I’m not much of one for starting; or playing along with, tagging memes but every once in a while I get a thought in my head about blogging and in turn wonder what other bloggers I like feel about the thought or concept. This post is one of types of posts in that I got to thinking about what I do to waste time when I either can’t find a subject worth writing about; or for some reason my blogging mojo has left me stranded staring at the great white expanse of the WLW edit screen.

For those of us bloggers that tend to treat their blogs as a business the idea of not posting at least one article can sometimes bring pangs of guilt and we find things to fill that time which should otherwise be spent writing the next killer post. Myself I find that my time wasting efforts usually break down to two main things with the easiest and most obvious being playing games.

This is probably the easiest way to waste time as there is so many types of games to choose from; depending of course on the power of the computer you are working on. For me the first game that ever gets installed on a new build of my machine has to be Civilization; which is now up to version 4, and is typically the first game I head to in order to escape that haunting blog editor screen.

Sometimes though conquering the world doesn’t quite relieve the frustrations that can build up from either having a bad day or posts that just don’t seem to come together. In this case there is nothing better that the murder and mayhem that a good old FPS (First Person Shooter) can bring to help vent that frustration. As much as I would like to be able to play the newer games like Jericho or Crysis my computer runs screaming at the very thought of trying to power those games. So in times like this I find myself resorting to Castle Wolfenstein and its relative easy game play.

On a side note in regards to FPS games – why the hell do game makers have to continually make these games harder and harder to play. What ever happened to the good old simple shoot the shit outta the bad guys and have fun doing it. Instead we have to have team play, more and more powerful machines and increasing difficulty in the playing of the game itself. Whatever happened to making games like Doom and Serious Sam?

The last type of game I use to escape with is the simple old fashion Solitaire; which by the way was beautifully redone in Vista. At the moment I am working through the demo period of SolSuite which is an excellent collection of different types of solitaire games. Once that demo period is done it’ll be back to the same old boring game that has shipped with Windows since almost day one.

In those times when games don’t cut it I find myself playing follow the links; which is pretty simple. The idea is to pick a single link from some post you have read as your starting point. Then on the page that the link leads to; and once you have read the page, pick another link to follow. So on and so on – it’s a simple little game but it’s amazing how much time you can waste as well there are times where you can learn something really interesting or new.

The interesting thing is that even though goofing off from writing should bring with it a feeling of guilt – even a slight one – for not faithfully getting those posts out there for your readers I often find myself feeling more refreshed than guilty.

So what do you do during those times of avoiding the blog editor screen – how do you rejuvenate yourself. Let us now either in a blog post or a comment here. All I ask is that if you pass along your time wasting secrets just link back to this post so I can see and maybe learn some new ones.

As for the tagging meme part how about it it Jeffro2pt0, ParisLemon, webomatica, engtech and Rick Mahn .. what time wasting secrets do you have ??