Today was the first day of summer classes for Ed and me. We’re taking a few courses each at our local community college so we can transfer credits into our regular universities. Last year, we made a video; we did the same this year, but didn’t get as much good footage, so I’m probably going to save it for an unseen footage video.

When we arrived on campus, we noticed that there was a huge panel blocking the entrance that we took into the building last year, so we had to go around through a different entrance. Apparently, they shut down the center intersection of the building so you can’t go from one half of the building to another without having to walk all the way around the outside of the building.

During lunch, Ed and I went to McDonalds, like usual. We each received a free sample of a cherry-flavored slushie, and received two straws. Ed grabbed both straws and unraveled then. Then, he proudly thrust both straws into his sample.

He proudly looked at me with his troll face on and asked, “You thought I was opening this for you?”

After Ed’s second class was over, he came out to the car and texted me telling me that he was done. I made my way out of the computer lab where I was taking my online class to find that Ed had removed his sandals and given my car some eyebrows.

After we returned home, I stopped by Ed’s house for about an hour or so. Meanwhile, three tiny children who live in Ed’s neighborhood decided it would be a great idea to come up to Ed’s door and accuse us of calling them big fat jerks, even though I had never seen them before in my life. I’m not quite sure what they were attempting to accomplish, but I think that Ed’s dad completely missed the point as to why they were at our door. Instead of acknowledging that they were even making an accusation at all, he told them to stop playing on his driveway because it’s dangerous, and if he’s not paying attention, he might run them over with his car when he’s coming back home.

I told them to stop being stupid liars and to go away.

They went away.

This past Wednesday, I took Ed Lam (also known as Grainyrice on the Internet) with me to martial arts to take a taekwondo class. According to Ed, this was the second time he had ever gone to a martial arts class. During his first class, all he did was play leap frog around the gym. So basically, this was his first real martial arts class.

The mass chaos started even before we arrived – on the way there, Ed got an epic foot cramp that inca­pac­i­tated him for over a full minute. According to Ed, the experience brought him enough pain that he felt he was “giving birth to his foot.” Apparently, some of his toes were stuck together, and he was arched over in misery for quite a while.

Upon arriving, Ed sat off to the side while I instructed an intermediate and advanced children’s class that takes place right before the adults’ class that Ed and I were going to take. I’m pretty sure Ed got pretty jealous at the intense skills the kids had.

When the time came for Ed to join in, we started with some warm-ups. A part of the warm-ups included everyone in the class counting off ten jumping jacks. Ed was last in line, and he started counting. He seemed to be doing great: “1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7 …”

At this point, I realized what Ed had done and stopped mid-jump to start cracking up in laughter. The remainder of the class started giggling as well, and our master (who is the equivalent of the head instructor) started at him with a “…” expression on his face.

Ed finished counting up, “8, 9, 10,” then acted as if nothing silly had happened. I notified Ed of his error, then realized that Ed most likely had no idea that he had even forgotten the number 5. He stood in confusion for a little bit, did one additional jumping jack, counted it as “5,” then smiled in contentment.

Normally on Wednesdays, we do sparring drills – that means, we put chest guards on and kick each other around to practice combat techniques. Unfortunately, today, we didn’t have enough people who brought their own sparring gear, so we ended up doing cardiovascular exercises instead.

A little over half-way through the 45-minute session (about 15 of which were used for stretching and warm-up drills), I noticed that Ed was missing. I looked around and saw him hunched over in the corner trying to catch his breath. He disappeared for a little while again, most likely to take a bathroom break and get some water, then came back looking as if he just experienced the most terrifying thing in his life. Moral of the story: Ed is weak. If you ever have to fight him one-on-one, just let him run around for five minutes and he’ll get exhausted, then he won’t have any endurance left to keep fighting. Also, we need to keep making fun of Ed so he starts exercising more.

The day following the work-out, Ed let me know that he was barely able to get out of his bed in the morning, and was unable to climb up the stairs without the help of his hands.

Earlier today, we had promotion testing for our taekwondo program. You might remember from last year that there are two promotion tests over the summer; I posted a few pictures from one of them. Our grandmaster brought his camera and took a bunch of photos, but they haven’t been uploaded to the Internet yet; when they do get uploaded, I’ll share some on my website in a future blog post.

Have you ever wondered how gas stations get refills?

A massive truck like the one pictured here comes along and shoves its giant hose into a hole in the ground, pumping gas into the deep abyss.

I dunno, at the time, I thought it would be a great idea to take a picture of this. Then I found it on my iPod Touch and wanted to do something with it so it would stop collecting dust, so I posted it here. The best part is, I wasn’t even able to center the camera on the actual hose that was pumping gas into the ground, and part of it is cut off by the right edge of the photo.

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.

After going on a severe rant about YouTube’s new update three days ago, this post is a huge turnaround, looking at the better side of Google.

I’m sure most of us have used our Gmail accounts as storage or backup space. Gmail users get over 7 GB of free storage, and most people don’t get 7 GB of text emails ever in their life, so they take advantage of that and use that space for other files.

