*TANGENTS

I’m doing a little advertising experiment on the blog, not because I’m trying to make this a revenue stream or anything, but because I want to see if I can raise money through this site. If I can help offset the costs of my hosting or whatever, that’d be nice.

I’m going to keep the ads discrete for the time being, and I’m going to have a series of them in Google Labs, just to see which ones perform better than others and which ones are the least annoying to everyone.

In the future, I’d like to expand this blog into a place where I can sell cool things like shirts and the such, but as for right now, lowering the cost of my server will have to be done with some old school adsense. Sorry about that.

My wife and I is cute. We is soooo cute.

My wife is awesome. She’s a very cute person, always supportive of any crazy scheme I come up with and is a an aspiring writer. And she’s started her very own website: Handmade Library.

My wife is a super crafty person (in that she’s artsy and creative, not shrewd and manipulative) and spent the last semester of her college career learning how to hand make books (like a 15th century monk) instead of letting a robot do it like a normal person. The result is amazing little cute books that now fill my living room. But the joy is that she teaches people how to make a book by hand on her new site. I’ve helped her set it up, taught her some CSS/HTML and I think she might even know what FTP is now.

I’m tremendously nerdy and always boring my wife to death with things like algorithm changes, endless details about computer components and yammering on about technical errors on TV shows (i.e. DNA tests on crime shows taking 2 minutes instead of 6 months). And then there’s sports. Let’s not even talk about sports. But she lets me go on insane tangents daily without even wincing. That’s love.

So I feel like I should give her some mad props about her progress in the nerd world. I just wanted to show off her new lovely site award her with a Magnetic Oreo award for entering into the nerdverse officially.

I’m on a computer most of the day. At least 8 hours for my job, and then a few more hours at night working on various personal projects (definitely not porn). In fact, I’m writing this post at 11 pm. And some studies, like this one by the Germans, suggest that staring at a screen might be ruining our sleep.

And although we all know that looking at a screen for several hours a day can ruin your vision, it also puts your brain on overdrive.

In this fun little study by UCLA, surfing the web (*is that a phrase we still use?) can actually make you smarter. Or at least make your brain more active. I guess old people are doing it to curtail Alzheimer’s or something. However, it’s because we’re surfing the web (or using a computer or playing angry birds) that many avid computer users are suffering from terrible sleep.

Here’s the fun thing though, according to that little image, the human mind is more active when using a computer than reading. Now, I’m no scientist but I would assume that if using a computer makes your brain more active than reading, then the inverse is also true: Reading makes your brain slow down and become less active (for lack of a better word). Focusing on reading a book calms the brain and helps you relax.

This isn’t really breaking news- lots of people suggest reading before bed before bed, I’m just saying that this image (helpfully reversed) is all I need to see to convince myself to keep reading this (so boring)

I’ve been sleeping terribly, and maybe this will help. Especially because it’s after midnight and I’m still watching Veronica Mars and blogging. I’m not sure which one of those is worse.