Hard boiled eggs do, in fact, explode in the microwave

by   •   General, Highlights
 

This post is over 11 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.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 spent the day at home today.

Before my mom left this morning to tend to the family business, she left some food for me in the re­frig­er­a­tor. It was tteokbokki, which is Korean-style rice cake with seasoning.

A lot of different stuff can be added in with the seasoning; my mom decided to put in some garlic, other boiled vegetables, and hard-boiled eggs.

I decided to eat this tteokbokki for lunch.

I mindlessly removed it from the refrigerator and put it in the microwave for two minutes.

A minute and a half later, I hear an explosion.

I realize that a hard-boiled egg had blown up.

Remembering too late that hard-boiled eggs explode in the microwave, I grudgingly get some paper towels and wipe down the inside of the microwave, dabbing at the remains of the splattered egg yolk. I yank out the rotating tray and wipe it down with a wet rag. After a handful of minutes, everything is cleaned up and ready to be used to continue heating my food.

But I’m not as retarded as you might think. I carefully inspect the food and find another hard-boiled egg. I furiously hack at it with my chopsticks until it’s in 12 different pieces. If there’s no albumen encasing the yolk, there obviously is nothing there to hold in the pressure and explode.

I put everything back in the microwave and set it for another two minutes.

A minute later the hacked up eGG EXPLODES ANYWAY HOW IS THAT EVEN PHYSICALLY POSSIBLE

I spend another five minutes re-cleaning the inside of the microwave.

Before putting the food back in the microwave for a third time, I just completely remove all the egg from the bowl and furiously let it fall in the trash.

…

There was a third egg hiding under the tteok.

I cleaned my microwave

three times

today.

 

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Re: “What was wrong with your website for the past 4 hours?”

by   •   Highlights, Q&A
 

This post is over 11 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.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.
 

In the spirit of Black Friday, I went searching for some great deals.

I came across a few at Namecheap – namely, $0.98 each for the first year of shared web hosting and do­main registration.

If you’ve been keeping up with me for a while, you know that I occasionally do website redesigns every few years. I’m long overdue for my next redesign, and there’s actually a valid reason for that.

The thing that’s holding me back is the fact that my current web host appears to be keeping cached copies of my .CSS files such that changes don’t go into effect until about 10-20 minutes after the edits are pub­lished. As you can imagine, making and testing changes to stylesheets is essentially impossible when your .CSS edits only refresh four times an hour.

For this reason, I was especially compelled to take advantage of the $0.98-for-one-year web hosting bar­gain from Namecheap.

I acted on my compulsion at 11 AM EST this morning when the coupon code was released on Namecheap’s special Black Friday timed deals page. The several hundred coupon codes sold out within a handful of mi­nutes, and I was fortunate enough to be one of the people to get one.

About an hour and a half after my purchase, I started moving files over to my new server, and by 1 PM EST, I was pretty much done. All I had to do was wait for the DNS to propagate, and my new old website would be live.

Or so I thought.

Continue reading →

 

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Regarding the Tetris Tournament Online III (TTO3) grand finals

by   •   Highlights, Tetris
 

This post is over 12 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.
 

Due to the overwhelming number of requests I have received to comment on the Tetris Tournament Online III grand finals broadcast, I felt like I could not ignore them any longer. I’ve given my opinion to a few different people in individual conversations, but like always, what I say always gets changed when passed along. So, I decided to post another official announcement again, this time regarding the results of the tournament.

For those who are completely unfamiliar with the Tetris Tournament Online, it is the world competitive Tetris championship tournament, sponsored by the Tetris Company, the copyright holders of the Tetris brand, and organized by Hard Drop, the largest Tetris community in the world (as of today).

One of the most frequent questions I got was why I didn’t stream or cast anything in the tournament. I already answered this to a decent level of thoroughness back on October 19, 2013. In case you missed it, you can read it here:

http://parkzer.com/2013/10/19/

The next most common question is how the tournament went. I managed to get the statistics for TTO3 from Twitch, Hard Drop’s primary streaming platform, and can give you a comparison to TTO2 from last year, which is the tournament where I hosted the stream and casted.