IF you’re an avid backer-upper, you probably noticed that the attachment size limit in Gmail is 25 MB. Unfortunately, there are some files that we have to save that are larger than 25 MB. In the past, depending on their skill level and adeptness with computers, people might have either just not backed up those files, or split them up using a program like 7-Zip.

With the release of a new feature called Google Drive, nobody has to do that anymore.

http://drive.google.com

Upon signing up for Google Drive, your Gmail inbox gets increased to 10 GB and you get an additional 5 GB of storage space on what used to be Google Docs. Except now, you can upload any files to Google Drive (with no 25 MB file size limit), not just documents.

The sorting and organization features have also been drastically improved, and now it looks like what you would see in a real operating system. It takes all the good parts of Google Docs and reorganizes them so they’re more convenient to use.

As of right now, you have to request an invitation, but I’ve been hearing that most people get the invitation within a few hours. This is definitely something worth checking out, so if you have a Google account, I highly encourage you to sign up soon.

First of all, I’d like to start off-topic and say that I hate rain. A few days ago, I woke up in the morning and took a shower. Then I went outside to go to class and took another shower. Except, the only problem was, for the second shower, I had nothing to use to dry off because I was in a lecture hall and not my bathroom, so I was dripping wet throughout my entire class. By the time I got moderately dry, class was over and it was time to go back outside and be rained on again.

Back to my complaints on YouTube.

I’m sure all of you have realized this to be a recurring theme, but I absolutely hate it when YouTube comes out with an update. First it was the home page redesign that made it impossible to actually view all your subscribers’ videos and remove them from the home page after you were done watching them, then it was randomly removing people as subscribers and making popular YouTubers lose almost half their views. Now, it seems like they’re going to mess up the partnership system as well.

For those of you slightly familiar with my YouTube channel, I have a handful of game-related videos from which I am making money. This is permitted under copyright law because throughout the entire video, I am providing insightful and relevant commentary and critique, rather than just playing the game and not adding any accompanying words. Usually, when I submit a video for monetization, I’m able to clarify this so the video gets approved and I start making advertising revenue off my views.

From the latest update, they changed the request form such that you’re not allowed to explain what is in your video. Now, when you submit your video, you click a button that says you accept the terms and conditions, then your video gets automatically submitted. Then, the idiot who goes and looks through submitted videos doesn’t even watch the video, sees that the thumbnail includes video game footage, and rejects the video for copyright infringement without even taking a look at what the actual content of the video is.

So, the point is, I’ve lost a good amount of money as a result of this ridiculous new system, and it’s very annoying.

This update came along with the new partnership update from about a week ago. I’ve been told by a handful of my friends that they got an email from YouTube letting them know they were approved for partnership. Sorry to burst your bubble, but you weren’t actually approved for the partnership you were hoping for. YouTube also happened to change the partnership system so they are no longer accepting applications for real partners (with custom branding), and opened up the new partnership system to everyone. The only additional feature you get as a “partner” now is monetization.

I’m not quite sure what the motivation was behind making this change, but now, anyone can become a “partner” with the click of a button and start making money off their videos. But, don’t be fooled by this, because it’s not quite what it seems. Your money is deposited into Google Adsense. For those of you unfamiliar with Google Adsense, you only get payouts once a month, IF AND ONLY IF you make more than $100 that month. If not, it carries over to the next month and you don’t get paid for that pay period.

Now of course, the “real” YouTube partners have absolutely no problem making over $100 per month because they’re good- and popular-enough video producers to attract enough viewers and display enough ads. However, everyone starts at the same spot, and I was back at square one at one point of my career as well, when I wasn’t making over $100 a month in the blink of an eye. Looking back at when I first started, it took nearly forever to get the first payout from Google Adsense. Thus, this seems more like a YouTube money maker rather than an update that’s supposed to give people a better opportunity to improve their video making. I can guarantee that a majority of these “new” partners aren’t ever going to reach the $100 mark. They simply don’t have the audience to display enough ads and make enough money. However, they might end up reaching about $50 before they give up. When they give up, that money doesn’t go anywhere, and stays with Google. Multiply that by the thousands upon thousands of people who are going to try out the new open partnership program, and those are some nice profits for Google without doing anything new.

Of course, if you know me, you know that I love Google and use pretty much all of their service. I even posted on Google+ not long ago that the new Google+ layout was the first time a social network has ever come up with a new theme and I liked it immediately without going through a “getting used to it” period. I use Gmail for all my email needs, and I forward four or five accounts’ emails all to my Google account. Keeping this in the back of my mind, it feels like YouTube is never up to par with all of Google’s other services. YouTube is always falling behind, and whoever is coming up with these YouTube updates seems to be the severe underdog at Google.

Am I expecting YouTube to ever change? Not at all. Their customer service is worse than terrible, and it seems like they simply don’t have the desire to take users’ thoughts into consideration before releasing updates. But hopefully something will work out, and even if YouTube itself becomes a failure, I’m hoping that the people who run YouTube – the video producers, not the staff members – will bring it back as close as possible to what it used to be.