If you watch any of my live stream shows (which is a little difficult not to if you read my website, seeing as I post replays of my live stream shows all the time, but then again, I guess you could just easily ignore them), you might already know that whenever I’m live streaming, my laptop overheats to dangerously high temper­a­tures, generally between 90°C and 98°C (which is around 200-210°F). Usually during stream, you’ll hear me saying, “I think my laptop is melting.”

Of course, the surface of the laptop isn’t this hot, or else I would be burning my hands as I type – this is the temperature of the processor inside.

The processor is what’s doing most of the work inside of my laptop, so if something goes wrong with it, it will force the laptop to shut down so it stops processing information and gets an opportunity to cool down. This usually happens when it reaches around 100-102°C, which is past the point at which water boils.

Of course, I realized that my processor is working hard to stream what’s on my screen, but I just couldn’t understand why it would do this when all I had open was a Flash game on Google Chrome, Skype, and the streaming client. Based off the background knowledge I had, I knew that there was something wrong, but I just couldn’t figure out what.

Then, XSplit notified me yesterday that it had an update. I updated the software, then went into the settings to see if there were any new options or features that I could change. Then, I made a sudden discovery as to what the problem was.

I noticed that the option to save a local recording of everything to my hard drive was selected. I went to the directory in which it claimed it would save my files, and there they were – every single stream I have ever done in the past, saved locally as Flash video files.

If you’re not familiar with video production, this might sound a bit confusing or meaningless. In simpler terms, my laptop was taking the stuff that was on my screen and making two copies of it, one to send to Twitch.TV to broadcast publicly, and one to save to my personal archives. Basically, it was unnecessarily doing twice the work that it had to do, without me telling it to do the extra work.

I turned off the local recording option and did another test stream, and saw incredible results. My laptop never exceeded 90°C, and usually fluctuated around 80-82°C (which is still really hot, but an excellent improvement and nowhere near the danger zone that might cause my laptop to commit suicide or melt).

So, if you happen to have problems with XSplit right now and the fact that it’s making your laptop or computer overheat, try looking in the settings to see if you have local recordings turned on.

Some people might actually want to keep a local copy for their personal archive, but it’s completely un­nec­es­sary to do this in real time while you’re streaming to the Internet. Once you’re done with your stream, you can head on over to Twich.TV and pull up your video replay. Then, you can use something like the Download Helper plug-in on Mozilla Firefox to download your replay after you’re done streaming. Yes, it does take a little bit of extra time, but this is something that you can set and forget about overnight, and it drastically decreases the load on your computer.

If you read yesterday’s blog post, I’m sure you can intelligently conclude that today was my second day of university for the semester. On Mondays and Wednesdays, I have a criminology class, which, as the name suggests, is the study of crime. As an introduction to the course today, we had a discussion during lecture about the topic of why people commit crime.

Our instructor took ideas from our class; someone responded with “addiction.”

Our instructor wanted our responses to be specific, so he asked, “Addiction to what?”

Of course, most of us expected a response like drugs or gambling, but apparently, the student who originally said “addiction” suddenly blacked out and had nothing to say. He struggled for a little bit, then said:

“Uh … jaywalking?”

Quite an interesting answer to say the least.

I hope you guys aren’t addicted to something like jaywalking.

In other news, I will be streaming some competitive Tetris from the Tetris Tournament Online II later tonight. Larry vs. v_f will be taking place at 7 PM PST (9 PM CST), and Blink vs. aitsu_k will be taking place at 9 PM PST (11 PM CST). Of course, there is going to be a little gap between the games, but I’ll try to fill it in with something entertaining, as well as chatting with viewers.

If you don’t know where to tune in, this will be live streamed on the Hard Drop Twitch.TV channel. If for whatever reason you can’t make it to the stream later tonight (or if it’s already past “tonight” when you read this), a replay of the entire stream will be posted here sometime tomorrow.

I’m actually sitting in the dark right now due to a power failure. I obviously cannot use the Internet because my wireless router runs off electricity, and my laptop’s LAN port is inconveniently broken so I can’t even directly connect to the jack (even though I’m pretty sure if the power is out, the direct Internet would be out as well).

Of course, if you’re seeing this, it means that I either safely made it to a location where there’s Internet, or the power was restored in my apartment. Meanwhile, I don’t really have much else to do, so I decided to blog.

