I have a problem. I am addicited to caffeine.

There, I have said it. That’s the first step toward beating my problem.

Back in October I noticed a trend that was having a lot of trouble sleeping on Sunday night. I basically thought that it was cause I slept in those mornings, or it was the stress of the week ahead. However, no matter what I did, I couldn’t get to sleep easily on Sundays. So I decided to visit my doctor.

He went through the basic list of what it could be, but decided quickly what he thought the problem was. You see, one of the first questions he asked was if I drank a lot of coffee or other caffeinated beverages. Of course the answer to that was yes. I was up to as many as 8 cups of coffee a day at that point. However, I had ruled that out because I could sleep most nights, just not Sundays. And I purposely avoided coffee on Sundays. What I didn’t know was caffeine could linger in your body for up to 2 weeks. Bingo! I think we had a winner.

Therefore, starting Halloween of last year, I gave up caffeine. All caffeine! No coffee, tea, soft drinks or anything that contained what the experts would call a “significant dietary source of caffeine.”

The first two weeks were awful. Headaches and a general feeling of malaise. With a little will power, I got through them and then it got easier. In fact, I went caffeine free for 6 months. That was the goal, and after that I planned to only have a cup of coffee a day since I enjoy it so much.

However, this is where I realize I have a problem. The cup of coffee slowly became a cup and a half. Then it was two cups. I am now back to 3 cups and starting to see a trend.

So, it is with this decree of my newly admitted problem, I am going to go back off caffeine. This time the goal is one month. After that, I’ll just have to play it by ear.

On April 3 I was invited to join Facebook. This would not normally be a problem, but I was intentionally avoiding joining another social networking site. I joined Classmates many years ago, but it really served no purpose and turned out to be nothing but a spam generator. However, since I was specifically invited to join by a good friend (or I though so, it may have been a scan of his contact list), I figured I could not decline.

At that point I decided to start an experiment. I would not add any new friends myself, just approve anybody who found me as long as I actually knew them. Well, it is 19 days later, and I now have 22 friends. Not a large number by any stretch of the imagination, but the composition is interesting. Most of the friends are not people I hang out with regularly, but people from my past. Some have moved away, others that I just don’t see much anymore and others are people I haven’t seen since high school.

I have to admit, I am a little impressed with Facebook. The site is virtually free (accept for the gifts portion) and the advertising is kept to a minimum. Facebook makes it very easy to track down people and see where they are now. Since I missed my 10 year high school reunion this year (I had a funeral to attend), I have found the site useful in finding out what others are doing these days.

So today ends the Facebook experiment. Since my experience has been good thus far, I have decided to stop being passive. Over time I am going to actively add people, and try to keep my page somewhat up to date. Of course Facebook will be lower on priority list since since it is not a necessity of my life. I just hope I don’t get addicted to the site like some people I know (you know who you are).

As some of you know, I am traveling again this week. I left last Friday for Burum (actually staying in Groningen) in the Northern part of the Netherlands, where Stratos has a Land Earth Station.

The trip has been pretty routine, mostly work. Though I did have a chance to meet up with Lori on Sunday, which would be the highlight of any trip.

I don’t feel like writing too much, so instead I am just going to post a few pictures.

If you have been visiting the site lately (all two of you), you may have noticed the old Brian’s Cube theme appearing and disappearing.  You may have also noticed that when the old theme was there, it was pretty much broken.  Well, I have started to get use to the WordPress theme tags, and I have now re-launched my old look and feel.

I cannot guarantee that the theme is without bugs, though I tried my best in testing it.  If you see a problem, leave a comment and I will fix it as quickly as possible.  I will also be adding new features (which are old features since the default theme I was using had them) like search as time allows.  I also plan on sprucing up the page a bit with some more color and some of my photos.  Until then, enjoy.

I sat down tonight to look at rewriting my old template to work with WordPress. In the end though, I really didn’t have the attention span for it. So instead I decided to just add a new plugin. Since I started posting photos, I decided to add the stimuli.ca Lightbox2 plugin. From now on my posts will have a thumbnail of the photo and you will have to click it to see the full version.

To show off the new feature I am posting a photograph I took on Friday night. While Lori was out with the girls, I decided to go downtown and shoot St. John’s at night. The following was taken from the base of the South Side hills looking North.