When I talk about working like a maniac for 10-14 hours a day, I sometimes get criticized for working too hard. I need to relax or enjoy life more, people say. When I read this, I assume that I've done a poor job explaining how I feel about work or how I actually construct my life, so I figure I may as well write a blog post to talk about it, as well as the underlying principle.

There are many days where I only leave my RV to shower. I wake up, drink tea while I do a quick Chinese lesson, write a blog post, program for twelve hours with a few short violin breaks, read for an hour, and the go to sleep. People assume that this is a stressful and intense day, but I actually find it very relaxing and enjoyable.

The benefit of having your subconscious make decisions isn't so much that it's a better decision maker than your conscious mind (it's probably not), but that it can make decisions much much faster than your conscious mind. You don't have to spend your focus and energy making decisions that you already have heuristics for.

For example, when I play poker, many of the decisions are made by my subconscious. This allows me to make many good analyses per minute, rather than just a few, and to dedicate my conscious processing to the most important factors at hand. It's not that I couldn't do all of the processing consciously, it's just that I wouldn't have time.

When I first released SETT, a common bit of feedback I'd get was, "It's nice, but it's really slow". This shouldn't have been too surprising to me, given that I hadn't spent any time optimizing it, and didn't know how to, anyway. So I sat down and decided to fix the problem. Now SETT is extremely fast, despite running on a single server with a 6 year old processor. It's far faster than WordPress, but still a bit slower than Tumblr, which is incredibly fast.

What happened? Well, I have a policy-- when something important is a weakness, I try not just to get it up to par, but turn it into a strength. If you look at decisions I've made in my life, you'll see this over and over again. I was terrible with girls, so I became a good pickup artist. I wasn't well traveled so I became a nomad. My posting began to become inconsistent, so I doubled up and started posting twice a week on a consistent schedule. I ate a moderately unhealthy diet, so I got very healthy and strict.

I had only the roughest of plans coming to China-- hang out in Shanghai, make it to Hua Shan, and drink some good tea. With a couple weeks of Shanghai loafing and a trip to Hua Shan under my belt, only tea was left on my checklist.

China has very high quality famous teas in several categories, many of which were invented here, but the two that I like the most are Puerh and Oolong. I was originally thinking that I'd head down to Yunnan province, where the best Puerh in the world is made, but with my days in China running short, a forty-one hour train trip seemed like a bit of a waste. The Wuyi mountains, on the other hand, are a convenient nine hour overnight train ride from Shanghai. Carl and I decided to head to the Wuyi mountains for a single 18 hour day, with no plan other than to drink Da Hong Pao, Big Red Robe, one of the most prized Oolong teas in the world.

With one overnight train in and out of the Wuyishan station per day, our itinerary was decided for us. We'd arrive a little before six in the morning and leave at ten at night. That may seem like a short trip, but all we really cared about was finding and drinking the Da Hong Pao, and we figured it would be enough. After reserving our two hard-bed tickets, we check the weather. Rainy the day before we get there, storms the day after, but sun on our day there. Perfect.

We're getting pretty close to being ready to launch SETT to the (unsuspecting) public. Shooting for mid December, but no later than January no matter what.

If you're a blogger, you can do us a HUGE favor by answering this quick one-page survey about blogging.

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It started about five years ago. On the internet I saw a picture of a really janky looking pathway that was nothing more than some two by fours bolted high into the side of a mountain. I immediately wanted to go do it. I did some searches, but came up empty handed. The name and location of the mountain was a mystery.

A couple years later I saw another picture of the mountain, and this time it had a name. Hua Shan. I looked it up, and it was in the middle of China, two hours east of Xi'an.

In poker you often win not by playing your cards, but by playing your opponents cards. My good friend and sometimes poker mentor once told me that to become a winning poker player, you must learn to win the pots that no one has a legitimate claim to. If you have an excellent hand, you'll probably win. If he has an excellent hand, he'll probably win. But if neither of you has a particularly good hand, the pot is up for grabs. It's in situations like these that rather than playing your hand, you focus on your opponents weakness.

I slept most of the flight from San Francisco to Vancouver. I was up until one thirty in the morning the night before, and had to wake up at five in order to get to the airport on time, so I was exhausted. Upon arriving in Vancouver I shuffled half-asleep to the customs station, which I had to go through even though I was only connecting through Vancouver, not stopping there.

The agent asks my name, where I'm going, all the usual stuff. I reply, giving short answers. I always give short answers in customs because first, I'm sort of offended at how they treat you as though you're some kind of criminal, and two, because I figure the agent just wants to hear a succint answer and get on with her day.

Eight years ago today I started my blog. It actually started as a livejournal blog which I used to chronicle my third (and successful) attempt to get onto a polyphasic sleep schedule. I had no readers and had no intention of attracting any. I had just remembered how hilarious my attempts to get on the schedule were in the past, how hard it was to remember the memories created in varies states of sleep deprivation, and thought that recording the experience might be a good idea.

At that point in time, polyphasic sleep was a hot topic. The internet was dotted with anonymous reports of success and attributed reports of failure, but until Steve Pavlina did it, no public blogger had ever gotten on the schedule and written about it. Steve has a large audience, so all of a sudden lots of people were interested in polyphasic sleep, and many of them found my site.

About a year ago I was in my bed, working on my laptop. A fist pounded on the wall of my RV, moving from the front to the back. Then more pounding on the other side. Finally I hear someone yanking on the RV doors. I slowly shut my laptop, turned off the lights, and sat in the darkness as I waited for the police to decide I wasn't home.

It was then that I decided I'd try and find somewhere legal to park the RV.

I sent out dozens of emails and got only one reply. A girl had an apartment in the Mission and was willing to rent me her driveway. I showed up with the RV, shimmied it past the entrance gate, and agreed to rent the spot. She asked where I lived, and thinking that we were getting along really well, I bluntly replied, "In here!" as I patted the wall of the RV.

"Oh! Right! Okay. Hmm. Let me think about this for a second. Wow! Am I okay with this? Yeah, I guess so. Okay! This is fine."