The Joys of Sleep Deprivation


<Knghtbrd> it's 6am. I have been up 24 hours
<Knghtbrd> Wake me up and risk life and limb.
* Knghtbrd &; sleep
<Tv> Okay everyone, we wait 10 minutes and then start flooding Knghtbrd with ^G's. Someone, hack root and cat /dev/urandom >/dev/dsp.

That's a pretty good description of my day. At 11:00 last night, I finally finished (well, as close to finishing as I would ever get) my General Relativity homework that was due today. I also had a little too much energy to just go straight to bed, but not enough energy or gumption to actually go do something somewhere else. And, with my roommate already asleep, I figured I shouldn't make too much noise.

Since I've been reading the Harry Potter books (read book 3 on Saturday before D&D), I thought, "OK, book 4 is longer, so I'll start it now, and finish it later."

One of these days, I'm going to learn better. My next concious thought about where I was in the book came somewhere around page 600 (of a 800 page book), but I was rivited there in my seat with the book. (Well, OK. Not rivited to the chair; because I realized my butt was getting sore from all that sitting, so I laid on the floor for the last 200 pages, but you get the point.)

No conscious noting of the passage of the hours. No conscious thought outside of the book. For 800 pages. And 5 and a half hours.

So I went to bed at 4:30. And woke up at 8:00. Blargh. I've been in the lab all day now, and I finally realized something: I don't work this way. Sleep deprivation is fine as a programming tool, but when I need to think about the work I'm doing, it simply doesn't work.

So, I'm going to knock off a little early today, and go home for some rest. At least I don't have to worry about Harry Potter 5 for a while....


Sorry about the techie humor at the top, but it seemed appropriate to my sleep deprived mind. And, it was the best one I could find in the fortune files on my laptop while I was writing this. And, out of curiosity, am I the only one who thinks that the Harry Potter stuff left the light-hearted happy-fiction land and took a turn for the darker at the end of book 4? Or has it always been just as dark and I never took notice before?


Brian Naberhuis
Last modified: Tue Oct 16 17:03:21 PDT 2001