• 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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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.

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!

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.

After spending three months trying to fulfill one of my yearly goals of starting a workout program (and failing miserably), I’ve decided that I need some extra motivation. The extra motivation of, say, millions of people holding me accountable for my actions. Therefore, I’ve launched the Fitness Project… also informally known as “Dadgum It, I’m Gonna Exercise Whether I Like It Or Not!”

This isn’t so much a “Change the World” project as a “Change the Body” one, but I do hope to inspire others to start their own fitness plans. Right now the project page is a bit lacking, but I’ll add more details as time goes on, as well as keeping a daily log of my own progress (since that’s kind of the whole point). Please don’t hesitate to leave a deriding comment if you notice me slacking off.

The Polyphasic Sleep intro has been posted for your perusal. You may find it by looking under “Pages” on the right sidebar (or by clicking here if you’re lazy).

It’s unfinished as of yet, but it should give you a good primer on what to expect. Yes, I’m going to try it… if you haven’t figured that out yet.