My new year’s resolution for 2008 was to get my sleeping pattern into check. To help me do this I recorded data about my sleep on a daily basis throughout the year. Although it was clearly impossible to get precise measurements of things such as the time I fell asleep, I managed to make estimates for every single day of the year. As with a graph of my taste in music, graphs about my sleep tell a surprising amount about my life.

As before, these large graphs show seven day rolling averages of the variables, each of which should be self-explanatory. The smaller graphs concentrate on one variable each. The blue line represents the daily change. The red line is the seven day rolling average, while the grey straight line is a trendline.

The final quarter of the year didn’t start very well. After a relatively well-behaved summer, I began to slip into nocturnal habits at the beginning of October. At first this happened by accident, but I also encouraged it because at the time the following two Formula 1 races were “flyaways”, races in Asia that happen in the middle of night UK time.

What I didn’t think of, though, was that while it was perhaps, just about, feasible to stay up until about 6am to watch the Japanese Grand Prix, it was totally stark raving bonkers to stay up until about 9am watching the Chinese Grand Prix. Which is why the graph drops more quickly than it rises, as I changed my tactics for approaching the grands prix at the last minute.

In mid-November, my work situation changed. Instead of working primarily at nights, which I had done more or less since I started working at Woolworths, I was now working during the day (I don’t know why — must be the excellent customer service I provide!). This completely altered the path that my sleeping patterns took, and also led me to view the project in a new light.

The week I woke up the earliest all year was the seven day period leading up to 1 December, when I got up at an average clock time of approximately 09:13. At the same time, my “insomnia”, which was one of my primary concerns through the year, fell through the floor, lasting an average of just 21 minutes per night by the end of the year. The average “insomnia” for the whole year was 1 hour and 30 minutes per night.

All the while, the amount of time I was sleeping didn’t change too much, despite the earlier-than-normal starts. It fell to an average 7 hours and 1 minute per night on 18 December. That is pretty low, but it that was a one off (it normally hovered around 7½ hours) and it had been as low as 5 hours and 59 minutes in March.

Indeed, the fact that the amount of time I slept per night was pretty much stable at the recommended 8 hours per night was the pleasant surprise of the project. Maybe I had nothing to worry about all along.

All-in-all, my taste of what life in a 9–5 routine might be like left me with optimism about how I would cope. I adapted to regular early starts without a great deal of bother. I slept a bit less, but not uncomfortably so. And I was actually saving a lot of time by falling asleep much more quickly when I got to bed.

I came to realise that perhaps all of the sleep “problems” I had were actually down to a lack of routine rather than any genuine trouble with sleep. Of all the experiments I tried to help me sleep better, having a reason to get up early regularly was by far the best. And there’s no use in setting the alarm early if there’s no reason to get up, because I’ll only switch the alarm off and sleep in until at least the mid-morning. And why not? Maybe my new year’s resolution for 2009 should be to relax more about everything.

You might be asking, “what’s with that mad spike on most of the graphs on 31 December?” Well, I was hit by a dodgy winter-related disease. I went to bed at about 16:30 and more or less slept right through until 08:30 the following morning. Apart from making me feel rotten, the illness caused a right mess of my graphs! Mind you, the finishing point of the seven day averages looks fairly normal because I had been so indulgent during that Christmas week.

Overall, I am pleased with how the year-long experiment has gone. The trendlines for almost every variable I measured went in the right direction as the year progressed. The exception was ‘lazy’, to my shame. The experience of the final few weeks of the year have assured me that I probably don’t actually have much of a sleeping problem at all.

But I found the whole thing fascinating, and I already kind of miss logging every detail of my sleeping habits. I referred to the graphs often just for interest. But I have decided that I had better stop graphing elements of my life in minute detail, before it jeopardises any relationships.

All of the remaining sleep graphs are included below the fold.

My new year’s resolution for 2009 is to read more books. I have quite a daunting pile (actually, it’s a shelf) of books that have gone unread, some for several years. I will make my aim to reduce the existing pile to zero by the end of the year. I think my primary strategy will be to get more reading done in bed before I go to sleep. After all, now that I’m no longer worried about my sleep, it’s probably the easiest place to cram it in!

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At work, we are given a choice between working on Boxing Day or working on the 2 January. I have always opted to take 2 January off, even though I tend not to drink much on Hogmanay — certainly not enough for me still to be hungover two days later. Sure enough, this year I have no plans to see in the new year with a bang.

(Even if I did, I probably wouldn’t be able to attend, as I’ve been hit by some winter disease that has taken it right out of me. Yesterday I was sent home from work, and when I got home I went straight to bed and accidentally fell asleep. This was at around 16:30. I stayed asleep more or less right through until 08:30 this morning. I feel better today, but still in no form to celebrate properly.)

