I moved back to Madison today and arrived early this afternoon.

Before we left, my mom packed up a lot of food for me so I can freeze it and take it out little by little to have a supply of homemade food in my apartment. When we arrived at my new studio, we were depressed to find out that the refrigerator in this studio was not as large as the refrigerator in my previous studio (it was more like a third of the size of the old one), and instead of having a completely separate freezer section like my old fridge, it had no freezer at all.

When I went to the front desk to ask for potential solutions to this problem, they said that they didn’t have any spare refrigerators that they could switch with the refrigerator in my new room, but they did have another studio that I could move to that had a slightly larger refrigerator. I agreed to take a look at the other studio (which was the only other studio that was empty), and realized that the refrigerator was slightly larger and had a small freezer box attached to the top of the main refrigerator section. Still not anywhere near as good as my old refrigerator, but better than the studio I was originally scheduled to move in to.

I agreed to switch to the other studio, but the refrigerator only had a small impact in my decision to switch. Instead, the main reason I switched was because the other studio was recently remodeled and had tons of new appliances. Most other studios don’t come with a dishwasher and range, but the one I was offered did. Also, most other rooms have their walls painted a dark, gloomy brown, but the one I was offered was painted in a lighter beige that didn’t absorb all the light. It also had tons of cabinets where I could store dry foods and other stuff – way more cabinets than would be offered in any other studio.

I’m still working on getting everything organized and put away.

As for all the food that was supposed to be frozen, my mom took a lot of it back because without being frozen, it would most likey go bad before I ever got a chance to eat it. She put as much as she could in the medium-sized refrigerator that I have now, and my parents said that would probably just go buy a separate small freezer in which to store food.

I’ll post pictures here of my new room like I did last year, but I’ll wait until tomorrow when there’s better lighting so you can actually see stuff in the photos. Meanwhile, I’m going to finish unpacking and go to sleep early so I can wake up early tomorrow morning and go back to the Badger Herald office to get some work done.

If everything goes as planned, I will be moving back to my university campus in Madison, Wisconsin tomorrow night. I’m not very well prepared and haven’t really started packing anything yet, so I should probably get going on that.

In other news, I found out today that someone cited me as a reference when writing a Wikipedia article a few months ago. Does that count as an accomplishment?

Finally, I’m also going to copy and paste my "Quick Update" that I had on my home page all summer long into here for archiving purposes, seeing as the summer is now over and the information contained in the update is no longer relevant.

What have you been up to / Why aren’t you online as much anymore?

Contrary to most other past summers, I’ve been keeping myself extremely busy lately, and the time I have to chat and reply to messages online has become extremely limited (so limited that I decided to throw this up on my website rather than individually respond to emails saying why I’m busy).

• I am taking three three-credit courses over the summer. I have to spend six hours a day, two days a week, attending class on campus, and several hours per week out-of-class doing homework, studying, and attending my online class. (Classes are over as of August 10, 2011.)
• I am working at the family business at least four days a week every day (seven days a week) for anywhere between 3 to 5 hours a day.
• I went back to doing martial arts again. I instruct and train in a group class setting four times a week about 1.5 hours per day. (My last day for the summer was August 25, 2011; I will be returning during winter holidays.)
• I spend a huge chunk of about one day a week doing other miscellaneous family-related work.
• I am doing a handful of website-related projects for the Badger Herald, which is where I work while university is in session.
• I still blog daily, which means a lot of free time I spend online is spent posting content rather than instant messaging or thinking of creative responses to your emails.
• I read and finish a book on average about once every two or three days three to four days, both for my own enjoyment and so I have another thing to blog about.
• I am studying for a standardized exam that I will be taking in the near future.
• I sleep at least 8 hours a day, because I don’t believe in cutting back on sleep and harming your body to make your day feel longer.

This doesn’t mean I’m not going to reply to emails anymore, but it does mean that my responses will not be as elaborate as they might have been before, and it might take longer for you to receive a response.

My hours of availability for instant messaging will usually be between around 10 PM and 11 PM US Central time.

There’s only two more days until I move back to Madison to my university campus, and less than a week before I start classes.

Quote of the Day

Parkzer: When do you turn 18 so you can join Google+?

