Magic

See that? That's called Modafinil, and it's magic. I was prescribed this yesterday morning for my sleeping troubles (er... lack-of-sleeping-troubles trouble?) by a PA who basically didn't know anything about sleep disorders (she wanted to give me Ritalin, so I threw a pamphlet at her with the word "Provigil" on it (brand name of Modafinil.).).

Anyway, you can read about Modafinil here. Pretty neat stuff, slightly reduces the body's need for sleep, helpful for shift-work sleep disorder, helpful for sleep apnea and narcolepsy, helpful for seasonal depression, and the list goes on. The best part is that it only kills 6 out of every 17 million users.

The worst part? No generic variety is available until 2012 and the brand-name is quite expensive... affordable, but expensive.

I like not falling asleep at work though. That's a big plus for me.

Untitled

Just finished reading "Watchmen." It was surprisingly good. I remember first seeing the teaser trailer before seeing "The Dark Knight" this summer. I thought it took itself way too seriously. The whole tone of the trailer, the background music, the images on screen... Looked like it was filmed by a bunch of assholes.

However, the hype for this movie is pretty enormous, and the script was done in part by David Hayter, whom I have a slight man-crush on.

I ended up buying the graphic novel, and read it in three sittings. The book is incredible, really. It was a great reading experience, tugging at all of my emotions over the course of the story. At times I was angry and frustrated (particularly at Rorschach) and at other times, I was hopeful (Laurie and Nite Owl's relationship). A lot of unsuspecting things happened, and it was just really cool to read and see. My only complaint is that the last chapter was quite rushed. The course of events would have taken more panels and words to adequately describe anywhere else in the comic, yet it was rather condensed (Veidt's monologue at the end was cut considerably, as admitted by the authors.) and I would have appreciated more things to see.

Now that I got it out of the way though, I can concentrate more on my own writing. On that front, I've opened up a second blog that I may eventually buy (the domain name, I mean). The site is meant to showcase my writing, putting updates on the book, excerpts, older stories, etc. I figure this will be my personal thoughts blog, the other will be the business blog. When it's ready, I'll release it's glory upon my readership. Both of you.

However, I hit a small snag with the site. See, my old computer I had in college had a lot of my writing on it. Hundreds of haiku, a lot of poetry, and tons of ideas for new stories. I had the first chapter to a really cool post-apocalyptic dystopia story written out. I was quite impressed with it, but I didn't finish the second chapter because I didn't know enough about the Cold War to really flesh it out. At the time, I didn't do much for rough drafts, just outlining and the best final draft I could in the first go. I've since refined my technique by churning out more words and then sifting out the gold parts.

I've been writing a lot at work. Usually I have a few hours of downtime, inbetween security checks and such. I take lots of notes and write down passages of story as they come to me. It's really exciting for me to see this thing come together, because it's so much better than anything else I've written, and it's only a couple thousand words so far. I'm devoted to making this as thorough and detailed as possible, without being too hammed up and concise to enjoy (something I know my previous stories have suffered from.), so that's what the site is for. I'm going to release little bits of what I like, and then improve on it and release it and hopefully get feedback from people.

On a more personal front, it appears that I may have genuine Narcolepsy. I finally got my sleep study results, two months + after the fact. Paid twenty dollars just to have the doctor read them aloud to me. Waste of time and money really, but I did learn that my sleep test was normal, however the sleep study doctor dude said I exhibit symptoms of mild cataplexy, and when you take that into account of falling asleep at work, even while talking to people and filling out paperwork, it leans towards Narcolepsy and they're going to subject me to more tests probably in February. The 29th is my consultation with a specialist. Whoopie. I decided I can't risk my safety any longer and I scheduled another appointment for Monday to ask for a drug called Modafinil. It's used to treat excessive sleepiness and shift-work sleep disorder and seasonal depression disorder. Three things I kinda have right now. Normally I wouldn't ask doctor's for drugs, but the last thing I want is to be taken advantage of while I'm dosing off in a room of 100+ inmates (which happens regularly when I have to supervise the cafeteria... 4 out of 5 workdays a week.) or not being able to respond to an emergency because I'm nodding off and don't hear the radio. That's my justification, perhaps it's overexaggerated, but I'm sticking to it for now unless my conscience or something gets the better of me.

