01 September 2010

Time allocation:	The blog	8:17
	Family dinner in Jerusalem	5:09
	Mundane activities	1:44
	Figuring out how to wear a necktie	0:25
Notes:	I've been working on this interactive blog post Little Social Games for weeks now, and since there wasn't much blog activity in August I wanted it to be done by this performance review post in order to keep the focus of the blog more on the big posts and less on the constant stream of little ones. This was the last day in which that would be possible, of course, so I set aside a majority of the day for the writing. For a few hours I was pursuing an ending very different to what's in the post now, which would have been more technically ambitious and flashy. I was very proud of the technical work I accomplished, but ultimately decided it wasn't working artistically, so I scrapped those hours of work and started that part of the post over from the conceptual level. It was a very hard decision, especially since I was rushing to finish the work the same day. But it was absolutely the right call. The entire family went out to dinner in Jerusalem, including some aunts and uncles who haven't been to Israel in years. It was a very long evening, though not such a bad one.
Performance review:	Wow. Good start.
Score:	10/10

02 September 2010

Time allocation:	Miriam's wedding	8:19
	Mundane activities	2:45
	Super Mario Galaxy 2	1:40
	Helping my parents with the seating cards	1:40
	Gamer Mom	0:57
	The blog	0:19
	Comics	0:19
Notes:	My sister got married today. It was nice. I wore white dress pants and a purple tie, and sat with a bunch of people who'd talk with me about TV shows. There will not be a blog post on the subject, because there's very little else to be said.
Performance review:	Two pairs of activities are exactly equal in time, which is astonishing since it was entirely unintentional. Also, the amount of time spent on the wedding is very nearly equal to yesterday's blogging time. I'm not sure I can fit these equalities into any neat little conceptual dualities, but it does give a sense that there's some sort of balance here, and that tells me that something's being done right. Speaking of which, the wedding makes this a unique day regardless of any other activities, so I'm very happy to see Gamer Mom on the list. With two highly-focused yet excellent days in a row, I may have to reconsider my general attitude toward activities exceeding seven hours in length. It's certainly something to think about.
Score:	10/10

03-04 September 2010

Time allocation:	Hanging out with family	3:33
	Mundane activities	3:15
	Comics	3:01
	TV shows	1:15
	Super Mario Galaxy 2	0:42
Notes:	I'm probably not going to get to see my brother, aunts and uncles again before they leave tomorrow, because while they're here I'll be in Jerusalem for the first rehearsal of Ruddigore. So I sat around, showing Benjy Super Mario Galaxy 2 and how I have my computer set up, playing piano, chatting with my aunts and uncles. I wish they were here for longer. It is likely to be years before I see any of them again.
Performance review:	This is a shorter day than usual, at only 11:46. For that amount of time, 3:15 of mundane activities is a bit too much. It demonstrates a lack of confidence in the direction of the day. Gamer Mom ought to have been given some time.
Score:	5/10

05 September 2010

Time allocation:	Ruddigore	5:57
	Mundane activities	4:05
	Super Mario Galaxy 2	1:52
	Comics	1:45
	Recording discs	1:04
	Looking into Firefox extension-writing	0:31
Notes:	The first rehearsal of Ruddigore went well. Afterward I listened to some of the soundtrack and went over some of the libretto. I will need to go over it more thoroughly later. I reached Super Mario Galaxy 2, which was a bit anticlimactic. I hope the "real" ending is better. I recorded a few discs for family members, of The Matchmaker and Keep Walking, Kid, which I instructed my mother to give them at the party they were having which I couldn't attend because it was concurrent with the rehearsal. It occurred to me that I'd get more work done on Gamer Mom with fewer distractions, so I looked into what would be involved in writing a Firefox extension that prevented me from opening other tabs while working on it in Google Documents. It turned out it was too complicated.
Performance review:	Where's Gamer Mom? That's what should have filled all that wasted time. And really, the disc-recording was wasted time too. That could have been finished in fifteen minutes, if I were trying.
Score:	5/10

06 September 2010

Time allocation:	Mundane activities	5:55
	Hanging around with my grandfather	5:10
	Super Mario Galaxy 2	2:01
	Comics	1:43
	Ruddigore	1:37
	TV shows	0:59
	Gamer Mom	0:33
	Installing Mario Kart 64	0:07
Notes:	The music in Ruddigore has gotten stuck in my head. I imagine it'll leave me alone in February 2011. My grandparents (on my father's side) left tonight, and they were in the house all day, so I spent a few hours with my grandfather. To get things started I installed Mario Kart 64, because that's one of the very few games he knows, but then we played Super Monkey Ball and Toki Tori. Afterward I showed him The March of Bulk, which made him laugh, and I told him about Gamer Mom, which launched us into a discussion. We talked a lot.
Performance review:	I thought we were done with mundane activities being on top. Other than that the day is perfectly competent, what with Gamer Mom and unusual activities and more work on the play, but this is level 2 and I'm not going to let the mundanity slide.
Score:	6/10

