Ryan James O'Sullivan

I have an odd relationship with winter.  On the one hand it is a season I truly love; to me there is no moment on this earth more peaceful then when it snows and the temperature is just around the freezing mark.  There is this beautiful silence and it has a restorative power to it.  On the other hand it is dark, cold and a season where motivation to get off your arse can be hard to come by.

To help cope with the drawbacks of the season I resolved this winter to focus on a few hobbies to keep me from wasting away hours.  The three primary hobbies I am focusing on are: micro controller programming, geocaching and model railroading.

Micro controller programming

Micro controllers are super small and low powered computers that drive many of the things you have in your homes – DVD players, clocks, televisions, and on and on.  My dear consumer whore friend Jim started working with the Arduino micro controller platform a few months ago and he was doing some seriously cool stuff.  I’ve never worked with networked devices before (that is devices that can talk to one and other by various means) and my head is full of things I want to try and make.  This hobby is a learning hobby for me – it is something completely new (although pulls heavily on my programming experience) that I’m super excited to be learning about.

My sort of end goal with micro controllers is to make a GPS device that will connect to my cell phone while I am ATVing that will report back my position and possibly allow me to send messages back through twitter, etc!

Geocaching

Geocaching is an old hat hobby for me – I’ve been geocaching since 2003 but because of my knee I haven’t been able to dedicate as much time as I’d like.  Now that my knee is kinda-sorta-thinking-about-it better-ish post surgery I’m excited to be getting back in to the swing of things and clocking some finds.  My goal here is to get out whenever the weather is nice enough (like this past and coming weekends!) to get some exercise and work the knee a bit.  I think everyone needs to find a good excuse to get out of the house in the winter and geocaching is that excuse for me!

Model Railroading

I’ve loved trains all my life.  Between my dad spending his life working on electric powered trains and growing up about a kilometer as the crow flies from the CN line that cuts through North-East Toronto and listening to the trains as I fell asleep at night.   I feel some deep and powerful connection to trains whenever I see one go by I feel the need to stop and appreciate the awesomeness and masterful human innovation of these monster machines.

So as a way channel to play out this love affair I’ve always had an interest in model trains.  About 7 or 8 years ago before I got married my dad and I built an initial lay out but between getting married and moving out we never got to complete it.  I’ve now picked up where we left off and together with my Dad we are working on building the layout we’ve always talked about.

I’ll have pictures of the layout to share soon and I’ll be posting updates here on the blog.

So that’s my winter coping strategy!  I’ll be posting updates as I work through these.

(Cross posted from Adventures of Taas, my gaming blog – life related so I want to throw it up here as well)

Do not adjust your internets – the title of my blog actually contains the words “MMO” and “break” and yes it does actually imply exactly what you think.

I have to decided to take a break from MMOs.

MMOs require an emotional, attention and time commitment that has increasingly been difficult for me to cope with. I started playing these games while I was still in school and it was easy then to balance game time with my life demands. Since that time I have gotten married, had a baby and have been steadily climbing the corporate ladder. All of this on top of the many hobbies and other things I like to dedicate my time to.

The reality is that competition for my time has become super competitive and the one activity outside of being a husband/dad that I hadn’t cut back on was playing MMOs and things like writing, working on programming projects and the like were suffering because of it.

So I’ve made a bit of a lifestyle decision to step back from the MMO world for a few months to get caught up on things I’ve been missing out on. My hope is that I’ll get a feel for my new job, the time and energy I have available for activities outside of work and family and sort of reset with some balance in my activities.

Adventures of Taas will continue to focus on my gaming related writings – this break is going to let me catch up on a lot of gaming writing I’ve been wanting to get out including a series on Guild Leadership.

So there it is… gone for now from the MMO genre but I’ll be back when I can figure out how to balance these demanding games with the rest of my life.