While Ed and I went to get lunch today during our break from class, we saw a car with a vanity license plate.

(The image is horrible quality because I forgot that the camera on my iPod Touch has digital zoom and not optical zoom.)

If you can’t read the vanity license plate, it says I LVE GOD.

I decided that the missing vowel in LVE was A, so she was actually trying to say that she was laving god. (For those of you who don’t know, laving is the equivalent of washing.) It must be really difficult washing an abstract concept that you can’t even touch.

After we got back on campus after lunch, the electricity went out again. Ed got really excited because there was an exam scheduled for his next class and he might not have to take it.

The the power came back on.

On our way back home, we saw this massive truck parked in a lot.

Ed insisted that I take a picture of it and upload it to my blog, so there it is.

I’m not sure if you’re aware of what Causes is or not, but regardless, never sign up for it.

A long time ago (maybe about 3-4 years ago), I used to accept all application requests on Facebook because I thought that if I accept them, I can’t be invited to them anymore. Unfortunately, that wasn’t exactly the case because once I started using the application, I got even more notifications and invitations to do more stuff with the app.

One of the apps that I randomly signed up for a long time ago without thinking was Causes.

Since then, they’ve been sending me emails about once every few weeks, even though I unsubscribed from them a long time ago. I click on the Unsubscribe link whenever I get one of those emails and it says that I’m already unsubscribed.

So whatever you do, don’t join their website.

They’re just trying to fool you into thinking that you’re supporting good causes when all you’re actually doing is signing up to be spammed for the rest of your life.

(Maybe that’s an overstatement, but still, save your own sanity and don’t do it.)

As a result of a ridiculous storm from this morning, I am sitting in the dark with my laptop because my entire town has no electricity. I’m probably not going to end up posting this until sometime tomorrow because my router at home has no power to send out an Internet signal, and I have nothing else to do in the dark until then, so I’ll make this blog post nice and long.

Fortunately, I have a 9-cell battery, I closed all unnecessary applications, I turned down the screen brightness all the way, I set my background as a solid black screen, and I turned off the wireless function so my battery has over 6 hours’ worth of power left.

I woke up a little bit before 8:00 AM this morning to get ready to go to class. At that time, it was storming worse than I think I’ve ever seen it storm before. The house was shaking enough that it felt like an earthquake, and a house nearby had all their roof shingles blown off. While I was getting ready, the power went out. I finished getting ready and left to go pick up my buddy and go to class.

When I got to my buddy’s house, I saw that portions of the edges on his siding was bent and blown off. I picked up my buddy and started driving to the local community college where we’re taking classes for the summer.

The drive there was ridiculous and it felt like I was driving in an obstacle course of fallen tree branches and downed wires. There were tons of police cars everywhere redirecting traffic, some in areas where the road were perfectly fine.

When we were almost there, there was a random police officer who was stopping people from taking the road that would have led me straight to my destination. As some of you might know, I have a horrible sense of direction and can’t find my way to any place without the use of a map. I didn’t want to risk getting lost, so I turned into a parking lot from one end and exited the parking lot from the opposite end, effectively placing me past the police vehicle and on the road he was blocking. The road was perfectly fine.

We kept going and finally made it to the community college just in time for our 9 AM classes. I parked in my normal parking spot and opened the door to go inside when a woman told us that the college was closed until 1 PM due to a power failure. Unfortunately, my buddy and I were unable to go straight back home because we had a class at 1 PM. We decided to just wait out the three hours, go get some lunch like normal for another hour afterwards, and resume our day as if nothing had happened.

After about an hour or so of waiting, a college police officer came up to us and told us that the college was closed for the remainder of the day (which meant that we had effectively wasted an hour of our lives for nothing). My buddy and I drove back home.

When we got back to our home town, I stayed for a while at his house and helped his dad fix the broken shingles on the side of the house. I was there until about 4 PM and had nothing to do except put my buddy in leg locks, arm bars, and choke holds.

After I got back home, I took my dog out for a short while and went to the family business. At first I was under the impression that the power was out there as well, but when I called my mom before I left the house a little after 5 PM, she said that the power was fine there now, and it was only out during the morning. I quickly grabbed all my electronics and chargers and headed out to the family business to charge up and check my email.

After tending to almost 50 emails that I got throughout the day, I went to do normal martial arts training at 6:45 PM, ate dinner, and came back home at about 9 PM.

