veeRob’s Blog

Greg, you’re going to especially like this one.

After some 10-15 years of using pine as my primary email client, I have finally switched to gmail.  Oh my gosh, my world is on fire.  Seriously.

When I find something that works, it’s hard for me to switch.  If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?  Well, it finally “broke.”  No, no, pine still works, and I still love it.  But gmail has caught up.  Here’s why:

1. While HTML emails were few and far between a few years back, now people have HTML in their emails without knowing if the recipient supports it.  pine will show the email, but links in the email don’t work (well, they will open in lynx, but that’s another story).  I’m sick and tired of copying and pasting links.

2. Reading mail on my phone is painful using pine.  It works, but it’s a few clicks and keypresses too many to get started.  And once I do have pine open, the font is so small I have to squint.  gmail has a mobile application that lets me read my email inside a specially designed program.  Thank you for that, Google.

3. Searching!  Oh my gosh, it’s impossible to find anything in my piles and piles of email.  I have every message I’ve ever sent from 1998 onwards.  This has proven very handy in the past, but I’ve wasted ten minutes or more trying to find a particular piece of information I once emailed.  With gmail’s searching, this will be much easier in the future.  Unfortunately, gmail doesn’t have an import feature, so it’s proving a bit tough to get all my old emails into gmail so I will have them to search.

4. The little tray is awesome.  Very nice to have an email notification and have it show me a bit of the email, so I can decide if I want to stop what I’m working on to take a closer look.  Very efficient.  Speaking of efficient, the threading feature is a much better way to look at email.  Google hires geniuses, plain and simple.  They’ve really figured out how to make life more efficient.

There’s a bunch more things that are awesome about gmail, but I think everyone already knows that, and that’s why everyone’s email address ends in @gmail.com.  OK, well at least I’m finally joining the rest of the world.  Moment of silence for pine, please.

Anyone who knows me well probably knows that I have a bad case of insomnia. I have a hard time “turning my brain off” at night and falling asleep. The weird thing is that I love to sleep, and I require more sleep than the average person to function. People have made me feel guilty for “sleeping away my life” and other such nonsense, but the book “No More Sleepless Nights” told me that I just needed more sleep than some people. Biological fact, I guess.

I’ve long championed a 28 hour/6 day week, or as I sometimes call it the “18/10″ (meaning 18 hours of waking hours and 10 hours of sleep). I used this schedule a few times when I was working very early in the morning on Friday and Saturday, and then my awake time got later and later in the week until I “lost a day” and my schedule flipped over. I don’t think I could function long term with this schedule, however, and I’m sure it’s not healthy.

I read an article tonight about experiment NASA conducted with people spending 65 days in enclosed rooms, where they messed with the lights and got these people on a 25 hour day. They concluded that people could function just fine with an extra hour added in their day.

I recently remembered that I kept a sleep log for the first half of last year to keep track of my sleep schedule, and I just revisited it and found some interesting conclusions. I amazingly tracked my approximate sleep and awake time for every day from 1/28/06 to 7/30/06, except for a 10-day period where I was on vacation. On average, I was awake for 16.01 hours and slept 9.19 hours every day. Adding that up, my average day lasted 25.2 hours.

For all of you math nerds, I also recorded a ratio of my sleep time to my awake time for each “day.” To illustrate what I mean, if I was awake for 18 hours and slept for 10, my ratio would be 10/18, or 55.56%. Why is this useful? Well, over the long term, it will approximate how much sleep I need to restore myself from the previous day’s awake time. The average of these ratios turns out to be 59.66%, which means that for every 10 hours of awake time, I should be sleeping about 6 hours.

Since there’s only 24 hours in a day, this means I should be awake for 15 hours and sleeping 9 hours a day to keep my body happy and live within the Earth’s definition of a day. This also closely resembles the average amount of time I was awake and slept last year, so I have yet another reason to believe this is the right ratio for my body.

Since I’m not currently working a regular job, I may try an experiment for myself over the coming weeks — go to bed at a regular time and wake up at a regular time, no matter what. I know, shocking. I am somewhat of a night owl, so it may be 4am/1pm, but hey, it’s a regular schedule, and perhaps I can even find a new career that will fit into the hours I prefer to be awake, rather than change the hours I am awake for a career.

Unfortunately, it’s now 7:15am, so the experiment does not start today.