The Morning Routine

I've got a fairly consistent morning routine when I get to work: turn on my computer, check work e-mail, then start surfing the web. I spend a good 45 minutes checking out various websites, sometimes longer, before beginning any real work. Sometimes when my reading reaches a full hour, I chuckle at how funny it would be actually count the websites I check every day. Today I realized that additionally, maybe it would be funny to actually list them all here. And so I now bring you a complete, chronological list of the sites that I habitually check out every single morning:

Bank of America
Blue's News
Gamespy PC Games
Gamespot PC Games
PlanetUnreal
Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter
SimHQ
LockOnFiles
LockOn.ru Forums
SimHQ LockOn Forum
Shockwave Battle of Britain 2 Forum
SimHQ Battle of Britain 2 Forum
SimHQ IL-2 Forum
Frugalsworld Falcon4 Forum
FreeFalcon Red Viper Forum
GlobalFalcon OpenFalcon Forum
Subsim Silent Hunter 3 Mods Forum
Subsim Silent Hunter 4 Forum
PlanetHalfLife
HardOCP
TechReport
DailyTech
San Jose Mercury News Fry's Electronics Ads
CNN
BBC World News
B's House
Embracing Mediocrity
GregP's Profundity
Sepia Mutiny
English Russia

Yup, that's my morning routine: 30 websites. You'll notice the pathetic abundance of gaming sites; it's an addiction, plain and simple. The first step is admitting the problem, right?

Over the course of the rest of the day, in addition to revisiting many of those sites, there are probably 20 others that I regularly browse.

As I'm sure many other people have similarly experienced, I've gotten so attached to keeping up with events in all of these little communities that I truly feel out of the loop and a bit off balance if I have to skip my morning routine and forgo my surfing.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen to me if I had a job that required me to actually, you know, work, within the first hour of arriving at the office. Yeah, that would suck.