I’m sure you’ve all made, or at least seen, those name acronyms where someone takes each letter of their first name and thinks of an adjective that starts with the corresponding letter that describes the person. For example:

Anopisthographic
Delitescent
Autoschediastic
Magirist

(Disclaimer: I have no idea what any of those words mean and they most likely do not actually describe me.)

When I was walking to my psychology research lab room today, I noticed that someone else with a room in our research wing named Lauren had one of these taped to her door. I read it, then noticed something strange about the words following the R – so strange, that I had to stop and take a photo of it.

Since when was “red red wine” an adjective? And since when was “wine” a valid way to describe a human?

…

I decided to take a quick photo and put up a quick blog post today to honor this overachieving tree, all the way to the right of the photo:

The rest of the trees in my apartment are as green as can be, but this particular tree in question seems to have finished going through autumn and is preparing for winter. If there’s one thing this tree hates, it’s procras­ti­na­tion.

I stopped by the Badger Herald office today for a meeting, and stuck around long enough to get some work done and to chat with co-workers.

While I was out in the main editorial area looking for someone, I noticed that our ArtsEtc. editor had brought a dog to the office because she was dogsitting for her boss from a different job.

Because I live in the main campus area in Madison for university, I rarely see any pets. Even if I were to see dogs, I would only see them, and don’t have many opportunities to interact with them. So, seeing this dog in the office made me quite excited.

Apparently he gets really nervous and shivers when he’s in an unfamiliar environment, but I managed to get him to eat a bit by hand-feeding him dog food, one kernel at a time.

Yes, that made me feel accomplished.

When I woke up this morning, I stepped into the shower, like every morning. I didn’t notice anything strange about my body, and felt relaxed while I washed myself to prepare for the upcoming day.

Of course, this was early in the morning, and I had just woken up, so I was only partially conscious. I’m usually in a drowsy and partially-still-asleep state until like 12 PM in the afternoon.

After getting out of the shower, I grabbed a towel and dried myself off, got dressed, and brushed my teeth. Even at this point, I still felt fine.

Then, I grabbed the towel again to dry my hair off a bit more. After getting my hair as dry as possible, I put the towel back on the hanger and left the bathroom.

Suddenly, I noticed that there was a sharp cramp-like pain on the right side of my neck, flowing down through my shoulder. Being a martial artist, I’m used to random body parts hurting, so I didn’t really think of it as much of a big deal. I tried to stretch it out a bit by rotating my neck around and squeezing my neck and shoulder, and extended my neck all the way to my left to try and crack it to relieve the pressure.

Nothing seemed to work as an immediate solution, but I still didn’t think much of it and went on with my day.

Not much later, when I got ready to leave my room to head to my first class, I realized that the pain in my neck was getting worse and worse. I tried to pinch my muscle to see if I could relieve any unexpected cramps or pressure, but nothing seemed to work. I tried cracking my neck again, but at this point, it was so painful that I couldn’t stretch my neck far enough to even get it into cracking range. I tried looking over to my right, and realized that the tightness in my neck muscles was so intense that I couldn’t even look to my right.

Again, being a martial artist, I’m used to having random injuries like this pop up once in a while, so I, again, still didn’t really think about it much and went on with my day.

By the evening, I realized that there was actually a problem with my neck. It had gotten to a point where if I wanted to look at something to my right, I would have to turn my entire body because my neck wouldn’t cooperate with my eyes.

I thought back to what I did that might have caused this. Of course, because of my subconscious state of sensation immediately after waking up, I don’t know if this neck pain developed overnight and I just didn’t feel it while showering, or if it had developed after I woke up. Assuming that I was conscious enough that I wouldn’t be completely oblivious to a stinging cramp-like pain in my neck, I came to the conclusion that this happened sometime between when I brushed my teeth and when I dried my hair again.

So, I decided to post the public service announcement in the title of this blog post along with my story from today.

The next time you go to blindly dry your hair, remember to think before you act.

Earlier this evening, I was looking through the photos on my iPod and making sure that everything was backed up for the iOS 6 update that’s coming out in a few days, when I came across a screenshot I took a few weeks ago.

