Unconnected Thoughts

Post number 100. I'll leave it at that...

Yet again, the hectic schedule of my family thwarts my attempt to start the gaming project. Fighting fatigue, being a bit discouraged from work and tasked with making dinner, cleaning up from dinner, picking up the house, bathing and putting the kids to bed, and then keeping baby Emily entertained and quiet while Mommy runs errands, I don't feel motivated to cull the list of games that will make up my personal challenge. However, some progress was made, as I stayed up rather late (at least for me) last night installing Red Faction: Guerrilla. The entire process took the better part of an hour, far longer than I anticipated. At least it's there and waiting for me to carve out an hour's free window to fire it up and play.

Update: After posting this entry, I decided to make myself a bit more tired than I already will be and started up Red Faction. It looks like it would be a lot of fun, unfortunately, it seems to grind my PC into dust with its complex physics. Going through the training mission and destroying the two small buildings required, it looked as if I were watching a slow moving slide show. Hopefully someday I'll have a machine that can run this, or I'll tweak the settings down to the minimum. That may help; regardless, I keep updating progress here.

On another note, I had an interesting reaction to a simple comment on Facebook. Sometime before going to bed, my Twitter feed was completely inundated with tweets from people either (a) on the West Coast complaining that friends on the East Coast were spoiling details about Lost, (b) announcing their intentions to leave or ignore the Internet, so as not to have Lost spoiled for them, or (c) raving that Lost was, in fact, starting. Later in the evening, after reading the 40th tweet along one of these veins, I posted that I felt like the only person in America that wasn't caught up in the Lost phenomenon. To my surprise, this comment spurred 16 comments from people who feel the same as I do. Considering how disconnected I currently feel from pop culture since the kids arrived, it was nice to see there are others in the same situation, and are proud of it.

Work today was a story of ups and downs. I spent the majority of the day buried in nerdy technical details, trying to chase down and wrap up the loose ends for a 90% design review due in a week or so. During that entire time, while it was not particularly interesting and sometimes frustrating, I packed up at the end of the day feeling really good about the progress I made and the focus I maintained, avoiding the temptation of the Internet almost all day. On my way out the door, I ran into a manager who made an offhand comment that a project manager I enjoy working with apparently has concerns or complaints about my work. Now the impression I take home from a 'good' day at work is negative, and I spent the rest of the evening with a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. Hopefully tomorrow will bring a resolution to this issue, so I don't have to agonize over it anymore.