Busy, Busy, Busy!

Busy, Busy, Busy! I know that numerous times I have told incoming students that you don’t have to worry about the time or effort level required to graduate at MIT, and most weeks of the year I stand by what I said…but these past two weeks have been hell for me. I will be out of the country for the next two weeks and between preparing to leave, completing my obligations as a member of the international plant trek team tasked with organizing the trip, mid-terms, and all of the normal activities and school work I have…I was actually busy. For the first time in a long time, and my first time in Massachusetts, I had to turn down a chance to play hockey…and with descent players too, not just some C-league intramural team. That one hurt. I HATE turning down free ice time. I’ve had a number of topics that I have wanted to blog about, a number of movies that I have wanted to watch, and a computer game that I have been desperately waiting for the release of (Empire Total War) and I did not have time for any of these things.

The game combines overall campaign strategy/country management (think the boardgame Risk) with military strategy 101 (think lines of units, reinforcements, and flanking)

I CANNOT believe that Empire has been out for two weeks and I have not played it more than 6 hours. To quote Vizzini (Wallace Shawn) from Princess Bride, “Inconceivable!”

I can catch up on some of the blogs as I travel in Europe (downtime while on planes, trains, and automobiles) but I can’t run Empire on my laptop. I can barely run Empire on my home computer and my laptop has no graphic processing capabilities. When I bought the lappy, I did not want to tempt myself with the ability to play computer games in class (turns out at Sloan, you pretty much can’t have your laptop out…but I did not know this at the time).