Bitching about sleep patterns.

I haven't had anywhere enough sleep the past few days. I'm working double shifts each day at the moment, which means I'm out of the house for ten hours a day. What seems to happen is that every day I get up only half an hour or so before I need to leave for work, and get home exhausted. Ideally, what I should do then is eat and go more-or-less straight to bed. But if I go to bed without having had any time of my own to read, spod, play games and socialise, after a couple of days I get really low.

The ideal solution would be for me to get up at 8 or 9am and do my reading & spodding then. But my body simply doesn't do mornings. The only times I'm ever awake at 8am are if I'm up from the night before. So I've been experimenting with staying up until about 2 or 2.30am and getting up at 11.30am. This suits me pretty well, giving me a good three or four hours to myself after work. There are, however, two problems with this:

1) I am lousy at bedtime discipline (occasionally known as "sleep hygiene", but I find that terminology extremely patronising). If I'm doing something engrossing, like playing The Sims, I can go without eating, drinking or peeing for hours because I just don't seem to notice those needs. I have to make a continual conscious effort to monitor what my body's doing, and a conscious effort to make damned sure that I switch off the computer at 2.15 and am in my bed by 2.30.

2) I really need ten hours sleep a night, not the eight-or-so that I'm getting. (Even when I'm in a fairly regular sleep pattern, it still usually takes me half an hour to an hour to fall asleep).

Last night I went to bed as soon as I could after eating. I fell asleep extremely quickly for me, probably within about half an hour. I slept very well for the first five or six hours. Then I woke up, and couldn't get back to sleep. I was just starting to fall asleep again when Richard's alarm went off at 7.30am for him to get to the airport. Said goodbye to him, fell asleep again, and got woken at 9.30am when some random neighbour pressed our buzzer to see if our car was blocking in his friend's (we don't even have a car). So when my alarm went off for work, I woke up groaning, turned it off and thought "I'll just lie here for a couple more minutes, then get up". Of course, I fell asleep again, and didn't wake up until it was too late to get to work. Argh.

[Comments disabled, because this is venting, not a request for solutions. I know quite perfectly well what the solution is - to make sure I don't book more hours at work than my body can handle. It's hard to remember to do that when you're as broke as I am, though].

sox is doing my head in!

I think one of the best investments we made was a CD burner. It only cost £60, and it's saved me huge amounts of time and effort. Before we had it, I used to have to give CDs to Richard to copy at work. Anyone who's tried to meet up with him in an evening will know what happens to him at work - he tends to get stuck there ages after he's planned to leave, and he never gets round to doing half the things he meant to do. The average turnaround time for him to do a straight disc-to-disc transfer for me was about two weeks, so you can only imagine how long it would have taken for him to get round to making up CD compilations for me.

Now that we have a burner at home, I make up compilations whenever I feel like it. It's not normally too difficult, unless you find that your input CDs were recorded at wildly differing volumes. We don't have any sophisticated audio software, and so far we've never needed any. I do audio processing with nothing more user-friendly than command-line sox. However, I'm failing to make any sense out of this part of man sox:

fade [ type ] fade-in-length [ stop-time [ fade-out-length ] ]

Add a fade effect to the beginning, end, or both of the audio data.

For fade-ins, this starts from the first sample and ramps the volume of the audio from 0 to full volume over fade-in-length seconds. Specify 0 seconds if no fade-in is wanted.

For fade-outs, the audio data will be trucated at the stop-time and the volume will be ramped from full volume down to 0 starting at fade-out-length seconds before the stop-time. No fade-out is performed if these options are not specified.

I typed in sox infile.wav oldfile.wav fade 0 200 4, and got a four-second sample out instead of the 200-second sample I'd been expecting. Various fiddling, and I discovered sox infile.wav oldfile.wav fade 0 2000 gives a 52-second file. Clearly, stop-time is not measured in seconds. But what is it measured in?

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Update: 21:00. There seems to be a bug in sox version 12.17.1. stop-time should indeed be measured in seconds. Downloading 12.17.3 fixed the problem. Just thought I'd let you know :)