Nonetheless, it feels right to work on Boxing Day rather than 2 January, even though I couldn’t articulate a reason why. I don’t know if this is some kind of subconscious Scottish patriotism, the day being recognised as a holiday in few other countries. Maybe it’s just because it’s later, and I want to save it up to enjoy (time discounting wouldn’t be much of a factor, as I filled in the form months ago). Or maybe it just indicates a preference for New Year as a holiday over Christmas.

It has to be said, Hogmanay is pretty naff. To be frank, we could do without the twee BBC Scotland fiddle-me-dee extravaganza. Only an Excuse? ceased to be funny about a decade ago, and lost all relevance to me as I lost interest in football. The other side is not much better, as if the BBC thought that making us suffer most Fridays of the year with Jools Holland on the box wasn’t enough.

But there is still something special about Hogmanay. I think it stems from my memories of it as a child. It was more or less the only day of the year when I was allowed to stay up late. For a nightowl like me, it was amazing. And sometimes I even got an extra special tipple with which to see in the new year: Irn Bru.

Mind you, it’s not as if childhood memories of Christmas are exactly dire. But I think it is easier to fall out of love with Christmas as you become an adult. Gleefully receiving presents makes way for having to give presents. Your eyes are opened to the stress everyone puts themselves under. People get hung up on creating the perfect Christmas, which I would have said rather ruins the mood, which is supposed to be cheerful.

Some people are forced to spend Christmas with family members that they don’t like, and possibly don’t even see for the rest of the year. For some, Christmas Day is a day of dreary, dreaded routine.

Perhaps most importantly, Christmas brings with it a whole suite of naffness. Tacky tinsel, Christmas cards with garish depictions of Santa Claus, and a list of terrible Christmas songs as long as your arm.

Despite the twee TV, our attitude towards New Year is much simpler. You go out with your pals, get blootered and take two days to recover. And perhaps most importantly, there are no bad Paul McCartney songs about New Year. Awesome.

So happy new year everyone! Thanks for sticking with the blog through the dry patches. I might make it my new year’s resolution to update more often. Then again, that was my resolution last year as well…

I usually forget the anniversary of this blog. I think this is for a variety of reasons.

Firstly, at this time of year we usually have other festivities on our minds. Also this blog has two major anniversaries in my mind. Moving to doctorvee.co.uk was a watershed, and I am sometimes reluctant to even acknowledge what I did before. Yet my first blog post, back in the days when I used Blogger, was posted five years ago, on the 30^th of December 2002. What a thought.

Less than two years later I upped sticks, and the first post on this WordPress blog came on the 8^th of December 2004. Crazy stuff.

Even before I started posting on Blogger, I had a web presence (some rubbishy Geocities pages). The move to the blog was gradual, which is probably another reason why I often forget the bloggiversary. It’s amazing to see how the blog has evolved over the years from several pithy posts a day a few years ago to today’s much longer and more infrequent posts.

Happy New Year

By the time you read this the clock will have struck midnight and you might well be nursing a bad hangover. So Happy New Year to you. Have some coal.

I have a strange relationship with Hogmanay. I often think I prefer it to Christmas, although when it comes it is often a damp squib.

I think I grew up with different expectations to most people of what the new year was supposed to be like. I saw it as a time for family moreso than Christmas. You know, when I was younger Christmas was about the Sega MegaDrive and Hogmanay was when I got to stay up late with the family and drink some Irn Bru.

A few years ago I discovered that this attitude made me a heretic and that Hogmanay is for getting rat arsed with your friends. Friends I can live with. I like friends.

But the drink? I like a drink, but I never see the point in getting totally rat arsed, even at new year. A bad hangover isn’t any better just because it happens to fall on the 1^st of January. In fact, it might be worse to have a hangover on this day because I want to enjoy the big dinner my parents will be cooking!

I was working today which meant that I didn’t get any real input into the plans my friends were hatching. Needless to say — as I am sitting here writing this post with T minus 45 minutes until the bells — I baulked at the plans, which sound to me like an utter recipe for disaster. I am fragile and I like to sleep. I can make do without a bed, but preferably somewhere with people that I actually know, and failing that somewhere in the town where I actually live.

So I am now having a quiet night in, which is quite odd, but I’ve been getting stuff done which is good. Christmas Day itself was excellent, but the rest of the holidays have been such a massive disappointment — mostly because I have so much studying to do.

I have essays and a dissertation to write. They have been hanging over me the whole time and it’s been quite a bleak month — and it will be a bleak couple of months ahead as the big deadline looms. But I have allowed myself to take the 31^st and the 1^st off, which at least gets rid of the guilt I feel when I inevitably begin procrastinating.

Usually I don’t do new year’s resolutions. By my reckoning, if you were really that bothered about whatever vice you’re worried about, you would try to stop it regardless of whether it was the new year or not. That’s why new year’s resolutions are bound to fail.

