9 Years of Sleep

For the last ten years or so, I used to turn on my PC when I came home from school or work and shut it down again right before I went to bed. So most of the time when my PC is running, I'm awake. I've also been idling in IRC for as long as I had Internet – when my PC is running, so is my IRC client.

I still have all my IRC logs since 2001 lying on my HDD. The log format of mIRC changed slightly over the years, but it's all easily parsable with some basic Regexp. I quickly wrote a PHP script that extracts the Session Start and Sessions Close markers and timestamps from these logs and transfers them into an image.

As you can see, I tend to stay up late. I also tend to go into a free-running sleep mode when I don't have to get up early every morning. At May 2004, after my A-Level exams and before my apprenticeship started, I “rotated” my sleep cycle three times. This has been even more extreme for the last two years, where we only had few lectures in university but instead worked on a lot of projects. I should really get one of these daylight lamps.

There's so much more interesting information hidden in these IRC logs. Maybe I can bring myself to parse and import all of them into a database, so I can run some simple queries on them. Maybe I can even find my pre-2001 IRC logs on some backup CDs.