Blog archives for February, 2005

A few weeks back, Bob stated that he thought he was sleep deprived. I did a little web searching and found this article that confirms that you are sleep deprived if you can’t wake up without an alarm. I think that I am suffering from sleep deprivation as well since I have to set an alarm every work day.

The article also states that everyone needs a different amount of sleep to feel refreshed. So how do I know how much sleep I need? Bob suggested that you set your alarm and then start going to bed earlier and earlier till you wake up before the alarm. I have not tried that exactly but I have been trying to go to bed earlier and I think it is helping. However, it might mean going to sleep at 9:00 or 10:00. Note: I said “going to sleep” not “going to bed”. That means if I want to read 30 minutes, I have to go to bed even earlier. Wow!

Maybe after I get “caught up” on sleep, I will need a little less to get up by 6:00 AM. Until then, I think I will make an effort to go to sleep by 10:00 to see if I can make it up to 40 winks.

I’m finding that my battle with email is going well. The clean desk policy is working well at work. On those rare occasions when I can’t deal with something one afternoon, it is a glaring item in my inbox the next morning so I deal with it ASAP.

At home, I moved all of the messages from my inbox to a “pending” folder. I installed Norton Internet Security with Spam filtering. I’m still training it about what is and what is not spam but I am seeing results already. It dealt with 75 spam messages for me yesterday. I’m still checking each one to make sure there are no false positives (I’ve caught a few) but will soon be able to let Norton do its job.

I’m slowly going through the pending folder filing away or deleting all the messages. Once I’m done, I should be back in control of my email. The key is to stay regular. Don’t let a day go by without dealing with that message if possible. File it, reply to it, or delete it – that is the key. Stay regular.

A common problem with RSS is that is are ordered by source not by time. If you want to show a set of feeds with all the posts in time order, you have to do some work. First, you will need a way to consume the RSS XML data and be able to process (I use PHP). I use Magpie RSS parser to process a list of feeds. As I process a feed, I iterate over all the posts adding the feed title, and the feed URL and then copy it to a new array of posts using the timestamp as the array key. After processing each feed, I have a list sorted by timestamp but with the oldest first. Call the PHP rksort() method flips the array around. Only then do I output any posts to the page. With this scheme, I can also limit the number of posts, the timeframe of posts, etc.

Not all feeds look the same. Some feeds are actually something called Atom and there are at least two versions of RSS. Magpie RSS can consume these types of feeds so most of the hard work is done for you. However, you can run into some quirks. Some feeds have the timestamp in one form (Unix timestamp) and others have it in an English readable form. Some feeds have the full post as the content and others have just a short excerpt. Some are plain text and others are HTML. Dealing with that is left up to the reader.

OK, Guys — just in case you didn’t know, it is Valentine’s Day. Go out and do your duty. Buy those cards and flowers. Stock up on chocolates and candy hearts (make sure they say “Be Mine“). Take her out to dinner. Do the dishes. Tell her how beautiful she is. And whatever you do, don’t let the day go by without telling your gal, “I Love You!”.

I’m bad about email. I tend to let my inbox pile up with things that “I’m going to get around to” or that “I might need.” Of course, I don’t have time to deal with them or they were not truly important after all. The result is that I end up with hundreds or thousands of messages in my inbox. On the way to work on Tuesday or Wednesday, I heard on NPR an email consultant or “therapist” who was discussing the problems that folks have with email. I realized that I have a problem and the only way I’ll fix it is to deal with it completely. So, as soon as I got to work I went to work to clean up that inbox. It took me a day or so of off and on work (between real work) to deal with all the items but I now have an empty inbox and all my “keepers” are in folders where I can find them if I need them.

Now I have to deal with my home inbox where I think I have over a thousand unread messages! At home I also have a bad problem with spam given the number of public email addresses I have (band, PTSA, chorus, etc.) I have some ideas how I’ll take my inbox back from the spammers, but that can wait for another post.