Funny thing about me. I’ve really never had any problems sleeping. I mean, through my teen years, I was practically the poster boy for sleeping in. It was amazing how much sleep I could get. I mean, outside of a few teenage boners, some drama with cigarettes and a deep feeling for girls lacrosse, I really remember very little from my teen life outside of sleeping. Those were some long days, friends. Before the Internet. Back when I spent a ton of time saying, “I’m SOOOO bored” to pretty much anyone who would listen. I spent a lot of time watching Miami Vice, thinking it was the coolest thing ever.

Ok, so I was often wrong about things. It was the 80s, man!

Those Long Nights

So I find myself in a situation in which the longest part of any date is the night. I find that I am waking up inappropriately at all hours of the night and it seems like my brain just cannot stop. Now I am actually doing research and finding out that things like calcium and magnesium actually help you with your insomnia. I also discover the sleeping pill the really the bane of my existence and actually only end up making me very eager to go and quite stupid for quite a good period of time, frankly.

But what I never really understood as somebody who has been a bachelor for a long time is that I actually do have a pretty serious problem: I’m talking about snoring. I realized that this was the issue that was because for all of these that I woke up thinking that I really didn’t get a decent rest, even though the amount of time passed seem to be evidence of the fact that I did get some sleep.

So now I find myself actually doing research on things like snoring mouthpieces and even checking out reviews on something called the SnoreLess pillow. What? Who, me? Well, I have been told that my sleeping place in my bedroom will no longer be reserved if I cannot quiet down. My wife hold the keys, and I certainly don’t really have the power to take them from her. So, I’m actually reading a lot of articles on sleep apnea and snoring and trying to figure out what kind of exercises I can do so that I no longer sound like a 1970 Dodge Challenger with no muffler when I’m sleeping.

The Curious Case Of The Snore

One of the things that strikes me as very strange about snoring is that it is one of those things that you could live alone with for the rest of your life and never really know what was wrong. I mean, there are those people who have serious heart problems and need things like a CPAP machine, but I tend to think that those people are more frequent than anything. Most people just have a relatively small snoring problem and frankly just need something like a pillow in order to quiet them down. I hope that I’m one of those people, because I can tell you that lately sleeping has been difficult enough as it is without knowing that I have a problem here.

If this makes any sense, I am actually sleeping because I am spending too much time thinking about my sleeping problem. It makes me wonder just how many people are thinking the same thing I am. Freaky.

I think you never recognize from the get-go just how much you’re going to miss blogging until you actually stop. I was one of those people who thought, “no way, man. This stuff is getting tedious. You need a break”, but the fact was that I really didn’t need that break. There are too kinds of people in this world, I guess. Those who are willing to stand up and speak about things, and those who listen.

That’s not to say there isn’t room for hybrids, of course What I recognized recently was that I am more of a writer than I am a listener. My wife knows this. Plenty of my friends know this. But I am not completely one dimensional, fortunately, which means I can adapt to conditions.

Anyway, that’s my excuse for the layoff.

They say that like athletes that have been away from their sport for a long time, bloggers find it tough to get back to where they were. To that I say – bull-hooey. I don’t know who “they” are, but this “they” tends to be very pessimistic, as far as I’m concerned.

Big Tech, Big Funk

So technology changes certainly aren’t slowing, are they? I mean, I’m certainly not talking about the letdown with the IPad Mini. I certainly don’t want to jump all over Apple’s back while they’re clearly running out of ideas. I get that they’ll never be the same company without Steve Jobs, but I think their next product is basically make-or-break for them. Make a bigger IPhone or a heavier IPod, though, and watch out below if you’re a stock holder. That stock be a wild one!

Among tech giants, though, Google continues to impress me. These guys continue to have a virtually insurmountable stranglehold on the very structure of the web, and no one, and I mean no one (I’m talking to you, Facebook) is going to have even a hint of changing that. It does suck for Bing and the other terrifying two in the realm, but what do you do?

What people don’t realize is that all of the minor search players were once fifty times as big as the big G. They could have gone in, bought the place and basically either raided it of all of its technology, or turned it into a corporate shill and slowly kill the brand and its quality.

Isn’t that what bigger tech companies tend to do, anyway?

I look at software companies as the absolute killers of any kind of creativity. I mean, look at Adobe. They’ve been selling the same bloated version of Photoshop for like 12 years, and every year they come out with a new “version” that’s basically the same as the last except practically unusable if you’re a newbie. This in turn feeds their whole “education” industry, which obviously adds to the bottom line.

Still, I’m a strong believer in the fact that PC chips are now mega faster than any piece of bloatware you may throw at them. This just means that most software companies, if people really understood what was going on, would just out and out give up and start over. Think of something new. Stop trying to rip off companies with a new product that just involved their interface designers remaking the GUI so that the product becomes difficult for novice users.

Uh-huh. Not gonna happen.