I've been addicted to Spider Solitaire for about a year. It requires a lot of reasoning under conditions of uncertainty, and with two decks dealt out, the search space of possible moves is too large to try degenerate strategies like brute force, even with the ability to undo all the way back to the beginning of the hand that Windows Vista gives you. The result is a game that forces you to learn heuristics to deal with uncertainty, which has an addictive hold on me.

This is testament to my obsession:

That's right, 649 games played in less than a year, with a 57% win rate.

So I'm going to kick it. Kick it right off my computer so that program won't be there to distract me when I don't want to write or code.


It's gone. Hopefully this will improve productivity, or at least push me to find more interesting distractions, like people, or Tasks. I will record future relapses and milestones here.

Update:
I just upgraded to Windows 7 and found the offending program back on my computer. So I booted it off again. This time it left some residue behind that I haven't been able to destroy yet.