Hi humans.
I’ve had some pretty interesting things happen to me in the past week, and I was fortunately able to capture each moment in a tweet. Everything interesting that I would have put in my blog was already tweeted, so instead, I decided to do a tweet commentary this week.
This is the text contained in the image, taken from a YouTube comment:
âHi, I know most of you wonât read this, but to the few of you who do, thank you. All my life Iâve wanted to be a turtle. I just feel like I was supposed to be born one. Iâve started wearing a cardboard shell around my waist and eating only small pieces of lettuce. Iâve also been living in my bathtub. But it just isnât enough. For ever[y] âlike,â my parents will give me one dollar to go towards turtle reassignment surgery. They donât believe in me, but I know you do. Thanks so much for helping me.â
Why do people do this? Why can’t they go do their homework or read a book or something?
Only two weeks. That’s not bad.
This one was said by my good buddy Garrett Royce, who you might know if you’ve been around for a long time. Yes, he’s still alive.
Of course, for those of you who don’t get it, Taco’s el something implies that Taco owns el something. El means "the" in Spanish. I think it was a little bit of a Spanish mix-up by Garrett.
I saw this on my way back from McDonalds. There was literally somone outside in the dark with a camera standing in front of a dead tree. She picked up her camera, took a picture of the dead tree in the middle of the night, the stepped to her left a few paces. She took another shot. She stepped to her left a few more paces, and took another shot.
This went on for several seconds before she looked down at her camera, then walked away in satisfaction.
I have a feeling I actually already tweeted this before, but I noticed it again yesterday. I just don’t understand why people try to parallel park their car in a tiny space that is clearly half the size of their car.
Even if they didn’t notice it at first, I’m sure they would notice it after they back up into the space, almost hit the car behind them, then notice that less than half of their car is actually in the space.
But nope, they keep on trying. They pull out of the parking spot, put their car back in reverse, and keep trying.
I’ve never actually had enough time to watch one of these parkers for longer than several seconds because I usually see this when I’m on my way to class, but the next time I see this happen and I’m headed back home or something, I’m probably going to have a seat on the sidewalk and keep watching to see how long it takes for them to realize that their car just doesn’t fit.
I was actually very happy that someone pointed out to me that there was
black ice on the ground. It made me get a little bit more hope in humanity because it reminded me that there are still some nice people out in the world.
Then I realized that I was being trolled in my own apartment building, and that the person was pointing at a rug and said that there was black ice.
I usually don’t have this many interesting tweets in one day, but I usually try to tweet something funny or interesting at least once every one or two days, so feel free to follow me by clicking on the Follow button on any of the embedded tweets above.
The Shamrock Shake is basically a huge (and slightly warm) mixture of whipped cream and mint flavoring. The mint flavoring is so strong that I was able to get a large Shamrock Shake, drink half of it, fill the entire cup back up with milk, then keep drinking it and still be able to distinctly taste the mint flavoring.
The chicken McBites were worse. It says on the container that they’re lightly breaded chunks of chicken. Unfortunately, they use the term âlightlyâ very loosely, because about 60% of the contents of the container is just breading. The McBites taste as if they were overcooked and give off a slightly bitter aftertaste that you would expect from burnt food.
This isn’t the first time that I’ve been disappointed with a fast food restaurant’s new items. If you’ve been keeping up with my blog lately, you might remember that I had issues with Taco Bell’s new items – one of which was an XXL Chalupa that was barely as large as two normal Chalupas, and a layered steak item (I forgot its official name) that was basically chunks of steak messily thrown and mixed in with cheese.
It’s highly unlikely that anyone with power in a fast food restaurant chain is reading this, but in case you are, please go make a decent new product so I won’t lose all faith in all fast food restaurants.
According to the instructions, if the number that I just scratched off matches the number printed on the inside of the advertisement, then I win. I opened up the advertisement to look for the number.
I wasn’t paying attention to the prizes at first, but seeing as the numbers matched, I decided to look back on the front of the advertisement to find what I won.
I won either $5,000 in cash, an ATV, a $2,500 Walmart gift card, a flat screen television, or $100 in cash.
Itching my head a little bit, wondering how I managed to pull this off, I flipped to the back of the advertisement to see how to claim my prize, and to see if there were any catches that I wasn’t aware of that would prevent me from actually getting my prize.
âOdds of winning; Prizes 1, 2, 4 and 5 are 1:40,000; Prize 3 39,996/40,000 and retail value range from $5 to $2,500.â
At this point, I clearly realized that I missed a very important part of this contest, and that something was amiss. I flipped back to the front of the advertisement to see what the third prize in the list was – the $2,500 Walmart gift card. But how would the retail price of a $2,500 gift card range from $5 to $2,500?
