Beware of Low Flying Owls

The “Sleep Experiment” seems to be going well. I’ve not quite cracked getting up when the alarm first goes but I have managed to cut back on the number of snooze alarms significantly. I might try the “practicing getting out of bed” approach mentioned in my last post over the weekend to see if it works. I did have a rather long lie-in today, finally getting up at around 11:30, but excused myself since it was my birthday.

Twenty is a slightly odd age. It sounds as if it should be significant but doesn’t seem to have any tradition associated with it, which is instead reserved for 18 and 21. Technically, your twentieth birthday marks the end of being a teenager, and thus the start of something else. I’d say it marks the start of being an adult, but I think that point depends on what you do after finishing school. If you go straight on to employment, you’re probably going to feel like an adult much earlier than someone who continues in education. Personally, I’m not sure I’ll feel like an adult properly until I leave university, despite the fact that I rent a house, have a negative bank balance, and various other ‘adult-y’ things.

So that leaves me in a void for two years. I suppose you could say that I’m a student, but I was that before so there’s no change there. Which perhaps is part of the problem. Every birthday, you’re asked “so what’s [age] like then?”, and you have to think of some appropriately witty reply despite feeling no different to how you did the day before.

To remedy this and mark the occasion of my birthday, I attempted a suitably manly task today and changed the tyre on my car. The garage door was broken and wouldn’t open when we first moved into the house, and the builders who fixed it were kind enough to leave a strip of thin rubber with a nail sticking out of it on the driveway. How no one noticed this over the past 4 months I don’t know, but I certainly noticed it when I drove away and heard it going thunk-thunk-thunk as it span round the wheel.

However, when I announced that I intended to change the wheel the plan was foiled due to an over saturation of engineering students in the house at the time, so I mostly watched them do it. I also learned that the engine oil was a tad on the low side, the coolant needed topping up and that I’d have difficulty cleaning the windscreen with the washer fluid gone.

Thanks guys, my wallet feels lighter already.

If you missed the first post, check Fitter, Happier, More Productive for some information on what’s going on.

Two weeks into the sleep pattern project, and I wish I could say that it’s going well, but by the lack of updates you may be able to tell that it’s gone a bit wrong. I’d love to be able to tell you that I at least managed a week before reverting to my sloth-like ways. Bit less than that. No, less than five. Try two.

One thing I have noticed however is that the time at which I get tired and want go to bed has become earlier, regardless of when I get up. Over Christmas I started going to bed later and later, on average at about 4am each night. Now I get tired sometime between 1am and 2am, which I consider much more sensible. How this has happened with little change in the time at which I wake up I’m unsure, but it can only be a good thing.

My problem is still dragging myself out of bed when the alarm goes. Steve Pavlina suggests practice makes perfect. The idea is that you can’t trust your early morning self to make the right decision, so you have to condition your self conscious into putting your body into automatic mode when you hear the beeping. This involves getting into bed, setting your alarm for a few minutes ahead, ‘waking up’, and repeat. I’m sure it works but it does seem a little silly, so I’ll give myself a few days before I try anything.

So this is the reset. Turning back the clock to day zero. Starting tomorrow I’m going to try again. Don’t lose faith in me yet.

In my wallet there is a photocard which forms part of a full UK driving licence. As a result, it can be assumed that at some point in the past I was able to drive a car. Not an intelligent automatic that isn’t particularly more difficult to drive than the sort of car you might find at the driving school at Legoland. A proper car. One with levers and cogs and more pedals than you have feet.

Unfortunately, it is an automatic that I have found myself driving for the past two years, and some of the lessons learnt while stalling at traffic lights in Slough have been forgotten. Not only have I been driving an automatic, but I have been driving a clever one. A normal automatic car has gears like any other, but the hard work of depressing the clutch and actually changing gear is done for you. The Micra that I’ve been trundling about in, however, doesn’t. My understanding is that it has some sort of rubber band which moves up and down a cone in order to change the gearing ratio. It’s possibly a bit more complicated than that.

So the discovery that I had been gifted my own car was both exciting and a little scary, and I returned home this weekend to pick it up feeling slightly apprehensive. However, it seems I needn’t have worried.

