Although I’ve been giving some updates related to what I plan to do with my website in the future and some changes (both temporary and permanent) that you should expect to see within the next few months, I haven’t really blogged at all about what I’ve been up to lately since I’ve started on summer break. So, here’s my recap of the first two weeks of this year’s summer break.
I thought I was going to come back home on either Saturday or Monday because those dates would be the best time for my parents to come pick me up, but instead, we got ahead of schedule and my parents were able to come get me on Friday. After returning, I didn’t do that much over the first weekend except for sleep and eat pasta. I actually forgot to take very many photos over the past few weeks, but, characteristically, I still have a strange photo – this time, of a finished bowl of pasta.
(For those of you who have not been around for very long, I have a tendency to take weird photographs like that. It all started when I took a picture of a pile of cut fingernails on my desk and put it on my blog back in the “Five Minutes in My Head” era; the entire era consisted of sporadically placed odd photographs of similar strangeness.)
Starting on Monday, I returned to my standard summer schedule of going to the family business (which is a laundromat) for a majority of the day, then going to a martial arts academy located near our laundromat called Chicago Martial Arts to instruct tae kwon do during a children’s class and train during an adult’s class. This has been going on every weekday for the past two weeks, and has basically been taking up a majority of my day.
For the beginning portion of summer break, I’ve been spending some time programming for the Badger Herald, which is where I work when university is session. There’s a huge website redesign project that still hasn’t been completely finished, but the coding work for it has been so unexpectedly erratic and frustrating that I decided I would need to take a break from all Herald-related programming in order to save my sanity. As mentioned in a previous blog post, this was also why I decided now would be a good time to do a complete overhaul of my own website – I felt it would be a good way to remind me how fun coding, programming, and web design actually is (as opposed to what one would assume when attempting to program with the Herald’s website).
Also, starting from some time last week, I started reading some more psychology books like I did last summer. The “What I’m Reading” section will in fact be making a comeback, but I’m not quite fully sure when. I’m pretty much done with my first book, and I have about five more pages to read of the conclusion. Then, like usual, I’ll be doing a quick summary of the book and give my opinions about what I thought of the book. Here’s a funny quote taken out of the book:
“
Hofstadter’s law tells us: ‘It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s law.'”
I thought the recursion in the law was funny. In case you’re questioning if the law is real (like I did when I first read it), you can click on the link to go to its Wikipedia page. (Meaning, yes, the law is real.)
This past Sunday on the 27th, I had a little bit of spare time to do some competitive Tetris commentary for the first time since leaving university for the academic year. It was not at all like my regular competitive Tetris live stream shows; it was some color commentary and a tiny bit of shoutcasting for the Cultris II winner’s bracket finals between Blink (the United States champion) and Jtadore. After having a little bit of streaming difficulty, we managed to get it streamed and recorded on Hard Drop’s Twitch.TV account. I had two other commentators with me, so if you watch the replay of the stream, you’ll only hear me popping up once in a while.
Finally, I decided to end with this strange photograph of some mutated cherries.
My mom bought these cherries because they were on sale, but all of them look like their handicapped. None of the cherries are actually what you would expect to see a cherry look like; instead, they’re either two cherries conjoined at the middle (with two seeds, one on each side), or a big cherry with a small cherry-like growth coming out from near the stem.
They taste a little strange too.