As of right now at the time of this writing, it’s been about half an hour or so since the power went out. Everything outside my window is dark except for university-powered buildings that have back-up power. For some reason, a fire truck is parked outside the apartment building right now – not quite sure what it’s doing there, since it’s raining and any fires will probably get put out by themselves, but I’m hoping that it has something to do with expediting the electricity recovery process.

Of course, when I’m bored, I take photos, so I decided to take a photo of the tiny sliver of the fire truck that I’m able to see from my window. There really isn’t anything else that I can take a photo of anyway because my cameras happen to not have night vision.

I’m trying to conserve my laptop battery as much as possible by closing all background processes and setting my brightness level to minimum, but then again, I should probably take this opportunity to go to bed early and catch up from the lost sleep from last night’s Badger Herald work.

In related news, the fire truck just left our parking lot and our power is not back on, so I guess they didn’t do too much to help out. I’m actually going to go down to the front desk to see if they have an update.

I’m back from the front desk, and apparently, the entire city has lost power and there is no estimate as to when the electricity will be back.

If you read yesterday’s blog post, or if you’re just an expert stalker, you know that today was my first day of classes for the fall semester. My day started with a discussion for my sociology of law class, which ended up not happening because our teaching assistant never showed up to class. He ended up sending out an email to us several hours after the meeting time to “clarify” that discussion sections would not be meeting at all this week. It would’ve been helpful if he had sent out that email 24 hours earlier so I could’ve slept in an extra hour…

My next class was a lecture for my sociology of law class. My instructor was born and raised mostly in China, and he has only been in the United States for ten years now, so he has a distinct Chinese accent. Fortunately, it’s not as heavy as most other Chinese natives, so it’s not going to make me laugh every time I hear him speaking and get reminded of Chinese accent comedy and parodies.

My last class for the day was experimental psychology. We spent a majority of the class period talking about the syllabus and doing an experiment about illusory correlations. We were the subjects of the experiment; we had to write our thoughts about a particular topic, then try to remember correlations based off short sentences of information we were given. It was clear that the main point of the experiment was to prove that if we prime ourselves by thinking about a member of particular group of people in a positive or negative way (for example, my specific variant was thinking about African-American President Barack Obama in a positive way), it would end up affecting how we think about the entire group (all African-Americans are seen in a more positive light compared to a neutral control group). At first it was really simple to understand and very to-the-point, but then our instructor started talking about her experiment in depth and started going on random tangents regarding variations of the experiment until the class period was over.

I’ve actually been taking random breaks throughout typing this blog post to eat walnuts and get some other stuff organized, and it’s been over an hour since the power has gone out. I’m pretty sure that it’s most likely not going to come back any time soon, so I’m going to go to sleep now.

After a majority of my blog posts from the past week or so being related to Tetris, I’ve had a handful of people ask variations of the question “Do you do anything other than cast Tetris anymore?” and “What have you been up to?”

Although I’ve been casting quite a bit more Tetris lately than I usually do (primarily because of the world championship tournament that’s going on right now, and the fact that everyone wants their matches shout­casted by me), I’ve also been doing quite a bit of other stuff since I’ve gotten back at university.

Since I got back to Madison, I’ve been spending quite a bit of time doing Badger Herald work. For those of you unfamiliar, I’m the web director at the Badger Herald. I had to come to Madison a week earlier than most other students because the Badger Herald releases a sizable registration issue on the first day of classes, and we need to work on getting that done (as well as an online version of all the articles) before classes begin. Today is actually the deadline for everything, and I’m almost done getting everything published and released to the public. We’re also planning to release a new landing page for the Herald website as a preview for a new website design I’ve been working on for quite some time.

In my spare non-working time, I’ve also been playing quite a bit of League of Legends with my buddy Del, because he’s my only friend who is ever available to play League of Legends with me. Yes, I have other friends who play League of Legends, but they’re all at like 2000+ elo and refuse to play with me because I’m a noob. In related news, Del is in a band called Unarmed for Victory where he plays the bass and does vocals. You should check them out if you like metal and hardcore music.

In other random news, the ceiling above my shower is still leaking water once in a while and still emits a smell akin to mold. If you read my blog post from a handful of days ago, you know that maintenance came in to “fix” the hot water on my shower by letting me know that the pipes were connected backwards, and that I just had to turn the knob over to the cold side to get hot water. In order to compensate for this never-ending stench leaking from my bathroom ceiling, I’ve been keeping the window in my room open. Of course, it’s also burning hot outside right now because it’s the middle of summer, so to compensate for my compensation, I’ve had to keep my air conditioning on at maximum temperature and maximum power pretty much all day and all night.

