I had my zoology exam today.

That’s what I was studying and memorizing off of right up to about 10 minutes before the exam. (I took the photo with my iPod, which is why the quality fails.)

The exam was not pleasant.

At least I don’t have any more exams for another 2.5 weeks.

Steve Jobs, 1955 – 2011

(Photo taken by Justine Ezarik at the Apple Store on Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, CA)

But life goes on.

… I have an exam tomorrow.

-.-

In zoology lab today, we learned about molluscs, which involved dissecting molluscs and looking at them under a microscope.

The first one was a mussel. Each lab table got two mussels to dissect; one of our mussels was normal, but the other one was inverted and had a purple shell. I took a picture of it, but it’s a little difficult to see the purple.

We then dissected a squid (which was slightly more gory than the mussel and I thought it would be better not to take a picture of it).

We also got to look at a tiny little adorable baby squid, which was only visible in detail under a micro­scope. I tried my best to stick my camera lens into the eyepiece of the microscope and snap a picture of it before it swam away to another edge of the petri dish, and this is what I got.

I also had my first exam of the semester today, which was surprisingly easy. In fact, it was so easy that it felt like I was forgetting to do a page of the exam or something. One quiz and one exam down, one more exam to go for this week.

So both operating systems on my laptop just randomly disappeared into thin air yesterday, and I’m not sure how it happened.

I would normally formulate this into a witty tip of the day, but I can’t really do that because I don’t even know what caused it. I did manage to fix it, but the Windows 7 recovery disk did it for me, I have no idea what exactly it did to fix the problem. (My Ubuntu installation is still missing in action.) So instead…

Tip of the Day: When you go to Jimmy John’s and buy a sandwich, and the person behind the counter hands you your sandwich and says “Enjoy!” don’t reply “Thanks, you too.”

Because that doesn’t make sense.

In other news, do you remember how annoyed I am at my sociological enterprise reader? (If you missed those blog posts, go back and read the ones from September 10, 2011 and September 15, 2011.)

These documents cease to annoy me.

What an excellent idea, let’s just zoom in too much to make the text too large, then go ahead and drill the spiral binding right into the first column of letters!

I got an email yesterday asking me about an advertisement found on my website.

First of all, I would like to make it clear that I am not responsible for placing any banner-sized advertise­ments on my website. The advertisement you see at the top-right corner is controlled by Google Adsense, and they decide what advertisements to put in that spot.

That being said, that also means that I do not personally support or endorse any advertisements ap­pear­ing in that ad zone.

The email that was sent to me yesterday asked me if the FLV player being advertised in that banner was a legitimate and reliable flash player. My answer to this is that I don’t know. According to the terms and conditions of Google Adsense, I am never permitted to ever click on any of the advertisements that appear on my website. In addition, even if I were to have permission to click on my own ads, I would not go through each one and test it out to see if it was a good website.

Thus, my word of advice for advertisements on my web­site is to be cautious when visiting other websites. If you think that something is suspicious on a website that shows up after clicking on one of my ads, leave it imme­diately and don’t download anything from it.

Also, make sure you have active and updated anti-virus software installed and running on your compu­ter.

As for that specific advertisement, if you really need a player for FLV files, I recommend getting VLC Media Player. Not only is it free, it is also open-source and rep­utable. I use VLC Media Player for playing pretty much all my video files. Even when I download a video in a file format with which I’m unfamiliar, VLC usually figures out a way to play it.

Yes, supporting VLC means there are going to be less people who click on that advertisement shown in the screenshot above if it ever appears again as a real advertisement, but I’d rather have my readers be safe than make a couple extra dollars off a malicious website’s ads.

Apparently there’s a football game tonight, and ESPN is on the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s campus to do a pre-game show.

If you’re not aware already, I live more or less next door to Camp Randall Stadium, so thousands of people have walked past my apartment today screaming and yelling.

This is why I hide inside my apartment during all football game days.

In other news, Strawburry17 (Meghan Camarena) released a new music video today for the song 1,000 Ships by Rachel Platten. As you probably know, I very rarely (if ever) embed videos in my blog that are not made by me, but I think this video is worth a spot here.

If you watched it and don’t get it, watch it again. It’s a good-enough video that it’s worth watching a few times.

If you still don’t understand it, here’s my interpretation of the video.

The character played by Jason Munday (the guy in the purple shirt and the main protagonist of the storyline) exists sometime in the future (I’m guessing 2015) and has built a time machine to go back and save the life of the character played by Meghan, the girl in the gray shirt and ponytail. As you can see by the newspaper story on the wall, Meghan’s character was killed while driving out to a café downtown to meet her friend Cindy after Cindy changed her plans last minute.

Unfortunately, this time machine that Jason’s character built isn’t the best time machine in the world and can only work three times before breaking down. He uses two of his three trials and fails, but gathers valuable knowledge about the setting and environment to devise a plan that will allow him to stall Meghan enough to avoid having her drive downtown and get killed by the vehicle collision. On his third and final attempt, he builds enough confidence and experience to successfully carry out his task and save a life.

The detail with which this story is told is incredible. Every object in the video has a significance that interlaces together to create an intricate plot progression. For example, even the way in which the newspaper articles and photographs are adhered to the wall has a subtle significance – the red sticky string is in the pattern of a heartbeat up until the newspaper article in which the girl’s death is announced, which at that point, it becomes flat, signifying death. If this was done intentionally, it shows a sophisticated level of attention to detail (even though I did also notice some continuity discrepancies such as random filming equipment in the background and the time on the iPhone being inconsistent).

The use of the timing of the music was also excellent. If you pay attention to the music, the ups and downs of the story match with the ups and downs of the music, and in many transitions, they match up down to the very last second (even though I think they missed precision timing on one of the most important transitions around at 2:32 – the point in time at which the cup hits the table should match up exactly with the return of the chorus, which is when Platten sings “eyes” and the bass guitar returns).

And finally, the use of special effects was outstanding. The effects are heavy at some points, but all of them were well-fitting and well-executed. I noticed that some of the effects kicked in a little bit early at times, but I’m guessing those were to put in to cover up any problems they might have had with chromakey. (Did you notice the time travel morph effect says “The End” at the end of the video?)

The one full complaint I have about this video is the selection of one of the backing actors – the individual with an aqua-blue iPhone case who acts as the hero in the second trial and gets his water spilled in the third trial. He seemed completely expressionless and the emotions he showed (or, the lack of emotions he showed) did not fit with the heroic nature of the character he was supposed to play.

Overall, I thought this video was good enough to claim a spot on my YouTube favorites playlist (which is extremely difficult to do). If you also liked it, you should subscribe to Strawburry17 for similar videos (not all of her videos are this sophisticated and complex, but good nonetheless).