uberc

When I get tired, either at night or in the afternoon, it "feels" like it's my brain getting tired more than my body. It's harder to concentrate, make decisions, and see things clearly.

My core solution is pretty simple: do various things to ensure I get a good night's sleep (which for me is 7.5 hours without waking up) and take a 20-minute nap in the afternoons. If I do these two things, my mind feels stronger for longer, more often at its best. If I don't, it can feel weak and drained and distracted.

I have also found eating less sugary foods tends to help, as does exercise, though I can't see as direct a impact on brain energy as sleeping and napping.

I suspect there's a lot more I could do. The brain consumes a great deal of a person's energy, perhaps even more dramatically for folks like me (and I suspect many on HN) whose minds are always buzzing with thought all day long, and I'd like to find more ways to "feed" it on a day to day basis.

So I ask you fellow hackers: what sleep, food, exercise, or other habits have you found to be most effective in fueling your day-to-day brain power?

Easily distracted by new email messages (or old ones that make you feel guilty for not replying) whenever you go to Gmail to send an email?

Try this: instead of going to Gmail directly and being confronted by your inbox as normal, create a web shortcut for this URL --

https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm

-- and click that instead. You'll get a clean, distraction-less Gmail compose new message screen. You can send your email and be on your way as if your inbox never existed.

I need to throw together a simple but elegant and visually well-designed database-driven web app to run the daily operations of a small local business. Workflow tasks include checking in and out customers, making sure the right information is gathered from customers, automating emails to customers, creating daily checklists for staff, that sort of thing.

Does anyone have experience using Force.com, Zoho Creator, or similar cloud platforms for similar applications. I'd love to hear the pros and cons based on your experience. Thanks!

I have a simple WordPress site hosted on Bluehost. It was unresponsive on Monday morning, and it took Bluehost half a day to fix it.

While the site was down, Bluehost was unable to give an ETA on when the problem would be fixed. Bluehost support did tell me that the problem was another customer hitting the SQL server too hard, causing the entire server to be slow. They also implied that this kind of problem was to be expected given I'm on shared hosting and paying so little (less than $10/month).

This is the first time in around 6 months that I've had any problem with Bluehost.

My question is: is this kind of half-day outage, with no ETA for resolution given, indeed normal for low cost shared hosting providers like Bluehost? If not, any suggestions for alternative providers?

I noticed the following pattern of email distraction happens to me regularly. I'll be working on or thinking about something. I think of a specific archived email I need to search for to get some information related to what I'm working on or thinking about. So I go to GMail. But as soon as I log in, I get distracted by new email in my inbox, or even by existing mail in my inbox that I haven't read yet but feel like I should, since it's been sitting there for hours or days. (The truth is generally those emails are NOT urgent, which is why I skipped them in the first place.) Before I know it, I'm dealing with inbox email, completely off track from my original focus which led me to search for a specific email.<p>Does this happen to you? Any tips on how to avoid this, e.g. is there a way to search GMail without seeing your inbox?

It's the classic amusement arcade game Whac-a-Mole on a wall -- any normal wall, with an overhead projector and Kinect (on the floor in front of the wall, pointed upwards).

Done as an exercise to learn Processing and check out what Kinect hacking is all out. Fun!

See video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZ30Kuk4kAE