Posts Tagged ‘productivity’

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Caring For Your Drinking Bird

by Derek on August 24th, 2010
Caring For Your Drinking Bird

A while ago I bought one of those drinking birds to have around my desk at work. When I was in high school I bought one when given the opportunity during one of my science classes. Tragically that one met with an accident that ended in broken glass and chemicals. My current bird is still going strong (except the cloth around his head is very loose and fragile and will rip easily when it’s moist).

Yesterday Anna was asking me why I didn’t have any water for my bird ever since I took him home. So I got the cup I had been using at work and went for the filtered water. In my mind I was getting the filtered water because I knew the water could get a little gross since I don’t change it often, so hopefully filtered wouldn’t get gross as fast as tap water. In retrospect it does look like I’m concerned about the quality of water my drinking bird gets :P

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First Things First

by Derek on July 30th, 2010
First Things First

Actually of the games on that shelf I only have Mass Effect 2 right now (got both games at great prices due to various sales). I’m not actually interesting in Oblivion, kind of interested in Fallout 3 and a little bit more interested in Dragon Age. Even though I’m not super penny pinching right now I was saying to Anna that RPGs are very cost effective in terms of dollar value for how many hours of entertainment you get out of them. Especially because a lot of these have been out for a while and already have game of the year editions or editions with DLC already included on the disc.

Mass Effect ultimately was a very satisfying game with a great climax that was rousing and fun to play through. I feel like it’s been a long time since I played through a game which got my blood boiling during its climax. Still though, there’s a lot of jank in Mass Effect that brought the experience down several notches despite being overall a very ambitious and well realized game universe. Based on improvements I’ve heard I’m very very much looking forward to Mass Effect 2. I think though that I’m gonna play it as a Renegade because it seems like more fun. Plus the way the dialogue is delivered from Shepard I think it’ll be a better fit. His “I have to go” or “I have work to do” often feels abrupt and rude which would make sense if he was being a jerk all the time.

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Unemployment Day 1

by Derek on July 27th, 2010
Unemployment Day 1

I hate hate hate dealing with anything money related and also official documents. Even after I know for 100% fact that everything went right part of me is still convinced that I did something wrong.

Today and yesterday I woke up either with or before my alarm totally awake without any difficulty. The thing about having a weekend after a workweek is that all I ever want to do is relax which makes doing “productive” things very difficult whether it’s work or playing video games. But now that I have all this time there’s no need to relax from anything so I’ve been rather productive.

Yesterday I read about a third of “Halo: The Fall of Reach” which is a book I borrowed from my friend JC. Went to Manhattan to do some errands, went to kung fu and watched some “IT Crowd.” I think I’m  also going to use this time to learn to make more breakfast foods. This morning I made whole wheat pancakes (I mistakenly bought whole wheat flour a long time ago and have been trying to get rid of it). They turned out ok, but I think I just don’t like whole wheat stuff, so it’ll probably be a while before all the flour is gone T_T

Mass Effect getting a little bit better, but I still feel super weak because I keep dying in firefights whether it’s on foot or in the Mako. Hopefully leveling up helps.

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After Work Productivity

by Derek on July 13th, 2010
After Work Productivity

Actually not entirely true, I was quite productive last night and was working on stuff until 2:00 AM. Though I think the trick is that I had my beer close to the end of the night instead of the beginning so this way it took longer to kick in. Also I had it with dinner so I had food in my stomach. Playing games after a beer not very hard. Getting motivated to do something that could be but isn’t necessarily fun, not very hard but not easy either :P

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Yes, That’s Productive

by Derek on January 25th, 2010
Yes, That’s Productive

Actually I’m taking out a few details. First we had to go to buy special food for Anna’s cat and while we were out bought ingredients we needed to make steamed pork buns. If my pedometer is to be believed it was a mile and a half walk the entire way.

Then we made the steam buns which took several hours because the recipe requires waiting for the dough to rise, then making all the skins, buns etc. Takes a lot of time but well worth it for the light and fluffy results! This time I think I messed up and made the skins too thin so they ended up being more like dumplings than buns.

Rest of the time I watched Anna playing Okami on the Wii since I feel bad that I’m always hogging the TV playing my games. I’m playing Infamous right now which is fun, but I admit probably not the most fun to watch someone else play since it’s an open world game and the story bits take a while to get to when you’re trying to do all the side missions first.