And now I’m sitting here blogging in the dark while my dog is laying down next to me snoring because there’s nothing else that I can do.

I tried calling our electricity provider, ComEd, to find out how much longer it would take for our power to come back on. The response I got was along the lines of “Our crew is currently out working to repair the damages and restore the service. The recovery process may take several days. We appreciate your patience.”

It’s funny how they’re appreciating my patience when I never said that I was being patient.

I’m lucky that my family owns a business over 10 miles away from my house so I don’t have to suffer from not being able to use electronics or checking the Internet for several days.

So what have I learned from this?

If you’re in a storm-prone area, try to keep a hand electricity generator handy (one of those little machines where you crank up the knob and it generates electricity, then you can plug stuff into it). I’m not sure how much those cost, but if they’re reasonably affordable and you rely heavily on electronics and the Internet, it’s probably worth having one of those lying around for instances like this. I’ve never actually experienced a power outage like this one before where it lasted all day and it’s expected to last for another several days, and I sure hope that I don’t have to experience another one in the future.

Also, dial-up Internet isn’t all that bad. I’m not able to use the Internet right now because I have DSL and the only way I can connect to the Internet is through a router, which requires electricity to operate. I’m not sure if you can just plug your computer directly into the phone jack and have it somehow work, but unfortunately, I was unable to test it out because my laptop only has a port for a LAN cable and not a regular phone jack. And yes, I tried plugging the phone jack into the LAN cable spot already, and no, it didn’t work.

Nine-cell batteries are definitely worth it. I’ve been blogging for quite a while already, and I’m still at about 6 hours of battery power remaining. Sure, 9-cell batteries are bigger and heavier, but I usually don’t carry my laptop around very much, and the extra weight is definitely worth the extra power it provides, even outside of severe storm and power outage conditions.

Always know where your flashlights are, and if you don’t have one, go buy one, even if you’re not in storm-prone areas. My mom told me to look for a flashlight next to my dad’s side of the master bed, and I found a massive yellow lantern that can pretty much act as a main light source. I’m not using it now because I don’t need light to use a laptop, but it’s useful for trying to navigate through the house in pitch black darkness.

I’m rapidly running out of things to blog about, and it’s still only almost 10 PM. I’m probably just going to go to sleep soon and wake up early tomorrow so I can actually see what I’m doing. Also, I happen to have a handful of books I got from the library that I can read all day tomorrow (and the days after, if needed).

Back on the first of this month, I mentioned that I’ve seen some advertisements that are unfilled templates. A few people had difficulty understanding what I was talking about, and I said that I would take a screenshot the next time I saw one.

While I was working on a project today for the Badger Herald, I saw a generic unfilled template ad­vertisement on our home page in an ad zone served by Google AdSense. I took a screenshot; this is what it looks like.

As you can see, it might be a failure in that the advertisement doesn’t say anything about the company, but it might also be a win because you (or at least I) want to click on the advertisement just to see what company would use an unfilled template advertisement, thus bringing more traffic to their website.

In other news, I’ve been doing way too much Shakespeare homework and reading lately.

If you’re a Gmail user, you might have noticed that there is a new link at the top of your Inbox called “Preview Gmail’s new look.”

Being the Google fan that I am, I tried out the new design and was moderately disappointed.

If you go to the Theme tab in your mail settings, you can change your theme to either Preview or Preview (Dense). The dense preview is the regular size, and the preview is an overextended size that was most likely created for people with 24-inch monitors.

The new preview theme doesn’t have enough contrast among the elements on the page, making everything mix and blend together. Each email isn’t distinct enough, and it’s not split up into easily-identifiable sections.

Google updated their Calendar to a similar theme, and the Calendar is bearable (even though I still switched back to the classic look). But, the new colors just don’t work well for Gmail.

I’m hoping that they’ll still permanently keep the option of using the classic design, because it’s much neater and easier on the eyes to use.

The Daily Post at WordPress.com

Topic #182: Write about your earliest memory, or the strongest early memory that comes to mind.

My earliest memory is of me eating a rice cake.

… That’s just about all I remember.

With the help of a buddy named Sid Narayananananan, I managed to get myself onto Google+ yesterday.

We originally tried the invite trick where apparently you can force Google+ to let people in by tagging their email addresses in posts. That ended up not working because I never got the email notification.

