Have you guys noticed the weird ads that are showing up on my website that are templates of generic ads that aren’t filled in? A common one I see all the time has a sheet of notebook paper as a background and an apple in the foreground. It says stuff like “header goes here” and “text goes here and more text goes here.”

It seems like it was an obvious mistake on the advertisement maker’s part, but it sort of got me thinking that it might have been done intentionally. If you’re not aware of Google Adsense’s terms of service, you’re strictly prohibited from clicking on your own advertisements on your own websites. There have been a handful of interesting advertisements that have shown up on my website that I’ve seen in the past that I’ve wanted to click on (but I had to find via the generic Google search engine instead), but those blank and unfilled advertisements make me want to click on them more than any other advertisement I’ve seen before.

If I happen to come across any of those advertisements on other people’s websites, I would definitely click on them to see what company owns the ad, which makes me think that these companies made this apparent “mistake” intentionally to make people want to click on their ad.

I dunno, just a random thought.

Picture of the Day

Too Lazy to Write a Phone Number?

Someone posted this notice at our business on the bulletin board.

Apparently someone else who wanted this service was too lazy to write down the phone number, and ripped it off and took it with them instead.

#BeingConsiderateOfOthersFail

(Taken with an Apple iPod Touch 4th Generation)

The popular complaint these days (among the like 1% of you who actually send me emails about my website) has been that I haven’t really been blogging too much about stuff I’ve actually been doing. I already put a section up on the home page that describes what I have been and will be keeping myself busy with this summer, but I decided to go into a bit more detail today.

Yesterday, I took my first exam at my community college for my psychology class. It was probably one of the easiest psychology exams I’ve ever taken. I’m used to taking impossibly hard psychology exams at my regular university, then getting satisfactory scores only after all the scores are put on a curve. The exam I took yesterday was easy enough that I’m pretty confident I got a decent score without any curves or score adjustments (but then again, I don’t think there are going to be any curves anyway).

Martial arts hasn’t been too eventful since the last promotion ceremony that I already blogged about. Most classes are basically composed of me exercising and kicking until exhaustion, then repeating the next day. I’m able to kick high enough to reach everyone’s head, but that’s giving me the false illusion that I’m flexible, which I’m not – I’m only able to do that because I’m tall. I’m trying to get back to reality and work on improving my flexibility.

I still go to the family business every night (which is a laundromat, for those who don’t know already). My trips are usually composed of sitting in the office and tapping away at my laptop, getting random work done and sometimes doing my homework if I have any. Then I walk around for a bit, clean for a little while, then come home.

I haven’t been keeping up with my reading lately, but hopefully I’ll finish another book within a few days and have another “What I’m Reading” section up. I haven’t had a paralleling “What I’m Watching” section for a while now, but I generally don’t have time to sit and watch a movie for an hour or two at a time.

And finally, no, I will not reveal which standardized exam I’m studying for. If I were to reveal it, you would find out what I’m planning to do in the near future, which I don’t want because I like being shrouded in a mist of mystery.

So one of my buddies, Benjamin Chow, told me today that he was freshly involved in a new organization called Proventus Entrepreneurship Group. Their mission is to apparently help poor people in India live a better life.

Benjamin wanted me to write about Proventus in my blog, and I thought it would result in an interesting blog post, so I decided to take his suggestion.

The founder of this group (not Ben) is an individual who, in the past, has asked me for personal help but had different underlying intentions and deceived me. However, regardless of who the founder is and how moral or immoral he may really be, I think Proventus is a joke, and was most likely made as a résumé filler.

Their revolutionary concept for the website is that the more money they raise, the more they can help poor Indians.

Because that’s not common sense at all.

The website is ranked as one of the worst websites I’ve seen. Not only is it poorly formatted and laid out, the content looks like it was written by a high school freshman who is trying to impress his English teacher by combining multiple (and not directly related) thoughts into massive sentences.

And of course, the advertisements.

In today’s era, free web hosting with no forced advertisements is so abundant that companies are starting to give you free gifts to use their free hosting. But no, Proventus is too good for free web hosting with no ads. They have to use some random website hosting company called Biz.ly that forces you to have adver­tisements all over your pages.

