being inside my place more leads to more tinkering with things and cooking (as home economics projects to save some money, point #7), and playing around with more puzzles and number games to quell boredom. I also resolved to use this winter to read more, and re-learn things about science and advanced mathematics (and making practical use of them, as the case through exploring and answering point #14).  
13. Thoughts of avoiding a sense of deprivation (point #8), rummaging through my closets and drawers (point #1 & #10), clothes shopping (point # 5), messing around with recreational mathematics (point #12), add to that the ridiculous manner of consumption and hoarding I have been witnessing a few people partake in, leads me to think about the last point as a open ended question about other psycho-social problems regarding greed and coveting things:
14. Why can't people use more common sense, arithmetic, and logic to determine:
1. The possibilities and abundance they already have through the application of probability and statistics?
2. How much is 'enough' before wasting more time, money and energy on items that become insanely superfluous and turn into a ridiculous collected/hoarded surplus?
3. The most efficient way to shop for stuff, and how to sense better about which things are 'wants' and which are 'needs', especially if one is already the sort that is on a fixed income*?

Let me provide an example, especially relating to 14.1 and 14.2. Suppose all your clothing vanished from your closets except for eight of each garment of your basic essentials**: in this case (thinking as a guy), they would be eight pairs of shoes, eight pairs of socks, eight pairs of undergarments, eight pairs of bottoms (trousers/jeans), eight belts, eight T-shirts, eight overshirts, and eight outerwear garments. Let's also suppose you have the right style going for yourself with each garment (i.e. each pair of pants will suit well with all the shirts you have, all socks go with the all the shirts and shoes you own, etc.). Thus, you would then already have 8⁸ ,or 16,777,216*** different possible permutations to wear as ensembles out of just this bunch of clothes alone. Supposing even that you eliminated choices by a wearing fresh ensemble of each kind of clothes item each day of the week, after randomly picking out your first outfit (as per the conditions of the ** footnote), within those seven days you still have 7,907,396 possible ensembles to choose from through the whole week(7,907,395 choices technically, since you would be reduced down to one pair of shoes, one, pants, one belt, one shirt, etc., by the last day so you would really have no choice left to make to dress yourself) even as you eliminated options by tossing each ensemble set in the hamper/not using them for the rest of the week after you wore them for a day.**** Knowing this now, how could you ever feel deprived if you stopped and looked at your closet with even more stuff in it than what I just gave as an example? The fashion police, compulsive clothes shoppers (whose delusions I just torched), and a few teenage daughters, are still already probably plotting to put a price on my head for mentioning this. Mugatu has probably already selected and trained the assassin to do it. I'll probably be strangled with a piano key necktie in my sleep (see Zoolander, hilarious movie).

If this is what's possible with just eight shirts, eight pants, eight pairs of underthingles, etc., can you imagine what goes through a mind like mine when I'm faced with the challenge of gazing at racks loaded with clothes in a store, and having to pick out something? Option paralysis takes over, and that's why I need the assistance of a female friend with a keener sense of my sartorial style than I have, to help me with colours, cuts, patterns and whatnot; to at least help pick out one item out for me and to provide a foundation to shop around, or else I'd be forever wearing jeans and plain T-shirts.

For regular day to day affairs, so long as what I have on fits right, feels and smells clean, and doesn't brand me as being some sort of friggin' redneck/cowboy or any other kind of hoodlum, I could care less about what I'm wearing, or having matching tags, or comparing my wardrobe to what someone else has on. To be honest, the famous people I have most respect for are those who coincidentally use the equivalent of plain brown wrappers as garb. Billionaire Warren Buffet, the Wizard of Wall Street, being as rich as he is, got away with wearing unpretentious simple cotton shirts, slacks and a blazer for a long time before finally being pressured by some cohorts into "looking respectable" by moving up to wearing $1,500.00, off the rack, Zegna Italian suits to work. Steve Jobs' business attire was a black turtleneck, jeans, and Nike runners. Mahatma Gandhi got by with even less. Their wisdom overshadows any flaws in dress and appearance they may have had. People who constantly have to overdress*****, to me, are doing their damnedest to try to shield some insecurity, or other major defect in their personality. I sure as hell won't trust some guy wearing gold jewelry, or a $3,000.00 suit, who is begging for money for a ministry, that allegedly preaches the words of wisdom of a Jewish carpenter who did his mission by wearing only a simple robe and sandals.

