Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with regular

Very irregular sleep schedule: okay in an otherwise healthy/happy life?

allterrainbrain — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 05:06:19 -0800

Very irregular sleep schedule: okay in an otherwise healthy/happy life? I'm lucky to be doing all my work on my own schedule, but this means I often end up with a very irregular sleep schedule (since the only things I do in person are evenings or overnights with friends/partners or concerts & events, all of which are planned for ahead of time).

Globally I probably average 7 to 8 hours of sleep for every 24 hours of life, but it's often, for example, in six blocks (averaging 8 to 9 hrs each) over seven days. I naturally sleep in blocks of 7 to 10 hours. But those blocks might be, say, noon to evening or dawn to midday or midnight to morning all in the same week.

Otherwise I try to be really aware of health (very good diet, usually good exercise, good outlook and low stress -- often periods of heavy work for deadlines, but low emotional stress). I'm young & female with no health issues. I rarely feel tired or wiped out, and when I wake up I'm myself pretty much immediately without stimulants (I've never been into caffeine).

But when I read general health advice, regular sleep schedule and sleeping in the dark come up all the time. I'm willing to make sacrifices for health, so with this question I'm trying to find out HOW important it is physiologically to sleep on a regular schedule and/or at night, so I can decide whether it's worth it to force myself into a regular sleep schedule.

Teach Myself to Hit The Toilet at the Appointed Time

jimmyjimjim — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 11:51:03 -0800

I want to practice yoga early in the mornings. But it's got to be after bowel movement. Problem is, my bowel movements, though quite regular in terms of daily-ness, occur at odd times. Sometimes I have to wait 2 or 3 hours after waking, and that throws off the whole sched. I also need to do yoga on an empty stomach, so eating something to stimulate the bowel movement isn't a solution. And I don't like coffee or cigarettes. I do try to keep a regular sched, waking/sleeping at approximately the same time each day. So....do I have any other options for teaching my body to do its bizness first thing upon waking?

A "hairy" situation over pizza...

MaHaGoN — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 18:29:44 -0800

If a manager of a restaurant blatantly lies to you, what do you do? Should I continue eating at this local pizza place, or take my business elsewhere? The Background:

A few of my friends were eating at a local pizza place. They are regular patrons at this restaurant, often times eating there a few times a week. The pizza's good, it's close by, and it's been a favorite of ours for a while. That being said, the manager knows us, and even mentions when we haven't been in for an extended period of time.

The Problem:

Hair was floating in one of the sodas. It was obvious, and identified as none of my friends due to its length and color. So, my friend walks over to the manager and hands him the cup and tells him of the hair. The manager proceeds to dig into the cup with a fork, removing a chunk of ice which the hair was frozen partially inside. He claims it was just a "trick of the eye" and that there was no actual hair.

The Questions:

How should my friend have responded to finding this hair in his soda? Do we forgive the manager and continue eating at one of our favorite pizza places even though he lied to our faces, just to save the cost of a dirt cheap soda? Is there any reason why he wouldn't just say sorry and offer a new soda? Should we just forget it ever happened and continue eating there like it's fine, even though it bothers us?

For the record, there would be absolutely no problem had he just offered us a new soda. Mistakes happen, people are hairy, and a stray hair is understandable. It's the lying to our faces thats the problem.

recording/playing a tv show

Noodles — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 15:04:03 -0800

Is it possible to record a tv show on to a pc and then later replay the recorded show on to my regular tv set, not my computer monitor but my actual tv. I know its possible to record a tv show on to a pc hard drive but I don't know for sure if its possible to replay that same show with out making a dvd.

Yet another condom question

smithmac_99 — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 08:55:53 -0800

Ladies, when using condoms, can you tell the difference between regular condoms and "ribbed for her pleasure" condoms?

Regex: Text from HTML, no attributes

ph00dz — Sun, 26 Mar 2006 19:15:47 -0800

Regex Madness...filter. How do I pull the text out of an html document without looking at the tag attributes? I'm using javascript... and I am just stuck. I think my brain is about to explode.

I'm trying to pull certain things out of an html document. Let's say, for simplicity's sake, it looks like this... 'cept with html tags. (Had to change 'em to display here.)



[!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"]

[html]

  [head]

  [meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1250"]

  [meta name="generator" content="PSPad editor, www.pspad.com"]

  [title]Sample Document[/title]

  [/head]

  [body]

    [p]

      [img src="http://blah.com/sample.jpg"]

    [/p]

    [p]

      Some text is [a href="fjkj.html"]here[/a]

    [/p]

  [/body]

[/html]

All I want out of that thing is:
Sample Document
Some text is
here

Is that possible? I thought I had something working... but I was so wrong.

I tried to spider down through the dom, but I never could get that right either.

As a bonus... is there a particular book/tutorial folks recommend for understandings the mighty regex?

Regular expression search engine

inquisitive — Tue, 21 Mar 2006 04:51:39 -0800

Is there any regular expression based search engine or search engine that allows to search for one word in the vicinity of another word, like say word1 within 10 words of word2 ? I remember altavista had this facility (i.e. one word within n words of another word) several years ago, but I can no longer see it now.

Is there a regular expressions standard?

normy — Wed, 21 Apr 2004 17:09:36 -0800

Regular Expressions: Is there a standard? [more] Many programming languages and technologies support pattern matching in text using regular expressions. Is there a published industry standard somewhere for their syntax and implementation?