  • Unique visitors. This is the number of different people who saw at least some part of the broadcast. TTO2: 37,963. TTO3: 3,340 (8.8%).
  • Max concurrent viewers. This is the largest number of people who were watching the stream at the same time. TTO2: 2,049. TTO3: 604 (29.5%).
    • An interesting supplementary piece of information – after TTO2 was over, we did fan games. During this time, the max concurrent viewers was 624. This means that we had more people watching fan games last year than the tournament had overall during the main event this year.
  • Average minutes per visitor. This is how long, on average, people watched the stream once they arrived on the page. I’m not 100% sure how to interpret this correctly because they’re displayed as ranges on a per-hour basis, but these numbers are taken straight from the Twitch statistics. TTO2: 3-45 minutes. TTO3: 7-14 minutes (25.3%).

To put things simply, TTO3 was massively less popular than TTO2.

The next main question I received was why this happened. The cause of this is simple – the leadership behind the tournament this year was insufficient. Hard Drop was not prepared to host the tournament yet, but an unqualified individual took over the lead and pushed this tournament to release without proper preparation. The founder of Hard Drop did not stop this because all he was interested in was to get something happening in the community.

Finally, the last question is if I will ever be re-entering the Tetris scene to revive streaming and broad­casting with high-quality production value. Unfortunately, I have no answer to that at this point. The primary determining factor is if the Tetris Company will start making an effort to promote their brand again. If they make an effort to improve the official Tetris game (which at this point is Tetris Friends – they can either improve it or make a new one), and become more motivated to get people involved with Tetris, then yes, I may consider re-entry. If not, then I will not.

 

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How to cut down an evergreen tree

by   •   Highlights
 

This post is over 12 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.
 

A few months ago, my dad and I cut down an evergreen tree that was growing out of control, causing the siding on our house to mold by blocking sunlight and keeping in moisture. I decided to take photos of the experience so I could help anyone else who might be taking on the same project. I finally got around to organizing all the photos and editing them for posting.

This is the tree that we cut down.

Evergreen tree

We started by cutting the branches off the bottom of the tree until we had a visible trunk we could use to actually cut down the tree.

When we had easy access to the base of the trunk, we attached a string as high on the tree as possible, then cut the trunk. While my dad was cutting, I yanked on the string away from our and our neighbor’s houses so it wouldn’t damage anything on the way down and fall in the right direction.

Fallen evergreen tree

Unfortunately, my dad cut a little bit too close to the ground, so the stump barely had anything sticking out. This is actually NOT what you want to do – you want to leave a little bit of stump still sticking out into the air so you have something you can use to pull when removing the root ball.

Evergreen tree stump

While my dad was working on cutting the side-spreading roots so we could lift out the root ball, I moved all the remains of the tree to the front driveway so our village’s public works department could come pick it up and turn it into mulch.

Evergreen tree remains

We successfully cut all the roots we could see coming out of the tree, but the root ball still wouldn’t move (again, likely because we didn’t have some stump left that we could use to pull). So, we watered the area to soften up the dirt, making it so we could dig even deeper at a future date.

Evergreen tree root ball

Unfortunately, that didn’t work out, so we ended up calling in landscaping professionals who had machinery designed to easily remove root balls.

Evergreen tree root removal

If you have any other questions, I can’t really help you out because I’m not a landscaping expert, but hopefully what I’ve been able to share so far is enough to help get your project started.

 

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Why I am not streaming for Tetris Tournament Online III

by   •   Highlights, Tetris
 

This post is over 12 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 do a lot of things on the Internet, so you might not necessarily know me for this, but a good handful of people discovered me due to my primary streaming leadership role in the Tetris Tournament Online II, the official annual Tetris tournament sponsored by the Tetris Company, the official copyright holder of the Tetris brand.

Many people were looking forward to Tetris Tournament Online III (TTO3), the sequel to last year’s tournament, and they were eager to have me return this year as a streamer and shoutcaster. However, most of these people noticed that I have not been the one streaming or shoutcasting any of the TTO3 matches so far.

I did announce some specifics about why I have not been the one streaming, but due to the unofficial nature with which I shared the information, a lot of it was lost or changed as it was passed on from person to person. There have also been some particular individuals who intentionally changed information as a personal attack to me.

To make things easier for everyone, I decided to publish my reasons here. If you hear anything else not included in this list, and it seems a little outlandish, it’s probably a rumor.

  1. I am gravely disappointed in the Tetris Company, and do not feel they deserve the publicity and free advertising that comes with Tetris Tournament Online. Their cooperation last year was mini­mal, and they just barely provided enough to get the tournament running. Nobody with whom I spoke showed any sort of genuine excitement about the tournament. The amount they supported our tournament was abysmal. They had many outlets to let Tetris enthusiasts know about our tournament so they could sign up, compete, and watch others’ matches; these outlets were barely used at all. Instead, a majority of our publicity came from Twitch, with whom I partnered in preparation for the event.

