NP: Vernon Reid & Masque, Other True Self

I solved my first Sudoku last week. I've only been peripherally paying attention to the growing craze, mostly because I consider myself a big "pattern recognition" kind of guy, and would be crushed if I couldn't crack that particular nut. And so, unless I had the time to really figure out the tricks of this particular trade, I didn't really want to bother. But I've got a link to an online puzzle in my browser's toolbar, and after wrapping most of my work for the day, I was in that zone where I don't really want to dig into anything significant and only spend fifteen minutes on it before leaving the office.

So I took a crack at it, and started to see the underlying structure. Now I've been picking up the RedEye and taking a shot at their daily puzzle on the train after the ten to twelve minutes it takes for me to finish the painfully easy crossword. Which has a misspelling in it yesterday.

Anyway, the morning effort is not going quite so well, which makes me wonder if there's a time of day element to how my brain can deal with this sort of thing. After looking at numbers and data all day, maybe I'm thinking in a certain dimension, and right out of bed, with no coffee, I can't quite get there. Of course, that's part of the point. If I can get the analytical part of my brain moving out of the gate, maybe I'll end up more productive at work.

Or I could just turn off my instant messenger client, which also seems to help tremendously. Or maybe its the fact that I'm finally being given stuff to do that's right in my wheelhouse in terms of skill sets. I don't know if it only just dawned on people that this is what I do, and do well, or if this sort of work only just came up.