Thursday 6 September 2007

Pic of the day: It is 2 AM in Sim City, do you know where your sims' children are? They are in the neighbor's kitchen, planning their education and doing unspeakable things in the kitchen sink! You just take your eyes off them for a second...

I suck at multitasking

I was about to write that "multitasking sucks", but that's not really true. It is a wonderful invention and works well with modern computers. Women are supposedly pretty good at it too. I, however, notice quite a bit of lag and fragmentation when I try to multitask in real life. Perhaps I need a quad-core brain too?

(Which reminds me: No, I still haven't bought a new computer. Also I still haven't bought Bon Voyage, the new expansion pack for The Sims 2. It should be out around now, the beginning of September. I don't have the exact day in my head. This is in itself somewhat unusual. I think even with Pets, I got it within a couple days after it was released, so I probably knew when it was coming. Now I don't really care all that much. There are bugs in it, most notably a new NPC is created every time you enter a vacation lot - possibly even any community lot - unless you download a fix from More Awesome Than You. Electronic Arts don't have a fix for it anytime soon. You don't fix it, it doesn't blow up your computer or even your game, but eventually after some weeks or months the game becomes too slow to play, and at that time it cannot be fixed except by un-installing and re-installing. Boo. Hiss.)

Even without the newest expansion, Sims 2 could keep me entertained all by itself. I need not really have any other hobbies, but of course I do. That is the problem, actually. I could fill the day entirely with Sims 2, but I could also fill the day entirely with City of Heroes. If not for my wrist, I could also play Master of Magic day and night, although I tend to get fed up with that after a couple weeks of obsessive playing. (Intriguingly I had a MoM fad in September four years ago, too.) Even without these games, my computer could have held my attention. There is the fiction I am writing on, in between everything else. Then there are all manner of fascinating things to learn on the web, from the frontiers of science to the frontiers of consciousness. If I tire of the seriousness, there are enough web comics to fill the day. Some of them have years of archives, although many are short-lived. Even catching up on those I used to read before is beyond me now, however.

Even I can't sit in front of a computer all day. So I take a walk, if nothing else then because the body needs some maintenance too. (I also tend to come up with ideas while walking, though they may disappear again if I walk for too long.) I can at least do this much multitasking, listening to music while walking. I haven't danced into the road yet (touches wood). I did mention the new mobile music player I bought, right? The Samsung YP-Z5F? Wait, I didn't, because I bought it today! It plays .OGG files that I get from ripping CDs on my standard Linux player. I could probably download them too, they are the equivalent of MP3 files, but I tend to buy CDs from cdjapan if I really like them. It is very rare that I buy European or American music anymore. (And just as rare that I download them, even to play through once.) Anyway, I have this player now and the music, but there isn't much time to listen to it except when walking, and sometimes I prefer quiet then. It depends on my mood and what I am thinking about.

I still don't understand much of the music. In part this is because I play so much Ayano Tsuji, who has complex lyrics instead of just a bunch of feel-good words in Japanese and English like many others. I don't know if I would be able to understand her lyrics even if I completed the Japanese course I have installed on my PC, but the truth is that I don't even touch it anymore. It's not that it is bad, but I just don't take the time. I don't see immediate results, since Japanese is so difficult, and so I end up always moving it to the end of the line. Sometime, someday, but not today!

Speaking of things Japanese, at least I do the brain training on my Nintendo DS every day. I don't make progress anymore, but stay in the 20- 30 year interval. And that's where I find the most convincing proof that I suck at multitasking: My response time to the exercises go way up if I even passively scan for something else, like when I am at work and scan for coworkers coming with problems, or at home making dinner and scan for the clock telling me that the pasta is cooked. Less than total concentration and the response time shoots up, making for a poor result (old brain). Perhaps older people really are more distracted, but I suspect the opposite is more likely. (I also wonder whether Dr. Kawashima has taken into account the Flynn Effect. Many people who have old brains now had "old brains" when they were young, too.)

The program also comes with a wonderful Sudoku, but I know I've said so before. The thing is, I wish I had time to play it, but these days I spend my commute reading New Scientist, which I foolishly started subscribing to. It is full of interesting stuff, but my commute now is perhaps 30 minutes, so it is hard to get through one issue before the next shows up. (New Scientist is a weekly magazine.) I try to squeeze in Illustrert Vitenskap too, the Norwegian popular science magazine, since I don't have time to read it at home (too much fun) or at work.

Another victim of Brain Training and New Scientist was Animal Crossing, probably the best game ever for a handheld console. It is nearly stress-free, you can basically wander around and do small things whenever you have the free time for it. But even small things take a little time. And there is the small point that you have to play cartridge jockey between it and Brain Training, unless you buy a new DS. (In some places you can get a new DS bundled with More Brain Training, or whatever the second edition is called. Something about Brain Age, in the USA. Anyway, it is worth looking into.)

But with all these interesting things to do, I end up not getting any of them done. For instance, I am writing this entry while playing City of Heroes. But CoH is a fast-paced game, so pretty much the only time I have to write is while zoning in and out of missions. This takes only as long as the slowest machine on the team, which is not very long with this duo. ^_^ It is an efficient way to play CoH, but a very inefficient way to write my journal.

At other times, I am writing my Journal on one machine while playing Sims2 on another. This leaves much more time for writing, since the sims are able to take care of themselves for shorter periods of time. If they are hungry, they will make their own food; they know how to use the toilet; they certainly know how to find entertainment, and they interact with each other spontaneously. But sooner or later they will run out of groceries, and there are some things they just don't do on their own (unless you have special hacks, in which case they often overdo it): Study skills, use the telephone, and of course make babies. They never get a new job on their own, and they never leave home on their own except to go to work. They will not buy new furniture even if they have the money and the furniture is obviously needed (such as for instance a new bed when a toddler grows up to become a child and no longer can use the crib). Perhaps you can make them do such things in the Sims 3, but that's still a couple years away. Until then, I have to keep half an eye on them.

Sometimes I even run The Sims 2 in a window on the monster machine while writing my journal or doing something else. It just seems a shame to waste that much power. It already runs Folding@home, but this only takes up half the processing power at most. There is plenty to go around. And my sims are in there waiting for me…

Of course I have other interests too, but I think you can see from this that I have a tendency to multitask, and that this multitasking tends to leave the journal near the bottom of the heap much of the time. You can always write your journal, after all, but if you don't keep an eye on your hero, he'll get shot. If you don't keep half an eye on your sim, he will starve eventually. If you don't comment on LiveJournal entries, they will be forgotten. If you don't write while your muses are chattering, they will leave. So, there's one pretty good excuse, don't you think? ^_^