Netvibes

Netvibes is an adaptive homepage site, which I use to organize my news and email and other notifications.

I've just gone through and removed the 'frivolous' feeds from my home page, leaving the AI feeds and business notifications.

I've found that people, even smart people like myself are very lazy. We tend to do what we're already doing. We investigate what we're already interested in. We allow ourselves to slump, within the limits we've set for ourselves, or have been set for us.

This is not to say that higher standards are all that's needed to get more from yourself. There is an apocryphal tale about a farmer teaching his horse to do without food, he slowly reduces the intake of the horse, and it adapts as best it can, until he decides it's ready to go all the way and it promply dies.

There are limits, but part of growing up, and becoming the person you want to be is finding those limits. Even if they're just limits to comfort, that's important to know. You can't be unhappy all the time for very long before other parts of your life starts to suffer.

So, today I'm just going to start doing some things that I have considered doing before, but for various reasons have never gotten over the inertia of what I was currently doing.

For a while there in SLC I had a polyphasic sleep pattern. Lately my sleep habits have been sloppy and creeping over the 9 hours a day I like them to be. I'm going back to polyphasic sleep, and less time in bed. I started Sunday(technically yesterday).

I haven't been consistent with this blog. At the best of times I found it helpful to be honest and regular with it. It helped me to organize my thoughts and grounded me in the invisible audience.

I've tried to keep my time at work to 8 hours a day, every day. This works out to 240 hours a month, since I work a little more than that most weekdays, I use that average excess to calculate my time off. Lately, that hasn't been working out well for me, with weekends being the time when I recover from disrupted/irregular sleep, and weekdays having a little too much frustrated or unproductive time at work. Part of this is because I'm working on some rather difficult subjects largely on my own, but some is also due to bad habits at work I've found myself in that keep me from being as effective as I would like to be. I'm trying some new things there, and I hope I can get more done with less stress.

Golf club Royal Bromont - Google Video

This is the most brilliantly put together thing I've ever seen by a DIY enthusiast. I would buy one immediately. I know people are going to be rushing to duplicate this, so I'll keep an eye on the scene and note when something accessible get's planned out.

For the time being it looks like he constructed all the technology himself.

todbot blog » Blog Archive » Arduino, the Basic Stamp killer

good news for hardware hackers

The Mprize-PayPal Founder pledges $3.5 Million to antiaging research

Peter Thiel is quickly making a name for himself as one of the largest contributors towards transhumanist efforts.

Last year he gave the Singularity Institute an enormous boost both in money and visibility, and here he both increases the MPrize war chest, and incentivises much further donation.

Looking over his history, since paypal, he has also invested well on the commercial side, being an angel in such explosive efforts as Facebook and co-producing one of my favorite movies of last year Thank You for Smoking

Amazon.com: To Reign in Hell: Books: Steven Brust

"Snow, tenderly caught by eddying breezes, swirled and spun in to and out of bright, lustrous shapes that gleamed against the emerald-blazoned black drape of sky and sparkled there for a moment, hanging, before settling gently to the soft, green-tufted plain with all the sickly sweetness of an over-written sentence."

Wow. That's one heck of a first sentence. Just now investigating Brust, I started here, as it was endorsed with a foreword by Roger Zelazny.

I went to visit the Blancos today, and bade 'happy birthday' to several people. It was a nice few hours, although I came back quickly and am back working again.

I'm happy to say that things at work are very interesting and productive, and more discussion on the subject of AI is happening on the various internet fora I'm connected to.