Let's see... Not much else to report. Been working out a few times a week, and I'm seeing noticeable results. I can bench more than I've ever been able to in my life, and I can kick higher and faster than ever before. My chest is bigger, but I haven't gained any weight. Must just be losing a little bit of the teeny layer of fat on my arms and stomach and replacing it with a little muscle. Not that I want to get really buff, mind you, I just want to be able to defend myself if I have to at work. I'm analyzing my workouts, reading up on workout methods and such, really refining what I do, but above all, I think I just need to eat more. If I didn't care about eating healthy, I could get by on less than 50 bucks a month in groceries, but now I pay probably over 100 for myself now. I'm never going to get out of debt that way though...

Eardley Song

Go us!

Typical January Day

Too cold to feel anything.

Curtis is all excited to film something now that we have the video camera set up with the computer. He's been trying to get me to think of ideas since then, and I just can't find it in me to do anything. I went to Wichita, just grumpy all day, snarling at Escalades and all manner of full sized truck, wishing my horn worked so I could honk at every idiot that pulls out right in front of me.

I could go on and on about the things that upset me right now, but doing that will only reinforce my mood. Or maybe it won't. Maybe it's just the lack of daylight this time of year and I am completely at the mercy of the glowy yellow circle in the sky.

Curtis and I turned the heater off in the house because our gas bill was 179 dollars last month (up from 30, in october). We got two electric radiators that will probably raise our electric bill to that height anyway.

On a lighter note, we watched Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark tonight. What a good old film. It's so light-hearted and corny and yet leaves you wanting more.

I guess I have a lot to cover

Two holidays gone by and nothing to write about? No, that's not it. Just no desire to sit down and make my fingers wiggle. Been in a mild funk the past couple days. I tend to come out of it while I'm at work, but when I get home it's time for bed, so I have no period to just sit down and let my good mood affect my day.

So, to recap I guess: Christmas wasn't quite my usual fare. No tree, no caroling, no church. Just me, Curtis, Laurie, and her son Josh. And tacos. We ate tacos and nachos on Christmas day and watched Step Brothers and I almost choked on some green tea when I laughed at the movie. And then later that day we saw Seven Pounds which took me in the totally opposite direction emotionally.

Then a whole lot of nothing happened for the next few days until New Years. Watched the ball drop with Laurie and Josh, then stayed up late playing Metal Gear Online with Josh. It was pretty fun, and I haven't played video games for such an extended period of time in probably over a year now.

Then the next day I stayed up all night played Call of Duty with Curtis (We beat it.) so I felt like I wasted another day on video games. This made me feel a little blah as well. My weekend, completely gone to gaming. I guess I wouldn't have such an aversion to it if my old roomate wasn't currently wasting his life on World of Warcraft. Shoot, some of the people Curtis works with don't do anything but play WoW. They even have kids and still devote 6 to 8 hours a day on WoW.

I texted my ex girlfriend today, to tell her Happy New Year. Then I realized why I don't like to talk to her anymore. She only has one adjective to describe everything that she experiences. Shitty. That's all everything is. It's just Shitty and there is no other way to describe anything.

Lame. I'm gonna go hit on a Walmart cashier now.

A week passed by

Seems the sleep study people lost my results. I'm just assuming that since I called them asking for my results and they went, "You seriously haven't gotten them yet?" and then still haven't called me back for a week.

Meanwhile, I'm still falling asleep at work and can't do anything to correct it that I'm aware of. From the couple people I've spoken to about it, I seem to exhibit a few symptoms of narcolepsy, a mild case for sure, but one that's affecting me nonetheless.

