Jonathan Sprinkle's weblog

I tell you what, I've missed the last 2 months of publishing, and it's all because I can't remember the darn URL to create a new blog. Oh, sure, I guess everyone else can remember to append "?__mode=view&_type=entry......", but I can't. I'm sure that I'd be writing every day, if I could just remember that.

What does the public at large due? I mean, people much dumber than me are posting blogs every day, but there's nothing in the MT installation about where to create a new entry. I'd love to install the adminlinks package, but I'm still working on it.

Well, looks like I may have successfully gotten MT to accept my peace offering of fruits and a fatted calf, so now I have my login buttons on the side. Don't push them, it'll restart your computer if you don't know my password.

No, not really.

You know, most people use their blogs for two things: (1) pretending that writing in their blog will change the policies of the United States, and thus donning a tinfoil hat in the hopes that perhaps some lowly state department official will be cruising around the web one day, during their lunch hour, and say, "You know, Jeeves, I say, one must do one's due to one's country by taking a day such as today, and, well, you know, having a spot of 'spot the good idea as held by one's peer' on the old information dual-carriageway. If that's the word I mean." Well, to cut a long story short, a crisis of conscience appears, and before you can say "Jack Robinson Crusoe" that very thing which you pretended to write has come true.

Or (2), keeping track of how to maintain blog software, or wiki software, or linux software, or any other kind of software.

Or (3), pointing out that people don't necessarily keep their word, even though facts published on their weblogs might contradict earlier (or later) weblog postings.

But not me. No, I'm using my weblog in a very creative way: I only write in it when I can remember the URL, and I never write anything related to work, or to weblogging.

I keep on thinking of that old adage one hears about people with writer's block: "Just write every day." Well, codswallup. If that's the word I mean. I'm gonna write every day, except for those days I forget, of course, and there's gonna be no blocks about it, you probably won't even want to read it. For heaven's sake, I'm an engineer, not a political pundit. Not that you'd want to read what most of them have to say anyway.

No, I'll just keep to the strayed (but narrow) columns of this Movable Type prison, and before you can say Lost: The Reunion (Starring Jackie Robinson and Robinson Crusoe), there'll be more words than an assembly exercise for Cray Supercomputers flowing on your terminal.

I've been experimenting lately with how to be more productive with my time. My most recent success is turning off my email for long periods of time, and then being responsive for short bursts. For example, today I checked email from 7:55 until 9:35. Then, I checked it again from 12:15 until 12:35. Then I checked it again later in the afternoon (about 20 minutes...). The long and the short of it is, I turned off the notifier. If someone really needs me they can call me. But seeing that notifier down in the corner really (really) distracts me from what is going on.

The other thing which has been energizing is working at home while I do lame stuff. Mary Margaret and I have been catching up on addictive TV shows. L O S T was first (anyone who read our Christmas Letter from 2005 probably knew this already). 24 is a good one as well (see the Jack Bauer quote as the title!). Other variants of this include:

• We haven't got much time
  
• There's no time
  
• How much time is that gonna take, and
  
• I need this now!
  

I had an email exchange with a few friends from grad school a few days ago. It began as a tirade against Daylight Savings Time by Sean, who was suggesting that the way to make it better for morning and evening people was to take away hours during the work day, and add them back during the dead of night, thus increasing the productivity of night workers (though college students might have more trouble staying up all night), having more hours of daylight after work, and just going ahead and skipping that hour after work when nobody gets anything done anyway.

Sean was rebutted by Scott, who suggested that the better way to do it was to distribute naps throughout the day, shortening the lunch hour and distributing the breaks more evenly. His exact quote was something like,

"You argue that an afternoon nap increases productivity, which I certainly agree with, but you can't cut the workday short by an hour and then expect an afternoon nap to fit in there as well (especially if you want the public to exercise also.) I recommend splitting the one-hour lunch break and additional coffee breaks into three equal (more or less) 25 minute breaks spread throughout the day. Take a ten to fifteen minute nap during one of them, eat a little at each of the other two, and walk or something else good for the heart and mind. You will be more productive AND healthier."

I first misread Scott's solution to re-distribute the wealth of the lunch break and coffee breaks as,

"let's divide the 1-hour lunch break into three equal breaks of 25 minutes each"

While I chuckled at this Reaganomics solution as a whimsical nod to the Escher-esque solution presented by Sean, it did get me thinking: why is it that we go onto Daylight Savings Time anyway? I mean, the days don't actually get longer, it just seems that way. As my college calculus teacher put it, "we might as well switch to Celcius at the same time, because 39 seems cooler than 102".

What we need to do is actually make the days get longer. I see a few possibilities:

1. Change the tilt of the earth. This might be a challenge, but those crazy kids at MIT are building a space elevator, so probably we could just tie a bunch of National Geographics to the end of it, and it'll twirl us away. Maybe a few "paleo-climatologists" would complain, but I reckon it's gonna get a little colder in the southern hemisphere, so more stuff'll freeze down there by, say, the day after tomorrow.
2. Reduce the spin of the earth. If we can do this, I kid you not, then both you and Sean can have your way: we can have longer evenings, AND longer daylight. My best guess on reducing the Earth's spin is to try to get Superman to fly around it--but get this, fly around it backwards. His increased mass will reverse the spin by tiny fractions, plus we'll finally have a ring around earth because he'll be going so fast. I think he'll pretty much have to keep doing this the whole time we need longer days in the summer, so we'll have to use that space elevator again to send up Lois lane and balogna sandwiches and what-not.
3. Move the earth further away from the sun. I read about this in a scientific journal that I saw at the Pilot Truck Stop once: if all the people in China jump up and down at the same time, it could push the earth out of its orbit. I figure since there's a bunch of people in India too, we could do this once or twice a year and push ourselved back and forth. While this doesn't give us longer days, we *do* have more days in the year, so we'll be able to have those few extra days at Christmas. Or over 4th of July in the Southern Hemisphere.

I've been living in Sydney for the last few days, and will be here for a few more weeks, working on the Sydney-Berkeley Driving Team's DARPA Grand Challenge entry.

I have to say that I've been on this new Australian diet. I don't know what it is, that makes it work, but the results speak for themselves. Before leaving for Oz, I weighed myself and came in at around 194.5. However, stepping on a scale here put me in at 88.0 even.

Not only that, but my biking speeds have improved dramatically. I averaged about 11/hr on my trips to/from Berkeley and my house, but here my biking velocity regularly clocks in somewhere around 18-19.

That's so awesome! I recommend everyone going on the Australian diet as well.

So I am not sure whether everyone observed the "International 1/24th of a Day of Darkness" (a.k.a., Earth Hour). But, I went with a few folks from the DGC project to view the cityscape (or perhaps lack thereof) to see whether we'll see stars like we'd never seen them before. Except for the 99% of the world's population who has been outside a city for at least one clear night in their lives.

Long story short, a few places turned their lights out, but more than anything I think that the Earth Hour cemented a few things in my mind:

1. There's a lot of light out there
   
2. It's not necessarily bad
   
3. Lots of people trying to do something may still not make a dent
   
4. Earth Hour probably didn't go off with the same gusto as the founders imagined