Today is the last day of my spring break, so I decided it would be a good day to recap all the mediocre things I did during break.

Last Friday, on March 30, my parents came to pick me up from Madison and drive me back home to Illinois. They came shortly after my last class ended, so I didn’t have much time to do anything in Madison before leaving. Upon arriving back at home, I went to my martial arts academy for a little while for the first time since winter break. For the remainder of the night, I helped my mom out at the family business (which is a laundromat, for those of you not already aware), came back home, wrote the blog post that was published that day about frequently asked questions regarding my competitive Tetris live stream, then went to sleep.

The following day, I went to the mysterious place that I mentioned this past summer (and possibly this past winter, I don’t remember). Here is another mysterious picture from this mysterious location so you can be even more confused. No, this is not where I live, and yes, this is the same place where I was doing some construction work over this past summer.

An unfortunate piece of news for a lot of you will be that I spent the second April Fool’s day in a row not doing an elaborate April Fool’s joke. My April Fool’s joke from 2010 was a pretty big hit on my website, and a lot of people enjoyed it. They were hoping that I would do something like this again, but unfortunately, I just haven’t had the extra time and effort to spend on planning out another joke like this, and putting together all the resources. However, if you want to check out the joke that I did back in 2010, you can read my blog post from April 1, 2010.

The following day, I went to see my doctor to get a general blood test to make sure I’m healthy, and visited the optometrist to see if I needed a significantly newer prescription. A few days after my test, I got my results back to see that I got healthier in the past year, and to see that my metabolism is still insanely overactive. The optometrist did some more of those confusing "which one is better, this one or this one?" tests which I can never answer correctly because he does it so fast and because most of my options are the same. Shortly afterward, he put some drops in my eyes that dilated my pupils so much that I could barely walk outside without being completely blinded by the sun. He ended up concluding that my eyes have gotten negligibly worse in the past six years, and that getting new glasses was optional.

The remainder of my week has been less eventful, spending most of my time sitting around at the family business programming and coding, watching YouTube videos, playing some League of Legends, and chatting online. I also got back on a four-day intensive taekwondo session like I usually do when I’m back at home during my academic breaks.

That’s pretty much all I have for today; now I have to get back into my academic and Badger Herald work phase.

This week is my final week of classes before spring break, and as expected, I have an overload of work to get done.

Earlier today, I had a presentation and an exam. Tomorrow, I have a paper due. On Wednesday, I have a quiz in the morning. On Thursday, I have another exam; on Friday, I have yet again another quiz.

What made things worse was that there was an epic fail with the Internet yesterday at my workplace, the Badger Herald. I, being the web director and the closest thing the office has to technical support, was asked to come in to fix the Internet.

Usually, fixing the Internet is an easy fix – I simply call our Internet service provider and ask them to make sure there are no strange outages on their side. Unfortunately, yesterday, this didn’t work out at all. Our Internet service provider was giving us internet perfectly fine, but our router wasn’t distributing that Internet signal properly.

I had to go into the office and lose some studying time, but I didn’t expect it to take too long. I just planned on restarting our router and sort of expected it to work again. Sadly, that didn’t work out because our router itself was completely broken. The worst part was, it took me about an hour or two to figure out that it was irreparable.

I asked for help from the former web director, but he didn’t really know what to do, so we had to call someone who graduated from our university four years ago and retired from his position back in 2008 because he was the one who originally set up our router system. He was heroic enough to drive two hours to Madison from his home, and get everything set back up and running for us.

So, as a result of my academic overload, I will most likely not be blogging or tweeting much throughout this whole week. Also, on a slightly related note, I will also most likely not be doing my weekly com­pet­i­tive Tetris live stream show this week either, as Friday evening, I will be getting a ride back to my home town to visit my parents. I’m not 100% sure when my ride is going to arrive yet, though, so make sure to keep an eye on the announcements at the top of the home page of my website and follow me on Twitter for the latest updates.

What was that?

Oh, you want to know what happens when your bottle of bleach leaks inside your laundry bag and gets on dark colored clothing?

Well I’m glad you asked, because I actually happened to have that experience a few days ago when I did my laundry.