07 September 2010

Time allocation:	Mundane activities	4:07
	Ruddigore	2:48
	Super Mario Galaxy 2	2:12
	TV shows	1:41
	Gamer Mom	1:26
	Comics	0:50
	The blog	0:43
	Sharing CDs and chatting	0:35
	Loricum	0:25
Notes:	My mother's parents left today, which meant I was free to restore the post "It's A Trap!" to its proper place on this page. It may seem a bit anticlimactic after the more refined "Little Social Games", but the blog is more complete with this post in it. Until now, the post was visible by invitation only, and I made up a story about it offending my mother so that I'd have an excuse to prevent family members from reading it. I've erased that lie from the blog, because with the wedding over there's no longer any need for it. I read through the libretto for Ruddigore. It's good. I burned a disc of Astro City comics and gave it to Avri, and I gave my Babylon 5 discs to David. I tried a free adventure game made by a group of teenagers, because a review on Adventure Gamers made it sound more interesting than I would have expected. It turned out it was every bit as awful as I should have expected, because it is a game made by people who don't understand games at all.
Performance review:	Mundane activities is on top again. It's not so hard to keep busy, really it isn't. So why do we have days like this? The day is way too unfocused for my tastes. The biggest activity is less than three hours long. There needs to be much more energy. I don't care where it comes from, it just needs to be there. Because it absolutely is noticeable when it's missing.
Score:	4/10

08-11 September 2010

Time allocation:	Mundane activities	6:19
	Reading comics	2:48
	Eric the Unready	2:14
	Watching the movie THX 1138	1:40
	Fixing a problem in Linux	1:16
	Maboshi's Arcade	0:16
	Practicing the Yom Kippur music with my father	0:10
Notes:	My goal was to only do activities I hadn't done in a while, with the exception of Gamer Mom. I didn't meet my goal. I actually was doing pretty well for the first half of the day, playing such games as Eric the Unready and Maboshi's Arcade. But in between the two halves of the day there were three days of Rosh Hashanah and Shabbat, and that broke my focus. After that I wasted a lot of time browsing the web and I read the latest comics (which came out during the holiday).
Performance review:	There's ambition here, but there's also more than six hours of wasted time. And having the one regular activity be not Gamer Mom but comics is just depressing.
Score:	2/10

12 September 2010

Time allocation:	Hanging out with Moshe	5:54
	The blog	3:08
	Super Mario Galaxy 2	2:25
	Mundane activities	2:19
	Gamer Mom	0:44
Notes:	Today was a fast day. Moshe came over, and we played Phoenix Wright and an hour of Myst. (He'd played it long before without getting too far; I showed him a few things he hadn't seen.) After the fast I asked him to leave so that I could work on the blog. That's the start of a new large-scale project, because I've written myself into a corner where any short and simple posts would seem like a step backwards. I reached what seems to be the final level of Super Mario Galaxy 2, which was very cool but not as big as I might have liked. I continued to study what I've written so far of Gamer Mom, tying branches together where appropriate.
Performance review:	Unoriginal, but good.
Score:	9/10

13 September 2010

Time allocation:	TV shows	3:21
	Mundane activities	2:24
	Comics	2:23
	Super Mario Galaxy 2	2:17
	The blog	1:39
	Ruddigore	1:10
	Listening to the radio, then writing a letter	0:50
	Gamer Mom	0:24
	Phone calls	0:14
Notes:	I started seriously watching the TV show Mad Men. I watched a few random episodes back when it started and it didn't seem interesting, but someone recently recommended the show to me so I started watching the episodes in order. It's much better than I gave it credit for. I burned another comics disc, and started reading a well-regarded manga series called Pluto. I reached the second ending of Super Mario Galaxy 2. I listened to a new concerto of Eliezer Elper's on the radio (around a half hour long), then I digested the experience a bit and wrote him an e-mail. The thoughts from the concert were still swirling around my head, so I wrote a blog post. I later wrote down some notes for the upcoming blog-project. I practiced Ruddigore properly for the first time. I wrote a few more nodes of Gamer Mom. I spoke on the phone with my grandfather, and I called someone about a possible continuation to the post "Multiplayer". (No, I haven't forgotten about that.)
Performance review:	There's little wasted time here, and some reasonably interesting activities. The order of activities is wrong, though. Just because we're past Level 1 doesn't mean balance isn't still important.
Score:	7/10

