Wishlist update for Thanksgiving 2012

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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.
 

I’ve always wanted to make a wishlist series and feature items about once or twice a month that I came across during that time period that seem appealing to me. I had the idea of starting this sometime in November of 2011 when I first started adding items to my Amazon wish list. Literally a year later, I finally got the time and motivation to execute my idea.

Please note that these items are elements of my wish list as of today, and not any time in the future. For the latest updates, please check my Amazon wish list directly at http://amzn.com/w/1EG9DR8JK4295.

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Razer Blackwidow Ultimate 2013 Elite Mechanical Keyboard

While I was browsing through some mechanical keyboards, I noticed that Razer came out with a newer version of their Blackwidow. I currently have the original Razer Blackwidow, and I think that it’s the best keyboard I’ve ever used.

The Blackwidow has blue switches. I’m nowhere near a keyboard expert, but I do understand that blue switches are food for typing, and I can definitely agree with that from experience.

Those of you who don’t know me well might not realize that I’m an extremely fast typist – my overall average is about 134 words per minute, and I can reach speeds of about 170 words per minute when instant messaging or typing anything limited to basic English.

I haven’t particularly done tests to statistically prove myself right or wrong, but even at this intense level of typing speed, there is still a difference – I can feel myself typing faster on the Razer Blackwidow as opposed to my laptop keyboard or any regular keyboard I might find on a public desktop computer.

I’m looking to get myself another Razer keyboard soon because there’s a new location with a desktop computer where I spend a lot of time, and the new Blackwidow seems to be a good candidate. If I do end up getting this, I would use it as a replacement to my old Razer keyboard, and move my old Razer keyboard to my secondary office.

Razer Deathadder Black 3500 High Precision Infrared Mouse

I’ve never really considered the type of mouse I use as a high priority, but when I tried to play League of Legends on a different desktop computer with a poor mouse and no mouse surface (I was using it on a semi-glossy table), I realized how important it is and how significantly it can influence me when I’m doing something that actually involves intensive mouse use, and how much it can affect my accuracy.

Being satisfied with Razer keyboards, I would obviously turn to Razer for a high-quality mouse as well, and I’ve settled upon the Deathadder as my pick.

By looking at the technical specifications of the mouse, it seems like a solid mouse that focuses on the basics, without charging me more money for extra bells and whistles that I know I’m never going to use. After reading the reviews, I discovered that a majority of customers feel as if it’s a strong, stable, durable mouse that’s still com­fort­able to use – which is exactly what I want.

As of right now, I’m using a pretty cheap mouse with (literally) a sheet of notebook paper as my mouse surface. If I do end up getting this, I will most likely get a proper surface for it as well to ensure that I get the most out of its extreme precision.

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That’s all that I’m going to cover in detail today, but I have a bunch of other stuff on my Amazon wish list that I think is worth taking a look at.

Again, even though I don’t expect anyone to get me anything, if you are considering it, please be sure to check my actual wish list first, as it may have been updated if I already got the item, or switched it out with a different item of better quality but same purpose.

 

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My apartment’s staff are trolls

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.
 

Last night, I came across a sign on my door notifying me that my apartment staff would be entering my apartment room to show it to a potential future resident. This is common for the staff to tape notes to my door to let me know of stuff happening involving me or my room.

Usually, when they tape it to my door, they put one piece of tape at the top so I can easily pull on the bottom and remove it from my door.

Apparently, whoever usually puts notes on doors wasn’t here today, and whoever temporarily replaced them was a troll.

As you can see from the bottom left, I tried removing the note from my door. Then I realized that the note was so securely attached to my door that the paper would rip before I managed to get any portion of tape off. Apparently, this messenger had the time and motivation to remove four pieces of tape and place them neatly on each corner, covering up the edge so the note would survive a tornado that might spontaneously form in front of my door.

So, instead of wasting my time sitting at my door picking off tape, I decided to leave them a note on their note (noteception).

In case you can’t read it from the photo above: “All four corners. Serious? Please remove and take after showing.”

 

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How not to use a public printer

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.
 

There’s a semi-public printer on my psychology research lab floor – “semi” in the sense that anyone can use it, but they need to be connected to the same network as the printer, and have it properly set up. As most of us probably know, printers are notorious for causing problems at the worst moments (such as your color inkjet printer using all the cyan and yellow the day before a paper is due, so you have to turn in your paper printed with pink text). Public printers are just as bad, but about five times worse.

Yesterday, someone on my floor came running to me for help with the printer.

The problem? She intended to print page 72 of a 300-page PDF document. Instead, she accidentally printed 72 copies of the entire 300-page PDF document, and didn’t know how to cancel the print job.

By the time I made it over to the printer, there was about a ream’s worth (500 pages) of paper already on the output tray, and the printer was still going strong.

