The Week of the Blue T-Shirt: Day Zero

With an exception made for the terrible smell that lingers in my room due to unregulated emission of illegal gases by my roommate (read: brother), this week has the smell of awesome to it. I've had a string of pretty good weeks, but I get the feeling that this one needs to be particularly awesome. I'm not sure where this feeling is coming from but I recogniz
e that it is real and am therefore working to make it a reality.

Quick update on my status: I'm attending school, dual majoring in Computer Science and Mathematics. Classes have been going great, and so far it looks like I've got an "A" in all of them. I got home from a mission 3 months ago and have been working on getting life started. So far things are going well. I still want them to go better.

I've been playing a lot of Starcraft II lately. It's awesome and I highly recommend it to anybody out there with some time to kill. One of the things I've learned as I've played it these past few weeks is that I'm a total sucker for achievement points.

The concept of achievement points is pretty simple. When you accomplish something particularly difficult or noteworthy you are awarded achievement points. Examples of achievements are the above image (build 5 zealots in the first 250 seconds of a single Melee game), stuff like winning 5 matches against hard computers in a row, having a single unit kill 40 other units in a league game, etc. etc.

To date, I've accumulated 1105 achievement points on SCII. (Confession: I haven't actually got 1105- I'm using a friend's account, and he got the first 100 or so before he let me use it.) You need to understand that these achievement points have often led me to stay up an extra hour or two playing. They're fun, let's be honest.

So as I sat pondering tonight a thought came to my mind. What if I built an achievement point system for my life this week? I've spent a long time playing Starcraft, and I figure it's probably time to put this drive to achieve into something that's actually worthwhile. (note: I'm not saying Starcraft isn't worthwhile) So that's the plan: I'm going to outline a plan for this week and attach point values to certain achievements. I'm thinking "Work out on Monday" is worth 10 points. "Work out every day this week" is a combination of all the sub-workout achievements, and will yield 20 points (that's consistent with SCII, by the way.)

This week is officially dubbed the Week of the Blue T-Shirt. While home this weekend I realized that I own a billion blue T-Shirts and that I really like them. I'm going to wear a different blue T-Shirt every day. Tomorrow I'm going to publish my system, all the goals for the week, and you'll be able to track my progress throughout the week. I think it's going to be fun.

So, invitations: TheOtherDentist.com officially invites you to make this week an achievement week as well. A million bonus points to anybody who will make a system and then publish their results this week. 0.5 million bonus points will be awarded to anyone who does it next week, because maybe some people out there want to think about this for a minute.

Second invitation: You are hereby invited to suggest cool achievements for me this week. I reserve the right to not use them. I would love for good suggestions of productive things to do this week that I wouldn't normally do. Realistic things, please. But if you've got something you've been dying to tell me to do, let me know and I'll see if I can't put it on the list.

This is going to be fun. Stay tuned for Day One tomorrow. I'll publish my outline and progress for Monday. w00t!