Loud music and heart-breaking science fiction
“All my life, I have had doubts about who I am, where I belong. Now I’m like the arrow that springs from the bow. No hesitation, no doubts. The path is clear.”
— Jeffrey Sinclair, Babylon 5
(Migrated away from rocketlift.com because exciting things are about to happen there but this just didn’t belong.)
The Brief’s roundup from last Friday includes a good sum up of why you shouldn’t be using Skype. The low down: They’re too surveillance-friendly. Zero out of four stars according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Google (Hangouts) and Apple (FaceTime) both rate more highly, although you shouldn’t ever assume your communications aren’t being monitored. Even Off-The-Record chats can get you into trouble if they’re being logged.
I love coffee. Coffee’s combination of complex flavors and the satisfaction of a craving that it delivers is just… indescribably wonderful. I also enjoy that it seems to affect my physiology more strongly than most people. I’ve joked for years that I’ll never need speed because I’ve got caffeine. Yes, that’s foreshadowing.
My doctors told me to completely cut out coffee in December. The thought was every bit as emotionally difficult as cutting out wheat and dairy earlier in the year. After psyching myself up for a few weeks, I quit my 3 to 6 cups per day cold in January. After six weeks, I experimented with bringing it back as a daily habit, but in much smaller doses. The experience has shifted the way I think about caffeine dramatically. Now, I’m preparing myself to cut it out permanently in April. I’ll reserve enjoying a cup of coffee as a very occasional luxury.
It turns out my experience can be illustrated with science.
According to a Johns Hopkins study quoted in this piece from Forbes:
In essence, coming off caffeine reduces your cognitive performance and has a negative impact on your mood. The only way to get back to normal is to drink caffeine, and when you do drink it, you feel like it’s taking you to new heights. In reality, the caffeine is just taking your performance back to normal for a short period.
Yep. When I’m on a coffee high, everything seems great. But those “optimal caffeine flow achieved!” moments I used to gleefully tweet are fleeting. After the (quite miserable) withdrawal, I couldn’t deny that I was performing at least as well off of coffee as I was on it, and got more done overall.
It gets worse: Based on other studies, caffeine hampers your emotional intelligence in a vicious cycle.
When caffeine disrupts your sleep, you wake up the next day with an emotional handicap. You’re naturally going to be inclined to grab a cup of coffee or an energy drink to try to make yourself feel better. The caffeine produces surges of adrenaline, which further your emotional handicap.
I hate this, but it’s consistent with how coffee affects me. Eliminating the caffeine ramp-ups and ramp-downs has been a big step in my quest for the even keel of emotional serenity.
Coffee is damn tasty, and I love a caffeine rush, but I no longer see it as a buff. Now I see it as a delicious ritual, but a temptation to overindulge to the point of self-destruction. It doesn’t ever make me a better (higher performing) person — rather, it reduces me. I really can’t afford that if I’m to reach my potential.
You might like to read Caffeine: The Silent Killer of Emotional Intelligence in its entirety on Forbes.com. Naturally, YMMV. If you’re a night person, you may not be a pitiful junky like me, because caffeine affects night owls less than morning people.
In an interview on Code Poet, Lisa Sabin-Wilson answers Michael Pick’s question about whether she’s found any additional challenges as a woman in what has been a male-dominated field.
In the WordPress community, at least, it seems like a non-issue, to me. However, that does not mean that we should be happy with maintaining that as status quo. I think the WordPress community is doing much to the effort of keeping it that way and presenting a model to the tech world, at large, on how life should be for women in tech.
It’s only one perspective, as she is careful to point out, but I’m really glad to hear that.
Camera quality aside, this has to be one of the best photos I’ve ever taken.