Yes, on Wednesday, September 5, 2012, I took over 12,000 steps and went up over 30 flights of stairs. I thought this would be a good way to go into my epic story of how inefficient the laboratory key rental system is at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

In the morning of this epic day, I had a lab meeting with my research group, where I learned more about the research we would be doing during the semester, and got administrative information about the credits that went along with participating in the lab, as well as getting keys to access the laboratory experiment rooms.

At first, it seemed to be simple. All we had to do is go to the second floor of the psychology building and talk with Gary, who would give us our keys. But, there was a catch – we needed to put down a $10 cash deposit ($5 for each key) before we were able to get our keys. Unfortunately, I never carry any cash around with me, so I had to go to an ATM to withdraw some money. From the Brogden Psychology Building, I went to Ingraham Hall, which was where the closest no-fee ATM was for my credit union.

From Ingraham Hall, I went all the way back down to the psychology building after withdrawing $10 in cash. I went to the second floor and finally found Gary. I told him which keys I needed and gave him the $10 in cash. Then he told me a tragic story.

I have to pay my deposit at the bursar’s office, not at the psychology building. The worst part is that the bursar’s office is about half-way across the entire campus, and Ingraham Hall, where I got my cash, is more or less on the way to the bursar’s office.

So, I had to head all the way over to the bursar’s office, passing again the street I used to head to Ingraham Hall.

After making my deposit at the bursar’s office and getting a receipt, I had to walk all the way back to the psychology building to show proof of payment and get my keys.

This epic trek across my campus to get my laboratory keys, as well as going to classes and going to the Herald office to work, ended up getting me over 12,000 steps taken today.

At least I got some exercise. -__-

I’m sure most of you already know that the issues I’ve been having with my laptop overheating has been a re­curring problem for the past five or so years.

After taking a suggestion from one of my buddies who live casts competitive Tetris with me once in a while, I tried to take apart my laptop to clean out the dust inside my laptop. He told me that the problem was most likely a bit of dust stuck inside near the fan that was preventing it from properly expelling hot air.

I whipped out my handy dandy mini screwdriver and started getting to work on removing the 20 or so screws holding the bottom half of the base of my laptop to the upper half of the base of my laptop. After getting through 19 of the 20 screws (numbers not exact, of course, but the point is that I had one screw left), I stuck the screwdriver in the hole containing the last screw. I applied a bit of pressure and started twisting, but it felt like the screwdriver was spinning freely inside.

I applied a bit more pressure, and realized that the screw was damaged up to a point that I wouldn’t be able to unscrew it. I thought to myself that it wouldn’t really matter, seeing as I had taken out about 95% of the screws, so I tried to split the base of my laptop anyway without removing the last screw.

It wouldn’t budge.

I stuck the opposite end of my screwdriver, which conveniently happens to be a flat-head chisel-like tip, into the crevice between the two parts of the base of the laptop. I fidgeted the screwdriver around quite a bit, but it felt like the two parts were being held together by superglue.

I had spent quite a bit of time unscrewing 19 screws, and I wasn’t able to successfully follow through with my plans because of a single broken screw. Then, I realized something.

What is the point of having 20 screws if, clearly, one screw is enough to hold the entire base of the laptop together without a hint of failure? Did Dell purposely design their laptops such that people like me would go through the struggle of unscrewing 19 screws, then get to the last one and explode in rage?

In frustration, I peeked into the fan area and tried to get the dust out without opening the laptop by just blowing as hard as I could into the opening.

Not exactly the best idea.

All of a sudden, tiny specks and particles (of dust, I’m assuming) fluttered out of the fan and into my mouth and up my nose. I had a sneezing fit for like 40 seconds straight, then realized that it had actually worked.

I put all 19 unnecessary screws back into my laptop. I had to drink about two glasses of milk to finally flush down all the random dust particles lodged inside my nasal passages and in my throat, but it seemed to work out. My laptop runs at a (relatively) cool 80 degrees Celsius or so when doing processor-intensive things, like when I play League of Legends. I haven’t tested out streaming yet, but I’m assuming the results will work in streaming as well.

So, the moral of the story is to not even try to unscrew all the screws on your laptop, because it will be an utter fail and a pathetic waste of your time. Instead, blow as hard as you can into the fan opening, and make sure you have plenty of milk to flush down all the foreign substances that you are about to inhale and swallow.

(Or just get a can of compressed air.)