Nevertheless, over the Christmas holiday I have become even more worried than normal about my sleeping patterns. It’s quite bad when you are routinely spending 13, 14 hours in bed — the first few trying to get to sleep, then around ten hours actually being asleep, dead to the world. At this time of the year, I miss entire days.

It’s okay to be like this when you are a student bum like me, but given that I am in my final year at university I won’t be able to get away with it for much longer. So now is the time to sort it out and to dedicate some real energy to finding a proper solution to my sleep problems.

I will also try to publish one blog post per day, although I have been trying to do that anyway!

I actually have a new year’s resolution this year. I’m usually not sure about resolutions you know. I don’t think I’ve ever actually had one. The thing is that they are always things that you don’t really have the willpower to do. Otherwise you would just do it anyway, instead of waiting until the new year to do it.

But this year I’ve decided to try and get my sleeping sorted out once and for all. Having problems sleeping scares me a bit. I know that sleep is very important, but I have always been a terrible sleeper. Apparently even when I was very young I used to stay awake until quite late.

Nowadays I find it difficult to fall asleep, which can mean two or three hours just lying in bed listening to the radio. But then when I do fall asleep I’m out for the count. Or when I wake up I don’t feel like getting out of bed. I might not get out of bed until about 2 or 3pm if I can help it. So my days are long and my nights are even longer, and the whole cycle starts a bit later every day. I have been known to go right the way round the clock so that I was back where I started.

And I’m kind of fed up with that sort of thing. I really want to try and improve my sleep. It’s probably not a good thing that my parents got me a coffee maker for my Christmas! But now it is my resolution, and I should really have a good go at sorting it out.

I was thinking of starting a separate blog to track my progress on this. But I’ve gone off the idea a little bit. Any thoughts?

Well a happy new year to you, now that we are actually in it. I notice that a few bloggers (like Will) have been posting their top five posts. I can assure you that the five most-viewed posts of the year will not have been my five best posts of the year. They will just be the ones that have attracted Googlers the most.

But no surprises as to what was number 1:

1. Big Brother’s Big Saviour. This post about Russell Brand stormed to the top of all sorts of mucky Google searches after some person in the comments mentioned Imogen’s sex tape. Disgusting. This page accounted for over 10% of all visits to this blog this year!
2. Richard Hammond. Descended into a debate about whether it’s disrespectful to dislike somebody (Steve Irwin) even though they’re dead.
3. Weekend mornings are meaningless once again. Simon Amstell left Popworld, but most people were only interested in searching for pictures of Miquita Oliver.
4. Another new Freeview channel. This post lays into smileTV, Freeview’s mankiest channel. People arrive at this page looking for information on Freeview channels. I imagine this post is a good advert.
5. Countdown to PS2’s Formula One 06. I’m still a little bit peeved that the actual review I wrote for this game is nowhere near as popular. Gah.

A few posts from 2005 were actually more popular than some of these, but they don’t count right because we’re talking about 2006.

The ‘popularity contest’ plugin, which also takes into account things like comments and whatever else, comes up with a slightly different result:

1. Big Brother’s Big Saviour
2. Another new Freeview channel
3. Weekend mornings are meaningless once again
4. Time Trumpet. I can’t even remember what I wrote in this post.
5. MySpace UK seems to have launched. Check out the comments full of emos who are shocked at the way I diss their Space.

So there you have it. My five (or seven) best posts of the year. I wouldn’t recommend it. Although I can deduce that April was a stupidly popular year. Hmm. I will try and get some kind of Reddit- / Digg-style voting plugin for this blog. That would probably be much better.

Okay, how else can I look at last year? What music I’ve listened to. I know I still haven’t posted my top ten albums of 2006 yet. I promise that is coming. But Last.fm offers a handy way to track what you listen to, and a glance at the rolling year chart on this day allows me to have a look at what I listened to over the past year. This will change tomorrow, so it’s worth taking a note of, if you’re interested in that kind of useless information.

1. Boards of Canada (851)
2. Radiohead (674)
3. Pulp (624)
4. Broadcast (615) — I don’t remember listening to this much Broadcast?!
5. Autechre (607)
6. Squarepusher (588)
7. The Fiery Furnaces (579)
8. Tortoise (472)
9. Aphex Twin (384)
10. Prefuse 73 (366)

Perhaps the most surprising thing (apart from how high Broadcast are) is how low Autechre are. For the most part though, this isn’t too different to my all-time top ten on Last.fm.

As for the tracks chart, apart from two tracks that appeared on two different releases (thus probably getting twice as many listens as they otherwise would have), all of my top ten is made up of tracks from Florida by Diplo and Everything Ecstatic by Four Tet. I got both of those albums for last Christmas. So that is probably proof that I don’t spend nearly as much time on the computer as I used to. The chart will probably look completely different at the end of the month.