I know that my blog posts have been either really long or really boring lately, and that’s mostly because I haven’t really had anything interesting happen in the past week or so. And I’m pretty sure that, by now, most of us know that if I don’t have anything to blog about, I go to The Daily Post on Word­Press.com to find a random topic that seems interesting, and respond to it.

I came back to campus on November 27, and I’ve been going to class, doing homework, and working since then.

A few days ago, I was doing my laundry when I came across this in the corner of our laundry room.

It was a little panel in the wall with a sticker on it that said “LEGOS.” It was so random that I decided to take a picture of it.

I’m sure it has some secret, cryptic meaning, but I just haven’t been able to figure it out yet.

I’ve heard for a short while that YouTube was coming out with a new page design, and they were allowing some people to test it out. Looking back at how almost all new YouTube redesigns were failures, I didn’t opt in to this testing period, and wanted to wait as long as possible to switch to it, even when the design went public. Unfortunately, the design became mandatory today, and I was right in my prediction – it’s another horrible failure.

It appears like every time Google attempts to do a redesign for one of its products, it fails, regardless of how good the actual product itself is. I mentioned a while back that the new Gmail design is poor because it doesn’t have enough crisp and distinct contrast, and makes everything seem as if it’s merging together. I also stated that they have too much padding and space in all the wrong places. A similar thing happened to YouTube, where everything is now combined and it’s difficult to see the difference between different components of the website.

The YouTube home page basically looks like a feed now. Everything that your subscriptions do is now combined on the front, along with recommended channels and videos. It’s difficult to manage the content and identify what is where. There is a check box that allows you to view uploads only, but the helpfulness of that feature is marginal.

The biggest problem that I found with the new design is that you can no longer hide a subscription’s upload. I am the type of person who literally watches every video posted by his subscribers. Sometimes, I don’t have the time to watch a 10-minute-long video, but I do have time to watch a 2-minute-long video, so I’ll opt to watch the shorter video first and the longer video later. In the previous design, I was able to hit a small X icon at the top-right corner of the thumbnail of the video when I was done watching it so my subscriptions box only showed videos that I haven’t watched yet. The new design no longer has that, and doesn’t even have a symbol that tells you if you have watched a video or not.

Thus, this means that if I watch a video, it remains in my feed, and continues to push longer and potentially unwatched videos further and further down my feed. So, if my subscriptions post enough videos, I might end up not even noticing some videos if they get pushed down all the way by videos I have already watched.

Google’s products are great, and I support all of them (except Google Wave, which I thought was a slight failure), but they really need to get some better creative designers.

My dad showed me an article in the Korean newspaper today that I thought would be funny to share.

For those of you who are unable to read Korean (which I am assuming is most of you), that article is basically reporting that Cook County, which is the home of Chicago, Illinois, USA, wants to separate from Illinois and become its own state, being the 51st of the United States.

Apparently the Cook County government has nothing better to do with its time than make ridiculous and useless proposals that will obviously never get approved.

I’m having Thanksgiving dinner leftovers.

I’m getting ahead in my academic work so it’ll be easier on me when classes start again, so that’s all for today.

Did you drop out of school? No problem. You can go work for Clear customer service.

For those of you who don’t know, Clear is a relatively new Internet service provider that emphasizes wireless services. As of right now, they have two separate plans, one for home and one for mobile.

Seeing as everything is completely wireless, I was curious as to what the actual difference was between the home and mobile services was. I didn’t see why someone could purchase the home plan and just bring the router with them, or purchase the mobile plan and keep the router at home. So, I opened up a chat window with Clear customer service to ask.

This is what happened.

"What is the difference between the home and mobile plans?"

"One is Home Internet and the other is Internet On The go."

If all anyone has to do to be a Clear customer service representative is just reword the question and repeat it back at the inquirer, then it’s the easiest job in the world and all high school drop-outs should apply for the position, because they seem to all be well-qualified.

After I thought about it a little bit, I figured that the router for the home Internet plan has to constantly be plugged in to a power outlet, while the mobile Internet plan router can hold a charge. But, that still doesn’t answer the question as to why the home plan even exists; someone could purchase a mobile router and keep it plugged in to a power outlet, and it will essentially be the same as a home router.

There are some boggling things in the world where we live.

I am now officially on Thanksgiving break, and back in my home town. Throughout the day, I took a few photos.

On the way back from Madison to my home town, my parents and I stopped by a random Korean market along the side of the road.

It was probably one of the sketchiest markets I’ve ever been to in my life. Most of the products were crammed into a random corner on horribly-constructed hardware shelves, and the floors were wavy and uneven.

Shortly after making it back to my home town, I went back to Chicago Martial Arts for the first time since the end of this past summer. There was almost nobody there because apparently people don’t come to martial arts the day before Thanksgiving, but we ended up ordering food and having a small day-before-Thanksgiving party.

Later in the night, my parents and I went grocery shopping. I saw these strange objects and decided they were picture-worthy. I think they are called rutabagas; they have an odd texture.

While continuing to shop, I came across this strange turkey-shaped cake. I thought this was also pic­ture-worthy.

That’s all for today; I’ll try to have more pictures tomorrow.