Zeo sleep experiments with pitch black rooms and blue light reduction

One of my big goals has been to try to get my sleep down to 5 hours of sleep per night.

A few years ago I was able to hit a zen mode for about 1 month where I was only sleeping 5 hours per night.

I’ve since been trying to duplicate that.

The theory is that if I can REM more efficiently, and I’m not disturbed during my sleep, then I can compact my sleep into a smaller time range.

The impact on my life could immense with a significant amount of time added to my life per day/week/month/year.

Adding 1-2 hours a night is like is like 2-4 weeks of extra waking hours per year!

_api_images_zeo_device.jpg

So inspired by this post at the Quantified Self Boston meetup, I’ve decided to go heads down on another iteration of sleep optimization.

One of the things I’m struggling with is that due to my athletic training, sleep is required for repair of muscle tissue.

It’s hard to argue for shaving an hour off as my body just flat out needs the sleep (vs someone with a sedentary lifestyle).

I still think that I can shave some time off though.

Step 1, no interruptions

One of the major optimizations that I’m trying to make is reducing the number of trips to the bathroom at night by reducing water intake after 7pm.

So far I haven’t had much luck. I think I need at least 3-4 hours of no water intake before I go to sleep to allow me to sleep through the night without any interruptions.

The iPhone is now off for all alerts. The only thing that can interrupt me is work with a special reserved emergency phone number.

The cats are also downstairs in their room (which is now really nice and comfortable so I don’t feel guilty about keeping them there).

Step 2, NO light in the bedroom.

I made this change last night by blocking out all the light from my misc devices.

I also taped black trash bags to the windows to block out all light.

Long term (after a week) I plan on replacing the blinds with ones that block out all light if this turns out to be a major optimization.

This was my first night running with these changes.

So far the results have been really interesting.

My dreams last night were VERY vivid. I had a long dream about traveling to China, and losing my wallet. I also remember my dreams which is rare for me.

In my dream I took a flight to Singapore but they purchased my ticket wrong and somehow I ended up on a circular flight BACK to Singapore which took 34 hours. In my dream I slept the whole flight (I N C E P T I O N) and then woke at the remote end BACK in Singapore really pissed off and demanded a refund! (ha).

I also had a dream that I was fighting a war with monsters that had invaded earth. Some other alien civilization came and was providing us weapons to fight them. Yeah, I’m a scifi nerd.

Right after waking up I felt , ok… Felt very rested. It’s 1pm and I feel a bit lethargic though. I slept 8 hours so this might be an overtraining as I need to take my day off from training soon. I might listen to my body and just take a nap anyway.

Step 3, No blue light before I sleep

I’ve understood that this has been a problem with my body for some time. If I expose myself to too much light my body produces less melatonin and I have trouble falling asleep.

Apparently, there’s a hack which was discovered circa 2001 which is to just block out blue light.

I’ve already bought these glasses and will be running an experiment tonight to see what happens.

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Published:
April 2, 2011 – 11:28 am
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The horrible problem of synchronized fitness data.

I rigorously track my food and fitness with as many tools as possible.

However, right now it’s a HORRIBLE mismash of technologies that don’t talk to each other.

Here’s what I currently use, or potentially use, and I want them ALL wirelessly communicating with each other without having to manually enter the data across websites.

- Runkeeper

- MyNetDiary

- My Digital WiThings wifi scale (which I just bought but am not using yet)

- My Garmin heart rate monitor (FR60) and Garmin Connect

- Polar CS500 bike computer (haven’t bought this yet)

- Zeo sleep monitoring system

- Garmin heart rate data uploaded to Runkeeper.

- My Omron blood pressure monitor.

My scale should broadcast my weight to all these systems.

All the data should be available to my doctor if necessary.

Most of these things require manual data uploads. This is HELL for me…. I hate it. It’s a non-starter now.

The Zeo, Garmin, etc. Don’t use them anymore. I’m starting to not use the Omron for my blood pressure (I have mild hypotension due to my athletic lifestyle which is annoying)… And the CS500 didn’t even get bought because it’s a non-starter for me to have to manually sync the data with a USB dongle’d computer.

I have a laptop. I’m not going to keep USB dongles in them all the time.

