Why is it snowing again

by   •   General
 

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My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

Just as I thought the weather was going back to normal and all the snow was almost done melting, this happened:

That is the view from outside my apartment window. Yes, the world is covered in snow again.

I guess this means that I am going to freeze the hairs in my nostrils every time I go outside again.

 

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Re: “Daily Prompt: Musical”

by   •   Daily Post
 

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My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

What role does music play in your life?

Source: http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/01/26/daily-prompt-music/

Music has a pretty significant role in my life.

Ever since I was little, I’ve been a pretty musical person. As a kid, I got lessons for the piano and cello. When I was around middle school age, I joined the school band and played the clarinet and saxophone. Also starting at around this time, I taught myself how to play the guitar using my dad’s classical guitar.

Although I’m not one of those people who say that music helps them get through life because they can relate to the songs, I still enjoy listening to music (just not on such an emotional level). When I was younger, I tended to be more picky about the type of music I liked, but now I’m pretty much accepting to all kinds of music except rap and hip-hop.

Whenever I’m at a computer with decently good speakers, I tend to always turn on some sort of music. Even if I’m not actively listening to it, I like having the sound of the melody and the bass in the back­ground, as long as I’m not trying to fully focus on something.

Since I’ve started attending classes at university, I’ve had significantly less time to produce music of my own. I considered doing some covers of popular songs and uploading them to YouTube, but I finished a grand total of one video before running out of time and realizing how much work it is to release a single cover.

However, whenever I go back to my hometown house over my university breaks, I still play the guitar to refresh my memory on the chords and notes, and sometimes pursue learning more songs on my electric guitar.

 

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Re: “Daily Prompt: I Got Skills”

by   •   Daily Post
 

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If you could choose to be a master (or mistress) of any skill in the world, which skill would you pick?

Source: http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/01/22/daily-prompt-skills/

If I could choose to be a master at any skill in the world (assuming “in the world” indicates that it has to be something that actually exists in the world, so I can’t pick “time control” or something like that) I would definitely choose to be a master at memorization.

Right now, I’m a student studying to earn an undergraduate degree at university, and after finishing my degree, am strongly considering continuing into further education to earn more degrees. One of the biggest problems students have is that they are not able to remember all the information they are given.

If I was able to be a master at memorization, I would be able to memorize all the information I need to know to prepare myself for my future much more quickly than anyone else. Being a master, I would also be able to manipulate what I forget.

Manipulating forgetting is very important – there are people who can already remember everything they experience (called savants), but some of them are driven crazy by their condition because their minds remember everything without question and they’re not able to forget anything.

Being a true master at memory, I would be able to put myself in a good balance, and end up becoming a Google search index providing instant results.

 

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My last normal semester of undergraduate studies

by   •   General
 

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My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

As of this past Tuesday, the final normal semester of my undergraduate studies at university has officially begun.

I specify “normal” semester because I still have to take an internship over the summer in order to finish my degree, and the summer is technically a semester of its own. However, I won’t be taking any other classes during that time, so it isn’t as normal as all my other semesters.

This semester I’m taking five courses – one research lab and four lectures. If you know a bit about me, you probably know that I was in a psychology research lab studying video games last semester, with a specialization on Tetris – I will be doing that again for the second semester in a row.

As for my four lectures, I think it’s going to get a bit confusing for me for the first few weeks or so of classes. The course numbers for my classes are 400, 411, 414, and 441. No, I did not do that intentionally. Those just happened to be the course numbers of the classes I needed to take to finish up my degree.

In other news, now that classes are back in session, it’s a lot busier out on the streets as people transport themselves from building to building. Normally, a lot of people ride their bikes around because it’s more efficient than riding around in a car.

However, it’s usually in people’s best interest to stop riding their bikes if there’s this much snow on the ground and the roads are frozen. But nope, some troopers out there are still riding their bikes on frozen roads, pedaling at about two miles per hour to make sure they don’t slip and fall.

Of course, now that classes are starting, there are more things that I need to worry about and spend time on, so the amount of content I will be releasing on my website (as well as multimedia content elsewhere) will be limited by time constraints, just like last semester.

