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"Recent studies have found that drinking coffee can actually be a healthy habit, enhancing athletic performance, increasing mental alertness and protecting against serious diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and even liver and colon cancers."
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"One hour of increased brain activity via thinking a lot or experiencing new stimuli can make you smarter, more energetic, more creative, and more sociable. Here are some of the endless numbers of activities that can stimulate your brain."
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"Your brain is a time machine with three modes that control everything from instantaneous tasks like moving to maintaining long trains of thought and ultimately staying in synch with night and day."
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"Your brain never stops working. But it does cease talking to itself when you lose consciousness"
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14 minute podcast; part 1 of 2
Circadian Shift
Surfing the information tsunami.
« September 2005 | Main | November 2005 »
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neat Flash app that shows the passage of time
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Flash clock with hand-drawn numbers
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Several articles about sleep from the journal 'Nature'
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set up a two-alarm system...
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letter and email writing both follow "a 'bursty' pattern -- most emails are answered fairly quickly, but a few sit around for a long time, and some sit around for a very long time"
Colour. I need colour.
Getting out of bed has proved to be an even more arduous task than usual this week. Hellish, in fact.
My little universe has been feeling even smaller of late. As the current place-of-employ is located within walking distance from The Hovel, I'm like a little rat scurrying back and forth between St. George and Bathurst, in my little maze (otherwise known as The Annex). Back and forth, back and forth.
A Saturday jaunt in Cabbagetown provided a much-needed change of scenery; walking further south meant that the day ended in the St. Lawrence Market area. Really should get out of my own 'hood more often.
Damn this receding daylight. So easy to feel down. Gotta remember to be positive.
One acquisition of note: I picked up Metric's 2003 CD release Old World Underground, Where Are You Now? (was on sale). It's OK. You can download one track from it, "Combat Baby" (one of the highlights, IMHO), plus another song from their new CD, for free over at Better Propoganda.
So, this is how much my blog is worth:
My blog is worth $27,097.92.
How much is your blog worth?
Guess I won't be retiring anytime soon.
(Found this widget via maximum verbosity.)
Another week of not-much-to-report, so I decided to go with a comics theme for this week's mood board. Actually, I wound up doing two boards.
Some comics that I enjoy reading online include:
- Dilbert -- brilliant deadpan delivery on the pithy truth of office life
- toothpastefordinner -- slackers, office drones, and lots of coffee
- Calvin and Hobbes -- an oldie but a goodie; grownups are either mundane or sinister -- Calvin does his best to escape
- Non-Sequitur -- sharp jabs at mass media and the hypocrisy of a certain Republican government
- Cat and Girl -- class warfare and jabs at liberal hypocrisy
- explodingdog -- drawings based on phrases that people send in; often whimsical, sometimes sad
- Get Fuzzy -- cats are evil and dogs are trusting and adorable
- The Joy of Tech -- mostly for Mac-o-philes, but will appeal to geeks of all stripes
I also read these comics (which don't appear on the boards) regularly:
- Bloom County -- an 80s relic 'fer sher, but some of the humour is timeless
- Gaping Void -- Hugh Macleod's (in)famous "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards"
- Spamusement -- clever twists on spam subject lines
And I keep track of most of the comics in the above lists using Comic Alert. Set up an account and have updated links to many of your favourite comics sent to you via RSS or email. (They've also started offering a web-based version.) Loads of fun.
Comics that I would read a lot more often if I would remember (or could subscribe via RSS):
BTW, welcome back, bob.
Here's a handy tip: outdated project plans (printed on 11x17 paper) make excellent placemats if you want to each lunch at your desk.
Then again, maybe it would be better if you went out for lunch.
I was originally going to wait until the end of the year to do a mood board retrospective, but since the website for the Multimedia and Website Design class at the University of Bolton in the UK has seen fit to include my weekly mood boards in their list of Help & Useful Links, I decided to put together a post covering what are (in my opinion) some of my mood board highlights.
So here are my picks for the top mood board for each month, from March to September...
This was only the second mood board I ever did, and I was still playing with things and getting a feel for what I could do. I like how the stretched-out photos complement the blurriness of the background image. The text(ures) worked out pretty well too.
Incoporating imagery taken from a CD I bought and a movie I saw wound up being a lot more symbolic than what I had originally -- or at least consciously -- intended. The hand is clearly grasping at the UML diagram (which represented a job that I had applied for) and I was sort of feeling adrift.
A Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy riff, but the real message was me trying not to panic over having been unemployed for several months. In a happy accident, the "DON'T PANIC" text wound up being the same shade of green as Marvin the robot's eyes.
By this time, I had found a job, and although I was enjoying it, the pace was leaving me rather overwhelmed. I rather like how the colours of the different images worked together on this one.
Not a particularly remarkable mood board, but I thought the colours and background image worked out well.
This was an incredibly busy and tiring week and this board was put together very quickly, using only five different images, but boy did I nail it. Like the egg says, I was just fried.
After the very fast-paced summer contract, I found myself in a new job. Life had slowed down considerably and everything became much more structured. And I was looking back and thinking "Where did the summer go?"
Feel free to poke around and look at the other mood boards. Some of them that didn't make this list didn't turn out too badly either. (Conversely, there are a few that just make me cringe when I look at them now, but they can't all be winners, can they?) I'll try to put together some good ones in the future too.
Random things in my head and elsewhere:
- There's still two weeks left in October, and I'm already chomping at the bit for the new month so that I can get my mitts on another 40 MP3s from eMusic. I've even organized my wishlist in an Excel spreadsheet so that I can sort my picks by artist or by track count with a few clicks of the mouse. (That's either incredibly obsessed or incredibly geeky.)
- Theme song of the day is "Seether" by Veruca Salt. I have an MP3 copy squirrelled away on DVD or CD backup somewhere, but I'm tempted to just buy the track from iTunes for some instant gratification. (Addendum: Yep, I bought it. Goodbye $0.99. Guess I'll just skip the morning coffee at Tim Horton's tomorrow.)
- Speaking of iTunes, they have a "Just For You" recommendation engine currently in beta. It recommends a bunch of albums (and songs) based on what you've bought from them in the past, and you can tell the engine "Don't Like It" or "Already Own It" in response to the album suggestions (which is a pretty sneaky/smart way of doing market research, if you ask me). But why, after I repeatedly keep telling it that I'm not interested in albums by Jay-Z, does it keep pushing different releases by him on me?
Lastly, this cartoon by toothpastefordinner is so true:
Meh.
A few brief flashes of things that are interesting, but otherwise...
- Sample thought: "If I have to look at this one more time this week, I am going to lobotomize myself with my pen."
- Sample lunch: leftover turkey with mashed potatoes and veggies
- Sample dinner: half a wedge of Camembert
- Sample tune: "Pretend That We're Dead" by L7, heard on WOXY Vintage, purchased the following day from iTunes
Several pix via stock.xchng; a couple from elsewhere.
Ennui has kicked in something fierce. I'm actually tempted to go to bed because I'm so bored (and lack the ambition to do something interesting, or at least useful).
Here's a pair of MP3s for you (hosted on Rapidshare -- some scrolling, clicking, and waiting required):
- Carl Orff - "O Fortuna" (4.37 MB)
- Apotheosis - "O Fortuna (Apocalypse Chorus Mix)" (5.57 MB)
The first is the widely recognized chorus from Carl Orff's opera Carmina Burana, while the second is a whacked out piece of techno that samples from the first (and reportedly is no longer commercially available).
So, enjoy the end of the world (sing along, if you like). Or maybe just enjoy the end of the week instead.
In absence of any other inspiration, here are some funny lists from McSweeney's that I like:
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zoom in (and out again) or pick another viewpoint -- very neat
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collection of links to various blogging tips
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go to bed whenever you want (i.e. when you're sleepy) but always get up at the same time every day
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work for ten minutes, break for two; do this five times to fill an hour's worth of working and breaking
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"quick sampling of Ask Metafilter threads on productivity, procrastination, and just getting it together"
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feeling blocked?
Yep. This is it.
All images from stock.xchng, except for the background, which came from Mayang's Free Textures.
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gotta whip The Hovel into shape
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"Web sites instruct fans on how to beat copy-protected CDs"
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Good free CD-ripping software (mentioned in above article)
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oh, my...
A little while back, Fluxblog brought a certain song to my attention:
"Rachel Stevens 'I Said Never Again (But Here We Are)' - Oh, Rachel Stevens - never stop with the glammy schaffel-pop! It is your thing and only Goldfrapp can touch you on this score."