I wasn’t really familiar with the printer user interface because whenever I use it, it’s usually to print one or two pages, and I usually just walk up to the printer and grab the sheet(s) without having to check or touch anything else. But clearly, the life of an entire tree was in my hands, so I took a careful look at the controls.

There was a red button labeled “Stop.” I pushed it.

On the touch screen, it asked me to verify my choice. I hit “Yes.”

The printing stopped.

Apparently, if you accidentally print over 21,000 pages, you enter a state of such intense panic that you become color blind (or just blind in general) and can’t see a red Stop button.

I wonder what she ended up doing with that random ream of unnecessarily printed paper…

 

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I am retiring from competitive League of Legends, moving on

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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.
 

This is an announcement post regarding League of Legends, a game many of you probably know that I stream quite frequently on my Twitch.TV channel.

First, before we begin, I want to clarify that I did not come to this conclusion out of emotion as a result of a few bad games or a losing streak. I’ve considered doing this for quite a while, now, and felt like this was the right time to follow through with my thoughts.

I am officially retiring from competitive League of Legends in the sense of solo/duo queue on Summoner’s Rift.

If you happened to have read my post from mid-to-late October regarding my first solo queue experiences, you know that it’s been pretty negative. I am a very competitive person and consider statistics and records to be very important. One thing that frustrates me most in life is if something outside of my control degrades my reputation or anything related to me in general. Clearly, these two things are playing a huge role in solo queue – my match results in no way reflect my capabilities as an individual player, and this is caused by other players who are playing in such a way that harms my ability to perform my best.

Overall, this is causing a severely detrimental effect on my mental well-being. Even when I win, I still become frustrated because of how the game ended up, and all the things that went wrong while we were playing.

I feel it is completely unnecessary for me to voluntarily put myself through this as a result of a game, so I have decided that ranked solo and duo queue on Summoner’s Rift is not for me.

Does this mean I’m quitting ranked play in general? Of course not. I am still willing to play team ranked games where I am able to select who my allies are, and I know that they are going to try their best.

In the mean time, to basically “cool off” from this, I am going to orient myself towards more single-player style games until I am able to find enough people with whom I can make ranked teams. As demonstrated by my blog post from late October, I already started playing and streaming Pokémon White 2; I am also looking into trying out RuneScape again (which I haven’t played for several months) because there is about to be a massive update released on RuneScape that is supposed to revolutionize combat, and I’m interested in trying it out.

There will inevitably be more information regarding this coming up in the future, so be sure to check my blog in the future for some updates.

 

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Shaniqua

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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.
 

While I was watching someone streaming a few days ago, I noticed a funny comment pop up in the chat:

“Sandy is a stupid name, no one listens to a hurricane named Sandy. Should have been named Shaniqua, everyone would be scared of that.”

For those of you who live under a mossy rock and haven’t been keeping up with the news, Sandy is a hurricane sweeping through the eastern coast of the United States. Apparently, the problem is that people just aren’t accurately gauging how dangerous this hurricane is, and are not preparing properly. That is where the quote came from – clearly, if the meteorologists had named the hurricane Shaniqua (which sounds like the name of someone who likes to back-hand slap people), people would be taking this much seriously and be more afraid of the hurricane.

(No, I’m not trying to be racist against people named Shaniqua; the slapping is just an image that comes to my mind that’s associated with a name, just like how whenever I hear the name Bob, I picture a generic white male with brown hair and blue eyes who always wears a white t-shirt and blue jeans.)

In a slightly more serious note, I know someone who lives in New York, and fortunately, she was not severely affected by the hurricane. If you are in New York, hopefully you are in the same position. If you happen to be less fortunate and have faced some tougher times, the next time you think to yourself, think this:

Parkzer is currently whining about how he accidentally wore slippers out into the cold and his toes feel like they’re going to freeze off. I, on the other hand, just survived a hurricane. I’m such a BEAST.

 

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“Pre-order your iPad Mini”

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 earlier today telling me to pre-order my iPad Mini.

I looked at it for a little while, then wondered, what exactly is so special about the iPad Mini?

If you guessed “nothing,” then you’re just about right.

If any other company took one of their products, made it a bit smaller, and sold it as if it was a completely new and innovative product, people would think that they’re crazy and are just asking to go bankrupt.

But not the iPad Mini, of course. Because it’s made by Apple.

Apple could take this a step further and create a new iPod Jumbo.

And people would still buy it because it has the Apple logo on it.

Edit: No, I am not attacking Apple, and I am absolutely not anti-Apple (I have my own iPod Touch that I pretty much use just like a smartphone). I’m just implying that the iPad Mini might just be a step too far, and that I am unsupportive of people who just buy random new Apple products without thinking about if they really need it or not.

 

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