Justin White: November 11

Justin White: 75 days

Garrett Royce: You can fake your birthday by 75 days

Garrett Royce: It’s Google, not the government

Parkzer: Google is slowly turning into our government

Auto-Correct Fail of the Day

A few days ago, I talked about the new games addition to Google’s (relatively) new social networking site, Google+. One of the games I talked about was City of Wonder, a game where you create your own civilization and watch it grow while going on expeditions, conquering colonies, and forming alliances.

I got a handful of requests asking me to go into more detail about why people should start playing City of Wonder and become my ally. Your wishes have come true.

You start off in City of Wonder with a tiny civilization with a handful of buildings and a long list of things to do. These things include building homes to attract more people to your civilization and increase your population, constructing markets to start earning silver coins and make a profit, and erecting cultural buildings to make your people happy. You can also start researching new technologies to advance in the ages. You start back in the stone age, and as you research more technologies, you advance into the bronze, classical, enlightened, industrial, atomic, and modern ages.

Once you get a good way into the game, you can start searching for colonies. Your first colony will be an island where you spend sand dollars to build another civilization just like your main village.

City of Wonder is a fun but non-intensive game that anyone can enjoy. It doesn’t require a lot of time to play – all you need is a few minutes at a time spread throughout your day.

If you decide to join, feel free to add me as an ally by searching for Adam Parkzer on Google+ and sending an alliance invitation.

A while back, I noticed that Google added games to their social networking site Google+. My first reaction to this was a negative one, because I remembered how annoying games on Facebook were. However, like just about everything else, I still gave it a try to see if my initial assumptions were wrong.

The three games that I decided to play were Angry Birds, City of Wonder, and Dragons of Atlantis. These games were somewhat similar to what you would see on Facebook, but they were much more advanced and well-made. As we all know from Angry Birds, these games are created by big companies who have intelligent and educated employees dedicated to creating game content, rather than lifeless teenagers trying to make games in their basement.

Apart from the better game content, the way Google integrates games into Google+ is far superior than that of Facebook. If you’re a Facebook user, you probably recall having your news feed and notifications flooded by invitations and updates from your friends’ games. I haven’t taken a close look at Facebook for about a year and a half, so I’m not sure if they changed the methodology of game invitations, but whenever I do sign in to Facebook once in a while, I still see notifications from weird applications that sound like games.

Google+ is completely different and takes the annoying notifications from games out of your main feed. The primary reason we use social networking is to keep up with the lives of our friends. Of course, we can also social network to play games with our friends, but that’s not the main purpose most people use social networking websites.

Unlike Facebook, Google appears to have a solid grasp on this and makes sure games and socialization are kept separate. If you’re playing a game and want to share something in-game with your friends, you can still post a notification. The special part about Google+ is that when you do this, it doesn’t post the update in your main stream, but instead, in a separate games-only stream. That way, the only reason your friends would see this update is if they go to their own Games page and look through the games feed. If you have friends who are not interested in Google+ games, they never see the post and never get annoyed.

This doesn’t mean that socialization is removed from games; the games stream is just like your regular stream, and your other gamer buddies can comment on and +1 the updates that you post.

If you would like to play City of Wonder with me (which is the only game on Google+ that I’m playing with moderate effort), feel free to search for me on Google+ (type in Adam Parkzer in the search bar) and add me as an ally.

My parents and I went to Ming’s Restaurant inside the Raddison Hotel at Schaumburg, IL today to use a coupon my dad got on Restaurant.com.

This is a food that we usually get at most Asian restaurants. I believe it is called hot and cold salad in English.

This is seasoned breaded shrimp.

Finally, this is shark’s fin.

The shark’s fin tasted horrible the the sauce they used made me gag. Not only that, my dad told me that when fishermen go out to harvest for shark’s fin, they catch shark, cut off their fins, then throw the body of the shark back into the water because people tend to only like eating the fins and not the meat. This effectively leaves the sharks without a method of transportation, so they sink to the bottom of the ocean in pain and die.

So you shouldn’t eat shark’s fin.

All of these photos have been added to the foursquare venue page for Ming’s Restaurant, so if you ever go there, you’ll see them.