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Chris Bowler wrote about his schedule, and the need to carve out some more time. His idea? Steal an hour and a half from his sleep time each week day. The experiment: I’m going to take two weeks and see how I operate on 5 hours of sleep per night. That probably sounds a little crazy, but there are a few caveats. 1) This will only be for nights before a weekday, Sunday to Thursday. Friday and Saturday I will sleep as long as possible. 2) I already happily exist on 6.5 hours per night (again, weekday nights) so it’s not a huge change for me. ...

James Shelley poses an excellent question: If everyone has everyone’s attention the value of attention is nullified. Thus to avoid mental bankruptcy, navigating an “attention economy” means saving, investing and being cunningly conscientious of your own attention. If you treated your attention as a monetary value, would you be considered broke, middle class or well-invested? In regard to the Internet, services like Instapaper, Readability, and sites like Read & Trust will become more valuable as information continues to proliferate. ...

Kurt Vonnegut gave some wise advice in this article back in 2008. Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you’re writing. If you scribble your thoughts any which way, your readers will surely feel that you care nothing about them. They will mark you down as an egomaniac or a chowderhead — or, worse, they will stop reading you. ...

Go figure. I just ordered my copy of HTML5 for Web Designers from A Book Apart, and Ian Hickson announces this change. I wonder if A Book Apart will change the name of the book for the next print run. In any case, it is excellent news that the HTML specification is no longer a draft.

As time passes , the more I realize it’s all that really matters. All this, just about everything I write here, it’s all about time. Time is the one thing we can never get back once it’s gone.

Noah Stokes reflects on 34 years of life.

Not the game. Stop typing as though you are still using a typewriter.

Randall Stross: At my house, the Internet connection is flaky at times, so I really shouldn’t demand that my favorite Web sites have Five-9s availability. Perceived reliability is determined by the least reliable service in the chain. A home user’s Internet connection, with a laptop using Wi-Fi, would be available about 99.8 percent of the time, estimates Mr. Hölzle at Google, which equates to about 18 hours of cumulative downtime a year. So, he says, “if Google provided Five 9s, you wouldn’t know.” ...

The game, Minecraft, is quite possibly the only graphical multiplayer game that captures the text-based MUD experience of years past. By that, I mean that not only can you login and play on a server with other people, but you can also download the server software and host your own game server allowing others to connect and play. Additionally, with some mods or some coding, you can add your own features and functions to the game. ...