Productivity Cycle
I’ve recently come to a significant discovery about my productivity cycle.
Wednesday is my strong day.
During a “normal” 5 day work week, you can find my productivity cycle is lowest on Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday and Thursday have this huge kick — I get the most done on these two days. Friday will see me tapering off, but still more productive than Monday or Tuesday (possibly combined).
During a “long” 7 (actually 12 day) work week, my productivity cycle is completely whacked. I’ll push my top productivity juices from Wednesday of week 1 to as long as I can (usually somewhere on Sunday or Monday of week 2). Monday afternoon will experience the crash. Absolute 0 productivity. Tuesday will see a ramp up similar to a normal Monday. Wednesday will be either Monday #2 and/or Tuesday. Thursday might be Tuesday #2, but more probably is a Wednesday. Friday will be Thursday. And the glorious weekend of sleep will then finally commence.
Most Saturdays are sleep days. Sleep in as long as possible. If we just survived a long week, this might be sleeping from dark to dark, Friday night until Saturday night. That’s around 20 hours. A normal Saturday is more like 12 to 14 hours.
Sundays are often similar to Saturdays, except that I’ll attempt to leave my Cave, at least for a little while. Not always.
World of Warcraft
Started playing WoW again. They’ve made a fair bit of changes since I’ve been gone. Going to get Darkspear-Balaern to 70, since he’s really close, and then level up Uther-Balaern. Both are warlocks. Of course. Rebuilding my awesome UI is going to take a lot of time though. Oh well, building UIs is fun!
My Life as an Excel Spreadsheet
No, I’ve not recently become made up of two dimensional array boxes…although I am indeed made up of cells, technically speaking. I’ve decided to begin (again?) tracking my life through excel. First, I have a Weight & Calorie tracker that I’ve been coding up. It’s fairly handy, and automated, mostly. Secondly, I’ll be tracking my work hours more closely using another spreadsheet. I used to do this, but slacked off. Once I’m satisfied enough with an initial version, I’ll post again, and attach them.
Just a quick note. Started using Twitter and added a live update at the top of the side bar. In the links section, there is also a direct link to my Twitter page. I can now send quick short update notes using it, either by IM, twitter.com, or text message. And all y’all can recieve them those three ways, or read them here.
Character: Malcolm (Lshoan Harah)
On most Sunday nights, I can currently be found portraying a vampire named Malcolm at the Vampire: The Masquerade troupe game Lshoan Harah. Malcolm is a Nosferatu, whose face was smashed into a fence and had his right ear mangled by his Sire. This is my first attempt at his makeup.
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- Malcolm Makeup
Adventures in Hair Dye Land
So, the blue faded into a mottled mess. It was interesting looking though, various shades of blue and gold (due to the original bleaching process). So, a new bleaching was done, to attempt to get an even color to start with. Of course, this wasn’t exactly the best idea. I actually ended up with platinum roots, with green ends. No pictures of that part though. Applied the purple dye, which came out very well, but since there was no red left in my hair to begin with, under most lighting (which tends to be florescent) my hair appeared blue. It looked brilliantly purple in my bathroom (which has very warm tungsten lighting).
The back of my head faded much faster than the rest of my hair. I figure that it must have rubbed off on my pillowcase (since it was purple instead of its original gray). I had some purple and blue dye left, so I mixed it together, and used that. It turned out fairly well, but looked more blue than purple.
After this faded, since I was going to be visiting my parents, I attempted to dye my hair black. But instead it looked navy blue. When I went to get my hair cut, I asked the girls there what they thought. They told me that since my hair had no red pigment in it, not only would it look blue, the dyes would tend to fade a lot faster. So, I dyed my hair red. The faded parts looked really great as red, and the navy blue parts were then close to black. Then on top of this, I used the black dye, and thus my hair was indistinguishable from my natural color.
And that’s the update on my adventures in hair dye land. I’m sure many more adventures are to come!
Pictures after the jump. Read more
Hands On: The Wii Zapper
On Sunday I acquired a Wii Zapper™ that came bundled with Link’s Crossbow Training. The Zapper is essentially just a piece of plastic that you insert the Wii Remote™ (or Wiimote) and the Wii Nunchuk™ into. The Zapper is held with your dominant hand (the one with the trigger finger) in the front with your other hand on the back (where the Nunchuk is located). At first this position feels odd and backwards, but after some time, you get used to it. This will tend to be the configuration most games will probably use now that the Zapper has been released. The manual also condones an alternate configuration where you do not attach the Nunchuk to the Zapper chasis. Many games released prior to the Zapper will likely use this configuration. The Zapper sports a larger B button trigger, that makes pressing it much easier.
