The Vent and Rant Thread

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by Verencat

...
I woke up at 5:30 these two last morning, depriving me of precious hours of sleep and leaving me desperate and turning around in my bed trying to catch the little sleep still available to me... I never ever had that kind of problem before, I used to be the night bird type! Now at 8pm I'm in my bed! Who am I?

Can I get spring now? Please? Pretty please?

I know, my schedule seems to continue to retro-grade. Earlier to bed, earlier to rise. I often don't know who I am either.

Sounds like you're sick to me, better stay home from work.

[wodin]

Originally Posted by ShortNCuddlyAm

OK - I'm done feeling sorry for myself

I'd like to have something to feel sorry for myself about.

[devilsadvocate]

Originally Posted by Verencat

I know!

I woke up at 5:30 these two last morning, depriving me of precious hours of sleep and leaving me desperate and turning around in my bed trying to catch the little sleep still available to me... I never ever had that kind of problem before, I used to be the night bird type! Now at 8pm I'm in my bed! Who am I?

It has been my experience that, despite the world completing a rotation in about 24 hours, the circadian rhythms of some are not in sync with that.

There's no metaphysical mojo involved. If left to my own devices, for example, and I went to bed when I was tired and got up whenever I woke up, we would find my wakeup time getting later by about an hour every day, more or less in sync with my bedtime getting later such that I would start out getting up in the morning, then it would be afternoon, then evening, eventually getting up in the mornings again. I believe (and have yet to see proof to the contrary) that most have a margin-of-error of maybe a few minutes, but a few of us can be noticeably off-kilter, and I wouldn't be surprised if the truly deranged in society have a sleep disorder that simply goes undiagnosed in light of having bigger mental fish to fry. What's worse is that everything will follow this pattern, from gastrointestinal behavior to hormone peaks, or pretty much everything that is regulated by the (assumed) 24-hour clock. Interestingly, I have mood swings which roughly follow this same pattern; for approximately 2 weeks I'll be a nice guy (well, nice as I can muster anyway), and the next two, to quote Chevy Chase, "I'm not." I realize that in terms of science correlation does not mean causation, but the results are repeatable and cannot be easily explained by anything else. Your mileage may vary.

It's actually rather annoying.

The point is, it's different for everyone (not that any psychologist will ever admit this) and if you try to mess with it your mind will conceive all kinds of mutinous acts.

Or, you could look at me as proof that there are truly not enough hours in the day. In any event, I now refer to this condition as Circadian Arrhythmia.
<--looking up how to get medical research grants

[DawnFalcon]

The natural Human Circadian rhythm is actually about 24 1/4 hours. Like many animals, we rely on environmental cues to correct this.

[devilsadvocate]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

The natural Human Circadian rhythm is actually about 24 1/4 hours. Like many animals, we rely on environmental cues to correct this.

True, but unlike other animals, we have an annoying habit of modifying our environment to suit our whims, even if said modification is ill-advised

[pshrynk]

When I get up at 5:30 I swear because the alarm clock didn't go off.

[Camann]

Ranting....finally got around to using $120 I had on account with Books on Board. They promptly locked my account because I had purchased a high dollar amount of books. They informed me they would be shutting down early for New Year's so I needed to contact them immediately to unlock the account. I did with 3 hours to spare. Then, a few minutes before they closed, they said I had to download a test sample before they would release my books. I did but of course too late...the account will stay locked until Saturday.

I wonder what they will require next on Saturday. They money has been in my account for months. I know how to download and transfer books to my Sony Reader...what next...maybe I'll have to prove I can read.

LOL, that felt good....glad this thread exists.

[jaxx6166]

Thanks guys. I feel better. The beer fairy brought me a present..and I found chocolate in the fridge from Xmas. Huzzah. Life is glorious and magical and full of wonder.

I'm in/out of the writing bug myself. Trying to rewrite the ending and trim a couple thousand words out of Beyond the Black is driving me crazy. I had hoped to have it ready by 12/25...but that didn't happen.

Now, my new rant for the evening is some of the firecrackers sound an awful lot like gunshots tonight. The cats are terrified. Happy freakin' new year.

I've also got the urge to revisit a character from forever ago. That may come to fruition sometime in the next 3 months.

