*Disclaimer* I’m not an expert after one week, but I figure if you were at all interested in my last post this is pertinent information as well.*

First off, thanks for all of the interest people are showing (I’m getting a lot of questions from friends & maybe a few odd looks too).

This past week has been up and down. I feel transitioning to the 3 hour + 3 nap schedule wasn’t really the difficult part. Sure, the mid-day nap for the first couple of days didn’t come easy. Initially I’d have a hard time falling asleep, but with the combination of my ‘black out bed’ and quickly getting tired enough around nap time it became less of an issue.

I’d have to say that for me, the real tricky part was adapting socially. This was an actual problem on Friday and Saturday. I’d be hanging out, or out at an event and I wouldn’t have an opportunity to just duck away for 20 minutes to get a nap in.

Failures

On Friday, after a week of near flawless sleep punctuality (sleepunctuality?!) I miscalculated (or rather, just didn’t plan…) and missed the afternoon and evening nap. Needless to say it killed me, I went to bed at 3:30 and woke at 8. And when I say ‘woke’ I use that term very loosely – think closer to the idea in which zombies are ‘awake’.

Apparently, I’m slow learner because I had a similar experience on Saturday too. I missed the afternoon nap, and was forced to take a break from hanging out with friends at 11:10ish and sleep on the floor upstairs for the evening nap. Needless to say, not the most effective sleep…

Successes

But it wasn’t all bad, in fact, a week that I wasn’t looking forward to at all because of how busy I was going to be work-wise became a breeze. Of course, my circumstances are special and I get the opportunity to set my own hours and tackle projects as I see fit. You 9 to 5′ers might not have this availability… But I bet with enough effort you could make it work as well.

I mentioned having an issue with the day naps and falling asleep earlier. Thanks to good ‘ole problem solving I was able to find a working solution to my issue.

My ‘black-out bed’

I just so happen to have an extra twin mattress that I have laying around for when I have an out of town visitor and what not. I also, just so happen to have a very large walk-in closet at my apartment. So, I followed the logical thought process and made a cave for day naps. I put a fan in there, it’s quaint.

Looking forward

I’m going to continue on, and give a little more care to Friday and Saturday plannings. And use general problem solving to deal with issues as they come. So far, I love it. It’s been up and down, and fairly difficult, but totally worth it I feel.

Have a much more specific question? Post it as a comment and I’ll try and get to it quickly, thanks!

I’ve been so busy that I’ve had to continue to push my personal Thematic child-theme portfolio & blog redesign back a few times (something I really want & need to do). It is coming along, but it is getting me frustrated. Don’t get me wrong! I love having enough work that I’m able to eat, but it seems that I’m always working, every free minute I’m designing & developing for clients instead of getting something done for myself that will be much more beneficial to my independent contractor (fancy for freelance) career in the long run. And even when I am with friends “rejuvenating”, I still am thinking/brainstorming for the project at hand.

The point is, I’m getting desperate I think, and for mental stability’s sake I’m afraid something dramatic might be needed.

Enter: The Everyman Polyphasic Sleep Schedule

In only a short description, the everyman sleep schedule is an alternative sleep schedule in which you have one 3 hour core sleep session and 3 twenty minute nap sessions.

If you are good at math, then you realize that is only 4 hours of sleep a day, and quickly following, you realize that sounds incredibly crazy.

I’ll be honest, it does. And, after much thought and one previous run in with polyphasic sleep back when I was in college I found out very intimately that it is.

My Everyman sleep schedule

With the various polyphasic sleep schedules you literally train your body to dive into the REM phase of sleep almost immediately which allows you to gain extra hours in the day. A possible extra added bonus is much more vivid dreams, people have reported to have amazingly vivid dreams as well as a clarity in recalling them. An extra creative boost, totally rad, right?

I’ll be honest, there isn’t a whole lot of ‘scientific’ research into the mental & physical long term effects but one google search and find a plethora of first hand testimony. I’m telling you through my blog about it because if I tell the world and keep tabs on the process I feel like I’ve got a sort of responsibility to following through. If I just keep it in my head, I’m sure I’ll fold after a month or so.

Here is the plan. 3 hour core nap from 4:30 am – 7:30 am, followed by a 5 hour shift or work. 1 20 minute nap from 12:30 pm – 12:50 pm, followed by another 5 hour shift. Another 20 minute nap from 5:50 pm – 6:10 pm, followed by another 5 hour shift. The last 20 minute nap is from 11:10 pm – 11:30 pm followed by the final 5 hour shift.

Initially, I want to stay as disciplined with the regimen as possibly as I can. The everyman schedule has reported advantages of being much more flexible in that you have a deviation time of about an hour or so for your naps without totally killing yourself or the rotation (missing a nap in the Uberman sleep schedule is like missing a full nights sleep). That is the plan, and this is the first week I’m doing it. It is already going to well, look what I’ve done in 20 minutes of my 4-5.5 hours of extra time! If you could text/twitter/or facebook me, I would really appreciate the encouragement and support.