*- Like those reckless spenders I've been watching.
**- By essentials, I mean the kind of clothing that you walk out of your house looking presentable and feeling comfortable in 95% of the time. I'm being generous here with the number eight, that's one of each item to wear each day of the week, plus one extra to have on stand by should you have to change once midday if you slop something up, or to have something to wear while you are using one of the days in the week to launder your other outfits (unless you do your laundry naked, but that's your business). For the sake of a little more simplicity, I eliminated null options (going without a jacket, sockless, beltless, or going commando), or else there would be nine options for each respective clothing article.
***- Another way of looking at this: if each and every day you tried to wear each one of those different combinations of that given set of clothes, without repeating any one ensemble exactly, you'd have to live roughly 45,933.5 years (leap years accounted for) to do it.
****- [number of choices for each item]^{(number of items in ensemble)}, therefore adding the remaining possiblities made by each elimination for each day throughout the week, ( 7⁸ + 6⁸ . . . +1⁸ ), yields the remaining possible permutations. I was totally wrong earlier with a posted answer using a factorial analysis. This entry may yet need corrections. This is exactly the point of my wanting and trying to learn advanced math. I know do well enough that the answer is a hell of a lot larger than 23. It's a number still large enough to challenge the status quo about how one can have tremendous outcomes with relatively few options.
*****- This includes overdoing it with the makeup for women.

Running Harder, but Standing Still

I finally did something yesterday that involved straying off to someplace different than work or home within this past week. I bit of browsing at McNally Robinson and enjoyed a light lunch with my friend; sadly it was all the energy I had in me for that day. Browsing wasn't as enjoyable as it usually is for me. As much as I wished to do more reading, my eyes have been too fatigued and sore for it, plus I've been stricken with recurring headaches. It's probably due to too much extra time used staring at screens, processing code and formulae throughout the week, and monitoring the FX charts before the start, and after the end, of each day of a string workdays 10 hours long. I'm sure that typing this is will even become challenging shortly.

The title of this entry is a bit of a misnomer. By running harder, I mean it seems to take more energy and a higher pain threshold to commit to doing it at this time of the year. I didn't run all week: the damp coldness has been giving my knees grief. The lack of doing it is making my metabolism level head south, as indicated by my tightening waistbands on my pants. I resolved to at least get out today, no matter what, but I wonder if the resulting shock and pain to lose an extra couple pounds would make it worth doing. I plodded along at some distance over 5 kilometers this morning: better than nothing I suppose. I went outside, absent-mindedly wearing my running shorts and light jacket. I honestly didn't sense how cold it actually was until near the end of my run when I visually noticed that the shoulders of my black jacket were coated with white frost from my condensed expired breath. My knees didn't suffer that badly thankfully.

There is a treadmill in my building's rec room to use, but I discovered recently that the damn thing is busted. So much for that option for winter training. I can't really stand treadmills anyway. It seems that I need some perception and sensation of moving through physical space and traversing an actual distance to make it feel like running is benefiting me. There is the indoor track at the local Field House, but I'm trying to avoid paying a mint to use it. Walking and cycling, at least for now, are still viable. There have been still good results. I'm noting that yesterday, even during this time of the year, was the first time I used my car in a week. The most heartbreaking thing to see along my trips by the river this week has been the unceremonious demolition of the Victoria Street Bridge.


The hope of getting to use this bridge deck to jog on is officially extinguished.

I'm struggling to figure out where to apply myself today, the second day of a three day weekend. I find I almost dread having unstructured time off, because it seems that I waste half of that precious time, and even more energy, which I don't feel like I have, trying to structure it. Blogging now, in it's own way, serves to help me piece that together.

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.”
-Alvin Toffler

One thing I did do, in keeping with my riding the wave of decluttering and living more frugally, was clearing away some books I found, which someone in the building gave away as freebies as they were moving. So, I took them to my favourite local used bookstore to exchange them for something more meaningful for me*. I was in non-fiction mood, craving something in the realms of finance, math or science: things I definately don't hear sensible conversations about when I'm at work. One cheap book I found that I was willing to re-read was Innumeracy: mathematical illiteracy and its consequences, by John Allen Paulos. This edition I bartered for is from 1990, but the truth in it is as valid now as it was back then. Now that I find myself playing around with numbers more, I thought it would be prudent to detect and extinquish those remaining numerical fallacies and statistical errors I myself still succumb to. The sad and dangerous thing though is that the more educated I get about such stuff by reading this book, the more likely I am to detect just how much more stupid people around me will seem when they are trying to argue opinions around me and are trying to stick in figures they don't understand into the mix. Thus, my respect for them begins to quickly retract (to put it lightly), and I just fear more for the future of humanity in general once such people somehow gain more power.