Other than a couple of slightly jumpy starts, I seem to be coping quite well. The steering is much heavier in my Fiesta than in the Micra, but otherwise I’m doing ok. One problem is that you don’t seem to get a sense of the speed at which you’re travelling for some reason. 70 miles-per-hour feels much the same as 30, which can be a bit of a problem when trying to work out how much room in front of you you need to be able to stop properly, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it.

The thing I was most worried about was making the transition to using gears, but again, I don’t seem to be having many problems. Fortunately, driving seems to be much like riding a bike, except with more wheels, and I was able to pick it up again fairly easily.

So now I have transportation, and hopefully I’ll be able to write about some of my travels soon.

Generally, new year’s resolutions are made near to the 1st of January, which is the date on which the year traditionally begins.

Unfortunately I missed this, partially because I don’t normally make any resolutions. Partially because I slept in that morning. This week, however, I changed my mind.

I’m not a morning person. It’s not that I get grumpy when I’m tired, I just have difficulty getting up in the first place. My morning thought process usually goes something like this:

Argh! I’m being chased by bees!
Hmm, the buzzing appears to be my phone alarm.
I should get up.
It’s warm in my bed.
If I get up it will be cold
This will be unpleasant.
Do I really have to get up now?
What’s a few more minutes?

At this point, the snooze button is pressed and the process is repeated ten minutes down the line. My record to date is 6 full cycles. If it’s really bad, I’ll even just reset the alarm for a couple of hours time, if I don’t need to be up that is.

But I often do need to be up. I made the decision to do something about it this week, when I switched off the alarm, fully intending to get up, but fell also again instead. As a result I managed to miss a lecture. A lecture beginning at midday. Last term I would have missed a train had my house mate not knocked on my door half an hour before it left “to check I’d woken up and gone”. So you can begin to see why this is an issue.

Earlier this week several newspapers began their guides on how to change your life. The Independent laid out a seven day plan of action, whilst the Express went one better and reckoned it could do it in a weekend. As you may now be gathering, I’m quite lazy, so I’ll spend a month doing mine.

I’ve broken the task into four weekly steps. The first week will be spent trying to sort out my waking up problem. Week two I’ll start trying to improve on the typical student diet, and week three I’ll work on exercise. I’ve not decided what task I’ll set for week four, perhaps I’ll learn to juggle kittens.

I intend to post updates every couple of days, so stay tuned to find out how I’m getting on.

I’ve wanted to update my blog for a while. I was bored of the old design and annoyed with the difficulty of adding in new features. The majority of posts were a little mundane and didn’t really fit what I wanted the site to be. So here we are.

Other than a new design and a new name, rather a lot has changed beind the scenes. I’m now running Wordpress  which makes things much easier to run, although it does mean I’ve lost all of my old blog posts. I’ve transfered a couple of the more interesting ones across to fill it up a little, including some rants and the series posted ‘live’ during my trip to France in 2006.

Hopefully I’ll start posting more this year. However, if things get a little slow, check out some of the links on my blogroll for some other rather good blogs I read.

If you subscribed via RSS to the old blog, you may like to update your feed address. The new RSS feed is here.

A week ago Radiohead released their new album In Rainbows as a digital download, not only in a DRM-free Mp3 format, but allowing fans to choose their own price. Whilst I don’t want to discuss the issues surrounding this and whether it devalues the music itself or not, there’s no doubt that it has created a huge amount of hype. For the week ending 14th October, the top ten most listened to tracks by last.fm users was made up solely of In Rainbows tracks, with a gap of over 25,000 listeners before the first non-Radiohead track. So if the main aim was to distribute the album to as many people as possible, Radiohead have certainly succeeded.

However, the first thing I noticed before even listening to it was the lack of album cover art for the new album. This is a problem for those that use iTunes and its beautiful coverflow mode, and I don’t seem to be the only person who have created their own cover until a high quality version of the official art appears. Jon hicks of hicksdesign.co.uk posted his own design and invited others to do the same, resulting in a huge number of variations. There’s also a flickr group with even more. My own effort, scraped from the In Rainbows website and modified a little, you can see above.

I’ll admit that I was quite excited by the thought of the Olympics coming to London. I can’t quite place my finger on why, but there’s a certain buzz and anticipation that having such a huge international event in the UK brings.

One thing that really annoys me is things that are or have the potential to be great becoming rubbish. I’ll give you some examples. Opal Fruits becoming Starburst. An event you enjoy and take part in annually that seems to lose popularity. That sort of thing.

