Early morning thoughts

So I'm sitting here wondering what I've done to myself to still be awake at quarter past one in the morning.

We both went to bed at 10:00, and were asleep by 10:30.  Sadly, I then mysteriously awoke at 10:45 and found myself lying in bed unable to sleep.  As my main problem for the last few days has been being awake too early, and I was yawning my head off through half the day this is inconvenient to say the least.

My brain, which was resolutely refusing to make itself useful computer-wise during the day is now buzzing with ideas for how to solve programming problems.  It's turning itself in circles like I'd had three cups of tea this evening, rather than a couple of glasses of water.  The only thing I can think of is the chinese meal we had - I know that the sauces tend to be sugary, which is why I mostly dishes that are low on sauce.  The chicken with spring onion and ginger may have been a mistake. 

A tasty, tasty mistake.

A quick google shows that blood sugar levels can cause insomnia, which will do as an explanation for now.  Although I could do with a swarm of monitoring nanobots linked to an EMH to confirm my suspicions.

Anyway, I got up from 11 - 12:45, then went back to bed, and then got back up again at 1:15.

I think I'll give it until 2:00 and try again.

*sigh*

Delicious LiveJournal Links for 12-5-2009

• Artists illustrate their favourite writers
  I rather like the Michael Chabon one.
  (tags: illustration art literature comics authors)
• What roleplaying combat can be like.
  (tags: games roleplaying funny)
• People believe that God believes whatever they do.
  The team asked another group of volunteers to undertake tasks designed to soften their existing views, such as preparing speeches on the death penalty in which they had to take the opposite view to their own. They found that this led to shifts in the beliefs attributed to God, but not in those attributed to other people. Finally, the team used fMRI to scan the brains of volunteers while they contemplated the beliefs of themselves, God or "average Americans". In all the experiments the volunteers professed beliefs in an Abrahamic God. The majority were Christian. In the first two cases, similar parts of the brain were active. When asked to contemplate other Americans' beliefs, however, an area of the brain used for inferring other people's mental states was active. This implies that people map God's beliefs onto their own.
  (tags: religion psychology science god morality research)
• Ask Carole, our Evolutionary Agony Aunt
  I laughed a _lot_.
  (tags: funny evolution genetics relationships)

Advice for the youth of today

"Dance like the photo's not tagged, love like you've never been unfriended, tweet like nobody's following"
From @heawood via dougs

Further Up and Further In

cheers to nancylebov for this video, which doesn't so much break the fourth wall as turn it into a hall of reflecting mirrors.

Shiny

I have no particular interest in Blu-ray at the moment.    I don't feel the need to rebuy all my old DVDs, and in fact tend to watch movies via VoD or download at the moment anyway.  (Or at the cinema).  And the quality improvements didn't really seem worthwhile, until I saw this review of the Zulu Blu-ray.  Scroll 2/3 of the way down and see the difference in quality between the various DVD transfers and the Blu-Ray one.

Still, I'm not about to rush out and buy one - but when the current DVD player finally dies, if the LOTR extended Blu-rays are finally out, then I could be tempted to upgrade...

Wish me luck

I've dropped all my important documents into DropBox, made sure my music is on the networked hard drive, and copied Neverwinter Nights off there as well, just to be on the safe side.

It's time to install Windows 7.

Wish me luck.

Well, that was surprisingly fast

22:02 started
22:30 first login. Connect to Ninite to install software and Windows Update to update the graphics driver, etc.
22:44 reboot finished
22:49 Bookmarks and passwords retrieved from xmarks. Contacts synched with GMail. Email set up
22:54 Tabmix plus and Adblock plus both installed. Normal browsing resumes.

Why did nobody tell me???

Why did no one tell me what happened if you typed "about:robots" into the address bar in firefox?