5 serious drawbacks of sleeping on your tummy you might not realize if you’re lucky enough to sleep on your back

May 7th, 2012

*disclaimer*
This article is little writing exercise in the style of cracked.com articles. No material was copied from that page, i just tried to impersonate that style of writing for practicing purposes.
*endofdisclaimer*

When you’re young, you can probably sleep anywhere, even with your head down a toilet. But when you’re getting slightly older, you might find the bending-over-the-toilet-and-taking-a-nap position suddenly and inexplicably a bit uncomfortable and you might look for a more appropriate sleeping positions.
My sleeping position was on my tummy. Numbers diverge but i seem to belong to a group as small/large as 13% of the population [1] – even when i was a baby, I could not sleep on my back, it had to be on my tummy. Yes, I’ve got pictures to proof it but I won’t show them here :-p

At first glance, this preference doesn’t seem to make a big difference. But what do those backies know? Not a lot about us poor tummies, I can tell you… let’s have a look at all the body parts that do not play nicely with sleeping on your tummy. Of course, there are also people sleeping on their sides but for the sake of simplicity I can’t include them here as well.

1) Where your feet point

If you’re not a ballerina or a clown you or your feet will have to get creative. Try lying on your tummy, keeping your legs straight with your feet as an extension to your legs. Can you feel the stretching? So what’s the alternative? Spread out your feet. Feels good for the moment but if you do that every night for six hours you will start walking around like a hillbilly. What I had to do at home is to raise the mattress a couple of centimeter so I could let my feet dangle over the edge of the bed. Don’t get me started on winter when it’s too cold to let your feet out from under the blanket…

2) What concerns your feet also applies to your neck

Raising the mattress certainly helped my feet but unless you own one of those fancy massage tables where you can stick your head through a hole, then your neck is still in twisted trouble. Again, try it out for yourself: Lay on a bed on your tummy with your head towards the left. Feels comfortable, right? Now wait 15 minutes. Still comfortable? Then you’re lucky. Now try to lay still like that for another four or five hours… i usually use the cushion to raise the head somewhat but this in turn makes your body twist slightly. I still haven’t found a valid alternative for this problem.

3) Forced weight check

Have you ever tried sleeping on a barrel? Imagine this barrel is your tummy and can’t be removed. Now the only position available to you is to lay on your back – in which position you can’t sleep. Aat least, that’s how it is for me. I can lay awake for hours on my back, in fact if I want to keep myself from falling asleep, that’s what I have to do.
So, I can’t let myself become too fat.

4) Your lower jaw and grinding your teeth during the night

Nightly teeth grinding seems a not-so-rare issue, mostly caused by mental grieve or anguish and apparently anyone can have occasional issues. But if you sleep on your tummy, you are basically lying on your face as we elaborated above.
What happens then is that your lower jaw will be pushed back every night for years and years until you end up with an overbite. As if it wasn’t terrible enough that your sleeping position is apparently trying to make you British, you will at the same time grind your teeth to a perfect flatline. You think I’m kidding? I wish I was but my dentist was actually questioning me about this and I don’t think I’m his type.

5) The lower back

Occasionally I wake up with lower back pain. Occasionally is still too often when I get this pain only during sleep. Sleep is supposed to be gentle and refreshing like a breeze on summer day or a fawn chewing on your nipple. Anyway, moving on from that disturbing image – sleep is not supposed the bringer of pain and misery. But unfortunately, all of the items listed above (the neck, the feet, the jaw issue) make you a twisted man (Twisted, get it? Haha…) which of course will do your spine no good. I suppose ‘backies’ are off much better in this respect as long as they have an appropriate mattress and apart from moving sides every two hours or so, I don’t really see an alternative.

I’ve been bitching about sleeping on the tummy for a couple of lines but are we really off that bad? Maybe. Can we help it? Hardly. Hey, at least we don’t look like entombed saints while we’re sleeping but like proper dead people, leftover of a crime scene. Meh… could be worse :-)

Links and references:
[1] http://angela-michel.suite101.de/gut-schlafen-mit-der-richtigen-schlafposition-a114045

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Creating scheduled tasks with schtasks.exe on Windows 7

April 24th, 2012

In Windows 7, it’s easy to create scheduled tasks. You can either use Task Scheduler under Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools or you can use schtasks.exe in the cmd. schtasks.exe can be scripted and most of the commands and options that are available in Task Scheduler are also available in schtasks.exe

In my particular case, I wanted to create a task that runs EVERYDAY in a 5 MINUTE INTERVAL from 07:00 to 21:30. Although schtasks.exe provides some examples, I promptly chose the wrong example to edit and whatever I tried didn’t seem to work.

