• I’ve updated the front page, About page, and my bio.
• While we’re talking about look and feel, you’ve probably noticed by now that Don’tASQ was given a new theme at the beginning of the year. I hadn’t made an official announcement about it, so here you go.
• To be able to post quality articles more frequently, I’m trying to change the way I go about writing. You’re likely to notice some stylistic changes as a side effect — unfortunately, this comes in the middle of a series. Ah well.
• Speaking of that series… Yes, my intention was to post each of five parts on a different day this week. No, I didn’t do that, but any reader of this site will certainly understand how that can happen! Look for Part 3 on Friday!

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This morning, I woke up about 30 minutes before the alarm was supposed to go off, with seemingly no logical cause. Ah well.

It’s now 5:56am. I was awake at 5:30, but it doesn’t count because I’ve been awake for almost three hours due to a medical emergency with a roommate. I’m not going to be very useful today.

Some of you may remember (or perhaps you’d like to forget) when I briefly wrote about polyphasic sleep. What I’ve not mentioned since then is that I’ve developed a strange “ability” to periodically switch between polyphasic and monophasic sleep patterns. As you can imagine, this comes in fairly handy during finals week or other high-stress periods of time. The problem? I can’t control when I switch back.

I’ve grown tired of my unreliable sleep patterns (or lack thereof), so I’ve decided to go “back to basics” and retain a standard, early-rising, 100% monophasic schedule for an indefinite period of time. In plain English: I will wake up at 5:30 every morning, stay up, and take no naps during the daytime. I call this Back to Basics because, quite frankly, I’m embarrassed that this step is even necessary. It’s not even worth designating this as a project, but I’ll be writing about it purely for accountability reasons. These posts will be categorized as Blurbs, which means they won’t show up on the news feed, so you won’t see them unless you want to.

Okay, Sun, the race is on!

Edit (1/26/08): I’m documenting this on the new Fitness page instead of in the Blurblog.

The conference is now officially and if I could describe it in one word, it would be interesting. The theme again was masterpiece and that seem to be pretty well uterated(?)[...] through out the conference. I only have a few seconds to talk right now, I will post the longer update later, but I can say one thing it is this. Be change that you want to make in the World until next time. listen

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[Edit by Scott: Here's what this post was supposed to say :)... "The conference is now officially over and if I could describe it in one word, it would be... interesting. The theme, again, was 'Masterpiece,' and that seemed pretty well iterated throughout the conference. I only have a few seconds to talk right now, I will post a longer update later, but if I can say one thing it is this: Be the change that you want to make in the world. Until next time."]

To start the year off right, I’ll be spending this week in Denver for the Denver Christmas Conference. This year’s theme is “Masterpiece”. I will try to post updates via Jott when I get a few moments (and hope to write a “real” post or two as well). Jott is a service which, in a nutshell, transcribes a phone call into text and sends that text as a message — or, in this case, a website blurb. However, I can take no responsibility for the accuracy (or lack thereof) of the transcriptions. Stay tuned!

Intuition is, by definition, a knowledge that doesn’t appear to have been picked up by any of the five senses or derived from any previously known knowledge. Some people will refer to intuition as a gut feeling or hunch. People who are more science-oriented might call it a flash of insight from the subconscious mind. Spiritual types may describe it as spiritual guidance or a sign from God.

Personally, I try not to jump to any conclusions about intuition — I don’t know what it is or where it comes from, nor do I claim to know. I accept it as a real phenomenon because of my personal experiences with it, and I listen to it because it usually proves to be smarter than I am. For one example of my experiences with intuition, read about the grocery trip.

I can’t prove that intuition is useful, meaningful, nor that it even exists. All I can prove is that, more often than not, listening to my intuition has coincided with a positive outcome. And in the end, that’s all that matters.

It’s Monday morning, around 7:30. I am in the weight room of the Athletic Complex, sitting at the leg press machine. I glance down at the pad of paper on which I record my progress, and see the number 16. “Okay,” I think to myself. “I did 16 reps on Friday, so today, I should be able to do 17.” And I begin. As usual, the first several reps are easy, but it doesn’t take long… 11… 12… 13… “This is starting to hurt, but I can’t give up yet!” 14… 15… 16… 17! “Whew! I made it!” That’s when I look at my notepad to jot the number, and am shocked by a realization. I didn’t do 16 leg presses on Friday (I must have been looking at a different exercise); I did only 12.

My exercise program, inspired by the Colorado Experiment, consists of several different exercises, one set each, completed to failure (i.e. when I physically cannot do any more repetitions). After hitting 20 reps, I increase the weight. Under this program, an increase of five reps between sessions is pretty significant.

But I didn’t think I was going far until the set was done. I was only trying for a small goal… and immediately quit as soon as I’d met it. I don’t know for sure that I could have done any more reps, but I almost didn’t even try after #17. I wonder how much more effort I truly could have put into my workout this morning.

Society teaches us to set goals and strive to meet them. There’s nothing wrong with that, inherently; but what happens after we meet our goals? Sometimes we’re tempted to stop there, or “take a break” even if we decide to set a higher goal and press on. Or sometimes we fail to meet our goals, and immediately conclude that they were too lofty. I, however, advocate a different approach: Failure? What’s that? It just seems like yet another excuse for apathy.

Does my exercise anecdote sound familiar? You can probably think of a situation in your own life that parallels it. The moral of the story is the same: Failure is all in your head.

On August 24th, at approximately 10:15pm, the dontasq.com server experienced power issues, causing an outage of both web and e-mail services. All services were restored a short while ago.

Under normal circumstances, this would have been a very minor issue and the downtime would have been barely noticeable; however, the server is not currently hosted where I have direct access to it. When these circumstances happen, I cannot resolve them myself, but need to contact someone else (who may not necessarily be available). As a result, the outage lasted 18 hours rather than 18 seconds.

The reason for hosting dontasq.com offsite is that my ISP does not yet offer a certain network configuration that is needed to access the server at all. (Techspeak: My school recently started giving private IP’s rather than public ones. I need to apply for a public IP to run a server, but this system apparently isn’t in place yet.) As soon as this is available, the server will be moved back on-site. This will result in another (shorter) downtime, but I will announce this no less than 24 hours in advance.

A major downside to running a revenue-free website is that all costs come out of your own pocket; on a college budget, this means everything has to be cheap. Professional hosting would likely eliminate these downtimes altogether, but I simply cannot afford it at this time. I have the technical ability to host (for free) out of my own apartment, so I’ve chosen that route instead. Of course, I would gladly accept any donations toward an upgrade.

I apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for understanding.

Last weekend, I brought the project that has consumed my life for the past six weeks to a loose ending by successfully installing KDE on the Linux OS.

English translation: It went from a text interface to a pretty-looking “icon” one.

There is still more work to be done, and there may be for awhile, but probably nothing worth writing about — and more importantly, nothing that will consume massive amounts of my time. The purpose of this project was not to describe the system I was configuring in gory detail, but to create a guide for those who would want to do such a thing themselves. I’ve finally written that guide.

It’s difficult to “dumb down” a highly in-depth technical project like this one, but I’m more than willing to answer any questions you may have.