[Sim]

Originally Posted by dragon(ele)nerd Just on staying awake, If you want to stay up a lot longer I suggest you eat coco beans, they have natural caffiene and plus since of the strong taste you probably wouldn't want to relax,

Yes, but then when you do eventually want to sleep - you'll probably find that you can't.

I've made that mistake previously - taking a highly-caffeinated drink the night before a big presentation so that I could stay awake longer and get my preparation done. All it did was keep me from getting to sleep when I needed to - and I was completely wrecked the next morning ... only adrenaline kept me going, and then I crashed later in the day and was very unproductive.

Most of my friends and colleagues are amazed at the hours I keep, especially since I don't drink caffeine (no coffee, no coke, no jolt cola, not even tea). They accuse me of not being a "real" IT geek (I also don't like super-hot curries)

When I was at IBM, I worked from home most of the time (except when heading out to see clients or in a classroom teaching a course), so I mostly got to set my own schedule - and now I am self employed, I work when I'm awake and sleep when I'm tired.

Usually that means going to bed when my eyes are starting to feel strained (typically somewhere between midnight and 2am), and then sleep for 6 - 8 hours ... I never use an alarm unless I have an appointment, I just sleep until I've rested enough (rarely more than 8 hours unless I'm catching up after a string of particularly late nights).

After observing how many of my colleagues used to rely on coffee or cola to keep themselves awake, I'm convinced that it's like a drug that you become dependent on - many of them are non-functional until they've had several coffees each morning!

If I'm struggling to keep myself focussed - I find that power-naps are a great way of re-energising. Laying down and closing the eyes for 15 - 20 minutes (even if you don't really sleep) really helps.

[dragon(ele)nerd]

Hmm, my mum always tries using traditional chinese medicine I take tree root powder for growth, and when I need to stay up I take these red little balls in a capsule, mind me but those taste horrible,

I don't like things with Caffiene much either, weird thing about me is I hate chocolate,

[Gigit]

I've been trying to get on the forum since the 16th via AOL as usual and keep getting a message saying it's offline. I've managed to access it by Mozilla Firefox today and was surprised to see that it's been up and running as normal since your update and maintenance. Any ideas?

[Sim]

Originally Posted by Gigit I've been trying to get on the forum since the 16th via AOL as usual and keep getting a message saying it's offline. I've managed to access it by Mozilla Firefox today and was surprised to see that it's been up and running as normal since your update and maintenance. Any ideas?

That's most likely a caching problem with the AOL browser, or perhaps with the AOL internet service (they may be using network level caches).

I admit that I have never used AOL or their browser, so I don't know about the issues or tricks.

No matter what the problem, it's bad form - the software (or network caches) should have checked the site and would have seen that it had been updated - and thus flush the cache and reload.

You can sometimes request a page reload (hit F5 in the browser), or force one (Ctrl-F5) ... but I don't know whether those keyboard combinations work in the AOL browser like they do in IE and Firefox.