After a lot of fiddling and calling up a good friend’s advice, this command line did the trick (should all be on one line):

schtasks /create /ru “system” /sc daily  /tn “your task name” /tr “‘%programfiles%\path\to\your\executable.exe’” /st 07:05 /sd 01/01/2012 /du 14:30 /ri 10 /f

What does this do?

Start a cmd as administrator and the above command line will create a task called “your task name”.
The task will be created and run:
-in system context (ru = run as user)
-daily from 07:05 (sc = schedule, st = starting time) until 21:30 (du = duration – 14.5 hours)
-in a 10 minute interval (ri = run interval in minutes)
-using the provided executable (tr = taskrun). Note that you can use environment variables that have to be escaped using single quotes.
-forcing the task e.g. if a task with the same name already exists, it will be overwritten

Where did I go wrong:

The help in schtasks provides some examples. My mistake was the following though:
If you choose /sc minute, you’re stuck on one particular day because you have to provide a /st and an /et (end time). The end time will always default to the provided time and the day the task was created and only that day. E.g. if you create a task running from /st 07:00 to /et 14:00, schtasks.exe will translate this to “from 07:00 <today> to 14:00 <today>” and only run it on that particular day and then never again.

Notable absent option in schtasks.exe:
In the Task Scheduler gui, a task can be created/optimized for Vista/W2k8 or Win7/W2k8_R2.
This options changes the tag “Task version” from version=”1.2″ to version=”1.3″ in the XML file of that task. In schtasks.exe, this option is not available but it doesn’t seem to make a difference at all.

HTHS
m.

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北京 – the funny part

April 20th, 2012

After spending a couple of days in Beijing, the sarcastic 外国人 in me started showing through again. I’ll demonstrate showing you some pictures, all of which were taken on 王府进大街 (Wangfujin Avenue, a big shopping street).

1) Directions?

If you have ever heard of “CHINES ECR EATURE” or “PHOTOG RA PHIC EQU IP MENT”, please raise your hand. And if you need a wrapping service for your presents, please go see the “THE BOX WRAPPER HAS”.

2)  The perfect gift for you 3 year old daughter…

You love your daughter, you have just been to 北京, why not show your love with this special t-shirt?

While you are in Beijing, the context may save you, but try wearing this t-shirt in an English-speaking speaking country in a park at night…

3) The Supermarket

Just a couple of shops down from the t-shirt store, I found this gem:

I wonder what the specialty is… probably spelling foreign words without using particular vowels. “Look, Ma! No ‘a’s!”

4) Those damned word boundaries again…

At least here, they have an explanation (well, sort of): They try to make the letters fit onto the panels. But they did a better job on 3)

5) Dictionary words, what a pain

Some words are easily recognizable, even when the spelling is incorrect. This one took me a minute and I first was thinking of “wrath”, but how can you sell that?

Only after looking at 手表, I understand that they meant “watch”. This is really pitiful… grammatical errors is one thing, but dictionary words? Also, they got the plural in handicrafts right, but will the supermarket be able to survive by selling just one watch and one shaving razor? Finally, thanks for providing a second translation of “toy”, didn’t get it the first time…

6) Ingenious parent-kid bike

Found this little germ on 北池子大街 (Beichizi Avenue), north of 天安门东站 (Tian’an men East station): an electric bike with a built-on kid’s seat. Given the traffic in Beijing, 新日 (new day) sounds more like a family prayer while riding.

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Password problems with Firefox Sync

March 30th, 2012

Although Firefox has sported a Sync option for quite some time, I only recently decided to make use of it.
I’m working on several different OS on several different pcs in several different locations and having my bookmark collection always up to date is a real time/lifesaver.

Unfortunately, every once in a while Sync reports “could not sync within the last 7 days” due to a password problem. (The screenshot was taken on a Ubuntu installation)

The offered options are to change your password, to unlink the device or to reset.

This happened to me on Win7 x86_64 with Firefox 10 and on a Win7 x86_64 with Firefox 11, both workstations joined to a domain and again on Ubuntu 11.10 x86_64 with Firefox 11.
I usually try to re-enter my password first and it’s always “incorrect” for some reasons.

I’ve solved plenty of user problems with passwords to know all the tricks’n'traps (keyboard settings, numeral keypard etc,) and I *know* I enter the correct password (although that’s what the users say as well). In the end, I usually unlink the device, delete the firefox profile and set up Sync again. You need to have your recovery key ready for this but as I store all passwords in KeePass files and sync them using Ubuntu One, I’m good with that.

