The biggest, and maybe the only reason I feel this way is the drive time. It took only 7-10 minutes to get to my last job without ever getting on the freeway. That alone would give me at least an extra hour at home, not have to go to bed early or get up early either. Now I go to bed around 10 or 11, whereas before, I wouldn’t go to bed earlier than midnight. This is due to having to get up by about 5:30-6:00 every morning to get ready, get the dog out, prepare breakfast and lunch before leaving by 6:30-6:45.

This maybe how I feel, but I wouldn’t give this up now that I have all my nights and weekends free. No more checking my schedule to make sure I can make a family gathering to see if I work. No more having to sacrifice making one event to be able to go to another. It was becoming harder to judge which event was more important to be able to make it to when I saw them all as being important.

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I can see everything I want on the site, but it is blocking at least one major thing I know has to be slowing my connection to this site. That is the video player that is display on the top left and automatically loads and plays clips from Sports Center. Now that NoScript is running, it isn’t displayed and ESPN.com loads immediately.

In my short time running this add-on, I have come across one site that has navigation that gets blocked, which I would think is a no no and is something that is cautioned when checking a site for full compliance to web standards.

I am trying a few others, but I haven’t had enough time to form any kind of opinion of them yet:

1. Grease Monkey
2. Web Developer
3. Fire Bug
4. ScribeFire

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By Brigid Delaney
Exhaustion: The Modern Malady
LONDON, England (CNN) — Is work exhausting us in a way it never did before?

Two things happened in one day that made me wonder. First, my new housemate got home just before midnight:

“Did you have a nice night out?” I asked.

“Oh no — I didn’t go out,” he replied. “I’ve been at work since 8 am.”

These sorts of hours are normal in the banking industry, he explains. Also, don’t worry about stocking up on extra food he says; “I have breakfast, lunch and dinner at work.”

That afternoon I visit a physiotherapist. My neck is so sore that it’s hard to turn my head. It could be the way I’m sitting, I say. Or the fact that I rarely take breaks, or that my job doesn’t take me out of the office anymore.

The physio nods. She’s heard it all before. She tells me the incidents of neck and pain in office workers has soared in the past 2 years.

“Something’s going on in the workforce that hasn’t happened before and its making people sick,” she says.

We discuss the probable causes: a move to a 24/7 work culture, more time spent at our desks due to over-reliance on email and a more contract based, short term work force that feel insecure in the workplace — and thus less likely to take breaks.

“Everyone’s also a lot more exhausted,” she says.

Social change is easy to recognize in retrospect but in the thick of this revolution of how we work, it’s hard to know what the fall out will be. Globalization, new technology and the relaxation of lab our laws have lead to changes in how we work. These changes in turn impact on our health and not always for the best.

Last year the Observer newspaper in the UK reported on the exhaustion epidemic, saying feeling tired constantly was no longer the burden of working mothers.

The article said working culture and ‘just keeping up’ with our normal workload was leaving us exhausted, stressed and leading lives that lacked balance.

They reported on a survey commissioned by Legal & General which found that 42 per cent of the 5,000 people asked said that lack of sleep was their biggest health concern, followed by 34 per cent worrying about low-level, general fatigue.

More than a quarter said they were stressed and another quarter admitted to depression. Chartered Management Institute, whose ‘Quality of Working Life’ report showed that more than half of us experience feelings of constant tiredness at work and even more of us suffer from insomnia.

Globalization, technology and the declining power unionized workforces are all social factors contributing to the feeling that work is overwhelming and never ending. It’s a Sisyphean task that promises only fleeting satisfaction because nothing ever seems quite complete.

Email keeps us at our desks longer, BlackBerrys may free us from our desks, but the payoff is appalling for workers. BlackBerrys tie us to work 24/7. With a BlackBerry there is no such thing as downtime.

Globalization has meant many workers particularly in finance, the media and law work across time zones. In this case, exhaustion is a very real product of the way work is now structured.

Deals done with Hong Kong are signed off at 2 a.m. London time. Deals structured in New York are signed off with the London office in the dark while the city that never sleeps, sleeps.

At Soma Health Spa in Kensington, Carolan Brown, the Managing Director has noticed.

“In the city, people are on the go for longer periods. They don’t sleep as well because of stress and noise pollution.”

They come in for a massage to relax but even their choice of massage has a degree of self-flagellation in it — they request hard massages when “they should be going for something relaxing.” Could it be that we are scared of switching off?

Richard Sennett in his book The Corrosion of Character discusses how the growing insecurity of work puts pressure on us to work harder. We are motivated by fear — not reward.

The result is a fraying on our health. There is not an out and out breakdown, where we are carried from the office to be confined for months to our beds to rest — instead work the modern way is a series of little deaths.

We become progressively more and more tired, we deny ourselves recovery time and the exhaustion each week etches itself a bit deeper.

Ben, a 30 year-old journalist from London does shift work and says he regularly only sleeps 6 or 7 hours a night. The result he says has left him feeling “constantly tired” as if he is never quite “on.” Recovery takes place on the weekends — but this is also when Ben socializes so “there is the constant tussle between my need to go out and get hammered and get about 12 hours sleep.”

Sharachari Maitreyabandhu who runs meditation workshops at the London Buddhist Center has noticed an increase in increasingly exhausted people joining the beginners’ classes. Some only make it part way through before falling asleep.

He says, “Modern life is incredibly complicated and fast – that has a very stressful effect on the mind and body and people’s quality of life diminishes. People are really busy — they might be well off but they are unhappy.”