Joining the list is the 2012 London Olympics, which re-branded itself this week with a new logo. “We don’t do bland. This is not a bland city,” said Sebastian Coe. “We weren’t going to come to you with a dull or dry corporate logo that will appear on a polo shirt and we’re all gardening in it, in a year’s time. This is something that has got to live for the next five years.” And so this is what we’ve been given to live with. And we’re going to have to live with it because it’s going to be everywhere. In order to pay for the Games, £2bn needs to be raised from private sponsors. The 12 worldwide sponsors, Coca-Cola, McDonalds etc. will undoubtedly be joined by hundreds of others, and that’s an awful lot of logo placement. At least the sunglasses industry should profit, as looking at the colours chosen I expect sales in the London area to skyrocket.

I’m a fan of modern design, for the most part. I like ‘clean’, simple logos. Structures such as the glass roof over the British Museum courtyard, the Eden Project and the Viaduc de Millau (that huge bridge in the south of France), are fantastic. I quite like the logo used when London was still a candidate city. It’s crisp and clean, and the coloured strands through the text mirrors the flow of the Thames.

The most interesting point, however, is that the new logo cost £400,000 to design. One BBC News website reader commented that “the spirit of the student having had months to produce something but still does it through a drunken haze the night before it’s due to be marked lives on”. I struggle to think what that amount of money was spent on. Certainly not research, as the public outcry from the British public over the last few days has shown. Better designs could have been found by going into a school class and asking for suggestions. Indeed, this one could have been drawn by a six year old with a ruler. The BBC have been asking readers to send in their own designs, and some are rather good. Opening a competition and giving away free tickets as a prize, for example, could have saved London taxpayers a lot of money.

Still, I’ll probably still go to an event or two, purely for the experience. Although I’ve started to worry what else the Olympic Committee have in store. I hope they’re not choreographing the opening ceremony.

This post comes to you from my friend’s room at Southampton University, which is slightly odd because the room is fairly similar to mine at Warwick (although I have my own bathroom whereas she doesn’t), but differences appear as soon as you leave the door, since she doesn’t live on campus.

I’m not particularly a fan of buses in unfamiliar territory. Trains I can handle. You know where you’re going, buying a ticket is easy, and there’s an announcement at each station so you know when to get off. With buses though, I never know quite what it’s going to cost (and the drivers often expect you to), and there’s always the worry that you’ll miss your stop, especially if you don’t know the area.

This isn’t generally a problem, since I live about 5 minutes walk form any of my lectures, and I recognise the areas of Coventry and Leamington Spa that I’ve taken buses to. Yesterday when arriving here however, I opted to take a train and a short walk rather than a bus, mostly because I couldn’t find the right bus stop, despite it being right outside the train station.

Maybe It’s my own fault then.

Well, that was an exciting journey back. Throughout the trip we managed not to have any major problems, so France decided to throw a huge one at us when were were leaving. As we were nearing Paris on the train, 2 hours after leaving Deauville station, Mark realises that he has left his passport in the house. We get a little worried. Phone calls are made. We decide to attempt to head through the terminal without it, and get Mark’s parents to bring it home since they’re visiting the house now. So the rest of us wander through without any fuss, and Mark approaches the French passport control with the words “Officer, I have a problem”.

They don’t seem to know really what to do, but since we were leaving the country aren’t really bothered about it. Mark gets sent on to our checkers, and gets let through using his driving licence, being given a ‘lost or stolen passport’ form as a souvenir.

The rest of the trip passed without incident, although the new ’self service’ ticket machines at London Waterloo are sufficiently complicated to warrant putting a member of staff next to each one to help people use them, but that’s a topic for another post.

And thus I find myself consuming vodka sorbet after eating our chow-mein-esque improvised dinner, which was surprisingly good. Today has been very lazy indeed and we haven’t done much, although tomorrow we’re going into Trouville-sur-Mer for shopping and such. Exciting.

The cooking experience was interesting, especially since we had no recipe and limited amounts of utensils. Nevertheless, we chopped vegetables and chicken, boiled noodles, slightly cheated by using a jar of pre-prepared vegetables, and added copious amounts of Soy sauce, and it turned out to be great. Josh described it as being like half an orgasm, if not more. So I guess that despite the initial dread it all turned out ok.

Nothing much more to add, so I suppose I’ll sign off until I return. Farewell loyal readers.