Botacon! or not…

Botacon is a robotics conference being held in Brooklyn, happening right now. It consists of a bunch of talks by people from robotics, like some dudes from Makerbot and Make magazine, which I was planning on going to. I say planning, because I’m not in Brooklyn: instead, I’m in my dorm. It’s quite unfortunate: these cool things are happening in my backyard, and I don’t even go to them…

The reason I’m still in my dorm is that I finally screwed up my sleep schedule. Being something of an insomniac, I have been waking up at 9am for the last week or so: except for the last 2 days, it’s been working wonders on my sleep schedule. Waking up at a constant time, instead of whenever I have to wake up, has seemingly cured my insomnia. Or maybe it’s just that I’m not getting 7+ hours of sleep each night, so I’m always tired: that notion lends credence to the thought that without enough sleep, I have to crash sometime. And I think I crashed this morning, right through 9am to 12am.

Staying up to 3am did not help things. Why did I stay up to 3am? My laptop is… less than satisfactory. For the record, the color really does appear differently under different lighting conditions: I have a feeling my friends are going to take one look at it and say something along the lines of “WTH IT’S SILVER FOO WHACHA COMPLAIN’IN ABOUT”. Ah well. At this point, it’s the internals that have really stood out to me: the touchpad is not quite an unusable monstrosity once I got used to it, and removing the fingerprint reader drivers removes that particular annoyance.

Nay, I do believe that the main cause of my troubles is the i7, which I got on a whim after I discovered upgrading to an i7 cost the same as keeping the i5 due to a coupon. The i7 seems to be putting out prodigious amounts of heat, and conversely draining the battery at a prodigious rate. When I cold-boot my laptop, it takes about a minute before a very particular spot under the laptop becomes uncomfortably warm on my lap. Then, battery life takes a dive, and I’m left with about 3 hours of life, max. I spent much of last night trying to figure out if switching to an i5 would help on both counts, which seems like it should help.

At any rate, I should probably change out of my pajamas, and actually get stuff done today. Hopefully Botacon comes back for a botacon 1 next year…