So yeah, bad night last night, up for 23 hours straight, falling asleep for most of it, started out in the upper 60s and ended in the lower 20s. A 40 degree drop in about 6 hours. You know, now that I think about it, it couldn't have been in the 20s. It wasn't cold enough, and it kept raining, not snowing. It was probably in the middle 30s.

Anyway, then I had trouble with some inmates not following orders, and so I wanted to dish out some relatively mild consequences, but my House Sergeant wasn't interested in it. I'm not sure if he did anything, but when he saw that I was getting frustrated at my standing, he told me to leave and go help some other officers outside the cell house. That wasn't really cool, and kinda exacerbated my frustration.

This is not to say that I was actually frustrated, just a bit annoyed. I was also not feeling well, being up so late and having so much caffeine in me that my heart rate was pumping at about 105 bpm, as opposed to the normal 60.

I hate to blame my inconsistencies and personal failures on something external like caffeine and lack of sleep. I really "should" have better self control, but I really "should" not anything. Should is merely hoping. I'll just not get as frustrated at my coworkers from now on.

I'm going to do some Tai Chi now (getting into it after watching a few videos. Makes me feel awesome.).

Also, if you want a good movie to watch that'll make you cry and give you long emotional nightmares, go see "Seven Pounds" with Will Smith and Rosario Dawson. It's fantastic.

Proclamation to the World #1

I, Chris Jensen, hereby declare Ubuntu Linux 8.04 to be inherently superior to Microsoft Windows in... every way but one. And the one failure of Ubuntu is not Ubuntu's fault. It is the fault of every single one of us for not using it.

I find I must go into more depth. You see, I built a computer for my brother for Christmas. It's a sweet rig and didn't cost me a fraction of what it would have to buy it prebuilt. Was a great project and I want to do it more often.

So now that we have two computers and a playstation in the house, I wanted to network them all together, or at the very least, connect them all to the internet simultaneously. I ended up buying a Linksys Router. Horribly expensive for the performance, but that can't be helped (well, it could have, but I was in a bit of a rush to get things set up.)

Our internet has been nothing but trouble since I hooked it up. We are dropping packets and losing data transfer all over the place. You can't even browse the internet because so many times a website will wait for a server to respond, but the information was simply lost because of something stupid. It was incredibly frustrating, seeing download speeds up to 1 Mbps from a direct connection, to 30 kbps with a routered connection.

I did a speed test with the router in Vista. 5000 kpbs download speed (eh, not bad) 61 kbps upload. For anyone reading who is not familiar with the terminology and relativity in data transfer speeds, let me just say that 61 kbps upload is about as pathetic as your old dial-up modem. I'm not paying for cable internet to get dial-up speeds. That's just ridiculous.

So, in my frustration, I decided to just reboot the computer and give it a rest. I missed my dual boot prompt, and it automatically booted Ubuntu. I figured, eh, what the heck, why not use it for awhile, see if I can get the internet to improve through that mess of foreign programming.

NOPE. NO PROGRAMMING.

Ubuntu autoMAGICALLY configured everything. My internet works perfectly, the chat room I moderate has a steadier connection, and the only hiccups are due to momentary blackouts in the router (which is pretty standard unless I were to install a homebrew firmware onto the router, which I'm not sure is necessary).

All of this is to simply say, everyone should use Linux. The only reason it isn't as popular as Windows or Mac is because it lacks a lot of support. You can't play high-end games with it and there are a few minor issues with things like Flash Player and Java. The more people that use Linux, the more developers will say, "Hey, there is a market available to us that would make us more money if we simply did a little work to port our software over to them!"

And best of all, most versions of Linux are free. Most software for Linux is free. Thinking about buying Microsoft Office? Don't bother. Open Office has nearly all of the same features (and some that Office doesn't have) and is completely free.