I got up at 5am once when I drove 1020 miles from Madison to Amherst, MA. I drove 20 hours straight. Then I did the same thing when I drove back (getting up at 4:00 this time).

Don't think I could do that anymore. More to the point, I don't want to.

Hah! Everybody's talking about the tubes:

A Series of Tubes

Via Tyler Cowen and Kottke

Ladies Home Journal's predictions about 2000 written in 1900:

Prediction #22: Store Purchases by Tube. Pneumatic tubes, instead of store wagons, will deliver packages and bundles. These tubes will collect, deliver and transport mail over certain distances, perhaps for hundreds of miles. They will at first connect with the private houses of the wealthy; then with all homes. Great business establishments will extend them to stations, similar to our branch post-offices of today, whence fast automobile vehicles will distribute purchases from house to house.

Prediction #23 is a curious mix of the prescient and wrong. "Ready-cooked meals will be bought from establishments similar to our bakeries of today." This is correct. Prepared food "to go" is now widely available, a concept they didn't really have in 1900 but is well-captured by the idea of being "similar to our bakeries of today." Then things go awry: "They will purchase materials in tremendous wholesale quantities and sell the cooked foods at a price much lower than the cost of individual cooking." In fact, people are just richer today than they were in 1900 and can afford more costly food-acquisition methods, especially if they save time. Interestingly, the premise here that wholesale purchase will make the food cheaper than home-cooking seems based on the idea that ingredients rather than labor are the main cost of prepared foods.

Last, of course, the tubes return: "Food will be served hot or cold to private houses in pneumatic tubes or automobile wagons." The pneumatic tube is a real technology, still in use to some extent today, but it was always more of a niche product than its proponents had hoped.

My previous job I used to get up at 4 a.m to be at work at 5:30 a.m. every day.

You know how our generation bemoans the lack of jetpacks and flying cars that we were promised as children? I wonder if previous generations felt cheated when their supposed future of ubiquitous pneumatic tube wonderment never came to pass....

A newly spotted giant cloud of intergalactic plasma is the largest known object in the universe. Spanning 600 million light years, it is three times bigger than the previous cosmic colossus.

Wow, that is big. That's 6,000 Milky Way's put end to end. The scale of things is space is just mind blowing. I remember doing the calculations for making a scale model of the solar system in our yard which is 150feet long in the long direction. The outer planets were just out, no way to do it. I could just manage to do the inner solar system and make the planets visible dots barely big enough to see. Mercury was questionable though, I wasn't sure I could actually make a dot small enough.

Me? I'm totally a night person. If left to my own devices I'd sleep from 5 am to 1 pm. Unfortunately, my day job would like me in the office before 2-3 in the afternoon.

What complicates matters is when I help my parents out at the restaurant on weekends. Last call is at 1:30 am and everyone has to be out by 2:30. It's 3 am by the time everything is cleaned up (assuming there's no band, which makes it more like 4-4:30 am) and it takes a half-hour to get to my parents' house. Then I need to unwind for a bit and the next thing I know it's 5 am and I'm going to bed. Getting up on a Monday morning to go to work after that is a bitch.

eta punctuation

A series of tubes - for people!

Imagine a city uncluttered with paved roads, where vegetation grows between the buildings, cooling and taming the urban environment. Parkways and parking lots become just parks. Imagine animals never having to risk their lives crossing a busy freeway or interstate, the sight of road kill as unexpected as the sight of horse manure is today. Imagine goods being delivered to businesses quickly and efficiently -- even automatically when needed. Imagine never having to deal with traffic, or getting lost, or refueling your vehicle, or wasting time driving when you could be putting the finishing touches on your report that is due. Imagine every home with a tube-port instead of a garage, every apartment building with a tube-shaft instead of an elevator, allowing people to get into a pod in their home and travel to anywhere that is hooked into the tube network. Imagine the entire world networked together with pneumatic tubing.

...

The world of tomorrow we are creating for ourselves and our children will be one of traffic congestion, pollution, and an ever-dimmishing natural world being covered in asphalt. We need to change our transportation policies -- we all know this -- but the question is: in what way? Pneumatic tubes transporting people via individual pods, operating on Internet based protocols is, as has been shown, the best solution. This will give people their freedom and space; reduce pollution, both chemical and noise; end costly, stressful, and unproductive traffic jams; increase safety; decrease dependence on foreign oil; and, most importantly, usher in the future that technology has been promising us.

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My previous job I used to get up at 4 a.m to be at work at 5:30 a.m. every day.

I've always wondered: does Hell have good dental insurance?

My previous job I used to get up at 4 a.m to be at work at 5:30 a.m. every day.

I used to be on that schedule when I worked for Starbucks, but the fact that I could have 6 shots of espresso on ice as soon as I got there eased the pain a little.

All of the pending work I had to finish up this morning is already done, which is good, but now I have to find a way to fill up the next 7.5 hours, and I don't have nearly enough worksafe fic with me.