Runkeeper is kind of annoying. If it had a cadence sensor I could put it on my bike and have Runkeeper automatically start/stop my rides once it noticed the cadence censor data.

That would ROCK. Right now it’s somewhat annoying to have to click that stop/start button but I haven’t stopped yet. The support of a cadence sensor would fix that for me and I’d be in heaven with Runkeeper.

Either that or automatically start once they see my heart rate above a certain level. The problem is that right now I have to insert the Fisica utility which is annoying …

I’m about 2-4 years ahead of the tech curve here I think. This type of quantification is rare so I think I”m seeing some of the early adopter problem.

I’m a pioneer with arrows in his back.

Published:
March 29, 2011 – 12:36 pm
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My Quantified Self

I wanted to write this post as I’ve been addicted to quantifying my life since I started to become addicted to fitness over the last 18 months.

I wanted to drop a bunch of weight and get more fit as I became more addicted to mountain climbing and backpacking (and spending more time in Yosemite).

Why shave just 10 lbs off your pack when you can shave 20-50 lbs off your body.

If you think about it, even 5 lbs is amazingly annoying. If someone asked you to carry around 5 pounds of weight for a year you would look at them like they’re crazy. However, tons of people will put on 15 pounds slowly over the course of two years and not even think about it.

What do I log? Here are the list of apps that I use and have some what stuck to over the past couple years.

Runkeeper

I record ALL my rides with Runkeeper. I’m addicted to cycling. Here’s my ride from today.

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This is pretty much my normal ride. The calories burned is more like 550-600 though. Not sure why it’s off.

Here’s my profile:

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82 THOUSAND calories. 1640 miles.

By way of comparison, 82k calories is 45lbs of sugar!

Without Runkeeper I would have NO way to know that.

I love this app!

It really needs better integration with my heart rate monitor but for now this is ok.

MyNetDiary

I use MyNetDiary to track all of my food. It’s a great app.

I have a pretty strict diet. It’s easier than it sounds once you incorporate dietary help into your daily life.

I have a bunch of tricks to do this. I keep plenty of safe food at the office. I have additional tea in my bags. I often make my own food in bulk since this is easier than having to compute calories.

201103191656.jpg

This is a typical day with MyNetDiary.

I even control my caffeine intake. It turns out that with my ADD too much caffeine is bad but too little is also bad. 33mg is the ideal amount.

Every morning I eat pretty much the same thing. My protein shake is actually very delicious. It basically takes like a milk shake.

I’ve also recently added fruit/vege smoothies for lunch. They’re tremendous and only take 10 minutes to make at the office.

Zeo

I have mixed feeling about the Zeo. It has helped me optimize my sleep a bit but the strap is WAY to big and it doesn’t have wifi.

It’s also like 2 years old and they haven’t shipped an updated version.

IMO the company is over funded and mismanaged.

I hope they get their shit together.

Vitamins

Controlling my vitamins has also helped out a LOT … I’ve identified a number of performance related deficiencies. Potassium being one that I identified a long time ago and have long since corrected for.

iFitness

I weight train 3x per week using the Starting Strength system and log the data using iFitness.

I wish there was a web based version of this app or at least a way for me to upload the data onto the web.

Blood pressure

I have a home blood pressure monitor.

Because of my aggressive athletic training I have hypotension (low blood pressure) and it varies based on salt intake, water, etc.

I can use the blood pressure monitor to keep tabs on this so I can figure out when to have more water, salt, etc.

It also has a significant impact on over training detection. When I have low blood pressure it’s often because I’m training too hard and need to down a TON of water.

I have one at work and one at home so I can really quickly measure my blood pressure.

Future improvements

Everything needs wifi. The Zeo is useless without transparent sync. I’ve only ever uploaded the data twice.

Runkeeper is a NO brainer. I have NO problem pushing the button before my rides. They have all my data because it’s easy to upload.

I wish I had a a way to record heart rate with a simple / small device.

I wear my heart rate monitor while I bike but I’d like to wear one while I sleep so I could add this to the data about the quality of my sleep.

24/7 body temperature would be nice.

These signals can be used to test for overtraining , dietary issues, etc.