So, I leave you with two questions.

A.) What is your opinion of my (maybe a little dramatic, but needed) experiement?
B.) What would you do with your extra free time if you had 20 hour days all the time?

More interested in finding out more about polyphasic sleep? Go here. More interested in first hand experience of polyphasic sleep in action? Here is a blog. And lastly, a great write up on the Everyman Sleep Schedule, here.

I’ve never been to wordcamp so I have no idea what to expect at all.

I’ve never done mobile coverage of an event before either, so I have no idea what to expect there either.

Should be an interesting weekend, come say hi, I’d love to meet you if you are here. You can find me on Twitter @m_a_simo too.

Stay tuned!

So, I’m trying to pull a custom field and setting the result as $sortingTag I’m then trying to query_posts looking in a particular category and by a certain tag.

Here is the code I’m using:

<?php if ( (is_page('web')) or (is_page('print')) or (is_page('identity')) ) {

$sortingTag = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'sorting-tag', true);		

query_posts(array(
	'cat'=>17,
	'showposts'=>15,
	'tag'=>"$sortingTag",
));
?>

Here is how I’m trying to implement it:

I’ve set up child pages ‘web’, ‘identity’, & ‘print’ under the parent ‘Portfolio’. On each page I’ve set a custom field with the key ‘sorting-tag’ with it’s respective page name (i.e. web for web).

And I’m using posts to hold my portfolio pieces, depending on the project each could have one or more of the tags ‘web’, ‘identity’, or ‘print’ (spelled the same, with same case).

Now my problem, I figure I’d be able to pass the custom field and search by that value for the post tags. But it isn’t populating the loop at all, I do get a populated loop when I change ‘tag’ to ‘tag_slug’ but it still isn’t changing the query results, it is as if they are still unfiltered..

Anyone have any help or run into this before? I’d love to sort this out… lol sort. Get it?!? Haha, sorry, couldn’t help myself…

But seriously, little help… and if you could pass this on to your wordpress guru’s that’d be sweet too.

If you know me at all, one of the last things you might describe me as is a shopaholic. Most of my wardrobe consists of clothes that people have bought and gifted me or stuff that I’ve happen to pick up in my travels.

Which is why a few of my recent purchases have surprised me so much. I’ve bought 2 shirts, a pair of shorts, and 2 hats. I wouldn’t really describe myself as an impulsive person, but this stuff caught my eye and I decided to jump on the deals.

Shirt 1: Relevant Store

I happen to follow @RELEVANTMag on twitter and they announced some new shirts on their online store, they said they were going to be on discount for a limited time so I decided to check it out.

I’m a huge fan of what Relevant is doing and what they are about, and I knew I was probably going to find something I liked. And I did. I found this, I’m still not sure if I can pull it off, but hey, I got it at a great price.

Shirt 2: Helvetica Bold

I’m not going to talk about this very much, it is self-explanatory. (I’m pretty much a moth drawn to light when it comes to fonts.) Helvetica Bold – Black. Sure, I could have probably done without this shirt, but I mean… well… shut up!

Shorts: Insight Shorts

If you don’t know what Jack Threads is, they describe themselves as the following:

JackThreads is an “invite only” shopping community selling apparel, sneakers, and accessories from well respected brands within the street/skate subcultures, all specially priced for our members.

Think of them as a more classy version of Woot that focuses primarily on Men’s Apparel and is ‘invite only’ that give very large discounts to their members. Most of their stuff is way to cool for me, but I signed up for them to examine their online business strategy and web design & code (and think through what I would improve if I had the chance) and never unsubscribed. I know, I know… I’m a nerd (and lazy at that), save it.

Anyways, I got these in white, with navy stripes and I must say, they are fly (I don’t use the word fly, but it seems fitting here). If you are interested in an invite, fill out my contact form and just ask nicely, I’ll see what I can do.

2 Flat caps

I recently got back from South Padre Island and as is customary with most trips I brought back a couple of souvenirs. Two flat caps to be specific. Honestly, I really wanted a kick ass Fedora, but I couldn’t pull it off. After being sad and dejected, I tried on one a black pinstriped flat cap and I thought it looked cool enough. I still don’t if I can pull it off, but I’ve been sporting them around this week, and well… I feel cooler at least. I’m sure passer-bys are thinking, “Douche” but who gives a damn. I got the black pinstripe one and a khaki-ish one too, so I’m ready to rock.

Seriously though, this is very unusual for me, I hardly buy things, especially clothes… I’m not materialistic, promise! So, if I made a terrible mistake or you like an item, let me know. Have you bought anything recently you are excited about?