Stephanie Driver — naturopath and manager at Jurlique Day Spa agrees. She sees a lot of clients who suffer from exhaustion and stress.

“There are loads of complaints that are linked to stress and exhaustion — a good 70 to 80 per cent of people that I see,” she says.

As well as prescribing treatments, Driver tries to look at the causes of exhaustion and advises clients to make subtle lifestyle adjustments.

“Take time out for yourself in the evening. Lots of people have a glass of wine in the evenings but I think this causes a lot of problems. Try having a hit bath with lavender or listening to music. I advise people to try and make sure they have time for themselves. Maybe take the phone off the hook for a couple of hours.”

Maitreyabandhu advises to switch off the TV even if it’s just for one night.

Carolan Brown of Soma says, “We’ve stopped relaxing. We don’t even know how to completely switch off. People work longer and longer hours and then there’s the commute and so there’s built up rage. People get home and they are angry.”

To overcome exhaustion she suggests being a little kinder to yourself.

“Have a relaxation massage, do pilates, create a space between home and the office where you can unwind. We know the causes of exhaustion to be honest. Unless you change your lifestyle, there’s not a pill to take to get rid of the exhaustion.”

The meditation, massage and hot baths in the evening may dim the effects of exhaustion but they won’t remove the brute cause — work. Until we change the way we work, and lower expectations of ourselves and others in the workplace we will be forever hostage to an unrealistic set of demands on our bodies. The current thrum of exhaustion, always in the background will start to take a serious toll on our health and well-being.

We’ll drink more, be too tired to exercise and not give our bodies time enough to recover from colds and flus. It seems that nothing short of another revolution in technology, in the way we work, and the way we re-organize our lives will free us from the ever-present feeling of fatigue.

Hold up here! Wrestling? I don’t like wrestling, but who cares about that…what is wrestling doing on the Sci Fi Channel? I turned it on one night to make sure it wasn’t an alien straight from Roswell taking on a Klingon. Nope. It was only two guys throwing phantom punches at eachother, missing by a mile, but pretending it hit them.

I ask again…why is Wrestling on the Sci Fi Channel?

I was recently talking to my Uncle about my family history, a passion with him, and how I can include a least a taste in my Web Programming Project. During our discussion, he mentioned that there is a song that was written for all Müllers (my original family name)…a sort of theme song.

Müller Theme Song

You just have to picture a polka band in laderhosen walking behind me while I go about my daily activities. The music sounds funny in this day and age, but the lyrics are somewhat sad. They are:

WILDWOOD, Florida (AP) — A man riding a personal watercraft was injured after a 4-foot-long sturgeon jumped out of the water and hit him, wildlife officials said.

Blake Nicholas Fessenden, 23, was heading north on the Suwannee River on Sunday when he was hit and fell off the craft, according to a statement from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Fessenden was knocked unconscious.

His girlfriend was riding another watercraft behind him and was able to get to Fessenden and hold his head above water before passengers on another vessel arrived to pull him from the water, officials said.

He was airlifted to a Gainesville hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, officials said.

A 31-year-old woman was hospitalized in April after a 3-foot-long sturgeon jumped into a boat being driven by the woman’s fiance. The pair was also on the Suwannee River.

Officials at the time said similar accidents occur once or twice a year on the river and that the fish can jump as high as 8 feet in the air and can weigh up to 200 pounds.

Article Link

The Twins have scheduled “Joe Mauer Sideburn Night” for their Aug. 10 game against the Toronto Blue Jays. The first 10,000 people through the Metrodome gates will receive replica Mauer sideburns, made out of synthetic dark hair with double-sided tape to allow for attachment to fans’ faces.

Article on ESPN.com. This event is a play on a commercial Joe Mauer appears in here in Minnesota. Check out all four for a good laugh!

I asked her the other day if she has been told what her email address will be and when she might be sitting at her computer so I can chat with her via Gchat. She told me that two years ago her company found that no one would answer the phone if they had the ability to surf the internet, send emails, play video games, and etc. Her email is internal only and her computer is not connected to the internet. I told her that sucks and that I would know how she feels when the day comes that my company takes away my video game, internet, email, and chatting priviledges and tells me I can no longer have my Netflix account mailed to me at the office anymore.

All she could say to that is…”at least I get to travel!” My response was that I travel every time I get a new movie in the mail.

Recently, I started thinking about actually writing down thoughts that I have had for stories. Since college I have wanted to write a book some time in my life. I decided that there is no time like the present. I have found that this feat is much more daunting than I had originally realized. It is easy to watch a movie and read a book and criticize what you would have done differently to make the book or movie better in your mind. But what about coming up with an original thought? That may not prove to be the most difficult part of writing. What proves to be more difficult is the plot and dialogue…not to mention character development. I have about six ideas right now. I have basic plot outlines, but getting it down on paper is proving difficult if not impossible.

Where do I start? How do I draw out my thoughts? How do I add twists and turns? I have noticed that I tend to think of the big picture too much and not an individual scene or sequence of events. I have read that once you develop a character you can start having conversations with these character in your head to get an idea of what it would do given a particular situation. What I have read basically tells me to throw myself into the world that my story would take place in and understand that this is YOUR world not the REAL world.

As for now I will struggle with my ideas and continue to keep a journal of my thoughts. Hopefully writing will start to come as naturally to me now as story telling did for me as a child.