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Geek It Happened to Me

Over-Caffeinated and Under-Slept

[This has been cross-posted to The Farm]

There’s just too much interesting stuff to do, and as a result I’ve

been over-caffeinating and under-sleeping. The end result is that

although I’m spending more time coding or learning some new

programming

tools and techniques (and with closures, Laszlo, Cocoa, all kinds of

ideas for Blogware and so on, there’s no shortage) as well as doing

some non-geeky reading, I’m actually getting less coding and learning

done.

I already knew that getting a good night’s sleep was essential to

being

productive, but it really hit me while reading the foreword to Aaron

Hillegass’ book, Cocoa Programming for Mac OS

X.

In it, he offers a bit of advice that I’ve never seen in any other

programming book: that getting eight hours’ sleep is important. He

goes

so far as to say that when learning something new and complex, one

should get ten hours’ sleep. He caps off the advice with a fact that

many of us know, but ignore:

Caffeine is no substitute for

sleep.

So that’s my plan for the next little while: to stop fighting the urge

to read “just one more chapter” or “just one more web site” or do

“just

one more thing” and get some proper shut-eye. I’ve been doing it for

the past couple of days and already feel a little sharper.

Categories
It Happened to Me

Life Imitates "The Onion"

Dan, when you read the Onion article Housemates Reject Third-Roomate Debt-Relief Plan, do you burn with shame?

I can think of 6500 reasons why you should.

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It Happened to Me

3rd Anniversary

It’s been such a busy time that the third anniversary of The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century — Wednesday, November 10th — completely slipped past me!

I’m glad to report that 3 years and 3,338 articles later (3,339

including this one), it’s still fun. Like the accordion, the blog has

paid off in ways I never could’ve imagined. When I started back in

2001, I thought it would just be a creative outlet and something to

pass the time as my job responsibilities as OpenCola were being

whittled down (in the end, all I was responsible for was building the

installer and the “About” box for our software). Instead, it expanded

my social circle, gained me a little internet notoriety and a handful

of newspaper and TV appearances, landed me a job, saved my bacon from a girl who wasn’t who she said she was and played a part in my meeting my fiancee. Hooray for unexpected uses of technology; as William Gibson once wrote: “The street finds its own uses for things.”

Or in my case, “The street musician finds his own uses for things.”

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It Happened to Me

The Sacred 37

Dave “Dave’s Picks” Polaschek informs me that the my age — the number 37 — is sacred in the numerology of the Hells’ Tunas Motorocycle Club.

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It Happened to Me

Accordionizing the Eschaton

I was busy cleaning up the house and getting ready for the arrival of Wendy and her parents (2:20 this afternoon) when someone came to the front door. Normally, I’m not bothered by door-to-door “spammers”; I’m usually safe from them at the Tucows offices. I’m glad that my house has a front door intercom with which I can screen out door-to-door salesleeches, Jehovah’s witnesses and the like.

I hit the “talk” button and the conversation went like this…

Me: Hello?

Guy: Hi, I was going door-to-door — I tried to reach your neighbours but they weren’t home — and I wanted to talk to you about The Rapture and the Great Tribulation…

Me: I’m very sorry, but I’m on my way out the door. Look could you, er, come by later?

Guy: Sure. I was wondering if you…

Me: Oh, I know about the Last Days. I read Left Behind, see, and I fully expect to be pulled away in The Rapture. I think that with everything the way it is in the world right now, it could happen really soon; the signs are there! Maybe you could come by for coffee later and we cou…

…and that’s when I let go of the intercom’s “talk” button.

He buzzed three more times, each buzz growing in length and sounding more desperate, but by then, I’d started scrubbing the toilet.


To the poor fella out there: Thank you for the opportunity to indulge in a little birthday prankery. Best present so far!

To those of you who were wondering if there’s a Chick tract on the topic: of course there is! You get bonus points for correctly guessing that it contains a reference to the Catholic church as “The Whore of Babylon”.

And to to my Evangelical friends: Real Rapture believers don’t buy green bananas!

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It Happened to Me

Birthday Gift Art

This just arrived in my inbox. My thanks to Patrick Kent!

Photo: 'iCcordionguy' -- parody of iPod ad.

Categories
It Happened to Me

So Many Goofy Grins, So Little Time

Photo: Joey deVilla at his desk at the OpenCola office, August 2000.

Me at the OpenCola office in August 2000.

More birthday self-indulgence: I’ve set up a photo album that would be

a catalog of where I was and what I was doing all these years. The

photos contained within the album were selected from my 1998 through

2001 collections; I’ll add more later.

You can see the photos in album or slideshow format.