Then, I just randomly went to http://plus.google.com and signed up as if I was eligible to sign up as a beta user all along.

I played around with Google+ for quite a while, and I would have to say that it’s probably the best social network I’ve used so far (even though it’s still in beta mode). I’m sure I’ve explained this way too many times, but I don’t like Facebook because I don’t like dealing with the annoying who somehow end up on my friends list and interfere with things I would like to keep personal or private among my friends.

That’s why I initially switched over to Twitter – I no longer had to worry about people bothering me or leaving unwanted stuff on my timeline, because I’m the only one who can post stuff to my timeline. But obviously, Twitter lacks the personal touch that Facebook might offer.

Google+ has the best of both Facebook and Twitter. It’s easy to determine how much you want to share with whom. You add the people you know to circles – family members in “Family,” close friends in “Friends,” and general people you know in “Acquaintances.” Have something you only want your family to see? Select the “Family” circle when sharing. Have something you only want people you know to see? Select the “Family,” “Friends,” and “Acquaintances” circle. Have something you want the whole world to see? Select the “Public” option and even people who don’t have Google+ accounts will be able to see it on your feed. The best part is that you can create and remove circles at will so you can find the perfect balance of information sharing.

Do you want to share something but don’t want feedback on it? Something that’s clearly annoying on Facebook is when you post something and it ends up becoming a medium for random people to argue with each other. If you happen to post something that would not prompt any productive feedback, just disable commenting and nobody will be able to voice their (unwanted) opinion on your post.

Which brings me to my next point, no more random people writing stuff on your feed! If someone wants to tell you something, they can click on the “email” button and they’ll be able to use their GMail account to send an email to your GMail account all from inside Google+. That way, the only comments that show up on your feed will only be (or at least, should only be) relevant to the things that you choose to post on your feed. With Google+, there’s no more instances where someone posts something unwanted or too private on your feed and it ends up sitting there for a long time for the whole world to see before you manage to get on and delete it.

Even better, no more “Happy Birthday!” posts. In the past, I’ve considered turning off my Facebook wall on my birthday so people would stop telling me “Happy Birthday” on my wall. (My wall is off completely now, for those of you who are wondering.) Sure, it’s great that you care, but if you really actually care, you wouldn’t contribute in the mass spamming of my Facebook wall. Right before I stopped using Facebook, I had almost a thousand friends. It’s not pleasant to log in to your Facebook account and have a couple hundred notifications of a couple hundred new wall posts all telling you the exact same thing.

Speaking of notifications, you have probably commented on a popular person’s status or photo before and ended up getting notifications for every single person that comments after you for the rest of eternity. Google+ has an easy way to avoid that. If you comment on something and you realize that none of the following comments are replies directed at your comment, you can simply mute the conversation so you don’t have to be flooded with notifications.

All photos are taken care of with Picasa Web. It’s prob­ably not that important for the people who have never used Picasa Web before, but I’ve been using it for a long time now, and I got excited when I realized that all of my old albums were automatically imported to my profile. Even the same privacy settings were carried over, so my public albums are still accessible by the public, and my private albums are still only accessible by me. One dis­advantage of having Google+ linked with Picasa Web is that it ends up creating a handful of garbage albums in your account. If you’re like me, you like everything or­ganized and neat, and it’s not possible to organize these Google+-specific albums because they have protected properties. Hopefully that’s something Google will change before the public release.

Also, the videos feature is not associated with YouTube. I haven’t posted any videos yet, but it seems like if you upload them, they end up on your Picasa account and are accessible through Google+ and Picasa only. It appears from people in my circle that the video function might not be working overall, but that might just be because the person in question just did something wrong. If you watch any of my videos, you know that I post literally all my public videos on YouTube, so it would be helpful if YouTube was integrated into Google+. It probably won’t be very difficult either, seeing as Google owns YouTube.

Another suggestion I have is the integration of Google Music into Google+. In Facebook, there’s a third-party application called iLike where it shows the music you like and frequently listen to. There’s also a website called Last.fm that keep tracks of your favorite songs and how often you play each song. It would be awesome if there was a Music tab that had a similar function and allowed you to share that information with your friends directly from your profile.

This is pretty much all I’ve managed to do on Google+ so far, but I’ll definitely be playing around with it more in the near future, and if Google releases any large updates to Google+, I’ll blog about it and possibly include some screenshots for those of you who are not yet on Google+.