Tips for getting a good night’s sleep

First of all, a little background on my sleep problems. I had bouts of insomnia through my teens and 20s, and it become a chronic problem in my 30s. I didn’t get any relief until three or four years ago. Regularly getting a good night’s sleep has improved my life immensely.

Here are some things that have helped me (in no particular order of importance):

• Meditate before going to bed. Meditating can help calm the mind and put things in perspective.
• If you find your mind racing when trying to fall asleep, write down your thoughts. That will quiet your mind.
• Wear a sleep mask. It’s a lot easier to sleep when it’s dark and the early morning light won’t wake you up.
• If you are worrying about something, write it down and tell yourself you’ll worry about it in the morning. Chances are, when you look at it the next morning, you’ll find that there was nothing worth worrying about.
• If you can’t sleep for more than 20 minutes or so, get up and have a bowl of cerial. Honey Nut Cheerios works best for me. It contains many ingredients that can help you sleep such as oats, almonds, honey — those plus the milk contain a lot of tryptophan, and the carbohydrates help your body absorb the tryptophan.
• Practicing mindfulness in bed helps. Feel the comfort of your bed and the warmth of your covers. Listen to the sounds of the night. Observe your breath. Listen to your companion breathing. All these things can help you relax and fall asleep.
• I’ve never found exercise to help me sleep, but the times in my life when I was overweight, I seemed to have more difficulty getting a good night’s sleep. Often, I didn’t feel rested even after seven or eight hours of sleep. Some apnea was detected during a sleep study a few years ago.
• Finally, if all else fails, you might want to try a medication like Paxil, which WILL make you sleep. I admit it; I’ve been on Paxil for a few years. I take 15Mg about an hour before bed every night. It has a few annoying side effects like difficulty urinating or achieving orgasm, but those fade over time. For me, the benefits far outweigh the annoyances.

Empathy for Hillary Supporters

I’ve been critical of women who have been supporting Hillary Clinton in part because she’s a woman. They’ve overlooked her lies and bad decisions because they wanted a woman to be president.

This morning, my wife said something to me that made me understand. There has never been a woman president and women feel under-represented in our country. They feel like second class citizens — much like many blacks and Hispanics feel.

In 2000, I was excited to be able to vote for a Jew, even if it was only for vice-president. Being Jewish, I overlooked some of Lieberman’s shortcomings simply because he was Jewish and it would be a major milestone in our nation’s history.

If there was a Jewish man running for president right now, I’d probably place a greater weight on all his good points and overlook his weaknesses, just like women are doing with Hillary. Now I can understand why they have such a strong emotional attachment to their candidate.

White House Exaggerated Iraqi Threat, Senate Report Finds

As Gomer would say, “Surprise, surprise!”
Link to Washington Post article
And here all along we thought they were being candid!

Well, we still have a few months left to impeach Bush and Cheney, which may not be a bad idea. If Bush is impeached, he won’t be allowed to pardon anyone. Actually, if he’s under investigation for anything, he won’t be able to pardon anyone. He also won’t be able to shield any documents. If that happens, we’ll finally be able to know to what extent corruption and incompetence has dominated this administration.

Clinton’s claim to have won more votes ignores caucuses

Hillary Clinton’s claim to have won more of the popular vote is just plain dishonest. Say we include Michigan, even though Obama followed the rules and took his name off the ballot — therefore received no votes. That gives Clinton 17,822,145 and Obama 17,535,458. Those are the numbers Clinton has been bragging about.

The problem with Hillary’s argument is that it completely ignores all states that have caucuses instead of primaries. The states that have caucuses are Iowa, Nevada, Alaska, Colorado, Minnesota, North Dakota, Washington, Hawaii, Maine, Kansas, Nebraska, Maine, Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. Obama won the majority of those states.

Hillary continues to make big lies, yet the more she lies, the stronger her followers argue her case. Kind of reminds you of the Republican party.

It ain’t over until Hillary is happy

Obama wrapped up the nomination last night, but Hillary’s not going away. She’s already publicly saying she wants to be his VP. Actually, she wants to be the co-president.

If Obama puts her on the ticket, we could have another Kennedy/Johnson situation where Hillary will have to be locked out of meetings. It would guarantee Obama would win the election but it would go against his principles. And after all — he’s running on a platform of change.

Hillary’s campaign has been the left-wing version of Karl Rove’s tactics, although less competent. Obama has taken the high road for the most part, and has run an almost flawless campaign. He can take that decision making ability to the White House and do great things for the country. Putting Hillary on the ticket would compromise his integrity.

