I’m Going To Be Very Busy

by   •   General
 

This post is over 14 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

It was brought to my attention yesterday that the light in my office back at my university randomly decided to stop working and smell burnt for a while. Even better, my coworker who shares that office space with me refuses to replace the light bulb and instead prefers to sit in the dark.

-.-

In other news, I’m extremely busy until Wednesday because I have to study for two exams and do a lot of homework and a lot of reading. Of course, this is for my community college and I’m only taking this class to get transfer credits, so I don’t really need to study. But on the other hand, I don’t want to underdo it so much that I fail.

So that’s why my blog post for today and tomorrow is and will be extremely short.

 

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No More Hot Weather

by   •   Daily Post, General
 

This post is over 14 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

Someone emailed me earlier today in response to yesterday’s blog post where I took a screenshot of my task manager. He was curious what my desktop background was, so here it is:

Yes, I know it’s not autumn yet, but I guess I’m eager for autumn to come.

I used to hate hot weather more than I hated cold weather, but after years of long, freezing cold winters, my preferences have switched and I would rather be really hot than really cold.

The only exception is that I have to be in a well air-conditioned area.

You may or may not know that I’m back home for the summer at my parents’ house where we actually have to pay for electricity (unlike my apartment), so I can’t blast on the air conditioning at 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius) anymore like I used to at my apartment. On top of that, our house is gigantic so it takes a lot of electricity to even lower the temperature of our whole house a single degree.

So I’ve been sweating a majority of the time that I’m awake (and I’m sure I sweat while I’m sleeping too). I normally don’t like driving, but I’m actually opting in to driving now because it’s easy to turn on the air conditioning in the car and have a cool environment in minutes.

 

The Daily Post at WordPress.com

Topic #190: Can a movie be better than the book it was based on?

I think it would be extremely difficult for a movie to be better than the book on which it was based. I usually read the book before I watch the movie, and I have repeatedly been disappointed by the amount of detail that has been left out in the movies.

I understand that the movie does not necessarily have to be the exact same as the book, but usually when I finish watching a movie, I can point out many seemingly important things that were left out. In the rare cases that I watch the movie before the book, I feel as if I’m being filled in on the missing portions of the movie while I’m reading the book.

I think a valid justification for this is that movies can’t drag on for hours upon hours, but books can easily go past a thousand pages and still be considered normal. Thus, movies simply don’t have the time to go through everything a book might cover.

 

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Remembering to Restart Firefox Fail

by   •   Daily Post, What I'm Reading
 

This post is over 14 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you don’t restart your Firefox for almost a week?

firefox.exe *32 850,000 K

It starts taking up almost a gigabyte of memory.

Now you know.

 

What I’m Reading

A while back, one of my readers named Jessie suggested that I read a book called How to Make People Like You in 90 Seconds or Less. She claimed that with my rising popularity, I would need to go out and meet more people in person, and I would have to learn how to make them like me in person as well as online. I didn’t really think that I needed to prepare for real-life encounters with people who keep up with me online, but I realized that it couldn’t hurt to check out the book anyway.

I was sort of disappointed after reading the book because the introduction claims that it covers some revolutionary method that has helped many people become successful. The main idea of the book is that when meeting people, you should approach them with a positive attitude and mindset and find stuff that you have in common. It also focuses on synchronization (or copying physical actions the other person does so they feel as if you’re someone familiar, because you’re basically emulating them) and identifying learning styles and using them to your advantage (such as identifying someone who is a visual person and describing your point of view in a visual manner).

Most of the stuff covered in this book seemed like either common sense or something that anyone could easily find out after some experience with meeting new people. If you don’t already know how to ask questions that induce longer responses rather than yes or no answers, how to synchronize with someone so that it’s not obvious that you’re copying them but still enough that the person subconsciously realizes that you’re special, or how to identify people’s learning style(s) (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) by watching their behavior, then this book might come in handy for you. If not, then it’s most likely not worth your time.

If you’re interested in buying this book, you can purchase it on Amazon.com at the following link:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0761149465/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=parkzer-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399369&creativeASIN=0761149465

 

The Daily Post at WordPress.com

Topic #184: If you had a third arm, where would you put it on your body? Would you put it underneath one of your other arms? Or somewhere more interesting, say, the top of your head, so you could reach really high things? Or would you put it behind you, so it’d be a makeshift tail?

If I had a third arm, I would probably put it directly under my current left arm.

I think that if I were to put it somewhere else on my body, it would become a hassle because I’m not used to having a limb in that area. However, I’m already used to having limbs on the sides of my body and it would be easy to get accustomed to the extra arm. I’m right-handed, so it might be difficult to do some things with my right arm if another arm was right below it, so I decided to go with the left side of my body.

I realize that this might cause a balance issue with my body because the left side of my body will be heavier than the right side of my body, but the only way to solve this problem would be to either have my arm sticking straight up off the top of my head or straight down from my crotch, neither of which I would think is a good idea.

 

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Is My Surge Protector Gonna Explode?

by   •   General
 

This post is over 14 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

Hi humans and surge protector experts.

I address surge protector experts specifically because I need your help.

I’ve had the surge protector pictured above for almost a year now. I bought it in Madison primarily to get more outlets than to actually use it as a surge protector.

I’ve noticed lately that the light on the switch is flickering and looks really weak. I searched on Google for possible explanations and apparently a flickering, blinking, or weak light on your surge protector means that it already protected your electronics from a surge and is no longer at full power.

This question might be silly to someone who actually knows how surge protectors work, but can I still use it to get more outlets without any problems and without worrying about protecting from surges? I never even needed protection against surges anyway because I unplug electronics when I’m not using them and turn off the switch on my surge protector when I’m away from my office or room.