Funny what qualifies as a productive weekend. Oh and we recently got our voice activated recorder to see if we can catch myself saying stuff while I sleep. It turns out it’s the same recorder of this more famous sleep talkin’ man whom I learned of shortly after starting my twitter. We’ll see if I get similarly amusing results.

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Secret to Productivity

by Derek on January 6th, 2010
Secret to Productivity

Or it could be having a sense of obligation to beat video games you already own before purchasing new ones, and having those video games be really boring. Also I’m coming off of my two week vacation where I did a fair bit of gaming, but when I’m done still had time to do other stuff. Whereas during a regular work week my nights are pretty short because I either have kung fu or Japanese class four nights a week so then I feel like playing games with what little time I have.

Anyway, the two games burning a hole in my shelf right now are Prince of Persia (the new cel-shaded one) and Gears of War which I purchased recently ’cause it’s really cheap now. Prince of Persia is just plain monotonous. Fight occasional guy, platform to boss, fight, retread ground to collect stuff, repeat.

Gears of War looks nice, shooting is okay but the game’s story is virtually non-existent, the pacing is rather slow and the difficulty level is such that I have to play casual mode otherwise I’m dying every two seconds. Plus this is the first game to make a satellite laser seem crappy. The reason being that the monsters so far that I’ve had to use the satellite laser on take five or so hits before dying.

Also, I played a ton of Uncharted 2 over vacation which has fantastic pacing so playing a badly paced game with no story is very difficult.

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No Better Way to Work Slower

by Derek on December 17th, 2009
No Better Way to Work Slower

I know from talking to friends that it’s not just me who has someone in their office who spends more hours in the office than anyone else yet accomplishes a fraction of the work everyone else does. It’s only worse when they complain about having too much work to do or stand around doing nothing.


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Early to Rise

by Derek on June 29th, 2009
Early to Rise

This past weekend I was in Boston visiting my family, seeing my sister’s second baby and playing a lot with her first. The thing about being in a house which has a 2 year old is that you wake up EARLY. Okay, for a lot of people it’s not really early, but part of their normal routine. But for me, 6 AM is two or so hours earlier than I wake up every day. It’s funny because when you’re with a 2-year old you sort of end up on their schedule including the nap in the middle of the day.

Anyway, when I got home I was up for a while but ended up crashing pretty early and waking up at 6 AM without an alarm. I went back to sleep, but when I was still okay at 7 I decided I might as well get up. Plus I hadn’t done my comic the night before so I needed the extra time.


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RSS Makes Low Productivity More Efficient

by Derek on May 29th, 2009
RSS Makes Low Productivity More Efficient

I have a very packed RSS reader with 30+ subscriptions in it. I’d say a dozen of which have lots and lots of updates during the course of a day. I use NetNewsWire for Mac OS X which has a feature that displays the number of unread articles in the dock whenever it refreshes. For the longest time it was set to refresh every half hour or so. Then I realized that it was destroying my already horrible attention span so I turned off the automatic refresh and the unread counter. Lo and behold I’ve gone entire work days without refreshing it! Not to say that I still don’t do it (and enjoy seeing the large counter of unread articles) but the temptation has been far lessened.

Despite my love of computers, all these little updated things really amount to internet junk food. Addictive and easy to swallow small bits. This is why I try to stay away from the more popular things like that now such as Facebook updates, twitter and such. I already find myself closing reddit links if the article is too long, instead enjoying the funny pictures more. I don’t want my brain to regress any more than it already has or any faster. Whether or not I’m doing a good job of that is debatable. Maybe ultimately I need a job where I don’t have a computer (yeah right). Only thing that makes me feel better is knowing kids growing up with all this technology are even worse off than me :P

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Subway Boredom

by Derek on March 17th, 2009
Subway Boredom

I know everyone uses their subway time differently, but I’m one of those people who see it as a time when I can really focus on something and get stuff done. Most of the time it’s recreational activities like listening to podcasts, playing games on my Nintendo DS, or reading. It’s one of the things I know I’d miss if I moved somewhere I had to drive to and from work each day. It could take the same amount of time, but the number of things I’d be able to do during my commute would be reduced dramatically. The subway for all its crazy people and such is still ironically enough one of the most distraction free places in my day. At work or at home I have boundless ways to entertain myself or RSS readers to check, but the subway is a pure environment where I’ll focus on one thing.


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