E-mail Shortcut/The Agony of Da Feet

First thing’s first: If you read no further here’s a simple tip that may be often overlooked: instead of opening up a browser window with yahoo mail or google or even just plain outlook, windows users can create a “Mailto:” shortcut on the desktop which opens up the compose window first. Do it by right clicking on the desktop and selecting the create new shortcut option (type “mailto:” in the first field, hence the tip name). I’m not sure how it works on macs but I’d love to try to make a hackintosh or maybe I’ll consider convincing Elise to get a macbook as a replacement for her aging (this thing is old, i.e. 128 mb ram) laptop. If you use e-mail to post to blogs or to do lists like remember the milk this can be very useful. Also props to one of the guys at Burockracy for the e-mailed link to Dropbox. In the coming weeks I may start using it to post GPL or open source programs for download.

Two weekends ago after the Avon breast cancer walk, I drove down to soldier field to pick everyone on the team up (using everyone’s favorite personal trainer’s Toyota Camry). After cruising down Lake Shore Drive and missing the exit (“aw f*ck!”) I finally took the next available exit overpass around 31^st St and started cruising to see how easy the pickup would be. Naturally being a jerk of a male counterpart to a fervent fund raising female, pardon my French, but I wanted to pick them up and get the crap out of there. Instead I somewhat instinctively realized early that it wasn’t going to be like that and so I turned around and went back to park in the east stadium garage. Overall the closing ceremonies were touching and it was announced that the walkers raised over seven million dollars toward breast cancer treatment and research.

E’s feet were beat (possible stress fracture?) and because of the crappy weather, what started as a minor cough at the start of the walk became a very bad chest cold. For about a week or so after the event I tried my best to take care of her but she tried to milk it so it became fun to see how long she could cry about something before giving up on asking for it (whatever it was). She went to the doctor to get antibiotics even a few days after that and then finally some of the chest cold started to die down but even still she has a cough because she doesn’t really get a chance to rest much with a fair number of performance commitments. I know that I would feel miserable in those situations without being at full health, and I imagine even with her level of patience that three weeks of being even a little sick could potentially have a depressing effect.

I don’t know if the past two weeks has been trying or were just like any other week, but I did feel as though I wasn’t as alert as normal and the combination with weather changes and lack of sleep caused a general malaise on the work/life balance. I’ve started to use tennis/gym time as times to tire myself out more/become physically worked as well as mentally and this has worked well but sleep I feel is a major issue which I wanted to gain a better sense of having/getting enough. Earlier this year I was fortunate enough to download an audio recording of an NPR report called “All About Sleep” (Search for it on torrent sites, it was a very cool thing to have to listen to on afternoon bus rides). One especially notable conclusion was that sleep is very important for the brain and the different type of sleep including REM are crucial one’s mental and physical health. For various reasons (i.e. the invention of artificial light/power, industrial revolution) we used to have much longer times to sleep and then also we were able to have 1^st and 2^nd sleeps in between which oftentimes we could wake up in the middle and have short periods of being awake and clear headed.

I’ve heard elsewhere that one can jump start the process of energy recovery by loading up to 10 hours a night for a few weeks. How to actually make myself THAT tired I still need to figure out…