Then I realized my epic mistake. I made a type of mistake that I’m known not to make. I missed a detail.
It wasn’t a $2,500 gift card; it was a gift card, up to $2,500.
I got trolled by an inanimate object.
Unfortunately, even though the squirrel had spent the last ten minutes dancing around the window, when I took my camera out, it felt as if it would be the perfect time to run away.
So the picture didn’t turn out very well.
This past Friday was when the fire alarm testing was. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this, my entire previous blog post from the 15th elaborated on the chance of someone encountering a real fire during a fire alarm testing period. I concluded that the chance was 0.0000328%, and, in case you were curious, no, I was not a part of that 0.0000328%. I am still alive, and my apartment building did not burn down from an unexpected blaze.
On the same day of the fire alarm testing, the weather decided to be a troll and start abruptly dumping massive chunks of clumped-up snow all over the place. This was after a series of days when the weather was actually getting nicer. I took this photograph from a bus stop:
The snow became that density in literally under a minute. When I was walking to the bus stop, the sky was completely clear; several seconds after I made it inside the bus stop shelter, it started lightly snowing, then several seconds after that, the clumps of snow were so big that the snow particles entering the shelter were all sticking to my jacket and I started looking like a snowman.
My last photograph for this week is of my office desktop computer. A long time ago, I used to take screenshots of my laptop’s background because people were interested to know what it was. I stopped doing that for a while because I was either using copyrighted images that I wouldn’t be able to post on my website for profit, or I just wasn’t changing my background image enough.
One of my friends went abroad to Prague this academic semester, and she sent me some photographs to use as my new desktop wallpaper. Because my desktop computer at work has dual monitors, simply taking a screenshot wouldn’t give it justice, so I instead decided to take a picture of the two monitors.
You might notice that the photograph was cropped to be panoramic, and stretches across the two monitors. If you didn’t notice that, then look more closely.
And last, but definitely not least, when I went to my floor’s trash room, I realized that it was nice and warm and cozy, while my actual apartment room/unit is freezing cold.
I’m not quite sure what to think of that.
I’ve always thought about what would happen if there was actually a real fire during the time the fire alarms were being tested, and because the sign says not to call the police (which, I’m assuming they meant to say the fire department), there would be no help arriving and the fire would go out of control.
In my curiosity, I decided to do a bit of research to find out what the chances were of that actually happening.
According to the United States Bureau of the Census, there is a projection of approximately 116,000,000 households in the United States as of 2012. According to the Emergency Preparedness Innovations Corporation, there are approximately 2,000,000 house fires reported each year. (Of course, not all of these two million fires are going to be harmful enough to injure someone, but there is an assumption that a reported fire was significant enough that it either required professional aid to extinguish, or it caused property damage that required a police report for insurance claims.)
According to this data, there is about a 1.7% chance that there will be a house fire in your place of residence in the next year.
That’s good to know, but that doesn’t really help us much for our question because the fire alarm testing is not going to last the entire year, but rather, about 10 minutes, or one-sixth of an hour. To bring the 1.7% chance per year down to scale, we’re going to divide that by 365.25 to see what the chance is of having a house fire at your place of residence on any particular day – that computation comes out to 0.00472%.
Breaking that down even further, because there are 24 hours in one day, we are going to divide 0.00472% by 24 to see what the probability of having a house fire in a one-hour time period is – that computation comes out to 0.000197%. And finally, to see what the probability of having a house fire in a given 10-minute period is, we’re going to divide our value once more by 6 to get one-sixth of an hour.
After all these computations, we can conclude that the probability of a real fire occurring during a fire alarm testing period is 0.0000328%. Finally, we’re going to divide 100% by 0.0000328% to see how many times our probability fits into 100%. This means that you would expect to see a real fire during fire alarm testing approximately once every 3,050,568 tests.
Taking this one last step further, as of 2009, the life expectancy in the United States was 79.1 years. That’s equal to 28,891.275 days, 693,390.6 hours, or 41,603,436 minutes. When we divide the number of minutes by the number of tests required to see a real fire during a test, we get about 13.64. That means that for an average person to see a real fire during a test in their life time, they would have to be at a fire alarm testing about once every 13 minutes and 38 seconds.
Fortunately, fire alarm testing tends to only happen once every few months.
No, I have absolutely no idea how that happened. I must have gotten in a fight with myself in my dream or something, and decided that the best way to defeat myself was to rip a hole in my pants.
This past Wednesday, I went into a basketball stadium to represent the 
