OK, it’s not quite Day 0. It’s more like Morning 0. EARLY morning 0. See, I like to hit the ground running when I travel. That means that tonight… I don’t sleep.
Let me back up… I’m traveling to Berlin for Synergy which is a conference put on by Citrix which is the employer giving me the most hours right now. In fact, they’re the only employer in a long while that’s decided to pay to send me anywhere, so hey I’m going!
In short, my job was to build a demo lab of machines for user research and I have to keep that environment happy over about 20 studies over the 5 days. Piece of cake. Well, hopefully. I did end up with one carry-on full of computing gear that didn’t get shipped (mostly a small Netgear ReadyNAS box with the virtual machines on it and some networking and power equipment). The studies run all day (8a-6p, or 0800-1800 as they say over there) and that means no time for daylight sightseeing until the following weekend. We’ll see how much free time I actually end up having after I factor in setup and takedown time. Hopefully I see more than the inside of the study room.
OK, back to my no-sleep mentality. I have an easy time surviving on less sleep than I’d say is normal or even healthy… 4 or 6 hours in a stretch can be sustained for 4 days or more, so I can really get an off kilter sleep/wake schedule. The only things that really reset are adjusting my meal times and extreme sleep deprivation. The mealtime adjustment makes sense. When your body expects food, it expects to be awake also. By shifting mealtimes, it should shift waking times. To further that, if I pull an all nighter (or most-nighter) it usually makes me tired enough to sleep almost on demand for as long as I need to catch up.
The flight out starts at 2pm and lands in Frankfurt (for a layover) at 10am local. That means I have to fool my body into sleeping on the plane so when I wake up for the landing, I’m already adjusted. For me to be sleepy enough I’m pulling the all-nighter now.
Because of the work schedule, I don’t think the trip report will be very exciting, but if I do have anything to note, I’ll keep y’all posted.
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