But politics in its current form is a game. You have to do whatever it takes to win. In this case, it means appeasing Hillary.

Obama has to offer her something in exchange for her not running as an Independent in the fall. There is already talk of her doing that (running as an independent) and that would mean another Republican in the White House.

So what are Obama’s options? He could put her on the ticket as VP, which would bring nearly all of Hillary’s supporters to vote for Obama, but would be revolting to those who are disgusted by Hillary’s behavior during the past few months.

He could give her a cabinet position, which is probably his best option, but one that may not go over so well with Hillary and her supporters. Maybe if he throws in a little money to help pay off her debts, that might do the trick.

Scary thought: what if Hillary decides to run as an independent

It’s evident that Hillary cares more about her own self-interest than the good of the nation (is the word own redundant in the phrase “own self-interest”?). She relishes in being the center of attention and having what could be described as a cult following. So after it has been decided that Obama will be the Democratic candidate, will Clinton run as an independent? If she does, that almost guarantees our next president will be John McCain.

Flying saucers in my back yard

I took this photo in my backyard this afternoon of two flying saucers.

How to guarantee your website will fail

Unless it’s a low traffic site, if you build it on a .NET platform, there’s a good chance it will have really poor performance. People will eventually get tired of using it and will go somewhere else. Considering building a website often costs 10s of thousands of dollars, choosing the right platform is essential.

One of the local news stations here in Denver recently launched their new website. They’ve been promoting it on their news programs and in commercials. It’s a well designed site with a lot of good features. Just one problem. It uses Active Server Pages. Sometimes when you submit a request it works — other times it just times out.

The performance problem is typical of Web 2.0 applications running on a Windows platform. These kind of sites hammer on the database more than an e-commerce site, and that may be part of the problem. I don’t know. I’ve never developed software on a .NET platform nor do I have any plans to in the near future. Besides the performance issues, there are also the security problems.

Some customers believe (erroneously) that if you have to pay a lot of money for a technology, it must be better than what’s available for free. Sites running on a LAMP platform are generally much better performing sites. When there are problems, often it’s because of poorly written code — not the platform itself.

Hillary supporters to vote for McCain out of spite

It’s settled (almost). The delegates from Florida and Michigan will be seated but with only half a vote each. That’s pretty generous considering the two states broke the rules. Obama wasn’t even on the ballot in Michigan and Clinton still only got 55% of the vote there.

It’s like if the Denver Broncos playing the Indianapolis Colts but showing up a day early to play and then winning 14 - 6. (They got a few safeties from fumbles.) It doesn’t count because it’s not a legitimate contest.

Where was the outrage early this year when it was decided that the votes from Michigan and Florida wouldn’t count? Oh, yeah. Clinton was winning back then. It wasn’t until Obama started gaining in popularity that the Clinton camp started protesting.

Now Clinton is comparing her fight to the struggles of abolitionists, suffragists, and to the plight of Zimbabweans. Haven’t we have enough of this kind of politicking? Clinton seems to be taking her strategies directly from the Karl Rove playbook.

Hillary supporters are outraged and many are saying they’ll vote for McCain in the fall, even thought Obama and Clinton are almost identical in their policies while McCain is the polar opposite.

There has been talk of Hillary being on the Obama ticket as VP. There’s also talk of putting her on the Supreme Court, should there be an opening. That’s called appeasement. They’re trying to figure out a way to make her happy. She should gain nothing from polarizing the party. We need change.

Religious insecurities

People are insecure in their beliefs when it comes to religion. The belief in God requires accepting some things purely on faith. Belief in Jesus as the messiah requires even more blind faith and belief that you will be rewarded by gaining a place in heaven requires yet even more blind faith. That’s why people are so emotional about their beliefs. They’re insecure about them. There is always some doubt in their minds that they are wrong, but they fear the consequences if their beliefs are true.

Of course, most religious beliefs come from the Bible, comprised of books written almost 2,000 years ago along with the other books written hundreds of years before that — the old and the new testament. Hell, they’re all old books. They should be called the old and even older testaments. Uh, oh. I said hell.

The more insecure people are about their religion, the more they try to justify their beliefs or rationalize them in some way. I just read a blog where the author was trying to say that Einstein — a non-religious Jew, was on the verge of accepting Jesus as the messiah.

Einstein was a pretty diplomatic figure. He tried to find positives in people and beliefs. Sure, he probably said some good things about Christianity. He said good things about Judaism and Buddhism, also. But the truth was, he was not very religious because religion requires blind faith and his life was about scientific discovery — the uncovering of life’s truths, and the only way you can uncover truths is with proof, evidence, and discovery.