In more random news, if you’re following me on Twitter, you might remember this tweet from a few days ago: “I think my neighbor is having a nightmare and has mistaken the wall between our rooms as the floor, and is trying to run away from something.” I got a few “wut” responses, so I decided to give the full story behind this tweet. Shortly after 5 AM, the wall between my room and my neighbor’s room started rumbling. When I woke up, I heard what seemed like footsteps on the wall. Thus, I made the intelligent conclusion in my half-asleep state at 5 AM that my neighbor was having a nightmare, and (s)he was running away from a vicious monster or something. However, unfortunately, (s)he mistaked the wall for the floor, and was trying to run away using the wall rather than the ground. Don’t worry, I’m sure (s)he’s okay now.

In even more random news (yes, I’m basically writing about stuff as it pops up into my mind without organizing everything), earlier tonight, I left my apartment building to head over to Jimmy John’s across the street so I could buy some dinner. Then, I noticed that something was going on in the parking lot of my apartment building, and realized that there was a grill-out and there were free hot dogs being distributed. I love Jimmy John’s sandwiches, but I of course cannot turn down free food, so that ended up being a pleasant surprise. What made it even better was that right as I got my food and came inside, it started raining a few minutes later. Of course, it’s not great that it rained on everyone who was eating outside, but I was happy that, for once, it started raining right after I entered a building, as opposed to immediately after I leave a building, as it usually happens.

If you’ve made it this far through this blog post, congratulations. I would have most likely given up on reading it after a few paragraphs.

My first day of class for the fall semester is tomorrow. Hopefully I’ll be able to make it to the Sewell Social Sciences building tomorrow morning without getting lost like I did at the beginning of last semester because I had forgotten how to get there due to the fact that I hadn’t been there for a month. I have a discussion and lecture for my law course in the morning, and a lecture for my psychology course in the afternoon.

I’m sure this is enough information about my life, so I’m going to finish up my last bit of work for the Herald for the night, then go to sleep so I don’t end up oversleeping tomorrow morning and missing my first class.

If you’ve been keeping up with my life lately, you might have known that I came back to Madison to my university campus this past Friday. I had to come back early because of work. Of course, working is not the only thing that I’ve been doing. Some other things I’ve been accomplishing are eating, sleeping, and failing at problem solving.

Of course, like the past two years, there have been a few miniscule but bothersome problems with my apartment room upon moving in. Last year, it was the fact that I didn’t have a large refrigerator or a freezer, and I had to get my own. This year, on top of a few other things, it was that the hot water in my shower wasn’t working.

Unfortunately, I figured this out on Friday, and by the time I had showered and realized there was no hot water coming out, it was too late to file a request with maintenance. They only take emergency requests outside of regular working hours and over the weekend, so I decided to just wait until Monday morning, and hoped that the hot water would randomly fix itself over the weekend.

Unfortunately, it did not, and I ended up filing my maintenance request. Maintenance came in to fix everything else that was wrong with my apartment, and looked at the hot water while they were at it.

The repair man let me know that the hot water was working fine this entire time.

I insisted that hadn’t been working for the past handful of days, and turned on the shower. I turned the knob all the way over to the “H” side and informed him that the water was freezing cold.

Then he turned the knob all the way over to the “C” side and said that the pipes were just connected back­wards in this room.

You may now proceed to spend the next five minutes laughing at the fact that I was so dumb that I couldn’t figure this out by myself over the span of like four days.

My mom and I went to an auto repair shop today because there was oil leaking from her car. This auto repair shop happened to be attached onto a gas station, and there was no waiting area, so while her car was being fixed, I had to stand around outside being bored.

Then I noticed something. Not only was there a gas station right next to the auto repair shop, there was also one across the street.

Having two gas stations in such close proximity seems strange, but it doesn’t end there. I turned around 180 degrees and looked over the fence in the opposite direction, and there was ANOTHER gas station within a hundred feet away.

I’m not sure what genius thought it would be a great idea to build a gas station when there was already one right next to it, and I’m not sure what other savant thought it would be a brilliant idea to build yet again another gas station when there were already two right next to it. But it seems a little counterintuitive in the business sense.

This is literally the first time I’ve seen three gas stations all crammed within the same block.

In other news, while I was waiting for the repairs, the gas station attached to the repair shop got a refill. In case you’re curious how they do that, here’s a photo: