Yesterday, TrikSlyr, one of Karen’s friends, did a 24-hour stream and invited us over to participate in the Just Dance segment of his show. I had never played Just Dance before, and I’m not really that great at music/rhythm games in general (I play the real guitar but suck at Guitar Hero), but I still agreed to play.

Once we arrived, we had to wait a while at the front door before TrikSlyr came out to let us in. He came down in a squirrel onesie, but he specifically asked me not to take a photo.

Apparently, I’m not actually that awful at Just Dance.

Seeing as the entire premise of the game is to dance along to music, a majority of the VOD from TrikSlyr’s Just Dance stream is muted on Twitch. But, there is one small non-muted segment that you can watch:

(If you’re from the future, it might be too late to watch, as Twitch changed their policy on VODs and no longer saves them all permanently.)

Back on January 21, 2017, I ordered this black faux leather platform bed, in anticipation of it arriving on time for my January 24 move-in date to my new apartment. The bed was supposed to arrive on the day of my own arrival, so the timing would be perfect. I ordered a mattress to go along with it (which is also visible in the photo).

My bed got lost.

After waiting an extra six days for my bed with an unknown shipping status, lost somewhere in OnTrac Shipping’s facilities, I reached out to Amazon to see exactly what they could do about my lost bed. After realizing that I am a Prime member and I was supposed to receive my bed a long time ago, they sent out another one on January 30, 2017.

That bed successfully arrived on February 2, so I was finally able to assemble the bed and place my mattress on it, rather than leaving the mattress on the floor. Then, something very interesting happened.

Apparently, after 13 days of my original bed aimlessly wandering around, nowhere to be seen (because the tracking number had no updates since January 24), it had somehow found its way to my apartment. So now, in the span of two days, I have two beds.

I’m obviously going to return that bed, because I only paid for one bed, and I don’t need a second bed to begin with anyway. But, I hope that at least OnTrac will be the one responsible for relocating this 90-pound bed back to the manufacturer or warehouse, rather than Amazon having to pay for an error they did not commit…

Why? Well, for various reasons, one of which might even include legal, I can’t say why.

I too hate posts like this where someone clearly subliminally complains about something, but never actually gives enough details for anyone to ever figure out what they’re even remotely talking about. I feel like those posts should never be published (or Facebooked, or tweeted, or wherever they are released on the Internet), because usually it’s just some personal drama that’s leaking out to the public.

However, unfortunately, for this particular scenario, this incident is important enough that I have the urge to document it, yet I’m not exactly able to reveal to the public as to what happened.

But now you know

I hate that road.

“Adam,” you may ask, “what is the point of taking a photograph off the third floor of the only condo complex ON the beach in Huntington Beach, CA, if you don’t actually SHOW US the beach?”

Well to that, I say … oops, I only took that one photograph today.

I’ve been to Huntington Beach a few times so far, and I generally go there for work purposes rather than to enjoy myself, so I don’t really think too much about enjoying beach views while I’m there. I snapped that photo above while I was waiting for someone, but if I were to want to take a photo of the beach, I would’ve had to go out of my way to go on the other side of the complex, which I wasn’t really that motivated to do. Instead, you get a nice view of … California State Route 1, also known as the Pacific Coast Highway. As you may have guessed, it goes along the Pacific coast.

In case you still really, really want to see the beach, I dug up this old photograph that I took back in November 2016 of the beach.

Yes, I promise you that’s actually the beach, and not some random dark photograph. And yes, the only time I have ever photographed the beach was when I happened to be there in the middle of the night. No, this is not an intentional troll.

Now that I’m living in a gaming house environment (at least until I go insane enough to want to move out and live off on my own), it’s important to actually consider the amount of passive noise that I’m making. Although I’m generally just a quiet person overall, some of the stuff that I do, such as typing, can be pretty bothersome to people around me, especially because I use the Razer Blackwidow with Cherry MX blue switches.

Some of the sound comes from the actual activation of the blue switch, but a lot of the sound also comes from the keys bottoming out. When you press the key a little bit too hard, the plastic bottom of the key will strike the plastic frame of the keyboard, making a clacking noise. Rubber o-rings prevent the sound from being too disruptive by dampening the sound of impact, making the keyboard overall much quieter.

The o-rings that I purchased and installed were the “Rosewill Rubber O-Ring Sound Dampeners for Cherry MX Key Switch (135 pieces).” After browsing around and looking at a bunch of different o-rings, these seemed to be the best ones that I could find. I’m no o-ring expert so I don’t have experience comparing different brands of o-rings, but these ones that I got seem to work well.

I don’t own a key cap remover, so to get it started, I dug in along the edge of the keys next to the bezel with a knife and popped one out, then proceeded to yank the rest out with my fingers. I have relatively long nails on my right hand because I play the guitar and I use the nails on my right hand essentially as guitar picks when playing the classical guitar, so shoving the o-rings into the key was easy. Push the keys right back into place, and you have much quieter keys.

These were pretty cheap (at least to my standards) – I got mine for only US$9.99 for a bag with enough o-rings for me to insert them on all the keys of my keyboard and still have a handful of backup ones remaining. If you regularly use a mechanical keyboard in an area where others are around you, I’d highly recommend installing some o-rings, just to be considerate.

(No, this blog post is not sponsored; I’m just impressed at just how much the o-rings help in terms of reducing sound. I’ve heard that using a soft desk mat, or even placing a cloth/towel under your keyboard, also helps reduce sound output.)