Dan Makovec’s blog

Insomnia

It’s 6.30am, and I’ve been awake for an hour and a half. I only made it to bed just after midnight, and I was exhausted then.

The problem is twofold: I’m a light sleeper, and we live on a busy street. I find I increasingly rely on caffeine throughout the day to keep me awake, and in the evening I’m not exactly a ball of energy.

This morning the traffic outside seemed worse than ever, far earlier than usual - especially the number of trucks. It was as if the glass was missing from the windows and doors. Brian of course slept through everything, and probably won’t be awake for another hour. I’m left sitting here wondering what to do. We’re signing on for another six months in this apartment this weekend. There’s no choice really - it’s taken so long to get ourselves sorted out here, we’d like to have a chance to catch our breath before moving again. Come November though, I’ll definitely want to be moving to somewhere on a quiet street, where we could even possibly leave a window open at night.

In the meantime, I’ve just ordered some mouldable ear plugs to help drain out the noise. It’s not usually this bad, and not normally so early, but I suspect the quality of my sleep, when I do make it through the night without completely waking up, has been pretty poor lately thanks to the occasional loud hoon driving down the street at 3am. With a bit of luck, the plugs will improve things to the point where I can get a solid 8 hours.

I’m also going to look into getting some thick curtains for the window. We’ve got nothing but a flimsy venitian at the moment, which has no noise cancelling properties at all. Every little bit helps I think.

I really feel like taking today off - I’m so exhausted and I haven’t even got to the stage of having a shower yet. Lord knows how I’ll make it through a 2 hour workout tonight. It’s no wonder I’m so often thinking glum thoughts about this town. I think I’m sleeping worse than ever since I’ve moved here.

Maybe I’ll just have a half day, then go to Target for the curtains.

In better news, the promotion is all but confirmed. I signed off on the templates for my business cards yesterday - “platform development manager”. Rather odd since I haven’t signed off on the contract yet. 10% pay increase, with option for another 10% bonus. That should keep me happy (provided I get some sleep) for the next 12 months. Maybe this time next year I’ll be able to look at buying a house - one that I can pimp out with a sound-proof bedroom!

Thoughts on Tiger

I just installed Tiger on the laptop, and to be honest it’s a bit of a yawn. Mail.app still sits waiting forever for god knows what when talking to my IMAP server (Thunderbird plays quite happily with the server, so who knows what the problem is?). Spotlight’s cute, although it’s too early to say whether I’ll be making any use of it. The same for the automator, really. The dashboard is cute (dictionary, quick calendar, stickies and a rollodex - basically a virtual office desk), although the sceptics were right - it’s just Konfabulator (I know, I’m running Konfabulator as well).

In fact, the only reason I got out my plastic for the upgrade was it’s Java 5 support. Despite the fact that it doesn’t ship with the new Java, Apple released the upgrade online overnight, so I installed it pretty quickly. It was disappointing that they wouldn’t offer a discount to someone who bought his first Mac only just over a month ago, but that’s Apple’s business model for you.

Ah well, I’ve got it now, it’s out of the way, and I can finally do my Java work on the machine.