Of course, when I set up Sync again and enter the same password as before, it’s deemed “correct” and my synced settings are restored within seconds.

You won’t find any information about this in Event Viewer but have a look at C:\Users\<username>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<random_name>.default\weave\logs (on Linux: .mozilla/firefox/<random_name>.default\weave\logs ).
The next couple of lines will refer to the Linux version, your mileage may vary on Windows but should be similar.

The log files contain a timestamp in Unix time (online converter here), warnings and debug messages such as “401: login failed”. It will also display your encrypted (?) username. Quite useful information but no hints to what the actual problem is. Previous post in the Mozilla support forum report that intermittent server failures could be the cause but from a user’s point of the view there’s no way you can verify this.

What are experiences with Firefox Sync? As a tool I like quite like it but this password issue is a bit annoying. Do you have any hints? Let me know…

UPDATE:
Maybe thrashing your Firefox profile is an overkill. Simply try restarting Firefox first. Whilst writing this very post, Firefox complained about an incorrect sync password (that’s why I was able to take screenshots ^_^) but closing Firefox, adding a new bookmark on a different pc and starting Firefox again, the new bookmark was synched without problem.

And another thought:
If you use the NoScript extension, make sure you allow https://services.mozilla.com – don’t know if it helps but it can’t get worse.

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Swiss German Keyboard Layout for Japanese IME on Windows 7

March 18th, 2012

In Windows 7, there seems to be a bug regarding the keyboard laybout in Japanese IME (probably not the only bug in Windows 7, but hey…). The issue apparently didn’t exist in Vista but affects Windows 7 users who use Microsoft IME to input Japanese on non-Japanese Windows 7 pcs.

After adding Japanese input via Control Panel -> Region and Language -> Tab “Keyboards and Languages” -> “Change keyboards…” -> Tab “General”, Japanese input uses an US layout keyboard whenever you input something in Japanese.

Basically, this is not a problem for users with a phyiscal US keyboard layout but there are some people with a non-US keyboard layout. E.g. mine is Swiss German and I even though I can use an US layout on a physcal Swiss German keyboard without problems, others might not be so lucky.

So, how do you change this keyboard layout setting? This article pointed me into the right direction but you can’t choose keyboard layouts anywhere in the IME settings. There are tons of settings but nothing to do with keyboards. In this case, you have change a registry key! Standard warnings on editing the registry apply, so be careful.

Start regedit and navigate to the following key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\i8042prt
Right-click “i8042prt” and select “Export”, save the key as i8042prt.reg on your desktop.
Open i8042prt\Parameters and select “LayerDriver JPN” in the right window pane. Double-click “LayerDriver JPN” and type the following value data: KBDSG.dll
Click OK, close regedit and restart your computer. At the next logon, you can input Japanese using Microsoft IME with a Swiss German keyboard layout.

For the curious: KBDSG.dll is located in C:\Windows\System32 – if you look at the properties, it says:
File description: Swiss German Keyboard layout.

I haven’t tested this but I imagine you actually use any kbd***.dll in System32 as value in “LayerDriver JPN” if you feel unhappy with the standard US layout.

HTHS, cheers!

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Guitar tab for Miles Of Machines Main Arpeggio by Jeff Loomis

March 11th, 2012

After transcribing some part of Devil Theory, here’s the transcription of Miles Of Machine, the main arpeggio.

Youtube: miles of machine by Jeff Loomis

Originally  transcribed using tuxguitar, I exported it to ascii so I could add the fingering and the chords.

Transcription: miles_of_machines_jeff_loomis

HTHYGP (hope this helps your guitar playing)

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Guitar tablature for Devil Theory by Jeff Loomis (delay arpeggio section)

February 26th, 2012

Youtube is a wonderful tool for musicians. I recently started learning some guitar solos shown on youtube.

One artist whose playing I admire very much is Jeff Loomis (Nevermore and solo artist).

In this post (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDs9EKJtpTs) he uses a classical basis with some delay to create a stunning little piece. I spent 3 afternoons transcribing this using tuxguitar, then export to ascii so I could add the fingering.

devil_theory_jeff_loomis

HTHYGP (hope this helps your guitar playing)

 

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Timesheet template (calc, LibreOffice) for 2012

January 4th, 2012

Just in time (almost) for a new year I finished my basic timesheet for 2012 and if you’re interested, you can download it from here: timesheet-2012 (right-click and select “Save as…”).

