12 hours by a screen

I sat by my computer for about 12 hours yesterday trying my best on the CodeSlam competition problems. This is how my schedule went:

2.5 hours: developed algorithm for stock question
3 hours: frustrated over not knowing how to implement BufferedReader/InputStreamReader
1 hour: contacted friend who helped me understand how to implement said things, sigh of relief
1 hour: frustrated over not understanding that the main class cannot access non-static variables
0.5 hours: finished off what I could for code, got part marks

1 hours: developed algorithm for game bot competition problem
2 hours: messed around with it, tried out variable terrible ideas
1 hour: submitted and waited for it to verse other contestants, had a 9th place standing for a short amount of time

(Right now my bot code is sitting at 49th place out of 95 or so "finalist" contestants, I'm really too burnt out to try to improve it though)

Holy crap did I have tunnel vision after that. I needed to stay away from screens after a while, but couldn't since I promised my brother a good gaming session on the Xbox. As I lay on my bed that night, I felt strangely relaxed.

Although a lot of my time was wasted/spent inefficiently (3 hours over input methods? Ahahaha), the experience as a whole will undoubtedly prove useful in the future as I walk deeper into the thick of computer science. A lot of mistakes were made, a lot of new things were tried out, a lot of frustration was had, and a lot of things were learned. The act of coding itself became a whole lot more interesting, and right now I can't wait to finish off all of my boring school assignments so that I can focus all of my efforts into working on my expanding mindmap  program idea.