14 September 2010

Time allocation:	Games night	5:05
	TV shows	3:56
	Mundane activities	3:36
	The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time	1:09
	Composing	0:47
	Cave Story	0:41
	Gamer Mom	0:19
Notes:	I continued watching Mad Men, which I seem to already be somewhat addicted to after just two days. I tried (without much success) to resurrect an old musical theme. I wrote a few key nodes in Gamer Mom.
Performance review:	Uninteresting, but not terrible.
Score:	6/10

15 September 2010

Time allocation:	Ruddigore	6:32
	Watching TV (Mad Men)	5:04
	Mundane activities	3:27
	Reading comics	1:37
Notes:	Today was my first rehearsal with the whole cast (Well, whoever showed up, anyway.) of Ruddigore. It was fun. I spent an hour practicing in the morning, and at the rehearsal I was able to do a perfectly adequate job of singing solos which I learned on my own time. The rehearsal was more for the chorus than the leads, so the music director would have just skipped half of my bits. But the fact that I already knew much of my part allowed me to already be doing the melody as the chorus learned to accompany. I finished watching the first season of Mad Men. It is a truly great show; I don't know why I didn't see that when I watched some episodes previously.
Performance review:	Ruddigore is still new enough that a rehearsal with the full cast qualifies as an interesting activity. But could this day possibly be any less ambitious in its execution?
Score:	5/10

16 September 2010

Time allocation:	The blog	5:43
	Mundane activities	3:25
	The Curfew	3:15
	Yom Kippur music	0:57
	Reading comics	0:37
	Buying a new watch	0:27
Notes:	I did some fine work on the blog, writing a third of intro to the new section plus the entire post which comes after the intro. I played through the Flash adventure game The Curfew because it's written by Kieron Gillen (who wrote the wonderful but short-lived comic S.W.O.R.D.). It turns out he's not nearly as good at writing adventure games as comics, but it was diverting enough. I got what seemed to be a happy ending. My watch died of old age. I got a new one, which is very different.
Performance review:	There was certainly time for Gamer Mom, so it's a shame I don't see that. It's a decent day.
Score:	8/10

17-18 September 2010

Time allocation:	Mundane activities	4:08
	Watching TV (Mad Men)	3:51
	Super Mario Galaxy 2	1:35
	Meals before and after the long Yom Kippur fast	1:20
	Reading comics	1:03
	Gamer Mom	0:37
Performance review:	What's there to say? This is a terrible day, redeemed only slightly by the presence of Gamer Mom.
Score:	3/10

19 September 2010

Time allocation:	The blog	3:36
	Watching a TV show	3:22
	Mundane activities	2:33
	Watching a movie	2:03
	Reading comics	1:12
	Toki Tori	0:48
	Gamer Mom	0:15
Notes:	The first half of the day was entirely passive: I watched a few more episodes of Mad Men and the movie Iron Man 2. Then I played a devious level of the puzzle game Toki Tori to wake up the active side of my brain, and spent a few hours continuing the big blog thing. I read seven more issues of Spider-Man from 1991. I'm dealing with one of several particularly knotty sections of Gamer Mom. When I'm done writing it, I may need to program it in some primitive form just to make sure it makes sense. It's hard to be sure just from the text, because there's too much to keep track of.
Performance review:	Not bad. I am waiting for some originality again, but this day is perfectly fine.
Score:	8/10

20 September 2010

Time allocation:	Mundane activities	8:42
	Watching Mad Men	5:30
	Trying to install Mac OS X on a virtual computer	0:45
	Figuring out how to upgrade KDE	0:25
Notes:	I couldn't tell you how many episodes of Mad Men I watched. And when I wasn't, I was either waiting for the next episode or reading analyses of the episodes I'd watched on the internet. I tried to install an illegal copy of Mac OS X with VirtualBox to make Mac versions of my game with, and it didn't work. I found out later in the day that I'd probably messed up something simple, but I had already impulsively deleted the installation file (which took me over a week to download). I thought that maybe if I upgraded KDE from 4.42 to 4.45 my computer would stop crashing occasionally. But I upgraded, and later in the day my computer crashed again.
Performance review:	This update is late because I dreaded posting this. A few hours of the web browsing should have been counted as Mad Men rather than mundane activities, because really reading about the show and watching the show are part of the same activity. But this still would have been a lousy day. Mad Men is just a TV show, albeit a fantastic one. It's a mostly passive activity. This addiction has gotten out of control.
Score:	1/10

