A Day in the Life of a (Junior) Meece

Wow, what a crazy two and a half weeks it’s been: 2 midterms, 2 projects, a protest on the third anniversary of the Iraq war, and EPiC X (the Gaming Club’s annual gaming convention), all over now. And just in time for spring to finally arrive with some superb weather. I’ll be dusting off the shorts and possibly getting in some ultimate frisbee action this weekend, the prospect of which has put me in an infectiously good mood.

Now, if you know me well, you should be surprised that “computer games” aren’t mentioned anywhere in the above paragraph. While I haven’t completely given them up (played Max Payne 2 for a half-an-hour today), I have been on somewhat of a hiatus from them since spring break, only partially intentional. The main factor in my computer gaming withdrawal has been the massive amounts of activities in which I’ve been involved recently (see above). However, there’s something else at work here, because I am still on the computer for hours everyday but not playing games.

Instead, I’m generally doing one or all of the following:

1) Browsing the web – I have about 20 webcomics, 5 gaming news sites, 10 blogs, several online forum RPGs, and other miscellaneous websites that I check daily. Thanks to Firefox, it’s incredibly easy to load up all of these sites quickly and then waste spend an hour or two going through all of them. Plus, most of those sites link to other ones, and I can’t resist looking at a few of those, so that prolongs the process.

2) Reading e-mail – I have 5 e-mail accounts, although only 3 of them receive mail regularly. I check them several times an hour, so in aggregate, that probably adds up to an hour of reading and responding to e-mails per day.

3) School work – Many of my courses use a system called Blackboard, which allows students to do much of their work online. In addition, I’m a computer scientist, so programming assignments come up from time to time. The amount of work I do on a daily basis varies greatly from day to day, but I’d estimate that I use up an hour and a half on average with this.

4) Listening to music – Winamp is almost constantly running on my machine while I’m in my room, especially when I’m doing work because it helps me relax and ignore the tedious nature of many of my assignments (I enjoy programming, but debugging can get very frustrating). Sometimes, I’ll take a break and “rock out” (a scary sight, to be sure; be glad you can’t see it), but otherwise, this occurs simultaneously with everything else.

So by the time I finish those routines, the work that I do offline, class, the meetings I attend, eating, listening to speakers on campus, and writing posts like this one (whoa, meta-blogging!), it’s midnight and I have to go to bed, particularly Monday and Wednesday night with my ridiculous 7:55 am class on Tuesday/Thursday. This fact doesn’t bother me a whole lot because my lack of computer gaming time is largely self-imposed and voluntary; if I wanted to play computer games, I could, but I choose to do these other things instead. What’s so bad about that?

Well, I have 4 computer games on my desk that I want to finish but have only barely touched: Fable, Black and White 2, Dungeon Siege 2, and Star Wars: Empire at War, in case you’re curious. But the nature of each of these games is such that you need to set aside at least a couple of hours to make any significant progress in them. For this reason, when I do find myself with an unexpected free hour, I’ll turn to a console game or a first-person shooter like Counter-Strike because they’re immediately satisfying and therefore fit my lifestyle infinitely better. I guess the only hope for these other games is the summer, but by then, my backlog of unplayed games will be even larger. Meh, them’s the breaks.

Hey look, I just got a new e-mail. Oh shoot! I forgot that I have to look through the European section of the NY Times online so that I’ll be ready for my IR 56 pop quizzes! And I have a club meeting in an hour. g2g ttyl pst gg lol.