What it contains:
-Months split into sheets, preceded by an overview sheet
-Adjustable settings for working hours per day
-All time fields are formatted to show a 24 hour clock.
-Weekends, holidays and days with reduced working hours are marked in different colors
-Swiss holidays resp. holidays for the city of Zurich (all in English)
-Some working days come with reduced working hours or half-days, these are included as well.

What it does:
-After you enter your starting time, finishing time and how much time you spent at lunch, the sheet will update the monthly total which in turn will update the total in the Overview sheet.
-Compares your daily efforts to the working hours per day and calculates a positive or negative overtime total, incl. red coloured negative overtime hours

What it does not do:
-Update itself for the next year. If you want the same timesheet for next year, you have to manually update the weekend color markings
-Adjust the holidays to different regions or countries. Frankly speaking, it’s all hard-coded :-(
-Allow for several entries per day e.g. if you work from 8am to 10am, from 1pm to 3pm and finally from 7pm to 9pm you will have to enter e.g. starting time 8am / finishing time 9pm / break 07:00 (3 hours + 4 hours)
-Convert your spreadsheet to a nicely formatted, printable output.

Notes:
If you’re unhappy with my timesheet, feel free to use it as a basis for your own (hopefully) improved version. Here are some learning steps I had to take:

-Calculating time difference in Calc (or any other spreadsheet software?) is a bitch. The crucial point is the cell formatting, not the cell formula. Most likely, you will have to customize an existing format. Have a look at the formatting of any cell in the “+/-” columns.
-Colored results are easy. Again, have a look at the formatting of any cell in the “+/-” columns.
-Copying a formula from one cell to another  will automatically adjust the referenced cells in the formula. You probably knew that and I knew it too. To prevent this from happening: precede a cell reference with a “$” e.g. “=F16″ should be written as “=$F$16″. Maybe you knew that as well. BUT! Did you also knew that references are also shifted per sheet when you copy sheets?
If you happen to have two sheets (“Overview”, “January”) with a reference of “=Overview.C18″ in the cell A3 in the “January” sheet and you copy the “January” sheet, rename it “February” and place it before the last sheet, the “=Overview.C18″ reference will automatically be adjusted to “=January.C18″. Apparently, these references don’t refer to a sheet’s name by default (as expected?) but refer to the relative order in which the sheets are ordered. In order to fixate a reference across sheets, use the “$” again e.g. “=Overview.C18″ should be “=$Overview.$C$18″

Last but not least, you can password-protect your sheet. Select “Save As…” and check the “Save With Password” checkbox at the bottom of the Save dialogue.

HTH some…

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Damn weather! *grmbl*

January 4th, 2012

There are those days when you get the feeling everybody or everything hates you… e.g. this morning I got up and saw that it’s raining outside. Nothing spectacular so far but none of the shoes I wear day in and day out are water-proof. One pair leaks, the other pair is made of a non water-resistant fabric. And don’t get me started on the sandals…
As I don’t like the feeling of clummy, cold and wet socks, I decided to wear my hiking shoes while commuting just to keep my feet dry. My exact thoughts were “I’ll wear the hiking shoes so my socks won’t get wet.”
I usually walk to the train station to get some exercise. The walk takes about 18 to 20 minutes. It was already raining when I left the house but it was a slight drizzle. However, after a couple of minutes it started raining really hard and some more minutes later my jacket was dripping, my trousers were clammy and wet and water started running down my shoulders and also into my trousers. When I arrived at the train station, everything was wet except for my head which was protected by a cap and my socks, thanks to my hiking shoes.
My wish had come true.

Here’s the conclusion:

If God exists (which he doesn’t), he/she/it is either…
-a sadist
-a child
-a foreigner who does not speak my lingo

Why?
The postulate “I’ll wear the hiking shoes so my socks won’t get wet” does not mean “as long as my sock stay dry, I don’t care about the rest”.
If you get this wrong and act ‘to make it so’, then it’s either “on purpose” (sadist), you’re just screwing around with people (child) or it’s an honest mistake because you have no clue what’s going (foreigner not speaking the lingo).
It’s a moot point to discuss somebody who does not exist but given the evidence in the People’s collection on what they conceive to be a collection of texts written by somebody who does not exist, “sadist” and/or “foreigner who does not speak the lingo” are the most likeliest explanations. They’re not mutually exclusive and given the time and location of some collected stories, the “foreigner” thesis would explain a lot.

Even though I have been in my office for two hours now, my clothes are still not completely dry. What a start to this day….

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All the best for 2012!

January 3rd, 2012

Hi everybody!

2011 is over and done, welcome to 2012. May you find peace, self-fulfillment and happiness all year round. If you’ve been reading my posts, please continue to do so in the future ^_^

Cheers!

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