I put all my pants and two jackets into a separate plastic bag because my main laundry bag was full. I also had laundry detergent, softener, and bleach to carry, and I unfortunately do not have three hands, so I threw all the bottles into the separate plastic bag. For whatever reason, the last time I did laundry, I thought it would be a great idea not to close the bleach container tightly.

The bleach slowly leaked out of the bottle and into the plastic bag. Of course, the plastic bag doesn’t have air filter holes in it like my other regular laundry bag does, so instead of leaving a small trail of bleach on the ground, it instead slowly pooled up at the bottom of the plastic bag, and got absorbed by my clothes.

It was a slightly tragic experience when I found out, and in panic, I threw them into the washing ma­chine as quickly as possible, hoping that somehow, water will restore the color.

… As expected, it didn’t.

After realizing that I had no idea what to do, I tweeted to my Twitter followers asking for help:

Help! How do I get bleach stains out of dark clothing?

— Adam (@Parkzer) March 19, 2012

I got a handful of random responses, such as scrubbing it with vinegar, bleaching the whole article of clothing so it becomes an entirely new color, or just leaving it as is. One of the responses I got was to use a permanent marker. At first I thought this was a troll suggestion (especially because it came from one of my friends), but after a while, I realized that it was actually probably the best suggestion.

I started with my black jeans. Fortunately, it was only a tiny spot, and it would be easy to color back in. Here are the before and after photos:

Even though the texture in that tiny spot is a little weird now, it actually turned out a lot better than I thought it would.

Next were my blue jeans. Again, the spot was pretty small. As I looked at the stain more, it seemed like I would be better off just leaving it, as it was way at the bottom where it wouldn’t be that noticeable, and it just looks like that portion of my jeans faded a lot faster than the rest.

Next up was one of my jackets. It’s normally a really dark shade of grayish blackish forest green, but the bleach stain turned some spots creamy orange.

The first spot was right up at the collar. I decided it would be fine to just leave it because it’s right at the edge where my shoulder would be, and if the collar flops down a litte, it’s covered up anyway.

The rest of the stains on my jacket were on the front down at the bottom. I considered filling them in with marker, but I decided that none of the colors I had would blend in that well. Also, because of the shape and placement of the stains, it doesn’t look as strange as it could have been.

There was one last article of clothing that got stained, and seeing this actually made me really happy. I was lucky enough that the article of clothing that absorbed most of the bleach was a pair of pants that I wear as pajamas.

Nice job taking one for the team, corduroy pajama pants.

I tweeted this earlier today and got a handful of people asking for more details about the situation and how I pulled this off, because everyone seems to like it when I tweet about stuff related to real-world applications of human psychology:

I just trolled someone who was walking behind me into going into a random bike shop by opening the door for them. …

— Adam (@Parkzer) March 14, 2012

… They thanked me and walked in, and I kept on walking down the street. Five seconds later, then came back out and said “wait what?!”

— Adam (@Parkzer) March 14, 2012

Yes, there is a typo in the second tweet – the “then” should say “they.”

For those of you who don’t quite understand what I’m talking about, I’ll do a little bit of elaborating.

I live in Madison, WI, USA, which is a highly-populated city — the second highest-populated in my state. In most cities of this density, there are usually lots of buildings and stores packed very close together, and there isn’t much open space like fields or parking lots. A lot of the stores near where I live have doors that lead directly out to the sidewalk, rather than a parking lot.

Earlier today, I got off the bus at my local McDonalds to get some food, then started walking back to my apartment. About a quarter of my way back home, I noticed that there was someone walking directly and closely behind me. I kept walking another quarter of the way back home, and I saw that this person was still closely behind me, but wasn’t making a pass. I wasn’t sure if this person was doing this on purpose, or if I was being paranoid, but I decided to have a little fun with the situation.

I was closely approaching a bike shop, so I gradually slowed my walking speed (and so did the person be­hind me). A few feet away from the door, I slightly adjusted my walking position so the front of my body was fully exposed and my arms weren’t covering my chest.

