I decided I was too tired to work on the PyCon presentation, so I went to bed instead. Five and a half hours later I haven't gotten to sleep yet. Instead, I've tossed and turned for five hours with these weird half-dreams about better ways of reporting and finding bugs in software. I say "half dreams" because I've been awake the whole time, knowing that I was lying in X position on the bed, knowing that I want to go to sleep and that these thoughts are just keeping me awake.

I've got this intuition that it's that "knowing that I want to go to sleep" that signals a real problem. It's similar to the effect when you're in a depression, when the mental state brought about by the condition start to contribute to the problem by colouring forward perception you've reached the tipping point. You have to recognise that the situation is a negatively reinforcing spiral and pull out.

I just haven't figured out how to do that properly for thinking too much keeping me from sleeping... actually, come to think of it, that's wrong. Heck, I did a few months of experimentation on how to do it when I was 16, I just don't practice any of those disciplines any more. I can't even recall the last time I meditated deeply enough to block out sound (which is the hardest sense for me to shut off)... and I don't exercise anything like enough to exhaust myself these days.

Cinemon is still seeing more modems offline than seems reasonable on the one CMTS. There are fewer than earlier in the evening, but it has sent 20 alerts during the hours I was trying to sleep. Bah.