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Comment Meditate (Score 0) 384

If you can't sleep, learn to meditate. This will rest your mind, among several other things.

I started meditating in college with the Silva method (alpha level meditation -- very light meditation, akin to when you watch tv)
After college, I started with the theta level (the point right before sleep) meditation course from: www.probablefutures.com.
A year after I got my tech diploma from college, I decided to transfer to university to finish my degree. I continued meditating during that time.
When I got to university, the amount of time it took me to finish an exam dropped by 50-75%.
When I was in high school and college, I typically took the entire time available to write an exam, and didn't always finish.
In university, I finished 17 out of 21 exams first. The next person out took twice as long as I did. The other 4 exams, I finished within 5 minutes of the first person.

The one difference in my lifestyle was meditation.

Comment Hours 35 == less gets done (Score 0) 311

I remember reading an article written by S.A.S. several years ago, about how they used their own stats software on their business practices.
Including training costs, turnover rates, and other factors, they determined that any work beyond 35 hours per week decreased productivity.
It would lead to code requiring more bug fixing / rewriting, staff leaving, etc.

Crunch was okay if it was for 2 weeks only. After that, things would deteriorate to the point where everybody would get less done in a day while working OT than if they would have just worked a normal day. You also need recovery time after working OT, in order to return to regular productivity.

From my own experience in the games industry, If you know you'll be working late and you already have been working late for quite awhile, you will be more prone to spread your tasks out more, since you need time to let your brain rest.

All in all, if you want to ship something on time, don't work overtime. Work 35 hours per week (I think that doesn't include lunch).

Here's a presentation on this very topic:
http://www.slideshare.net/flowtown/rules-of-productivity-2756161

Comment Re:Shove the laptop to one side (Score 0) 312

Looking down all day is hard on the eyes. I always keep the center of my monitors in line with my eyes when I'm looking straight ahead.
I use a 30" monitor at home, and my eyes feel great after a full day.

At work I've got my laptop on top of a stack of books, and a larger monitor in the center of my desk so I can look straight at it, also on top of a stack of books. Using a separate kb/mouse. Feels way better than having them sitting on my desk below my line of sight.

Comment Re:Get out of the ergonomics = expensive mindset (Score 0) 235

>The top of the monitor should be at your eye level

I find it *way* more comfortable to have my eyes looking straight ahead at the MIDDLE of the monitor.

Also, make sure your monitor is far enough away from you. I use a 30" monitor at home, so I have a very deep desk. I can be on my computer for 12 hours a day and feel totally fine. I use a chair with armrests, a Microsoft ergonomic keyboard on a keyboard drawer (so it's lower than the desk), and a logitech g5 laser mouse (glides really nicely and has a nice weight to it).

Comment Re:"and uses DirectX (ugh...)" (Score 0) 153

Thank you for the insult. It had been awhile since I looked at it, since when I did look at it years ago, before getting into the games industry, that was not how I understood the license. At the time, it appeared to be a "you have to give your source code away" license, so I never bothered looking at it again.

I suppose I should have looked it up before posting, so thank you for the reminder.

Comment Re:"and uses DirectX (ugh...)" (Score 0) 153

From what I remember, you can't use SDL commercially, unless you want to give everything you make with it away. Makes it pointless to learn
if you want to professionally develop games.

As for OpenGL:
It doesn't need to become everything. However, it would be FANTASTIC if it had built in asset-loading functions.
Like the ability to load a mesh with a couple lines of code... An SDK for OpenGL would be awesome.

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