And it's a damn catchy little tune that lent itself to some heavy repeat time on WinAmp here in The Hovel. (Only later did I learn that Stevens was a member of the pre-fab telepop group S-Club 7, but I will choose to ignore that from hereon in.)
Anyway, one of the commenters to the Fluxblog post (as did another MP3 blogger, don't remember who) pointed out how the track sounded like Adam and the Ants. When I first heard the track, I immediately thought of it as sounding like Amii Stewart's disco hit "Knock On Wood", with a bit of a slinky Deborah-Harry-circa-1978-spandex-and-ripped-T aesthetic thrown in for good measure.
So, I thought to myself, "Wouldn't it be great to hear all this put together?" It took a bit of scrounging*, but now -- finally -- here they all are, assembled as the Circadian Shift glampop set:
- Amii Stewart - "Knock On Wood"
- Blondie - "Heart of Glass"
- Adam Ant - "Goody Two Shoes (Hot Tracks Mix)"
- Goldfrapp - "Train"
- Rachel Stevens - "I Said Never Again (But Here We Are)"
And you can download it all as a single ZIP file (22.2 MB) (via Rapidshare) and play spot-the-influence and/or slink, schaeffel, and glam out to your little heart's content.
* - most MP3s obtained from other sources on "The Internets"
Acid house fans, you must download this mix:
- funkstörung - "bring back the bounce mix" (MP3, 55.1 MB)
Featuring old-school goodies from LFO, M|A|R|R|S, A Guy Called Gerald, Robert Armani, Aphex Twin, Joey Beltram, Green Velvet, and more, more, more...
Thanks to Totally Fuzzy, who has the full tracklist.
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"This epidemic of long hours at the office -- whether physically or remotely -- defies historical precedent and common sense..." (thanks to Jimcat for the link)
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"Glazing - Corporate-speak for sleeping with your eyes open; a popular pastime at conferences and early-morning meetings."
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background sounds to play when you need an excuse to hang up the phone
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from Ask MetaFilter: "Where can I find quality MP3s (or other) of nature sounds, running water, birds, etc, that I can listen to at my desk?"
October. It's freaking October already.
The start of the month meant another 40 MP3 frenzy from eMusic. My picks this month were:
- The Pleasure Principle by Gary Numan -- scary to think that this album was released over 25 years ago, especially as I remember when the song "Cars" was a hit; after hearing so many current-day electro throwbacks, it was time to return to the real deal, and this still sounds great
- Long Distance by Ivy -- I first heard the track "The Edge of the Ocean" courtesy of a free download from Amazon.com; the rest of the album offers more of the same dreamy pop with breathy girl-vocals (including bonus French accent); there's also a rather charming cover of "Digging Your Scene" by The Blow Monkeys
- Tenor Madness by Sonny Rollins -- classic bebop; back when I went through my "building my jazz CD collection" phase, there were a number of discs that I'd pick up in the music store, look at, and then put back down (too many choices!), and this was one of them (I did eventually buy two other Rollins discs -- the terrific Saxophone Colussus, and Sonny Side Up, recorded with Sonny Stitt and Dizzy Gillespie)
- Steve Reich - Drumming by So Percussion -- a new recording of Reich's 1971 work for "nine percussionists, two vocalists and piccolo"; probably the best way to fully appreciate the intricacies of it is to listen with headphones while lying down in a darkened room
- and, since those four albums brought me up to thirty-nine tracks, I chose for my last one the song "Streets of Your Town" by The Go-Betweens, for a dose of rainy-day late-80s nostalgia
I also wound up buying a couple songs from iTunes -- two oldies from Boz Scaggs, "Lowdown" and "Lido Shuffle" (both from his album Silk Degrees). Both were 70's era MOR tunes that hovered around the periphery of my consciousness back in the day; then, a couple weeks ago, "Lowdown" was playing somewhere when I was shopping and it just smacked me in the head. It was just a matter of time before I gave in and bought it.
In other happenings from the last seven days, excavation work continues at The Hovel, whilst the bane of my existence this week has been the pile-of-crap-masquerading-as-software known as Microsoft PowerPoint. At one juncture, I was about ready to fly down to Redmond, find the idiot responsible for PowerPoint's completely useless and unreliable formatting functionality, and beat them about the head severely with a wrench. Argh.