A post inspired by my friend Mary:

ThinkGeek has this Swiss Memory USB module/knife geek-thingy. Mary apparently saw it at some point and sends me this email saying she doesn’t know why it would remind her of me *wink*. Hmm… me either. (Not.)

Here’s what I said to her about the Swiss Memory USB geek-thingy:

I’ve seen this item before and it’s not quite geeky enough. I mean, really, what self-respecting geek walks around with less than a gigabyte of pocket-sized storage in a single device? ;->

Seriously though, I’ve been looking at these type toys for quite a while and can’t see anything less than 1GB being useful. Now that 1GB devices are available, I can’t think of anything I’d really care to use it for. That’s kinda like Willy Wonka being indifferent to chocolate and not knowing why, heh.

A few minor plug-in related things to finish up, but mostly it’s done… four hours later. Not bad, I guess, considering all the plugins and other customizations I have installed. Not a lot of swearing at the computer either which is a pretty good measure of degree of difficulty/annoyance in the process. :) Of course, if you take WordPress’ word for it, it’s a 5-minute deal — sure, if you’re using nothing but what comes in the “box”, as it were, and, really, how many people are doing that? I know of a few; and by a few I mean “can count on one hand.”

Anyway, if ya notice anything clearly broken please post a comment on this article (hopefully SpamKarma will let you).

Speaking of comment spam: I apologize ahead of time but I’ve had to make it a requirement that all comment posters register and be logged-in in order for a comment post to be accepted. I thought the spamming was bad before but in the last three days there’s been so much (attempted) comment-spam posting that the machine is overall much slower to respond to anything. :(

Do not use the Publish button when writing a private post. It over-rides the ‘Private’ radio button without warning. :P

I hope, anyway.

To all those who in the last couple of months may have legitimately attempted to post comments and got rather brashly denied, I profusely apologize for not properly testing and configuring the comment-spam filter software I installed and stupidly assumed would “just work” with little modification. I should know better.

Argh.

I’ve now tested the filter system more thoroughly and figured out which part isn’t working, then disabled that part; comment posting then worked again. I don’t have any way to test the system from far-and-wide places though so there might still be something lurking, and the real-time blacklist part of the system is still enabled; if you’re on that list, there’s not much I can do to help.

If you find that you still can’t post non-spammy comments, please send me a note at stillbroken at jimbala.net…. If you can include your IP address used at the time of the comment it would be very helpful.

Excerpt from:
Circadiana: Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sleep (But Were Too Afraid To Ask)
Until not long ago, just about until electricity became ubiquitous, humans used to have a sleep pattern quite different from what we consider “normal” today. At dusk you go to sleep, at some point in the middle of the night you wake up for an hour or two, then fall asleep again until dawn. Thus there are two events of falling asleep and two events of waking up every night (plus,
perhaps, a short nap in the afternoon). As indigenous people today, as well as people in non-electrified rural areas of the world, still follow this pattern, it is likely that our ancestors did, too.The bimodal sleep pattern was first seen in laboratory animals (various birds, lizards and mammals) in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, i.e, before everyone moved their research to mice and rats who have erratic (un-consolidated) sleep patterns. The research on humans kept in constant conditions, as well as field work in primitive communities (including non-electrified rural places in what is otherwise considered the First World) confirmed the bimodality of sleep in humans, particularly in winter.
[…]
Popping melatonin pills is one of the latest crazes. Melatonin failed as a sleeping pill and its uses as a scavenger of free radicals are dubious at best. It can shift one’s clock, though (rebeldoctor.blogspot.com…). However, it cannot help against jet-lag or effects of shift-work (shift-lag) as melatonin is likely to shift only the main brain pacemaker in the suprachiasmatic nuclei. The problem with jet-lag and shift-lag is dissociation of rhythms between cells in different tissues, i.e., your brain clock may resynchornize to the new time-zone/schedule in a couple of days, the clocks in your heart and lungs in a week, and in your stomach and liver in a month. In the meantime, everything in your body is desynchronized and you feel really bad. If you keep changing your work shift over and over again, you never get to achieve complete synchronization, leading to long-term effects on health, including significant rise in heart attacks, stomach ulcers, and breast cancer.

Well, intercontinental flight is here to stay, and some shift-work is neccessary for the modern society to survive. It is now understood that some people (chronotypes) adjust to night-shifts and even properly executed (non-rapid, phase-delaying) rotating shifts, better than others. People have always tried to self-select for various schedules, yet it has recently started to enter the corporate consciousness that forcing employees into unwanted shifts has negative effects on productivity and safety, thus bottom line. See Chernobyl, Bhopal, Exxon Valdese and Three Mile Island accidents – all caused by sober but sleepy people at about 3am, just like thousands of traffic accidents every year.