The best part? It’s Biz.ly that’s getting all the revenue from those ads, not the person who owns the web­site.

Good luck convincing people that you’re a charity website if your website subdomain has .biz in it (which is representative of “business”) and you have advertisements all over the place.

Want to see how horrible this website is for yourself? You can find it at Proventus.biz.ly. I don’t even want to turn that into a link because I’m afraid that someone might think I’m endorsing it (which, I guarantee you, I’m not). If you’re too late and that website doesn’t exist anymore, it’s most likely because it failed and they gave up on it. Which, I’m sure, will happen very soon.

If you ever plan on calling the Pizza Hut national headquarters for any reason, don’t.

I tried calling the local Pizza Hut to place an order today for pick-up. Instead of an employee answering like normal, I was forwarded to an automatic answering system that told me to press 1 to place an order. Then a woman with a heavy ebonic accent answered the phone and asked me for my phone number.

After I gave her my phone number, she asked me for my last name, my first name, my city, and my street address. When I asked her why she needed my street address (because I was picking up and not getting delivery), she said “never mind” and continued on.

She asked me if I was going to pick up my pizza from my local Pizza Hut and gave me the address. I said “yes, of course, where else would I pick it up from?” Then she told me that I was actually talking to the national headquarters and not the local Pizza Hut.

If you don’t know already, Pizza Hut has a deal where you can get any pizza at any size with any toppings for $10. I said that I wanted a large pan supreme pizza, but the woman said that supreme pizzas don’t qualify for the ANY PIZZA and ANY TOPPING deal and I had to pay $2 extra. I said I would like to change my order to a large pan pepperoni and sausage pizza, and she said she had to look it up to make sure that qualified under the ANY PIZZA deal. After a while, she came back on the line and said it was fine.

Then she attempted to contact the local Pizza Hut to place my order for me, but said that she was unable to do so and offered to place my order for me at a different location. She said she would look up other Pizza Huts in my area that were accepting orders at the moment.

About five minutes had passed at this point. I have never had to wait more than one minute to finish placing a pizza order over the phone, let alone five. I told her to forget the order and hung up.

Moral of the story: if for any reason your local Pizza Hut decides to transfer you to the Pizza Hut national headquarters, hang up and try calling your local Pizza Hut again.

If you’re following me on Twitter, you probably already know that earlier today, I went to a tae kwon do testing and promotion ceremony for the first time in several years. I used to do tae kwon do (which is a form of martial arts, for those who don’t know already) when I was very young, but I stopped after getting my first-degree black belt.

For those of you who have been keeping up with my blog posts lately, you know that I’ve been doing martial arts again over the summer as exercise and to refresh and improve my martial arts skill and ability.

The place where I currently do tae kwon do had a promotion ceremony today where colored belts tested to rank up to the next belt level. There was a large group of white, yellow, orange, and green belts; one blue belt; two brown belts; and one mixed red-and-black belt (which I don’t remember if it’s called a high-red belt or deputy-black belt). I helped with the red-and-black belt’s test by holding one of the boards they had to break.

The students who were testing weren’t very good, and the only person I thought was achieving and deserving of her promotion was a small brown-belt girl, but it seems like the master at this institution is extremely nice and promoted everyone who tested. This was a color-belt promotion exam, though, so I’m pretty sure that he’ll be a bit more stricter when it comes to black-belt promotion exams.

Quote of the Day

“I need to find different ways to save more money. I cut so many coupons that I had to buy more scis­sors, which ended up defeating the purpose of cutting coupons in the first place.”

I heard that on a radio commercial for auto insurance and couldn’t stop laughing.

BREAKING NEWS: Edward Lam likes to steal volleyballs from little kids.

On a lighter note, Owl City’s newest album was officially released yesterday. Most of the album was leaked on the Internet before yesterday anyway, but it is now available on iTunes for legal downloading and listening. Some of the songs reflect what you would expect out of Owl City, but some of them are distinctly different and include collaborations with other guest artists. I wouldn’t say this is one of their better albums, but I still like most of the tracks.

Picture of the Day

Picture or Video?

This is what happens when Edward Lam thinks he’s taking a video but instead takes a picture.