So I guess the main question is, is my surge protector damaged electricity-conducting-wise and I should replace it, or can I still keep using it if I’m not worried about surges and just want the extra outlets?

 

Response: Justin White’s “Facebook Dislike Button” (July 14, 2011)

Yesterday, a buddy of mine named Justin White wrote a blog post about the Facebook dislike button (more specifically, the lack of a dislike button). You should probably go read that now so my response is in context and you know what I’m talking about.

http://jtwhite.net/2011/07/14/facebook-dislike-button/

To begin my response, I want to state that looking at the main idea of the post, the post itself is misnamed. The main focus of the blog post is not about the dislike button, but about things that Facebook users request in general. In the conclusion, Justin explains how Facebook’s users could go about bringing about change on Facebook.com. He uses the dislike button as merely an example, not as the main focus of the article.

Ignoring the title, Justin’s proposed solution to getting a dislike button is for many people to start using advertisement blockers: “They would need to have a good percentage of Facebook’s users to protest by installing … advertisement blocking software and refusing to disable it on Facebook … until a dislike button is created. By doing this, you are … boycotting Facebook and therefore hindering the income of the company.”

We first have to take a look at the types of people who use advertisement blockers in the first place. The reason they want to get rid of advertisements is because they’re bothersome and they don’t want to deal with them. These are generally the types of people who would never click on an advertisement in the first place, or if the advertisement is interesting enough, might click on one or two once in a while, but at significantly lower rates than other people. These are also the people that advertising companies don’t even target because it’s a waste of their resources. Facebook would probably save more money by saving bandwidth not showing advertisements to these people than they would earn from the miniscule number of potential clicks they could get.

Next, how many people actually use an advertisement blocker? The most famous one is Adblock Plus, an add-on for Firefox. According to Add-ons Product Manager Justin Scott from Mozilla, on May 17, 2010, there were 131.9 million active Firefox users and 10.7 million people with Adblock Plus installed. That calculates to about 8% of Firefox users using Adblock Plus. As of today, according to Net Applications, 21.67% of Internet users use Firefox. Eight percent of 21.67% equals about 1.73% of all Internet users using Adblock Plus. Not a lot, if you ask me. At this rate, I’m pretty sure getting enough advertisement blocker users to leave a dent in Facebook and make the concerned is going to take a long time.

But what if we were to suddenly somehow get over half the population to use advertisement blockers? Justin points out that Facebook might implement a script that detects advertisement blockers and prevents you from using their website if you don’t whitelist it. But that’s way too much work. There’s an easier solution.

Advertisement blocking software works on the concept of keywords. It identifies domains and URL paths that are common to advertisements, and prevents them from showing up. For example, if the ad blocker were to block Google Adsense advertisements, they might block all URLs that follow the format of http(s)://adsense.google.com/*. But what if the advertisements didn’t fit a specific pattern?

For example, what if Facebook started randomizing the URLs of their advertisements? What if an image displayed as an advertisement had the URL of:

https://facebook.com/.jpg

(If that URL isn’t random enough for you, refresh the page to get a new randomized URL.)

Sure, the ad blocker could block everything that matches http(s)://facebook.com/*.jpg, but then it would be blocking all the images on the entire website. By doing that, Facebook can essentially force you to disable your ad blocker to use their website without actually forcing you to do anything at all.

So what’s my point? The best (and I think the only effective) way to really boycott Facebook is to literally boycott it and not visit the website. Unfortunately, seeing how addicted people are to Facebook, I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon. Installing an advertisement blocker, creating groups and events, and doing other protest-like things will most likely get you nowhere to your quest to get a dislike button. And even the concept of a dislike button is dumb. Disliking a status (or anything, for that matter) is spreading negativity and will only cause arguments. Facebook wants their users to enjoy their time on Facebook.com, not spend hours arguing with other users.

 

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Ed Lam Lves Big Black C … ars

by   •   General
 

This post is over 14 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

While Ed and I went to get lunch today during our break from class, we saw a car with a vanity license plate.

(The image is horrible quality because I forgot that the camera on my iPod Touch has digital zoom and not optical zoom.)

If you can’t read the vanity license plate, it says I LVE GOD.

I decided that the missing vowel in LVE was A, so she was actually trying to say that she was laving god. (For those of you who don’t know, laving is the equivalent of washing.) It must be really difficult washing an abstract concept that you can’t even touch.

After we got back on campus after lunch, the electricity went out again. Ed got really excited because there was an exam scheduled for his next class and he might not have to take it.

The the power came back on.

On our way back home, we saw this massive truck parked in a lot.

Ed insisted that I take a picture of it and upload it to my blog, so there it is.

 

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Do Not Sign Up for Causes.com

by   •   General
 

This post is over 14 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

I’m not sure if you’re aware of what Causes is or not, but regardless, never sign up for it.

A long time ago (maybe about 3-4 years ago), I used to accept all application requests on Facebook because I thought that if I accept them, I can’t be invited to them anymore. Unfortunately, that wasn’t exactly the case because once I started using the application, I got even more notifications and invitations to do more stuff with the app.

One of the apps that I randomly signed up for a long time ago without thinking was Causes.

Since then, they’ve been sending me emails about once every few weeks, even though I unsubscribed from them a long time ago. I click on the Unsubscribe link whenever I get one of those emails and it says that I’m already unsubscribed.

So whatever you do, don’t join their website.

They’re just trying to fool you into thinking that you’re supporting good causes when all you’re actually doing is signing up to be spammed for the rest of your life.

(Maybe that’s an overstatement, but still, save your own sanity and don’t do it.)

 

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