Ha-Ha-Hiatus

I think it's obvious from the radio silence that I failed the Uberman (or the Uberman failed me) but a few days in. And I had such high hopes! Anyway, should I decide to retry at some point, this is where the story will break, and I'll continue with the original blog. Until then, hasta la vista.


Or should I say ... buenas noches.

Goals

Many people have raised the point that with 22 hours in my days from now on, I may run out of things to do. Currently, though, I'm studying Engineering at Cambridge University, and this is providing me with plenty of distraction. Right now, I'm working on understanding the principles behind transistors (as voltage amplifiers), which is a pretty basic concept that I really ought to know by now. I have a few goals that'd be nice to get through in the next few weeks, so I'll stick them into a nice bullet point list, as that seems to be de rigeur right now with me.

• Get up to speed with circuits, both linear and digital. Right now, my level of understanding in both of these lecture courses is less than ideal. This is going to involve going back over the lecture notes and working hard to make sure I can get my head around everything in them, because if I can't handle the first term's work there's not much hope.
  
• Get more up to speed with computing. We have to learn to program as part of our course, and while I can just about cope with the exercises they set us, I feel like I really ought to be more familiar with programming in general, and maybe not even just in C++. Accordingly, I feel like I ought to mess around with a few languages. There are plenty of resources for this on the net, and I'm sure Rodrigo and Ed would be happy to help out with this.
• Write more. It's weird, because I don't consider myself as much of an author, but I'd like to get some ideas out of my head and onto paper at the least.
• Learn some more jazz theory. This is pretty low down on the list, as, let's face it, it's pretty unimportant to my life right now.

It's twenty to four, and I'm going to work on my lab report a little more before I hit the sack at 4. Stay tuned to find out whether I wake up at 4.20 or not - I'm guessing not. Sadly, I doubt I'll be able to keep this up for very long. At least this blog has more than one post in it now.

Day one

This is a blog to chronicle my experiences with the 'Uberman' sleep schedule. For reasons unknown to mankind, I appear to have decided to try out such an ill-advised plan. I'll summarise it here:

• Instead of sleeping for a long period every night, alternative sleep schedules have more frequent but shorter naps
• The most exacting and extreme of these is the 'Uberman' sleep schedule, in which you take a 20 minute nap every 4 hours.
• For convenience' sake, I've chosen to take naps at 4, 8 and 12, or as close as possible.
• For those of you less mathematically gifted, this means I'll get a full 2 hours' sleep every 24 hours. However, the idea is that all of this sleep is REM sleep, which is the important kind.

Having attempted the Uberman for a day or two earlier this week and relapsed into an ordinary sleep pattern after missing two naps and getting drunk at a rave, I'm starting again, as of 12 tonight. I've had one nap so far, and it went pretty well.