  2. I received next-to-zero compensation from the Tetris Company for the work I put in last year. The competitors at least received mediocre prizes – the first place winner received an electronic, but the runners up received prizes worth less than the shipping costs needed to send them internationally. The stream­ers, organizers, and hosts received absolutely nothing. The only benefit I received whatso­ever from streaming was a little bit of advertising for my website via the logo I had on the stream overlay. My co-commentator for the grand finals received literally nothing.

  3. I no longer have the time to put into Tetris. I graduate from undergraduate university, and have moved on to a graduate and licensure program. I no longer have the time to do whatever I want with my free time like I did when I was an undergraduate. I also have other things into which I must invest time.

  4. I no longer have the resources to stream. Back when the Tetris Tournament Online II was going on, I lived in my own apartment in Madison, WI that came with free 50 Mbps Internet. I no longer live in Madison; I moved out after I graduated. I now live back at my regular house in my home town, and commute to my graduate university. This also means that we don’t get free Internet, and the Internet we have is approximately 1.5 Mbps – nowhere near fast enough to stream anything at any viewable quality.

  5. The time I do spend on gaming, I would like to spend on games that have a future. At the rate the Tetris Company is going, Tetris has no future. Their attitude towards the Tetris community is counterintuitive, and is causing them to miss out on opportunities that will make their game more popular. On the other hand, there are plenty of other game developers who engage closely with their community and player base that has a much more promising future. I am going to stick with those companies.

Hopefully that will satisfy a lot of curiosity revolving my Tetris situation. Again, there is a lot of incorrect information intentionally being passed around by individuals who oppose my decision and wish for my failure. If you wish to remain at a neutral or supportive stance with me, I ask that you combat the wrong information by linking to this post, or simply by just not passing the wrong information on further.

 

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Re: “Daily Post: Non Sequitur”

by   •   Daily Post, Highlights
 

This post is over 12 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.
 

Note: for this Daily Post assignment, I decided to put the prompt at the end rather than at the top, because I feel reading the prompt before reading the post will act as a spoiler.

Jonas entered the library with a skip in his step. Earlier that day, his teacher complimented him for being a great reader, and encouraged him to keep reading. Jonas took his reacher’s advice to heart, and sprinted straight to the library after school. He wanted to get the biggest, thickest, hardest books so he could become the best reader in the world.

While scanning the shelves, he came across a 2,000-page encyclopedia. He instantly knew this was the one. Even the name of the book was beautiful: Britannica. Jonas and Britannica – it was meant to be. He brought it up to the circulation desk to check it out.

“I’m sorry, young lad, but you cannot check out reference materials.”

Jonas stood there thinking about what the lady had just said. Then it clicked. He knew what was happen­ing. He had seen it in movies before. It was a forbidden love. The love between Jonas and Britannica was forbidden.

Jonas knew exactly what to do next. The movies he’s seen taught him well. He had to run away with his true love. He had to run away with Britannica.

He carefully looked toward the exit. There was an obstacle blocking the path to freedom and true love. There was a young girl standing by the door, looking out. Jonas sized her up – only about four feet tall, not much larger than he was. He made the decision. He believed in himself. He could do it.

He dug his heels into the ground, then sprang forward. He began sprinting head-on towards the exit. The lady at the check-out desk began calling out for him, but he didn’t care. She just wanted to hold him back from his destiny.

The obstacle got closer and closer. “Britannica, we will get through this together,” Jonas whispered. He held the encyclopedia at head height and charged forward. As he approached the obstacle, the book collided with the back of her head, causing her to topple over like a bowling pin. She shrieked out in pain and confusion, but Jonas didn’t care. The noise was just another attempt at the world trying to stop him from achieving his ultimate fate.

The path was clear. As Jonas charged through the door and the book passed through the magnetic sensors, sirens started going off. “Wow, this love must be REALLY forbidden if even the police and FBI are after me,” Jonas thought to himself. He began the sprint back home. He never looked back, not even to notice that he had accidentally dropped Britannica in the parking lot on his way out.

Five minutes later, Jonas arrived back at his house.

“How was school?” his mother asked.

“It was great, my teacher made me really happy today!” Jonas replied.

“What did he do to make you so happy?” she asked.

“He tried to hit me with a forklift!”

Write a post about anything you’d like, but be sure to include this sentence somewhere in the final paragraph: “He tried to hit me with a forklift!”

Source: http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/09/23/daily-prompt-nonsequitur/

 

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