When Jenny's gone...

I become very bored and lonely.

For a little background info, Jenny has left for a trip to Asia, where she will work in the Google Tokyo office for a few days before hopping over to Qingdao to see her Grandparents. I, in the meantime, am continuing the work thing in Mountain View, and attempting amuse myself while she's gone.

Some things I've done:

- Played video games: Probably about 24 hours worth during the weekend. I got a game called "Just Cause" for Xbox 360, which is just like the Grand Theft Auto series. You fly around a gorgeous island, completing missions to overthrow the government and grabbing territory from drug lords and corrupt government officials. While the quest for 1000 Xbox achievements points continues on that game, I have only left the house to do the following...

- Eat - at Google...three of my four meals were there. Well, I only drove their twice. On Saturday I got enough chipotle BBQ pork loin to last through dinner. And Saturday was some thai chicken. Very very good!

- Gym - I'm proud to say I went. Made me feel worthwhile.

- Shop - took my butt out to get some clothes I really didn't need. I went to Express Men at Valley Fair and bought two pairs of jeans and a t-shirt. I also stopped by Old Navy and got some socks and boxers. That made the trip worth it.

So what will I do the rest of this week? I've done all my Christmas shopping, so it will be more of the same. Work, gym, video games. Gotta get it all out of my system before Jenny comes back!

Xbox obsessed

The best thing about Xbox 360 is that there are achievement points associated with each title. 1000 points can be obtained for each game, based on completing certain objectives. For me, I've always been obsessed with completely beating a game - getting 100% completition in GTA Vice City or beating Farcry/Fear/HalfLife2 on the hardest setting.

But now Xbox live records a gamer score, with all of the points associated with the games you've played. It totally makes me keep playing games just with the point of getting achievements to have a higher score. I'm around 5000 points, but people online are as high as 50000. Maybe one day I'll reach that much!

VIdeo Game Diets

I guess it could come to this. West Virginia, which has the worse child obesity rates in the country, hopes to put a DDR game in each of its schools. At it stands, DDR has been proven to help improve health:

"Preliminary results from a 24-week study of 50 overweight or obese children, aged 7 to 12, showed that those who played the game at home for at least 30 minutes five days per week maintained their weight and saw a reduction in some risk factors for heart disease and diabetes."

Here's a link to the full Yahoo! article.

I think this is a step in the right direction, but we really need to stop eating McDonald's and get rid of soda machines in schools. There's little help in playing DDR and then cooling down with a 200calorie Pepsi.

Winterbells High Score

My high score from the best Winterbells game of my life. 22,325,992,035,810,622. I don't even know what that number is.

Wilmot: twenty-TOO FUCKING MUCH.

I'm never playing again.

How to effectively waste time over Winter Break

I had the goal of writing most of my Senior Thesis over Winter Break. It was a grand plan, consisting of staying in my room, with my laptop and my hundreds of pages of notes and articles, typing away on Microsoft Word for two straight weeks. I wanted to hit 60 pages over break. But who am I kidding? There's no way I could be that productive. It's Thursday night and I don't think I've even hit twenty pages, and it's twenty poorly written pages at that. So what have I been doing? Here's a list of five things.

*Before I begin, I would like to thank my friend Wilmot, for singlehandedly dropping my productivity with his amazing links that have distracted me this entire break. If it wasn't for him, there might have been no need for this post. Oh, by the way, this is Wilmot pictured here.

1) Lemmings Online:

I got this link from Wilmot. If you haven't played Lemmings before, the game is quite simple. Lemmings drop from a hatch and start walking mindlessly in one direction. It's up to you to direct them to do certain tasks, like digging, climbing, blocking, or even turning into a bomb to blow themselves up. Your goal is to get a certain number of Lemmings into their exit before time runs out. It's much harder than it looks. Of course, I decided I had to complete as many stages as I could. Unfortunately, the Javascript platform would not register the necessary fast clicking needed to make bashers bash fast enough to beat the Mayhem level I was stuck on. So, I had to move on. Nonetheless, I was up until 5-6am many nights playing this game.

Reward: Nothing

2) Eyemaze: Grow Cube, Rpg, ver. 3.

From Wilmot again. It's hard to explain these puzzles. They're 3D and based off a flash platform. The object is to complete the puzzle in a correct order. And it's hard! Things interact with each other differently based upon on the order that you use them. Of course, Jenny had to figure out how to beat the level before me an hour after I started playing. So besides finding out that I'm pretty dumb, I stayed up until 7am playing this game. Double dumb.

Reward: Seeing a cube turn into a lizard and a bouncing ball travel through a tube.

3) Orisinal.com's Winterbells

Courtesy of Wilmot. This game features the cutest that can be bunny as it hops higher and higher on white winterbells. Each bell you hit gives you 10 points plus 10 more for each subsequent bell you hit and every now and then there's a dove that will DOUBLE your score! Needless to say, this game really has no upper threshold, so you can play as long as you want for and go as high as you want.

Reward: Hitting 1,088,576,251,100. Basically 1 trillion points. That's fulfilling. Sorta. No, not really.

4) NY Times Crossword Puzzle / Yahoo Crossword Puzzle / St. Louis Post-Dispatch Crossword Puzzle

I became a crossword puzzle fiend over break. My family has been into them for as long as I can remember, but since I was the only one really around the house, I got first dibs. I did the print editions of the St. Louis Post Dispatch Puzzle which included their own puzzle plus an older puzzle from the New York Times. And if I was feeling lucky, I would do the one found in the NY Times. And when that ran out, there was always a puzzle on Yahoo games. But this would be something I could only do Monday - Wednesday. After that, it gets too hard, except for the Post-Dispatch puzzles.

Reward: Completing a puzzle feels good. A self-esteem boost when you have no friends.

5) Drinking

Of course this would screw me over. How could I ever think some wine would make it any easier to write a paper at night? With my sister's boyfriend visiting for the past few days, work was a no-no past dinner.

Reward: Being tipsy feels nice. Everything seems so much more funny.

Except for the last two, Wilmot contributed mightily to all of this procrastination. So thanks a lot. I can't say its been all that bad. I've definitely had a relaxing break, I've gotten a lot of sleep, and I even did productive things like get my license renewed, cleaned parts of the house, and went shopping. But when I think about all of the work I could've done, I just get sad. And then I go back to surfing the internet. :-)