*- I spent no actual money, I made a tidy little profit in terms of store credit, I gave old books new life, it helps to save a tree or two, plus by buying through this kind of discount I have the satisfaction of sticking it to the man by avoiding the rip off of paying an average 12% higher listed Canadian price for a book (even in e-book format) when the looney is close to parity with the US dollar. I feel it's all good karma for me.

Mid-October Fizzle Down, Time Puzzles

This weekend has been so lovely, and too short. It didn't help that I spent most of my time commiting myself to starting and finishing a few home economics projects instead of using more time to spend outside. I needed to bottle some beer, and then found some great other discounts and used the opportunity to make some pickles and sausage*. With all the sausage, beer, and sour pickles in my kitchen, it was like a one-man Oktoberfest around this place.

Running has been a bit of a pain lately, both figuratively and literally. My watch stopped tracking for the last couple of runs, including today's. My leg is starting to stiffen again, perhaps because of it losing its muscle memory due to more infrequent trials, and my failure to give it the stretching it probably needs. I've been resorting to doing more walking instead. Ella is definately happier, because of her extra inclusion, and getting to tour around more and sniff out the remaining smells of autumn that she finds lovely before the weather gets worse.



Mega-Eyeballs (Ella) greeting Super-Schnozz (Chance)

I thought I'd test my wits with FOREX trading again, and I'm trying to relax right now in this early afternoon Sunday before the currency markets re-open in Oceania and East Asia (it's an hour away from Monday morning in Sydney). This time discrepancy, the Toronto Waterfront Marathon**, messing around with time equations in Excel, and noticing my typical current waking hour falling close to an hour ahead sunrise at this time of the year as the daylight hours shorten more and more as we approach winter solstice made me think about all sorts of puzzles related to time, and realizing how much of our own language is a barrier as to why it's so damn difficult to formulate a sensible equation that a computer can process, and now much more difficult it's becoming to process happenings in a global ecomony in a world that functions 24/7. Questions that boggle my mind are things like:

• How far into the "future" does this "present" moment exist? That is, what is the limit of the farthest extended reading of time that the current moment can be expressed as a future time compared to your own timezone. The answer to this, of course, is whatever the current time is in the UTC +13 timezone, 19 hours ahead from my timezone, which would be the one west of the International Date Line. This time is being experienced along the meridian that intersects some rock out in the mid-Pacific somewhere. How far would you have to go if you jumped off that rock and started swimming until you technically reached "yesterday"?*** That answer would depend on how far north or south this rock was from the Equator. This leads me to wonder. . .
• If I were directly on the geographic North (or South) pole: the points on Earth where all time zones converge, which one do I use? If I took 5 paces northward from the South Pole, turned 90 degrees right and ran in circles, keeping a constant radius from the pole, would I be prematurely aging myself by days at a time? Theoretically, moving through all timezones so fast, I could pass through a week or so after a couple hundred meter circuit. Is it possible to stop your aging by running the other way around?****
• Supposing one had a regular diurnal cirradian rhythm, what would be the most optimal time to fly, and which flightpath must one take from one's timezone of origin, to the opposite side of the Earth (12 hours) that would most proactively reduce, or entirely eliminate, jetlag?
• If someone made a virus by some innocent botch in a financial program where a calculation was being made by using "negative time", could that person effectively use the resulting "negative interest" to pay off their credit card, and even make money?
• If I had to pay a capital gains tax here in Canada on an investment I made at a Hong Kong brokerage house, which had a massive fluctuation in profit (or losses) between 23:59:59, Dec 31st my time, and 23:59:59, Dec 31st  Hong Kong time, which quarterly report is used?

Some of those things are silly thoughts, others are asked out of genuine curiousity. The other prompt for this weird fascination with timezone play is a quirky European film called Night on Earth, a film about the lives of taxi drivers around the globe at one particular evening. 

I only other thing to add here is a little maxim my late uncle frequently said: "Today is the yesterday of our tomorrow."


*- A bit disappointed with my savings yield with the pickle and sausage making. I figured that I considering the quantity I produced and the time I used, I only saved between $65.00 and $75.00. I'm sure I could do even better than that. The sausages are bitchin' awesome by the way. I can't report on the pickles for another couple of weeks.