This was built especially for me, I’m running leopard (I took the dock into account.) on a mac book pro at 1440 x 900 resolution. If you like the style feel free to use it, if you want to actually customize it, put in your own text, change resolutions, adapt, change, remix, etc.. fill out the contact form and put “June desktop” as the subject with your request as the message and I’ll shoot you the .psd working file! Enjoy!

June Desktop 1440x900

I was at the DFW WordPress May Meetup earlier today (at BJ’s) and met some really smart people that know a whole heck of a lot more than I do (and are much further along “the road” than I am).

One guy in particular, Randy Hoyt, was a great resource for what I’m attempting to do with wordpress. After talking with him for about 5 minutes, we got on the subject of Custom Field’s and he said Custom Field Template was a great tool that would help me achieve my goals.

Needless to say, I left the DFWWP Meetup pretty pumped to get back to my computer to start playing around with all the ideas of what I could do bouncing around in my head!

After I got the CFT plugin installed I decided to take it for a test drive so to speak. (*As I’m new to a lot of this, the nomenclature I use may be off a little, as I continue I hope I do a good enough job describing the process I followed. Also, if there is a better/more effective/efficient process than what I’ve followed, please, enlighten me!)

I made a custom field template that I titled “Portfolio” with the plans of handling all of the ‘extra’ data associated with a portfolio piece (i.e. Client Name, Client Quote, Portfolio Image, Skills used, etc…)

There is a great post by Gabriel Serafini (@gserafini) in which he highlights and does pretty good walk through of setting up your own CFT template. I won’t go into it here, check out his post.

Here we go! I had my template all set up and rigged up some test posts to test out the functionality and work out any bugs. All of the ‘simple’ fields worked beautifully (client_name, portfolio_image, etc…) but I had put in a custom field ‘skills_used’ that utilized checkboxes. Since you can click on more than one box it passes an array to that custom field, which I haven’t had to deal with up to this point. I didn’t know if I could parse the array successfully and apply the html tags I wanted to it as well and place it in the wp template I needed it in.

I found some good posts on the net but nothing that really dealt specifically with this particular issue (granted, I’m sure it is out there, I looked for like 5 minutes max…) so I rolled up my sleeves and went to work.

Here is what I came up with, I’m sure it is pretty sloppy (I consider myself a php novice pretty much.) but it works like a beauty. I decided to wrap everything in an unordered list and wrap each skill used in it’s own list item.

<?php //get skills_used (custom field) ?>
<?php $skills = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'skills_used'); ?>

<?php if(empty($skills)) {
	//if $skills is empty DO NOTHING!!!
}
else {

	echo '<ul class="skills-used">

		<li class="skills-used-title"><h4>Skills Used:</h4></li>';

	foreach ($skills as $skill) {
	    echo '<li class="'."$skill".'">'."$skill</li>";
	}

	echo "</ul>";
}
?>

*this code was placed into the single template file for my portfolio category posts* (It can go in any wp template you need it to go into, sidebar.php, single.php, etc…)

Description: I passed the custom field ‘skills_used’ which was part for the template that I created in CFT ( Remember the checkboxes? Ya, those guys.) to a variable $skills. Then I tested this variable to see if it was empty, if it was empty I wanted it to do NOTHING, although, if it had the good stuff, I wanted it. But the question was, how to get all of it. Enter “foreach”, basically, the jist of what is happening here is that I’m splitting the array apart and labeling each part it pulls off as the variable $skill (not plural!) echo’s it after wrapping it in the li tag, then forgetting it and moving to the next one, until there is nothing left. Tack on the close ul tag and wrap up the php.

An astute student would notice two ‘$skill’ varables being used each foreach. Very good padawan, I want css control over each one, so I’m listing the class of the list item as $skill. This way, if I use Photoshop CS4 for a particular project, I can place a sexy little blue square with “Ps” carved into it.

That, my friends, is what was so cool that it got me blogging at 1:30 am (pardon my spelling!). There is a whole lot of cool stuff you can do with custom fields and similar implementations to this, it just takes a little imagination and experimentation. Enjoy!

So, I just moved into a new apartment and I need some wall art. I’ve decided to design a handful of posters at 16×20. Since I enjoy type and typography, I’ve chosen this subject for my first poster design.

Here is the clincher, because of the grid I set up for the project I have 14 fonts to chose from that will be ‘showcased’ (aside from Helvetica, of course).

If you had to chose 14 fonts, based on typographical prowess and aesthetic, what would they be?

Introducing the Letter A

There are so many interesting and downright beautiful fonts out there I’m wondering what kind of responses I’ll get back. For this particular design, I’ll be focusing on the first letter of the English alphabet, “a”. For no real reason other than I think it is visually the sexiest letters around, (closely followed by ‘g’, ‘s’, ‘y’; all of this is my opinion of course…)

So, here we are, I want your input, I want the sexiest fonts you can muster. Leave comments and I might include one of your fonts in my poster!