I think the next thing I’m going to buy is the withings scale which is a wifi scale that you can use to measure your weight.

Published:
March 19, 2011 – 4:13 pm
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Amazon launches Prime Instant Video how does Netflix feel about Hosting on Amazon Web Services

I was recently at the Silicon Valley Cloud Computing meetup hosted by Facebook where Netflix was talking about their hosting nearly their entire cluster on Amazon Web Services. Specifically – SimpleDB.

Here’s what really would bother me if I was at Netflix… Amazon decides to compete with you heads on in my primary market.

Well that is what’s happening. Amazon is getting right into the video streaming space.

Why shouldn’t they? They want to do with DVDs what they did for books. Make them more accessible and easier to access. It’s their modus operandi.

So now your data provider is a direct competitor. Now what?

Should you just abandon your entire stack? Years of investment? Maybe. Probably. But now what? Where do you go?

Maybe they can go with Cassandra on RackSpace. It’s not going to be easy.

Many would say that this isn’t going to be a problem. They’re going to say that Amazon will be politically correct and not cut you off at the knees. After all, if they cut off one customer, Amazon is going to look bad and it’s going to hurt their hosting business (which is growing rather large).

But I’ll tell you what’s NOT going to happen.

Netflix won’t be able to collaborate with Amazon on large purchases regarding a launch. It will provide nice competitive intel to one of their main competitors.

Amazon now has tons of intel about their bandwidth, hardware stack, and database configuration. Amazon could in theory just flat out look at their entire database. I’m not saying that this would happen but it’s possible.

If Netflix were hosted at Rackspace it would put up a pretty significant wall that would prevent Amazon from spying.

Power corrupts.

Further, what happens if Netflix has a major outage and needs Amazon to step in and help. From time to time something major will happen and you need your hosting provider to step up and help.

We’ve done it with Softlayer and Serverbeach in the past at Spinn3r. We have some sort of very difficult problem and we work directly with our hosting provider to help us jump through hoops to fix it.

You think Amazon is going to be motivated to help one of their main competitors launch a new product? You think they’re going to push a SimpleDB fix to patch a production issue that Netflix sees? Maybe, but their interests aren’t 100% aligned and this is frightening.

Here’s more about Amazon launching Prime Instant Video:

 

We heard it was coming and now here it is. Amazon has flipped the switch on its “free” video streaming for Prime members, the service we’ve been hearing about for the past month or so. If you’ve already been taking advantage of subscription-based two-day shipping so that your impulse buys get to your door a little quicker you can now enjoy streaming of 5,000 pieces of “prime eligible” content, including some recent movies and a lot of TV shows, much of which will look awfully familiar if you’re also a Netflix subscriber.

[From Amazon launches Prime Instant Video, unlimited streaming for Prime subscribers -- Engadget]

 

Published:
February 22, 2011 – 10:01 am
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Twitter FAIL with the recent Uber block.

This was a colossal fail on the part of Twitter.

Even if you don’t think they did this on purpose, it was a huge PR error on their part.

Or a PR win on the part of Uber.

Either way Twitter lost and appears to come across as a bully.

The world doesn’t like bullies.

 

Here’s where Twitter is being snakey: “These violations include, but aren’t limited to”. Uh… you can’t start off with “we have simple rules” and then not be able to precisely and completely explain fully how a 3rd party violated them. That doesn’t scream forthrightness. That screams attorney-speak.

[From Why did Twitter suspend UberTwitter? - Quora]

 

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February 18, 2011 – 8:35 pm
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Great read on Hadoop’s 4000 machine scalability wall.

Hadoop has hit a 4000 node scalability wall.

Most of us aren’t running into this wall but it’s interesting to see what it’s happening.

The elasticity of clouds make this more of a challenge. Most people don’t normally need 4000 noes but say you want to do something REALLY fast. I could see wanting to spool 8000 -10000 nodes to compute PageRank or a clustering algorithm and wanting it to finish FAST.

Having a limit on 4k nodes is a challenge.

