Ingredients:

• Grandma’s multi-grain bread with visible seeds: $2.00
• Kroger brand crunchy peanut butter: $1.74 x 2
• Smucker’s strawberry jam: $3.59

It would have to be white bread, creamy peanut butter, and grape jam for the kids to even consider eating it.

I’d prefer a Windows program, but I can deal with it being on Linux if that’s the only reasonable way to get the job done.

I’ve always had an internal alarm clock that lets me wake up right before the electronic version goes off. I’ve even on occasion been able to look at the clock just before going to sleep, think about when I wanted to wake up, and “set” my internal alarm clock for the next day.

The last few years this internal clock has been broken because of my sleep apnea. In the few instances it would wake me up, I was so tired that I’d go right back to sleep, waking up later and finding that the real alarm clock had been beeping for 20 minutes straight.

Since the CPAP came into my life, this nifty feature of my brain has been working again. I don’t know if I’ll still be able to calibrate it, but I’ll take what I can get.

Currently the machine is set for a minimum pressure of 5cm and a maximum pressure of 15. The EPR was set to reduce the pressure by 2, so it seems that 3cm is not enough to keep my airway open. I am hereby admitting that the doctor has more experience with these things than I do, and that EPR was probably left off for a good reason.

Down the road after I’ve really gotten used to the machine, I might experiment again with EPR, but set the minimum pressure to at least 7 so that the true minimum won’t go below what it is now.

• Now is the time to call loved ones at a distance. Share your news.

This morning there was about two inches of snow on the sidewalks. In days past, I would have ignored it, not having the energy to shovel it. Very often our neighbors will happily run their snowblower up the block and do it for me, and if that doesn’t happen I can ask one of the kids to do it. Yes, I know this makes me a lazy putz, but today I put a small dent in making up for it by going out there and taking care of it myself. I did most of the driveway and the entire sidewalk, which on our corner lot is 100 feet in the front and 110 feet on the side.

One of the cool features on my CPAP machine was not enabled, but the medical supply place turned off access to the advanced features. I found out how to hack past the restrictions and this morning I turned on the Expiratory Pressure Relief feature, which drops the pressure when you exhale and resumes it when you inhale. It’s smart enough to revert to constant pressure if it detects that you’ve stopped breathing properly. I’m hopeful that this will make my experience with the machine even better.

I urge everyone to go and vote if they’ve registered, no matter which candidate or party they prefer, even if they live (as I do) in a state whose majority will probably swallow your vote and make it nearly meaningless. You never know what might happen.

Last night was my first night on the CPAP. It’s this model, including the humidifier option. I’ve got this mask to go with it.

When I had my sleep study, I was clinically asleep in under a minute after lights out and showing apnea symptoms within 30 seconds after that. Last night, I’m pretty sure it took a lot longer for me to fall asleep initially. It’s an unusual feeling, breathing against air pressure. Not unpleasant, just not normal. I went to sleep on my back, something my wife hasn’t let me do in recent memory, because I invariably stop breathing right away.

I feel subjectively better today. Still yawning from time to time, but I don’t feel like I have to force my eyes open constantly like almost every day up to now. It’s not quite the night/day difference I’d been hoping for, but after one night it’s pretty amazing.

There are two main culprits for this. One is that the software we use asks more and more of the hardware. Microsoft and other primary software vendors add more and more capability all the time, but most often with a full new version like Vista. The same thing happens with everyday software like Office, instant messengers, photo processing software, and so on. Most of the development is done with rapid development environments that are abstracted from writing regular source code by one, two, or more layers. Each layer adds tons of potential functionality and makes development faster, but also adds large amounts of complexity and code. If they were written at a lower level, they’d be a lot smaller and probably run several times faster, but initial development would not be as rapid.

The other major culprit is a little feature introduced by Windows XP known as WinSxS, or Windows Side by Side. This is a repository of library software, primarily system DLLs. It’s a compatibility mechanism, solving the enormous problem known as DLL Hell that plagued older Windows versions. IN a nutshell, when you install just about anything, it makes a copy of system libraries that the program requires and puts them into a program specific subdirectory of the %SystemRoot%\WinSxS folder, where %SystemRoot% is normally C:\WINDOWS.

This does two things that cause problems. It chews up disk space when multiple versions of the same DLL file exist, and it chews up memory when different programs load different versions of the same DLL. There is some intelligence in this folder - for the most part, identical files that get copied in multiple times are actually references to the same file, not additional copies. It still chews up a ton of disk space, though. Although you can’t rely on the disk space reported by Explorer for the folder, if you go exploring it you’ll be amazed at how much is in there.

This nod to compatibility loses the performance benefits that led to the creation of dynamically loaded libaries in the first place. It can also lead to problems where a third-party program is still using an old version of a DLL even though you’ve installed a service pack or security update that should address a problem.

The WinSxS folder is the primary reason that you can get such incredible speed gains by reinstalling your computer from scratch (from a CD that’s had the latest service pack slipstreamed in) and applying all the updates before installing anything else. Unfortunately, I’m not aware of anything that’s got enough intelligence to prune this folder without the risk of screwing something up badly, so reinstalling remains the only sure-fire cure.

I’ve seen the advances in system architecture first-hand. One of the easiest and most dramatic demonstrations of the difference is in compression and text processing, both of which are heavily used by the package manager in Debian. My faster server runs an older version of debian, the slower one runs a newer version, so this is not an apples to apples comparison, but it’s pretty close. I ran these two commands on both servers:

rm -f /var/lib/apt/lists/*
time apt-get update

The older version of Debian downloads 11.1 MB of data and decompresses to 49.7 MB. The newer version is 13.7 MB and expands to 60.1 MB. This is a 23 percent increase in downloaded size and a almost 21 percent increase in the extracted size.

The slower server (400 MHz PII) downloaded, uncompressed, and combined its package information in 71 seconds, using 41 seconds of CPU time. The newer server (1.7GHz P4 Celeron) did its job (granted, with more than 20 percent less data) in 26 seconds, using 18 seconds of CPU time. A system at work running with a dual core 3.4Ghz CPU and the same software as my newer server took 8 seconds with 5 seconds of CPU time, with a lot of it visibly spent waiting to establish connections with the remote servers.

EDIT: The second paragraph of this post never got finished. I think I got my original intent in there now.

The sleep study is very expensive, so I wanted to find out what it would cost after insurance. After looking at the costs and the bank account, I decided to just go with the machine and skip the second study.

In the few days between getting the results and making the decision, the sleep doctor left the country, and would not be back for two weeks. I couldn’t get the ball rolling because he had not written a CPAP prescription before he left. He arrived back in town on Monday of this week, and finally got the prescription written yesterday.

Today the home medical supplier called me and we set up an appointment. On Monday morning at 10:00 AM, I will pick up an auto-titrating CPAP machine. In theory, it’ll be the best night of sleep I’ve had in several years. It’s oddly appropriate that I may finally be fully awake on election day.