Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Added a music and audio section
I put aside a page for all of the music and recordings I have made. So far, there’s only a zip of the 3 ambient noise tracks I made a year ago. Some people really liked them, but they’re probably talking out their ass.
Listen for yourself:
Music/Audio page
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Flirting with Polyphasic Sleep - Part 2
It’s been a few days since I started altering my sleep cycle, and it’s been more than 48 hours since I decided to adapt to the Uberman cycle. The first tip people will tell you who have attempted polyphasic sleep, according to many blogs and websites I have read about the topic, and I can now confirm this as truth:
DO NOT OVERSLEEP.
I did this twice already, at the 4 AM spot. My schedule currently goes 12, 4, and 8. Yes, this screwed me over because not only was it difficult to get up from naps afterward, it makes you tired like you haven’t slept for a few days. And on the Uberman schedule, you basically haven’t. It does way more harm than good, because all of the sleep you missed in the middle of adapting, your body is going to want to make up for. [more]
I set multiple alarm clocks, and somehow, I manage to turn them all off and crawl back into bed. This is going to stop though, knowing the root cause of my midday fatigue.
To prevent oversleeping, in the event that I become too exhausted, I take an extra nap, at the advice of Steve Pavlina’s polyphasic sleep logs. So far, so good.
Despite these minor setbacks, I feel very well-rested after just a nap or two. And at the annoyance of those who doubted the Uberman sleep cycle, it looks like I just gained 11/12ths of my life back by not spending it sleeping. Freakish, but awesome, no? I suppose we will know by the end of the week whether I have fully adapted or not.
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Flirting with Polyphasic Sleep - Part 1
I decided I finally had something to write about here, that is, an experiment in polyphasic (meaning broken up into different naps through the day, as opposed to monophasic) sleep. I am the guinea pig here.
After a major disturbance in my regular 8-hour sleep schedule two nights ago, I took two naps, exactly two hours long, but 4 hours apart (and I’ve kept this up for the past two days), since it reminded me entirely of the original Uberman’s sleep schedule, which I aim to adopt. According to the author of this article, she was able to get through the day on just 20 minutes of sleep for every 4 hours of being awake, taking a total of six naps spread out through the day.
I’m not really going to discuss the benefits, the research, and the drawbacks here, because the links above elaborate more on that. Rather, I will be documenting how it affects me. [more]
As I’ve said, I have been doing this for almost 2 days now, and as of this writing, I am in the middle of the second day.
I began on day 1 because I was unable to get a full night of sleep. I got exactly two hours between 9 AM and 11 AM, then another two hours between 3 PM and 5 PM. After the first nap, I felt pretty damn tired still. But after my second one, I awoke, feeling as well-rested and aware as ever.
Following this, I looked up the original Uberman’s sleep schedule. I had heard of this before, but never tried it because high school is one long 8-hour chunk, and the teachers never took too kindly to anyone sleeping in class, for any reason, because of a perceived illusion of being “unproductive”.
Another four hours soon passed, and I went to sleep at 9 PM, waking up at 11 PM on the dot. I was very hungry, so I ate ramen because I am a fucking weeaboo. As I have noticed, eating smaller meals frequently suits this type of schedule more. I also had some coffee, but that was a bad idea, because I was only able to get an hour in for my next nap. It was difficult for me to fall asleep, and I was extremely tired when I missed that one. Then when I woke, it was nearly time for my next nap! So I took this one, woke up, and still felt tired. The effects of missing a nap or cutting it too short are dramatic.
I came home from my class, and crashed for another two hours, and here I am now, feeling well-rested and recovered from my recent sleeping mishap.
The current question is: should I maintain a 2-hour nap schedule, or 20-minute nap schedule? I will find out soon enough.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Master your EQ, make your music sound clearer
Yes, the EQ, or equalizer. The average person usually doesn’t bother messing with it, but if you want to get the clearest sound for every song, you need to do more than just use the presets. I’m no music technician, but I get pretty anal about the quality of my music. Hell, I hate mp3s that come in less than 256 kbps because I can almost always hear the compression artifacts. The reason I wrote this is because there weren’t that many guides on the subject when I googled it a long time ago. [more]
In your basic graphical EQ, you have a few bars that represent the various frequency bands. These start on neutral, neither negating or boosting the signal produced by the song. The leftmost sliders are the lower frequencies, and the rightmost sliders are the highest frequencies. In most songs (except for most classical music, electronic and IDM), they won’t go to extremes, but you can take advantage of the EQ to change the tonal qualities of the song to your liking.
Whatever you are listening to your music through also plays a huge part in the tonal qualities of your sound. The size and shape of your speakers, their location and surroundings affect your sound a lot, and an EQ can help you to sort this out, after you have arranged your speakers properly. Experiment with the placement of your speakers. Most people just point them forward in an enclosed desk, but tilting them diagonally away (about 45 degrees or so) from the monitor changes the sound ever so slightly. This can wash out a bit of the treble, which your average desktop speakers seem to produce too much of, and bring out the bass. You use the boards of the desk (walls, in my case) to make the sound reverberate off of it, and turn it all into one large speaker.
One more thing I forgot to mention about the graphical EQ: the preamp.
Basically, when you use the band sliders on the EQ, you are either amplifying or turning down a signal, and that signal determines how much of it the speaker needs to output. If a given song, for instance, already has a good deal of middle and treble frequencies, and you boost those anyway because you just want to get brighter tones, you may get a washed out, chopped up, and distorted sound.
What is happening is that the signal being sent to the speakers is getting cut off by an imaginary bottlenecked “pipeline”. The input is greater than what the output can handle. This is where the preamp comes in. If you drop the preamp a few decibels, it’s like lowering the EQ across all bands, with respect to the settings you already have on the sliders. So you boosted your 12K band to +12dB? Drop the preamp 3 decibels, and you have a net gain of +9dB on the 12K band. Magical, isn’t it? Think of the preamp slider as your zero, the 0dB level that normally applies to the other sliders.
Lastly, try experimenting with your equalizer to figure out what you want out of your sounds. There is no universal EQ setting because there are different speakers, different songs, and different people. It’s really the only way to understand why you should use it. I guess you can just turn off the EQ and ignore it, but you’ll be missing out on making a whole lot of awesome songs sound even better.