**- A friend of mine is participating in it; thinking about how she dislikes traveling into different time zones and wondering how her subjective experience of the run (effected by jetlag) was compared to her actual performance.
***- The opposing question is: how late into the "past" is this present moment being registered? I hence would presume GMT -12. Don't ask me how daylight savings would would play on this. I'm from Saskatchewan for Crissakes, and in a timezone where we don't have to mess with that shit.
****- There is a natural phenomenon by which a prolonged stay on Antarctica, a place where -82 C temperatures occur, and 50 kpm windspeed is common, that will induce a greatly delayed cellular decay, and all chonological aging stops. . .it's called FREEZING TO DEATH!

Thanksgiving 50 List

Today is Thanksgiving, a time to reflect on what we are most grateful for. Generally, I'm thankful for these 50 things (in no order of importance):

1. Waking up and still breathing
2. Having the power to get myself out of bed*
3. Not just being able to walk, but to run as well (did 10 kms this morning)
4. Being in generally good health
5. Being, for the most part, pain free
6. Having all my five senses
7. Being allergy free
8. Being in better physical shape now in some ways than I was even as a younger man
9. Being free of addictions; not being a social parasite to others by being a slave to any 
10. Looking reasonably good for my age
11. Being Canadian
12. Living in a peaceful nation
13. Not having to worry about the cost of most health care should I need it
14. Living in a reasonably secure area
15. Access to the lovely parks and trails to jog in during summer
16. Owning property instead of renting it
17. Having adequate living space without an outrageous cost
18. Having a cozy fireplace, to comfort me during winter
19. All the comfort food that I know how to make
20. Clean running water that one can drink from the taps
21. Being employed/employable
22. Adequately accessible roadways and transportation
23. Not having to spend a ridiculous amount of time commuting to work
24. Not being on any form of social assistance
25. Having a frugal mindset, and able to notice and appreciate the simple abundance around me
26. Having a computer and access to the Internet
27. Having enough technical savvy to use the aforementioned things
28. A simple enough life to be able to live independently, by myself
29. Having enough creativity and knowledge about how to cook
30. Having a better than average literacy skill (it's shocking to know just how much of the world is really illiterate)
31. Having a better than average ability to write
32. Having just enough enemies **
33. Having enough sense and discretion about how to eject those who qualify as candidates of point 32 out of my life
34. My best friend
35. My family
36. Doing what I can to live a little greener
37. My dog, the enjoyment she gives me, and having a big enough heart to care for her
38. My very eclectic music collection
39. The free books and media at my local public library (my library card is the most valuable thing in my wallet)
40. Living in a nation that scores high on allowing intellectual freedom.
41. Access to nutritious food
42. My iPhone
43. The useful apps on the iPhone
44. Having an appetite for life-long learning
45. The times that I can nap or meditate in silence
46. Games and puzzles
47. My books
48. Lessons in Zen
49. Any good sleep I can get
50. Knowing that there are more than just 50 things that could be added to this list

*- I know it may seem silly to say, but work with the disabled for a while, and you'll see that this point is not so trivial.

**- Let's get real here, if you have friends, you will have enemies. Be thankful that the world has a few examples of malicious and idiotic people whom you would never wish to be like, otherwise you wouldn't know what it's like to do and be better.

Progressive Apps

I have no clue as to why I feel jazzed up today, except for the fact that I've been really nerdish and anal about getting a few more applications and organizational tools working for me in a good way, and having a few more 'Eureka!' moments and breakthroughs as I continue to pursue re-establishing some sort of order to my personal domain.

I'm still struggling to bend my brain around some of the more abstract portions of my learning modules in the programming manual. I suppose after comparing programming to all else which I construe as a bothersome problem to deal with, I've given these things a new perspective, and they now appear a lot less difficult to manage. Whether it's done formally or informally, I'd highly recommend it to everyone to learn some kind of programming. It's not just about sorting out variables and configuring data to be processed. It's also about understanding the flow of information, and having that flow and following it's momentum is what is needed to get out of a rut when blocked by a problem.

With gaining more knowledge and skill at programming and flow of information, one becomes more attune to the concept that any common problems are just forms of information that need re-processing. Circumstances never arise with any label of "good" or 'bad' attached to them. Circumstances only become problems whenever they conflict, clash, and interfere with whatever ambitions, goals, missions, or ideals of progress we've set for ourselves, and then get wrapped up in our own dramas that we build around them. Most of the challenge in dealing with them is just breaking up things into manageable sets and putting them in a much simpler framework. Keeping motivated, monitoring , and applying action is the rest of the job.

My iPhone is armed with these apps that I find especially useful. If anyone knows of one that creates good flowcharts and fish bone graphs, I'd love to hear about then. Here are a few productivity apps that I find especially useful when I'm mobile, and when I want to capture, analyze, compare, and chart ideas that strike me from out of the blue:

Simple Minds - What this app is for is mind mapping: taking a central theme and creating related offshoots to build upon the idea to provide options and enhancements. It allows one to follow through with some open-opened creativity. It's relatively simple to use, and the variable colours can be helpful for coding categories.

