Gunpowder Tea

Even though I’ve lived in large cities most of my adult life, I haven’t embraced the cultural diversity they offered until recently. And by diversity, I mean what they consume.

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My Polyphasic Sleep Experiment – Day 3, Nap 1

OK, so I have a new plan of attack. Jumping up when my alarm goes off has never been a problem. (Mostly because I never actually fall asleep.) The problem has been not staying up long enough to resist the temptation of going back to sleep.

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Go See "An Inconvenient Truth"

I just watched the movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” and it has me seriously motivated. The key word is actually Truth, not the Inconvenient. So much BS is cut through in this film, it should be part of school curriculum. It shows us what we all suspect is happening, but have been happy to ignore.

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My Polyphasic Sleep Experiment – Day 2

This isn’t working. During all my naps, I wasn’t able to fall asleep at all, and when my 4am nap came around, I did the old “sit on the bed” trick after I turned off the alarm, and the next thing I knew, it was 11am.

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My Polyphasic Sleep Experiment – Day 1

As of 10am yesterday, I put myself on a polyphasic sleep schedule, starting with a 30 minute nap at noon, with subsequent naps every 4 hours. The drill goes like this: every 4 hours, I go to bed and set a nap alarm for 30 minutes. I go to sleep, and wake up 30 minutes later when the alarm goes off.

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Diet and Exercise

I’ve caught my profile reflected in store windows when I walk down 17th Ave lately. I don’t like it. I’m not fat yet, but I have a little gut that makes me hard to take seriously as a throbbing, rock-hard hunk of male virility.

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R.I.P. H.E.R.B.S.

I really tried to keep the thing alive. It was scary how quickly it pointed out my incompetence, by dying.

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My Polyphasic Sleep Experiment Begins

This summer has been a SNAFU; instead of doing a last edit of my novel’s final draft, I have yet to write a word. Instead of adhering to a rigourous sleep schedule, I have been crossing the border of consciousness willy-nilly. I have not been able to conjure the determination to stick to my plans. I could blame lots of things for my distraction, but in the end, it comes down to a lack of resolve on my part.

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How to Cancel Your Vonage Service

As I mentioned yesterday, I cancelled my Vonage VOIP account. What I didn’t mention is that I was an impatient jerk when I did it. I have been reading too much about corporate “retention” programs on the internet, and it made me jumpy.

(If you have a doozy of a customer service story, please add it to the comments!)

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Why You Should Skype, Not Vonage

I cancelled my Vonage account today. Vonage is a “Voice over IP” (VOIP) company that lets you use your high speed internet connection, with their specialized equipment, to make phone calls. Slick setup, reasonable quality, and great value. For $20 a month, I got 500 minutes anywhere in North America, with all those fun voicemail, call waiting, conferencing doohickeys thrown in. But then I tried Skype.

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