Status report

So, here it is, year 2007. Should become an interesting year for me in many ways. So many things to do, so many ideas to try out, so much experimenting to do (you can read about some of these ideas from my last post).

From the beginning of year I don’t have anymore this ‘regular’ 8 to 5 job and what a blessing this is, at least right now I think so. I don’t have to get up at certain time and I don’t have to sit my hours at office, no matter if I have anything to do or not, I don’t have to ask permission to take longer breaks or even few days off. I do exactly what, when and how I want and it feels good indeed. Of course it doesn’t mean that I sleep 12 hours and play computer games all day, far from that. It means that I actually have to work out my salary.

Things I’ve done from the list I posted last time:

• Tube headphone amplifier – still unfinished and has little hum, but I got it working! And the sound is oh so lovely, this is definitely the best sound I’ve ever heard from headphones. And the glow… Wow! Actually this ‘romantic’ tube glow was one of the reasons I wanted to build my own amp (second one was of course the super-good sound this old technology can produce). When I finish this and the next one, for which I already have all parts, then it would be nice to compare them. Tube against tube, tooth against tooth.
• Biphasic sleeping – currently I’m on my second day trying this out. Basically it means that I sleep at nights 4.5 hours and sometime during day 1.5 hours, total of 6 hours. Because one normal sleep cycle is 1.5 hours, all sleeping periods must by 1.5, 3, 4.5, 6, 7.5 etc in duration. Theory behind this is that when I sleep 2 times I need to sleep less and I’m more rested during day. We’ll see. So far it has worked out nicely – I go to sleep around 02:00 and wake around 06:00, second sleep is from 14:00 to 15:30, or thereabouts.
• No meat diet – also work in progress. No meat for 9 days and I don’t even miss it. Nice
• Do something useful in lisp – work in progress. I started to program Snaps4 web in lisp, currently it’s plain static HTML, but more than half of what’s needed to run it from lisp server is already done. I must say that I and lisp get along quite well, tho I have to look up many things from books or web which are natural for me in Perl (no wonder too, I’ve used it for about 5 years almost daily). It’s quite interesting experience to work with language that was born in 1958. In computer world this means very-very ancient!

Anyway, here’s magic tube glow demo for you: