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11/19/2003 Entry: "Too tired to sleep... and my web pages celebrate 8 years of ... web" In the words of John Aston, "I am feeling much better now..." Part of severe lack of sleep is total emotional instability. I had to seriously check and recheck my emotions before they got out, which was thankfully made easier by the fact I didn't have anything go particularly wrong to me yesterday. In fact, I got told that I would be working more with Linux and Perl, which I love, but I also requested to continue my VB.NET path, so I always have at least one foot in MS Windows. But by the end of the day, I was totally wasted on sleep dep. Christine let me have the bedroom to myself, and then something I forgot about happened again: I was too tired to sleep. Part of my "insomnia" problems is that my body sometimes wants to keep going even though my mind wants to rest (it's usually the other way around). Then I develop a kind of physical psychosis where my body itches like crazy, all over. Stabbing itches. Like I'll be falling asleep, and then BAM! My leg itches so suddenly, the muscle jerks. Then my arm. Then my head. Then some spot I can't get to on my back. I figure this is my nervous system melting down. Usually a hot shower takes care of this, but when I am that out of it, even if a glass of water is in front of me, I won't drink it, complaining I am too thirsty. I also become oversensitive to any type of noise, movement, or light. I finally took a hot shower, and tried to hypnotize myself to sleep by doing deep breathing exercises while petting Artoo in a slow rhythm. That worked, and I finally was able to go to sleep at 11:15. My 42 hour day was over. It's funny, it feels like Tuesday because my brain keeps thinking it was just a really long Monday I just had. Anyway, in the shower this morning it occurred to me that this website turned about 8 years old this month. This website has been online since 1995. Wow. A little history: It started in late 1995 when Brad gave me an account on Digex. I was http://www.access.digex.net/~glarson for a while. The web site was at first one page, then one very long page, then two pages (part one and two of one large page), and then it was organized and split into three pages: Main, Diary, and Links. Then I was on Silverdragon as http://www.silverdragon.com/punkie. I started several sections, most due to a job where I was on a very slow (4 calls a day) phone queue, and I had a lot of time in front of a computer with an Internet connection. This is when I debated the "frames vs. tables" thing because having frames a was a volatile topic back then, but I ended up going with frames because of the ease of updates. Then Silverdragon crashed, and I was on two websites on members.aol.com that was hidden as one by a series of clever links. The Silverdragon was back, and I was back. Then Silverdragon burned down. So I was on Simon's server, Chaosart, for a few years, and got the punkwalrus.com and punkadyne.com domains during those times. Then Chaosart was screwed over by Comcast, and had to be shut down because the outages were just too much for Simon to take. Brad had a new Silverdragon, and I am still on Silverdragon now! So I started with Brad, and I am still with Brad. Thank you, Brad! I have also been on the Internet for about 14 years, but I am not sure when that happened exactly. I think it was late 1990/early 1991 I got my account on Bessel at the University of Maryland, thanks to Allon Stern. Allon was the server admin, and was responsible for keeping the machine up and going. Since he didn't want to babysit it, he had some of his friends have access to it by dial up, and WE were supposed to call him when it went down. He also installed a MUD on Bessel (for the same reason, and it ended up being one of the top 40 MUDs for a while), and we helped keep it working and connected. In exchange, we got free Internet access, as well as free Unix admin training. I used to dial in using my Atari ST, a vt100 terminal emulator, and a 2400baud modem. Later, this became an IBM XT. Then a dumb terminal connected directly to a modem. I learned CLI because I didn't HAVE a GUI! Then Allon graduated, and we all lost our access. I was on Capaccess for a while, and then I got AOL. Now I connect high speed using Cox High-speed Internet (and work).