MindTools - A nice little compendium of productivity strategies, for helping me to get out of ruts for planning complicated things. The problem solving and the exercises to challenge assumptions are some of my favourite ones in this app.

PDF Reader - Generally OK to transfer PDF files to, but on the iPhone screen, even with expanding the view, details of the fine print on a letter-sized paper formatted document are a little hard to read.

Graphio (Lite) - A cool little piece of productivity software that makes diagrams and graphs for flowcharts and more. The only flaw it has is the difficulty in bringing up the keyboard to label the chart objects. This prevents me from bothering to upgrade to the full version.

OneNote - This Microsoft app is a very dumbed down version of the full MS Office OneNote program. There is a checkbox function for to do lists, a point form outline maker, and photo capture button, but nothing else really. The only saving grace it has is for collecting rudimentary material, which can then be uploaded to a desktop/laptop for more detail with colour coding and graph making.

Dropbox - This provides instantaneous picture sharing with all cloud connected devices from your pics and other files. Simply splendid for faster processing of shared photographs, and posting them on blog entries. The process of having to email them to myself first was very cumbersome in comparison.

Evernote - A very good note app for collecting tags and sharing with other wi-fi connected devices. Unlike OneNote, it will record voice and index your tags and categories for you.

Lift  - The newest one I collected so far. It is what can be termed as a positive habit recorder and monitor. You can pick from a shared list of, or create your own, habits that you want to include in your life and stick with. It's a checkmark diary of sorts, to monitor your progress and account for all the little things that will amount to greater goals. It will also link one with a support community, some of whom are monitoring the same things they wish to include in their lives as you, who can even give you props to encourage you.

One Quarter Left: of the Year ... and of Me

October began yesterday, so now we're into the beginning of the final quarter of the year. It opened with me making a platelet donation at Canadian Blood Services, and then going through the futile process of trying to rest before doing my stupid night shift.

I gave up in frustration with trying to rest through the day to prepare for it by trying to bore myself to sleep with studying. I ended up starting and processing a bunch of other household stuff. I hoped that the later sunrise would allow me more wind down time, but it wasn't so. I have three more of them to do before year's end. I do my best to push myself through when I do work them, but I've resolved to not put myself through any future hell of doing anymore of them. I have enough vacation hours and banked stat time to allow me to do so. It's better for both me and the people I serve if I avoid them. I don't want to go to any job, or do any task, or sign up for anything else where I'm reduced to being only 25% (or less), of the kind of person that I want to be; when it becomes such that it reflects both mentally and physically in my performance, which is what is effectively happening when I commit to doing these shifts.

So, I've been awake for more than 36 hours now. Here are a few more peculiarities that I'm noting and learning about me while I'm stricken with this degree of insomnia, with my senses working overtime, and depleted of a few less discretionary mental faculties:

• I try to chill out with music, giving eighties alternative/indy artists a good play over (The Cure, The Smiths, Siouxsie and the Banshees, David Bowie, The Jesus & Mary Chain, XTC, Joy Division, old school R.E.M., et al.).
• Anything I tried studying the previous day is just not in memory, thus wasted time and a total write off. I have to redo the last unit from my programming manual.
• I get strange and ridiculous surges of hunger that interrupt sleep, and for very carb-loaded foods too. This time I did something out of character and made pancakes ... for myself , after I came home, a true sign that I'm having some sort of a mental breakdown from exhaustion.
• I purposely isolate myself at home to prevent myself from making impulsive purchases while having less than adequate decision-making ability.  
• I get really geared to do something to fix myself better, despite the fatigue, with problem solving strategies by exploring productivity improvement sites, like Mind Tools™ (only after when my eyes aren't hurting too much to read).
• Gobbling up any pain-relieve pill that will sooth the headaches and muscle/eye-soreness, (I usually avoid anything in pill form if I can).
• I try to vent my general edginess and frustration through blogging, hoping that sleep will strike me down soon afterward.

If I'm still not able to sleep after this, my next manoeuvre is to review my stack of scans, sketches, and scribblings to see what of these non-ongoing things are most likely achievable within the next three months. Part of my problem with the lack of headway in some things is the degree of interest diversity I have, and trying to do eight or nine things at a time, rather than just narrowing the focus down to one or two items. My To-Do list really needs to be abbreviated.