As I Xi It v2.3

For the past few days I’ve tried to kick start my sleep experiment, but it’s really not going very well at all. When the alarm goes off after the first sleep session, I’m awake, but because I’m still tucked up in bed, I drift off back to sleep again and wake up some hours later. I don’t seem to have the discipline or mentality for it at the moment.

I’ll give it a few more tries and see what happens. The problem might be the “core hours” of sleep or just difficulty waking up on these dark wintery days. It should be easier when its sunny. Unfortunately, the weather’s just wet and miserable for the rest of the week.

At the moment I’ve got some free time so I thought to myself, why not give the Uberman Sleep Schedule (USS) a go? It’s basically a way of reducing your overall sleep time through an initial adaptation period of having a series of naps. There’s more info on the Wikipedia site – click here.

From my initial literature search, it seems that no one knows what the long term effects are and the first couple of days are the worst. From this, I’m hoping that I’ll be feeling less fatigued throughout the day having only had a few hours of sleep overall.

The method I’ve devised for myself is to get 4 hours of “core sleep” then have three 30 minute naps spread throughout the day. Hopefully I’ll adjust to this regime in a week or two and find it easier to wake up and fall asleep. Ideally, I’d like to have a few hours of “core sleep” and a 30 minute nap when I get back from a 9-5 working day.

Let the experiment begin!

Here’s an homage to King of the Hill featuring Cici!

Cici’s Window from Xi on Vimeo.

The other day I popped into Walkabout for dinner in Covent Garden. It’s an Australian pub decked out in Australian regalia and they have some great burgers on offer.

I had an ultimate springbok burger. Three layers of meaty springbok with two giant onion rings towering above a salad and side of chips all for only £8.95, a bargain! The springbok had a nice, dense, gamey taste and texture and it was a touch smokey in flavour.

The onion rings were much bigger than your average onion rings and the batter stayed on once you bit into it unlike lesser quality onion rings where the onion just slides out when you pull your teeth away. My only complaint is that I wished there were more of them.

Since I’m in a desktop customising kind of mood, I tweaked my desktop’s desktop too. This is the Microsoft Zune theme with a wallpaper I made myself using my own pics and the wood background from here.

It’s 20:58 of Thursday 13th November and I hear fireworks still. Deepvali’s over and so is Guy Fawkes. Fireworks use ought to be more restricted.

I was getting bored of the stock visual styles that came with Windows XP on my netbook so I had a Google for some other ones and came across Royale Noir which was suppose to be for Windows XP Media Edition, it looked quite good so I thought I’d give it a whirl. The wallpaper (Spectrum of the Sky) complements the colour scheme quite nicely and its all pretty easy on the eyes. The Rocketdock skin at the bottom I dug up from here.

The whole desktop seems to match the blueness of my Aspire One. A happy coincidence really, all I wanted was something different from the run-of-the-mill XP desktop.

Over the past couple of days, I’ve been meddling around with Ubuntu on my USB stick. At first I tried using this method (Click here) but I couldn’t get it to save my settings after shutting down eventho’ I opted for the persistent install. Next I tried Xubuntu’s persistent install which did save my settings, but it was a bit heavy to run for some reason. Xubuntu’s suppose to require less resources than Ubuntu so you’d expect it to be faster, but that wasn’t the case. I found it awkward to customise the interface as well.

So, this evening, I finally made a working Ubuntu persistent install on my USB stick using the Live CD method (see here). It basically involved downloading the .iso from the Ubuntu site, burning it onto a CD, booting up from the CD, enter the demo mode and using the USB install from within Ubuntu. It’s still a bit slow, but that’s to be expected since it’s running off a USB stick instead of a hard drive.

Initial impressions are that it looks nicer than Windows XP, but I don’t think its as easy to use, but then I am a newbie at the whole Linux thing. So far I’ve managed to change the theme, put up new wallpaper and add/remove some software. I think further meddling’s required.

It’s the 9th November and you know what, there are fireworks going off as I type this. There’s just that popping sound and its been raining on and off over the past two days. Obviously rain didn’t stop play.

Last night, there were fireworks still going off at 11.59pm GMT. I’m sure there are noise pollution laws here about such things.

All this fireworks nonsense has been going on for three weeks now. Surely it must all end soon??

My old Logitech Notebook mouse was starting to skip a bit and the cable kept on being snagged on things when I used it out on location, so I thought I should get a new mouse to go with my new netbook.

The Logitech VX Revolution is considered by some to be the “mutts nuts” of notebook mice and it’s certainly one of the best notebook mice I’ve used. The build quality is on par with the Logitech MX510 which I use for my desktop. It’s got oodles of buttons including my favourite forwards and backwards buttons for more efficient web browsing. The cool features of note for me are the zoom slider and the metal scroll wheel with hyper-fast scrolling. You can adjust the traction of the scroll wheel with the flick of a switch underneath from clickety-click to smooth frictionless free wheeling (not official Logitech terms) great for uber long documents. The only issue I have with the mouse is the stiff zoom slider, but I think with use it should ease up.

Being a wireless mouse, it’s got a USB receiver which is quite small (not as small as those in Logitech’s Nano range) and tucks into a hole at the rear (*insert tawdry orafice joke here*) which also switches off the mouse at the same time. There’s also an eject button to get it out. It all makes for a very compact and neat package. If one wishes to leave the receiver plugged in, there is an independent on/off switch too.

Ergonomically, it fits the contours of my hand and is as nice to use as my MX510. It uses a laser sensor as opposed to an optical sensor or even a trackball (remember those??!). It’s nice and responsive which is what you’d want from a mouse. You can tweak the mouse behaviour with the included SetPoint software. Overall, its a great piece of kit.

Together with my new mouse, I also picked up a Belkin Mouse Trap. It looks like a taco with a zip and I suppose the orange innards makes it look even more taco-ey if you flipped it inside out. It’s basically a circular piece of neoprene with a zip around the edge. You can use it to store various bits and pieces like a mouse, USB stick, pen and a cable. If you’ve got one of those flat, credit card sized mice, you could probably tuck in a tiny netbook power adapter as well. It’ll be a snug fit, but possible. When you open out the taco mouse trap out, it becomes a mouse pad. For about a fiver (£5), its a useful addition to any travelling netbook/laptop set up.

In the mice line up pic in the gallery below, I am aware that the MX510 on the left looks exactly like its predecessor the MX500. Reason being that I found my old faulty MX500 and swapped the case out since the blue MX510 was looking a bit worn and decrepit. So now, its a MX510 in MX500 clothing. From the looks of it, the current MX518 appears to have the same casing as the earlier MX’s so it’s probably switchable, of course this will void your warranty.