As far as Link’s Crossbow Training is concerned, it’s fairly fun and surprisingly well done for the price of the bundle (US$24.99). There are nine levels with three stages each, and various modes and objects that you have to shoot. Shootables include targets, boxes, pots, signs, dummies, and various monsters from the Zelda series. A number of familiar locations are present, as well as a number of familiar friendly creatures.
Of course I had to try the Zapper with Alien Syndrome. Playing my favorite class, The Seal, was great with the Zapper. I felt like I had a bit more fine grained control of my targeting reticle, and being able to use both hands to steady my weapon was really great. The “Nunchuk Attached Configuration” isn’t completely compatible though — two of three minigames require separate movement of the Nunchuk from the Remote. This isn’t a problem for me because I don’t really like to play those two minigames. “Nunchuk Separate Configuration” is completely compatible, and feels just fine. I feel like my shooting is a little less stable this way, but it feels much better than just holding the Remote alone–the constant pressing of the B button and aiming with the Remote alone starts to hurt my wrist after a while. The Zapper alleviates this problem. Note: Alien Syndrome isn’t the only shooter that makes me suffer from wrist ache–Metroid Prime 3: Corruption also causes this problem for me.
Should you get it? Sure! A nice budget game and a well made, sturdy peripheral that makes pumping the trigger and aiming much easier. This piece of plastic isn’t like those useless sports attachments.
Playing with ustream.tv
Colin and I were playing with the recording feature of ustream.tv. This is what resulted:
Tags: evangelion, intartubes, nge, streaming video, unit02, web service
On Joysticks and the Wii’s Success
I disagree with the reasons the author of the article presents, as well as his inconsistent counting methods. (Original Article)
- All Nintendo consoles have -3 to their button count (Nintendo D-Pads = 1 input, while all other D-Pads = 4 inputs)
- Motion sensing capability on the wii (wiimote+nunchuk) = 1 input (actually is 2, one for each wiimote and nunchuk)
- Power button on wiimote is ignored (but not on the ps3 or 360)
- On the PS3, he counts the “analog stick buttons”, but not on any other platform.
Rules (as extrapolated from article + input types ignored):
- Analog only input = 1 input (normal joysticks, pressure sensitive button)
- Analog + Digital input = 2 inputs (joysticks with buttons, pressure sensitive button with additional clicked state)
- D-Pad = 1 input (only because it is replacing a joystick; add +3 to applicable platforms if you want to count them as 4x buttons)
- Button (any button on controller) = 1 input
- One object with motion sensing = 1 input
- Toggle buttons = 1 input
- Light sensor = 1 input (x+y by pointing at screen)
Actual input counts:
- Atari 2600 = 2 (correct, sort of; he ignores that the console had around 4 or so toggle switches as well that could be used during gameplay)
- Intellivision = 17 (correct)
- Atari 5200 = 20 (correct)
- Atari 7800 = 3 (ignored)
- NES = 5 (correct)
- Sega Mastersystem = 5 (ignored)
- SNES = 9 (correct)
- Genesis/Sega CD/32X = 5 (ignored)
- N64 = 12 (ignored)
- PS1 = 11 (not 14)
- Dreamcast = 9 (ignored)
- PS2 = 16 (not 18; and we’re counting the analog stick buttons and the mode button which he does not count)
- GameCube = 13 / 15 on wavebirds (ignored)
- XBox = 15 (ignored)
- XBox 360 = 17 (ignored)
- PS3 = 17 (not 20)
- Wii = 14 on wiimote + 4 on nunchuk = 18 (not 12) (ignoring the plugging in, the strap, and the protective rubber cover)
But the real problem is that he seems to think that fewer inputs on the Wii’s controller is why the it is successful. It’s really because moving a physical object to move a virtual object in three-space is more intuitive than using two joysticks to do the same. It’s the same reason that a mouse seems intuitive. Beyond that, it’s also that there are new ideas on the Wii (and GC), like party games — games that have no end, they’re just fun to play with other people — these don’t really exist on Sony or Microsoft platforms (except the Halo clones, which have limited audiences). Another off the wall theory is that the current consumers are buying “glossy white plastic” products, such as Macs, iPods, and Wiis.
Disclaimer: These are my personal thoughts and should not be construed to be anything but that. They are not endorsed by my employer, my family, my friends, my webhost, or really anybody.
Update: December 7th, 2007 – More consoles, formatting
Alien Syndrome sells over 200K units
I was very excited to hear that Alien Syndrome has currently sold more than 200,000 copies in North America and Europe. Hopefully that number will continue to rise, especially during the upcoming holiday season! 
Tags: alien syndrome, sales, sega, totally games