21 September 2010

Time allocation:	Watching Mad Men	6:03
	Games night	5:44
	Gamer Mom	1:58
	Mundane activities	1:35
	Ruddigore	0:27
Notes:	My goal for today was to solve the "knot" in Gamer Mom which I mentioned earlier. What I mean by that is that there are a bunch of intertwined paths, and every possible combination of buttons needs to work without the section getting too big if at all possible. My plan was to program what I had written in BlitzMax, using the button function I made for The Perfect Color, just to work out the logic of it all. I adapted the button function and copied what I had so far, then I added a few nodes. After that I decided to reward myself with work well done by watching an episode of Mad Men. It would give a good message if Gamer Mom were above Mad Men, wouldn't it? Well, maybe that would work better if it were really close. Say, three episodes of Mad Men. And so it went, and I ended up staying up until 4:30 AM because I couldn't stop watching until I reached the end of season 3.
Performance review:	Well, it's not every day games night is passed. That's interesting, I guess. Gamer Mom has a significant presence, and mundane activities are minimal... if it weren't for the fact that I had absolutely no control over this day's focus, this would be a 9/10. But I had absolutely no control over this day's focus. I could very easily make excuses, and I could very easily conceded that Mory Buckman is going to be an addict. But an addict cannot, by definition, be in control of his life.
Score:	6/10

22-23 September 2010

Time allocation:	The blog	3:25
	Mad Men	3:23
	Mundane activities	3:19
	Comics	2:19
Notes:	I'm getting close to being able to post the beginning of this blog thing, honest. The introduction is a lot of work.
Performance review:	Good. I know how hard it's been to keep Mad Men from taking over the day, so I'm impressed that the blog overtook it. It's not very interesting, though.
Score:	8/10

I didn't notice it in the past two days, but I've already passed the point where it's not possible to win the month. So again I'm going to end early. I actually lost this one a bit faster than August, pathetically enough. Anyway:

September 2010

Average score:	5.94
The month in review:	The month started out strong with Miriam's wedding. But as soon as there weren't external events making my life interesting, I fell into a creative slump. The most noticeable characteristic of the month was the prominence of the TV show Mad Men, which demonstrated just how much of a problem my addictive tendencies are. Also, I again struggled to keep mundane activities below the 3-hour line. The first problem, I don't know exactly what I can do about. This is hardly the first time I've gotten so addicted to a specific activity that all others stopped mattering as much. And while I'd like for this to be the last time, I can't figure out a way to make that happen. If you have any suggestions, please offer them in the commenting section. Otherwise, I'm going to ignore the problem for now. I'm almost done with these Mad Men marathons, since I'm just a few episodes away from catching up. So the rest of the month is going to be focused on minimizing wasted time. I'll do one exercise, day after day. The rules are simple: I'll count how much time I'm wasting, and if it exceeds 59 minutes I lose. If I can pull that off consistently, and if I finish up Mad Men, next month should be much better than this one.
Verdict:	TRY AGAIN

24-25 September 2010

I watched nine episodes of Mad Men, in so doing catching up to the rest of the world. After Shabbat I went to the yearly open Sukkah at a neighbor's house with many delicious cheesecakes. Eli invited me to a LAN party, and I'd never been to one before so I accepted. This involved bringing my computer to Ramat Beit Shemesh. We played the first-person shooter Urban Terror for hours, and it was a decent way to pass the time but I would have had more fun staying at home. First-person shooters are evidently not my thing. When I got home, I made a mistake in plugging in my computer and blew a fuse in it. I sat on the floor in shock for 4 minutes and then went to sleep. My total free time in the day was 0:54.

WIN

26 September 2010

The cost to repair my computer was a quarter of the price I paid for the entire machine. It's more than I currently own, so I owe my mother. With that hanging over my head all day, I was unfocused and slow. Even with an extended games night lasting from 5:00 to 12:40, mundane activities were at 2:33.

LOSE

27 September 2010

I finished the blog post and couldn't decide on what to do with the rest of the day. Mundane activities were 4:02.

LOSE

28 September 2010

Mundane activities are at 1:10. So close. The trouble is that I've been allowing myself to browse the web. Maybe that should be off-limits entirely. I spent nearly two hours on Gamer Mom, and went into Jerusalem with my parents to escape the house before a party Dena was throwing.

LOSE

29-30 September 2010

I spent the day on three activities: comics, TV and Phoenix Wright (with Moshe). I made sure that every minute I could spare was devoted to these activities, the result being 51 minutes of mundane activities.

WIN