Update #2: After some time, I accidentally got this tablet working again in Vista. The problem seem to be related to wisptis.exe. If you don’t see this running in your tasklist, try Win + R -> wisptis. I did this before I installed the official Vista driver. It worked fine as a pointing device (without pressure detection), then I installed the official driver and voilia! It worked like a charm!

After all these years of comptemplating, yesterday I finally bought the my P-Active XP Pen graphic tablet:

Played around with it for a while. It was not as difficult to pick up as I thought. Here’s a quick sketch I did after like 10 minutes of practice:

Pretty fun to play with, not bad for around $500 HKD

1. A dance in a cold shower Effectiveness: *****

This is my trump card of getting my consciousness back very fast. For a total of 10 – 15 minutes, you basically get 100% alertness and clarity back. Cold shower is also a folk remedy described to have numerous benefits for the body system including cleaning the circulatory and reducing blood pressure.

One downside for this method is its difficulty for execution. Getting my ass in a cold shower in itself is hard enough, it takes a loath of willpower to do it at a cold winter night at 3am. I find doing warm up exercises before the shower very important to get my motivation up and also not get sick the next day.

2. A quick nap Effectiveness: *****/*

This is really a double edged sword. Getting up from a 15 minute quick nap sometimes can really feel like having a whole night of quality sleep. You are fully charged and the effect stays very long too. In a sense, this is way better than A dance in a cold shower. That is, when it works. When it doesn’t work, which has a not so insignificant chance to happen, the result is waking up fully energized by the fact that the now 30 minute due project has not progressed at all since last night. I can say that because I’ve had both, and concluded this is way too risky for important things. From my experience, if you do choose to follow this method, make sure you snap out of bed quickly when you wake up. Stand firm, walk around the hallway to “start up” your system. That minimizes the chance of you deciding you could use an “extra 5 minute sleep”.

Speak Effectiveness: ***

You’ll want to choose someone who’s not also sleepy, for obvious reasons. When trying to talk to someone, it is very easy to get too excited and you end up having traded some quick nap time for chit chatting. If you are working alone at night and there’s no one awake for you to talk to, try speaking out loud and pretend to be chatting. A good way to do it is reading out articles aloud, with articulate pronunciation & tonality. However you choose, just get the mouth moving.

Chewing gum Effectiveness: **

Another way to get your mouth moving. This is not as effective as speaking out loud because you can still fall asleep when you’re chewing. Especially during the times when the gum starts to get flabby and loses the effect.

Sit straight Effectiveness: **

All other things aside, you can at least influence your psychology with your physiology. As futile as it may sound, it actually gives a little awareness, and this is very portable too! You can do it almost everywhere, even in a classroom.