When I was at the door, I reached for it with my left hand and opened it, pulled my right arm back be­hind me, shrunk my body down very slightly, and made direct eye contact with the person behind me. I smiled, tilted my head towards the door, said “go ahead,” tilted my head back upright, and made a slight nod.

The person behind me looked slightly taken aback and said “thanks,” then walked into the store. After they were completely inside the store, I let go of the door and continued on my way.

About five seconds later, I heard someone behind me saying “wait, what?!” in a bewildered voice. I didn’t look behind me, but one would assume that it was the man who I just trolled.

In response to the people who have been asking me how I pulled this off, and saying that they would never fall for it, it all relates to the power of using subtle cues associated with persuasion, and the con­text of the situation. I’m not going to go into much detail because this is a very potent skill that is difficult to acquire and master, and I want to keep it that way, but I will say that the general under­pin­nings of why this worked is because the person behind me was overwhelmed by so many stimuli that I sent him concurrently and consecutively that he complied with my wishes without intending to do so.

I will admit that I did get somewhat lucky for this to work, because some people are inherently resistant to such stimuli due to their nature and personality. For those who said that they were going to try it themselves, good luck, but don’t make a fool out of yourselves.

Here’s a random fun fact: whenever my deputy and I go to work on Friday evening, we always go to Taco Bell.

Today happens to be a Friday, and we both happened to go to work today to work on some pro­gram­ming.

I know I said a few months back that I’m going to stop trying Taco Bell’s new items because of the relatively poor experiences I had with the layer steak wrap and the XXL Chalupa, but this time, I couldn’t resist.

Yes, that is literally a taco inside a massive Dorito.

Yes, the Dorito tasted like a real Dorito, but with about five times the flavor.

Do you know when you’re eating a bag of chips and some of the chips have a lot of seasoning on them, so they’re a lot more flavorful than the other chips are? Well, the entire Dorito shell was basically like that.

Remember how the weather was a troll earlier last week and made it start snowing massive chunks?

It happened again.

And this time, it caused a car collision right outside my apartment building.

In other news, I think it’s time for more Twitter highlights and commentary.

One of my instructors used Word Art, rainbow gradients, and Comic Sans MS all in the same Powerpoint slide. I think I’m going to blow up.

— Adam (@Parkzer) February 23, 2012

My child developmental psychology instructor apparently thought it would be a great idea to integrate Mi­crosoft Word Art, rainbow gradients, and the font Comic Sans MS, all in one slide in her Powerpoint pre­sentation during lecture. For those of you who aren’t aware already, these three elements are prob­ably the top three worst things you can possibly use when designing anything that doesn’t belong in a day care center.

The girl sitting next to me just tried to write the word “survey” in her notes, but spelled it “suervuermy” instead. #wat

— Adam (@Parkzer) February 24, 2012

During a social psychology lecture, we were doing an in-class review and our teaching assistant was going through the main ideas of each of the sections that were going to be on the exam. One of the sections was about surveys, and he emphasized the fact that surveys are one of the most prevalent research techniques used in sociology.

The person sitting next to me (whom I did not know) decided that this would be some useful information to write down in her notes. It appeared as if she was about to write the word “survey,” but instead started writing “suer.” Curious to see if she would catch her error, I kept watching her. Instead of going back to fix her mistake, she kept on writing “vuermy.”

After taking a second to register what had just happened, I burst into laughter and abruptly stopped myself when I realized that I was laughing out loud. The people surrounding me stared at me for a little while, and I put my first up to my mouth and pretended I was coughing and sniffling.

Crisis averted.

So apparently the new Pokémon games are going to be called Black 2 and White 2. I feel let down. ds.ign.com/articles/121/1…

— Adam (@Parkzer) February 28, 2012

This tweet isn’t as funny as it is disappointing. I found out on the 27th of February that, a few days prior, someone representing Pokémon made an announcement that the new Pokémon games would be called Pokémon Black 2 and Pokémon White 2. That is probably the most uncreative name that they could have possibly come up with.

I’m pretty sure that if they hired a professional boring man (which is obviously a man who professionally goes around doing boring things) to come up with a more boring and unoriginal name for the new Poké­mon games, he would have failed.