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a new year
2005-01-14 - 9:09 p.m.
Conclusion, and a New Beginning
2004-11-06 - 1:54 p.m.
-
2004-09-01 - 6:19 p.m.
midnight
2004-08-23 - 5:24 p.m.
where I went, and where I'm going
2004-07-27 - 8:05 a.m.
I had a long weekend, too - not the vacationing kind, but the in-the-office-at-10PM-on-a-Sunday kind.
And can I tell you something?
Freakish Pinball Geek was playing the Medieval Madness table. At 10 PM on a Sunday.
I don't think he ever leaves.
(That would certainly explain the showering problem...)
Anyway, the task that kept me here so late is thus: My boss would like me to review reviews.
That is, I am to surf a selection of the largest gaming sites on the internet. I am then to read and dissect those reviews (which are oft far from refined prose) and determine, somehow, which factors lead to a high critical score.
Essentially, I'm taking a bunch of qualitiative text and doing a quantitative analysis of it.
And this isn't actually a project for my boss - it'll be seen by the SimCompany execs - even used by those execs.
I am feeling very compelled to remind them all that I am, in fact, pulling this all out of my ass.
I fear I will be fired if the big giant SimSequel fails because I accidentally told them something silly like "all successful games have Pikachu in them!"
But then again, I felt that way at one of my old jobs. I was a research assistant back in my sophomore year for a project developing a computerized reading tutor. My job was to sift through hours upon hours of human tutor sessions on video. I then had to develop a taxonomy of interactions and quantify the frequency of each type of interaction. (Interactions included things like sound out, spell out, analogy, etc. etc.)
The whole summer, I felt like I was balancing on some shaky plank of pretend information. Was I really qualified to do that work? Maybe not. It was sort of interesting at the time...
Makes my head hurt thinking about it, in retrospect. (Mostly the insecurity about my work.)
But it also reminds me that I haven't been very good about maintaining some of that intellectual growth from those golden years of education... but then again, I only know a few people who can claim such a feat.