 

Given observed trends in cluster sizes and workloads, the MapReduce JobTracker needs a drastic overhaul to address several deficiencies in its scalability, memory consumption, threading-model, reliability and performance. Over the last 5 years, we’ve done spot fixes, however lately these have come at an ever-growing cost as evinced by the increasing difficulty of making changes to the framework. The architectural deficiencies, and corrective measures, are both old and well understood – even as far back as late 200

[From The Next Generation of Apache Hadoop MapReduce · Yahoo! Hadoop Blog]

 

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February 18, 2011 – 8:12 pm
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Facebook CTO Bret Taylor’s Biggest Mistake? Buying Servers

There’s a middle path here. You can go with someone like Softlayer or Rackspace and have your cake and eat it too.

Softlayer is a bit closer to being the cloud. We love them. Great company. Major partner for us… we’re going to be doubling down on servers this year and they’re going to get another big order from us.

This was the best decision I’ve made regarding Spinn3r I think. We gave this decision a lot of thought and were going to Colo but at the last minute I said felt that Colo was just a bad call and we went with Softlayer instead.

Win!

 

Facebook CTO Bret Taylor says buying servers was a mistake. A very big mistake. At the time, he was chief executive at FriendFeed, which eventually was sold to Facebook for the tidy sum of a reported $50 million. But these were the early days. He and his team needed to decide between buying servers or using Amazon Web Services. They bought the servers.

[From Facebook CTO Bret Taylor's Biggest Mistake? Buying Servers - ReadWriteCloud]

 

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Published:
February 11, 2011 – 9:25 pm
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Stumble Upon’s Async

This looks really cool… I wish there was a way to easily keep track of all the OSS projects that larger companies throw over the fence.

 

This Java library provides some useful building blocks to build
high-performance multi-threaded asynchronous applications in Java.
Its implementation was inspired by Twisted’s asynchronous library
(twisted.internet.defer).

Deferred allows you to easily build asynchronous processing chains
that must trigger when an asynchronous event (I/O, RPC and whatnot)
completes. It can be used extensively to build an asynchronous API
in a multi-threaded server or client library.

[From stumbleupon/async - GitHub]

 

Published:
January 25, 2011 – 12:15 pm
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Verizon unlimited data for iPhone = brilliant

This is a great move by Verizon. AT&T has been going back and forth with unlimited data.

Combine this with their mobile hotspot and the Verizon iPhone looks sweet.

I might switch to be honest… I have NO service from AT&T at my house, and generally hate them as a company.

 

Mr. McAdam certainly doesn’t want to miss out on any sales now. Anticipation Verizon would soon offer the iPhone held back sales over the fourth quarter, he said. Analysts seemed happy with the subscriber growth, but McAdam wasn’t. “It wasn’t what I hoped it would be,” he said.

Update: But you’d better act fast. Speaking later Tuesday morning, Mr. McAdam said the iPhone unlimited plan will be a temporary offer and that the carrier will follow AT&T’s move to tiered pricing in the not too distant future.

[From Verizon iPhone: $30 Unlimited Data (for Now) - Digits - WSJ]

 

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January 25, 2011 – 10:37 am
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API Software Engineer at Spinn3r in San Francisco

We’re hiring an API Software Engineer to join the team over at Spinn3r.

We’re probably going to be hiring 2-3 engineers in the next month or so but don’t grow too fast. We want to focus on one position at a time so we can bring in the best potential hires.

This is a fun time to work in a startup though!

Job Description

Responsibilities:
Interact with customers both in the early sales cycle and support role to answer technical questions about our technology (crawling, ranking, etc)
Work with our API to understand throughput issues, protocol challenges, and optimize it for new issues as they arise.
Develop new version of our API as it evolves (more throughput, additional features, etc).
Monitor our crawler stats to enable understanding of operation and detect operational anomalies, monitor statistics, implement new features, etc.
Work on Java implementation of various new Spinn3r features as well as fix bugs in our current product. You will also be working on infrastructure in this position and responsible for various backend Java components of our architecture.
General passion and interest in technology (distributed systems, open content,
Web 2.0, etc).
should stress that while you’ll be interacting with customers, and providing support, our customers are exceedingly brilliant and amazingly knowledgeable about our space. They’re a major asset and staying in sync with them is very important for the company.

[From API Software Engineer at Spinn3r in San Francisco | LinkedIn]

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Published:
January 20, 2011 – 1:58 pm
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