Meh. I'm tired and sore today, and i don't know why. Maybe i'm not getting enough sleep. Actually, i'm pretty sure of that, since despite spending 12 hours at work staring at one of several flickering screens, i come home and instinctively log in so quickly that my tossed jacket has yet to land on the sofa and my kicked-off shoes haven't even hit the floor. With a feverish intensity doubtlessly experienced by divers doing breath-holding exercises who finally return to the surface, taunting the cold grip of the sea, i jack back in after the seemingly endless haitus from technology that is my 20 minute commute. Why do i do this to myself? No one has emailed me in the time it takes to bounce my way 15 miles down I-5, no one has replied to one of my forum posts while i was unplugged and behind the wheel of the Pathy. Besides, if they had… it would page my wireless phone anyway, so i'd *know* there was an email waiting. Why do i need to check? Of course, nothing exciting awaits, and i fall back into the workday habit of checking more and more places, expanding the circle of subscriptions, until i find something that offers a new tidbit to click on that wasn't there 1200 seconds ago. Eek. I am addicted. I am the crack whore of the new millenium.
Anyway, where was i? Oh, yeah… i need to sleep better. Cause i stay up too late, doing all that stuff i was just tangentially blathering about. And cause alarm clocks are evil. Let’s get to the root of that. Have you ever been pleasantly awakened by your alarm clock? NO. My furnace is timed to warm the place up just before the alarm goes off, to make it a little easier to stick that first toe out from under the covers. On days when i don't need to get up at 5:15, the heater thing does it’s trick anyway; i wake up feeling well-rested and ready for life at about 5.30am. Days like today, when that alarm comes shrieking through the night, my blissful slumber is interrupted in a most jarring manner.
Enter technology’s answer: the Sleeptrack watch. It tracks your sleep (shocker!) by using your blood pressure or brain stem activity or drool rate perhaps, and then tries to wake you up as close to your target alarm time as possible in a window that coincides with your natural fluctuations of deep and light sleep. The idea being it’s better to wake up at 5.04 or 5:24 feeling great than at 5:15 feeling like your head is filled with oatmeal and your limbs are carved from solid blocks of concrete. I'm not sure what the threshold is for “near" your target time, but if you don't have a happy-zone anywhere close it just wakes you up regular. Anyway, sounds interesting. If it wasn't $150 i'd give it a try. If the nice people at sleeptracker want to send me one i'd be happy to give them my first-hand impressions. ;)
Monitoring yourself with a watch is neat and all, but what if it doesn't match what you're wearing? That’s what medical monitoring contacts are for. How handy would it be for all you diabetics out there if your eyes turned green when sugars were too high? A simple glance in the mirror or an observant friend might save you an unpleasant reaction. They also have potential for measuring other things, like potassium levels, cholesterol, etc. No more blood test, kids! How exciting is that?
Okay, that’s about all the excitement i can take for today. I'm going to resume watching Die Hard 2 and reading really old issues of dieselsweeties until it’s time to go home and check my email.