 

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League of Legends: New ranked leagues system on PBE

by   •   League of Legends
 

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My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

If you’ve been keeping up with the League of Legends patch notes for the public beta environment, you might already know that there is going to be a new leagues system for competitive ranked play on League of Legends. It’s currently being tested out, and will eventually go onto the live servers in some form of what the testing version is like now.

The basic premise of the league system is that you’re placed into a league, and you compete to earn points in order to get promoted and demoted from divisions inside the leagues. If you do extremely well, you can also get promoted to the next league.

The main idea of doing this was to get rid of the elo system – basically, Riot Games didn’t want each individual person to have a numerical value assigned to them that signifies their skill level. They also wanted to make the scale of competition more local – instead of being on a massive ladder of hundreds of thousands of people, you are now competing against a handful of other people who have been placed into your division.

My initial opinion about this is that, although it might be pretty on the outside, it seems to be the same as before on the inside. It doesn’t seem like matchmaking will prioritize you with people in your own divi­sion (and if it did, it would get pretty frustrating because you would be playing with and against the same people over and over). The number of points you earn to move on to the next league seem to still be global.

Going back to matchmaking, it most likely will completely ignore what league or division you’re in, because it will still use a hidden elo (or MMR, which stands for match making rating), just like normal games do. So, if you seem to be a very unlucky silver league player who always fails your promotion series, you might have a high-enough hidden elo that you’re queued with gold and platinum league players, but still never manage to get out of silver league.

Of course, I had to try this out, and as we all know, the people on PBE are complete trolls (or are just plain stupid or bad). I streamed my experience to share with everyone.

Out of the first three games I played, two of those games I had to carry so hard that if something like this happened on the normal server, you would be considered some sort of god. The first game I played Kassadin and went 33/10/13 (the tenth death being an execution to a super minion), and the third game I played Miss Fortune and went 29/9/11.

I ended up placing into Silver Division I (which was named Zyra’s Infiltrators for me).

If you’re also interested in trying out the new leagues system, you can head on over to the public beta server (and prepare to carry as hard as I did if you want to win). If you want to watch the replays of my stream, they can be found on Twitch.TV at http://twitch.tv/parkzer/b/359268549 for the first part and http://twitch.tv/parkzer/b/359328617 for the second.

 

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In case you’re curious: uptime statistics for 2012

by   •   Site News
 

This post is over 13 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

I got an email report a few days ago from a service I use that tracks my website’s uptime.

Uptime, of course, is the time that my website is up – basically, any time that my website is not down due to some sort of server error. A few years ago, web hosting services emphasized how they have 99.9% uptime rates, but nowadays, it’s not that huge of a deal because near-100% uptime is pretty much expected out of all hosts now.

Either way, I thought the stats were interesting, and decided to post mine here for 2012 for those who were curious.

Yearly uptime: 99.92% Downtime: 5 hour(s) 48 min(s)

Month 2012-12 Uptime: 100.00%
Month 2012-11 Uptime: 100.00% Downtime: 46 sec(s)
Month 2012-10 Uptime: 99.66% Downtime: 2 hour(s) 9 min(s)
Month 2012-09 Uptime: 99.98% Downtime: 5 min(s) 35 sec(s)
Month 2012-08 Uptime: 100.00%
Month 2012-07 Uptime: 99.84% Downtime: 1 hour(s) 2 min(s)
Month 2012-06 Uptime: 99.99% Downtime: 5 min(s) 39 sec(s)
Month 2012-05 Uptime: 99.91% Downtime: 33 min(s) 29 sec(s)
Month 2012-04 Uptime: 99.90% Downtime: 37 min(s) 4 sec(s)
Month 2012-03 Uptime: 100.00%
Month 2012-02 Uptime: 100.00%
Month 2012-01 Uptime: 99.81% Downtime: 1 hour(s) 13 min(s)

Seems like October was my worst month.

Two hours and 9 minutes out of 31 days? That’s pretty rough.

 

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