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false consciousness; true unconsciousness

So yesterday was my first sincere attempt to get up at 6AM, in preparation for Ada not having to take letters to school apologising for my absence. It went pretty well: I successfully bludgeoned myself to sleep at around 10PM, and my gazmodic Sleeptracker Pro watch woke me up when it caught me in a light sleep cycle a little before the alarm went off (the watch spots this with an accelerometer — if you’re rolling around, you’re sleeping lightly and ready to be woken up).

Admittedly, I don’t actually have Ada to take to school today, so I mostly blundered around doing chores until I collapsed asleep around 8.30. That would be 8.30AM, unfortunately — I work up around tennish with my subconscious definitely smug about having made me simultaneously early to rise and late to work. Psych!

This evening, I didn’t have much to tell you lot apart from the fascinating vagaries of my sleep pattern, so instead I tinkered around getting the Sleeptracker Pro database software working. The watch not only wakes you when it sense your in a light sleep cycle, it stores all your lighter moments in a database which you can suck down over USB using a dangerous-looking crocodile clip. Somebody wonderful has written a Linux version of the Sleeptracker Pro client software (called “napkin”, marvellously), and I’ve just got it to work:

There, now burglars will know the best time to rob me. It’s not often that I have to compile software from scratch these days, and as I did so, I marvelled at the absolute trivia stored in my head that let me stumble towards getting this working. Oh, it needs gtkmm to work — well, that means it’ll need the libgtkmm-dev package. Hmm, actually it’s now saying it doesn’t have a MODULE. I’m guessing that’s not a thing called “MODULE” but that I don’t have the right gtkmm module. Let’s grep for gtkmm in the configuration file. Aha! Here we go, it’s expecting gtkmm version 2.4, so that would be libgtkmm2.4-dev. And so on.

It’s times like this when I wonder about what I call false consciousness among technology users. We’ve so often invested so much time learning all of this eldritch magic, that we end up loving the tyrant machine because of its trickle of rewards, and despise anything that gives us those rewards without vindicated the sunk costs of the trivia that we’ve so painfully learned. I wonder if OS X is popular among Linux ex-pats partly because it is both shinier, and one ends up having to use all of this craziness whenever one needs to do something tricky there, too: as opposed to Windows where all of this Unix knowledge is like knowing the Ancient Mayan for “browser plug-in”.

The worst part is that there’s no easy way to put this knowledge into words, because it’s practically unconscious for me now. I don’t think I could tell you how I got this program to work, even five minutes after I manhandled it into existence. It’s like my fingers and lower brain-stem knows Linux better than my conscious brain does.

8 Responses to “false consciousness; true unconsciousness”

  1. Michael Krelin Says:

    The sacred knowledge is about responsibility and having no one else to blame. Like I had no one but myself to blame for the lack of sleeptracker support for linux and to cast the spell and breath life into one. And those who lack the sacred knowledge and don’t take the responsibility are always at someone’s mercy, regardless of the time, place and operating system.

    Love,
    H

  2. Rod Begbie Says:

    How do you like your SleepTracker? As a continually exhausted sort, the concept tempts me. Curious to know what you think about it.

    (I’m also wishing the chaps at Axon Labs would release something. I saw their prototype last year, and it’s a bit more sciency about your sleep patterns than just “you’re moving around a bit”)

    Rod.

  3. Zooko Says:

    I owned and used a SleepTracker for a long time — on the order of a year. It was the first model — the one Danny has appears to be newer. It was uh, unremarkable. I can’t remember what happened to it. I remember thinking at the time that it was kind of cool and kind of useful.

    Nowadays I have discovered the secret of not being exhausted: I take a 25 minute nap whenever I feel less than alert. I do this between one and three times a day. Scientists will tell you that people who do this score better on all sorts of controlled tests. I haven’t done any controlled tests on myself, but it is so pleasurable not to feel that awful dragged-out zombie feeling any more.

    Hint: sleep longer than 25 minutes and you will awaken disoriented and groggy and miserable. Technically this is called “sleep inertia”. If you experience this more than a couple of times then maybe try 20 minutes instead.

  4. Danny O'Brien Says:

    I wish I could nap. I’m happy to think that the Sleeptracker is just a little placebo to get me to be interested in things when I wake up. Today I idly looked over at the chumby — god, I’m really not this gadgety, promise — and saw people talking about Ubiquity and that got me out of bed. I think just having enough crutches to maintain your interest in your own health is good enough, and if that requires foolish hardware that you can nonetheless put your faith in, then why not?

  5. Michael Krelin Says:

    I don’t think ST helps to wake up. I don’t even remember when was the last time its alarm was triggered by my pattern (as opposed to the deadline). But I like the vibrating alert and the fact that I can connect it to my PC.

    Now I wish those modern watch phones had built in accelerometer, then it would be easy to program sleeptracker with this same vibrating alert which also uploads acquired data automatically. And I still would be able to connect it to my PC!

  6. Lee Maguire Says:

    “I don’t think I could tell you how I got this program to work, even five minutes after I manhandled it into existence.”

    My experience-tempered philosophy here is: if you don’t know how what something does or how it was built, delete it. * All software is destined to break or get deleted, and always at a less convenient juncture.

    * (Or rather move it to a directory called something like “delete-after-20081101”).

  7. Danny O’Brien’s Oblomovka » Blog Archive » the most useful simple script i have Says:

    […] nick s on horrid day; roll-call of the presidentszero on strong opinions, weakly heldLee Maguire on false consciousness; true unconsciousnessPetty. Me. Uk. » My American Fellows on horrid day; roll-call of the presidentsMatt Petty on […]

  8. Christian Neukirchen Says:

    A different approach, that works well for me who is paranoid (or romantic?) about keeping old stuff: http://chneukirchen.org/blog/archive/2006/01/keeping-your-home-clean-with-mess.html

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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