[kazbates]

Originally Posted by vivaldirules

I hate epub (although I like the idea of it). But I hold out hope that soon publishers will realize that the formatting of their ebooks is as important for marketing as the quality of the paper, fonts, and cover art were for pbooks and will therefore pay more attention to it. And the publishers in turn will make vendors of readers (like Sony) pay some more damn attention to their lousy, stinking firmware.

Amen to that. I've spent the last 3 days rebuilding my library within Reader Library (yes, I know I can use Calibre, and I do, but it doesn't allow for annotations which I use rather extensively) because the software failed to launch. No matter what hoops I jumped through, I could not get the stupid thing to run. Programming decent software is not that hard. If we could do it in the '80s with machine code, they should be able to do it better with the advanced languages they have now. At the same time, I rebuilt my library in Calibre. I was running an older version on my kitchen laptop because I prefer the lrf format to epub and the newer version (6) does not support lrf the way it used to but was still running the newer version on my studio laptop. I've finally uninstalled the newer version and reinstalled the older on my studio laptop so that I can finally have everything consolidates. I feel so much more organized now so I guess there was a silver lining in all this after all.

As it turns out, I was able to get my computer to recognize my reader by shutting down the device, pushing reset and turning the reader on. Thankfully, I did not have to do a hard reset which would have erased all of the ebooks on my reader for which I did not have a back-up thanks to a faulty Memory Stick (I did run out yesterday to purchase another SD card to use as my new back-up). Perhaps 2010 will turn out to be a better year than I thought it would.

[montsnmags]

Right now I'm inna bad way. Every humourless, arrogant subjective opinion posing as an ethical position, or injured pride from glorified self-importance dressed up as justifiable arsehattery makes me want to chew through the posers face and into that plain cubic Lego lump of barely sentient beige jello they can only call a brain by way of giving their reflexive spinal chord something to hold up and occasionally suck as a leech on a still-warm corpse.

I've a burning urge to cut loose and spit invective until ears bleed, and if my Queen Zelda isn't back soon, well quite a few oxycodone washed down with a slow schooner of Stolli will be my lead before hitting that special Big Red Button in my UserCP marked "Adrian" and letting him off my back (or climbing, slipping, falling, falling, falling from his) to go to town on every last bit of pissedoffedness he can sink his rabid, diseased bloody teeth into, megalomania be damned and undammed.

Yay, though I walk through the shallows of the valley of the drowned woods, black dog at my heels, I will fear no harm, for Adrian is the bringer of chaos and I his necessary Mandelbrot set piece. Pawn to Joker 11ty. Check.

Yours half-spare,
The Fool

[kennyc]

...but on the other hand....

[Wetdogeared]

Well, trying to objective, I guess justifiable arsehattery (or should that be unjustifiable arsehattery) can do that to a person. Not a great start to the new year. You are showing considerable restraint though while waiting for Zelda. I hope she returns soon too.

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by montsnmags

Right now I'm inna bad way. Every humourless, arrogant subjective opinion posing as an ethical position, or injured pride from glorified self-importance dressed up as justifiable arsehattery makes me want to chew through the posers face and into that plain cubic Lego lump of barely sentient beige jello they can only call a brain by way of giving their reflexive spinal chord something to hold up and occasionally suck as a leech on a still-warm corpse.

I've a burning urge to cut loose and spit invective until ears bleed, and if my Queen Zelda isn't back soon, well quite a few oxycodone washed down with a slow schooner of Stolli will be my lead before hitting that special Big Red Button in my UserCP marked "Adrian" and letting him off my back (or climbing, slipping, falling, falling, falling from his) to go to town on every last bit of pissedoffedness he can sink his rabid, diseased bloody teeth into, megalomania be damned and undammed.

Yay, though I walk through the shallows of the valley of the drowned woods, black dog at my heels, I will fear no harm, for Adrian is the bringer of chaos and I his necessary Mandelbrot set piece. Pawn to Joker 11ty. Check.

Yours half-spare,
The Fool

Marc, check the surf, and have a beer. It's below freezing here in Texas now. For all the sticky wickets life passes at you, it still beats the alternatives....

RSE

[devilsadvocate]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

Marc, check the surf, and have a beer. It's below freezing here in Texas now. For all the sticky wickets life passes at you, it still beats the alternatives....

RSE

Yeah, heard about that from my stepson in the TX panhandle, they're only 5 degrees warmer than here, and we're struggling to stay above zero this weekend. I expect it here but really, what's up with that?

[Greg Anos]

GLOBAL WARMING!!!!!