I made it.

Today is December 31. I finished one year of daily blogging.

For those of you who have not been with me for my entire journey, I decided at the beginning of this year to blog daily with motivation from the Daily Post at WordPress.com. They recommended bloggers to set a new year’s resolution to blog daily. I, of course, made a new year’s resolution several years ago never to make another new year’s resolution again, and I have not broken that resolution. However, I still decided to accept the challenge of daily blogging, and it was a moderate success.

I thought it was pretty interesting to document a small portion of my life every day for an entire year. Although I don’t really like reading my own blogs or watching my own videos (which I heard happens to a lot of people once they start producing tons of content), I’m sure that later on in the future, I’ll look back at what I did in 2011 and appreciate that I left behind this many memories on the Internet.

I’m sure you would be able to guess this, but no, it was not easy, especially on the days when I didn’t really do anything interesting and had nothing to blog about. Those were the days when all I did was answer a Daily Post prompt or post a Daily Shoot photo.

And, I’m sure you would be able to guess this as well, but no, I am not going to continue blogging daily into 2012. I decided that in 2012, I’ll focus more on the quality of my posts rather than the quantity. You won’t be seeing any short blog posts anymore where the only thing it contains is a single random photograph or a single paragraph of text. Instead, future blog posts will integrate more relevant pictures and have more comedy in the content – similar to what I did a long time ago that got me my first wave of readers. Essentially, all blog posts from now on will be “worth” reading, rather than being “just one of those blog posts that exists so Parkzer can blog every day of the year.”

And, as we all know, my strength in writing lies in telling funny anecdotes to which many people can relate, so I’ll try to do that more often.

So, to everyone who has stayed with me since the beginning, I appreciate your support; to all new readers, expect a stream of good content to come your way in the near future.

I’m going to take a short break from blogging, so I’ll see you all in a few days.

Today, I ate the largest hamburger that I think I’ve ever had in my entire life.

It was from a Mexican restaurant across the street from our family business called Azteca Restaurant, and they call it the Durango burger. It tastes almost exactly like a Whopper from Burger King, but it’s a lot bigger (almost twice the size), a lot fresher, and it has fresh mushrooms in it.

I wanted to take a picture of it, but I was already 70% done with it when I remembered, so that’s why the picture is of a partially-eaten burger.

It doesn’t look that delicious because I took the photo with my iPod in a low-light setting, but it was probably the one of the best hamburgers I’ve ever had.

If you want to check them out, their website is http://www.aztecamex.com.

I’m currently at our family business being bored. Today is Christmas Eve, so we’re closing early, but I still have to wait for all our customers to finish before I can close down.

Our parking lot is almost empty except for a few cars belonging to a few remaining customers, and a lonely shopping cart in the middle of nowhere from the supermarket next door.

I’m going to go tidy up and get ready to leave now.

I am now back in my home town in Illinois.

After coming back home, I stopped by our family business with my mom. On the way there, I noticed that there was a new gas station that was constructed while I was gone for the fall semester.

The picture is blurry because I took it from a moving vehicle.

This new gas station is currently wtfpwning all the competition because its price per gallon is about 20 to 30 cents below other local competitors. As of right now, it’s even lower than the price at Sam’s Club, which almost always has the lowest gas prices because it’s a membership-only store.

We have a tragedy here.

It’s snowing.

That picture was taken at around 5-6 AM, and since then, most of the snow has blown away. But re­gard­less, snow makes everything much more difficult and I don’t have time to deal with snow right now (or ever).

Have you ever wondered how your email provider determines what email is spam and what isn’t?

If you haven’t Googled it and figured out already, here’s the easy and basic answer: each email goes through a filter that applies a handful of checks on the email. If the email fails to pass a particular check, it earns points. If the email accrues a particular number of points or more, it gets sent to the Spam folder.

For example, if the email subject is in all capital letters, it will get some points. If the email subject has more than one exclamation point in it, it might get a few more points. If the email was delivered from a domain name that is historically known to send spam, it will get a lot of points. If it has particular keywords in it, it will get points depending on how common the particular keyword is in spam emails.

If you haven’t noticed already, a very frequent spam email that many people receive is third-party advertisements for Viagra. Unfortunately for the spammers, most email providers have identified this spam and have become very good at identifying Viagra advertisements. So, the spammers have to be­come creative.

For example, instead of calling the drug Viagra, they might call it V1agra or Vi@gr@. They might not even call it Viagra at all, and just call it "male enhancement supplements."

Yesterday, I got an email with a subject line that I think is so far the most creative subject for selling Viagra: "Buy stimulants for your meaty carrot."

I’m not sure if that is an epic win or an epic fail.