I stopped by the Badger Herald office today for a meeting, and stuck around long enough to get some work done and to chat with co-workers.

While I was out in the main editorial area looking for someone, I noticed that our ArtsEtc. editor had brought a dog to the office because she was dogsitting for her boss from a different job.

Because I live in the main campus area in Madison for university, I rarely see any pets. Even if I were to see dogs, I would only see them, and don’t have many opportunities to interact with them. So, seeing this dog in the office made me quite excited.

Apparently he gets really nervous and shivers when he’s in an unfamiliar environment, but I managed to get him to eat a bit by hand-feeding him dog food, one kernel at a time.

Yes, that made me feel accomplished.

When I woke up this morning, I stepped into the shower, like every morning. I didn’t notice anything strange about my body, and felt relaxed while I washed myself to prepare for the upcoming day.

Of course, this was early in the morning, and I had just woken up, so I was only partially conscious. I’m usually in a drowsy and partially-still-asleep state until like 12 PM in the afternoon.

After getting out of the shower, I grabbed a towel and dried myself off, got dressed, and brushed my teeth. Even at this point, I still felt fine.

Then, I grabbed the towel again to dry my hair off a bit more. After getting my hair as dry as possible, I put the towel back on the hanger and left the bathroom.

Suddenly, I noticed that there was a sharp cramp-like pain on the right side of my neck, flowing down through my shoulder. Being a martial artist, I’m used to random body parts hurting, so I didn’t really think of it as much of a big deal. I tried to stretch it out a bit by rotating my neck around and squeezing my neck and shoulder, and extended my neck all the way to my left to try and crack it to relieve the pressure.

Nothing seemed to work as an immediate solution, but I still didn’t think much of it and went on with my day.

Not much later, when I got ready to leave my room to head to my first class, I realized that the pain in my neck was getting worse and worse. I tried to pinch my muscle to see if I could relieve any unexpected cramps or pressure, but nothing seemed to work. I tried cracking my neck again, but at this point, it was so painful that I couldn’t stretch my neck far enough to even get it into cracking range. I tried looking over to my right, and realized that the tightness in my neck muscles was so intense that I couldn’t even look to my right.

Again, being a martial artist, I’m used to having random injuries like this pop up once in a while, so I, again, still didn’t really think about it much and went on with my day.

By the evening, I realized that there was actually a problem with my neck. It had gotten to a point where if I wanted to look at something to my right, I would have to turn my entire body because my neck wouldn’t cooperate with my eyes.

I thought back to what I did that might have caused this. Of course, because of my subconscious state of sensation immediately after waking up, I don’t know if this neck pain developed overnight and I just didn’t feel it while showering, or if it had developed after I woke up. Assuming that I was conscious enough that I wouldn’t be completely oblivious to a stinging cramp-like pain in my neck, I came to the conclusion that this happened sometime between when I brushed my teeth and when I dried my hair again.

So, I decided to post the public service announcement in the title of this blog post along with my story from today.

The next time you go to blindly dry your hair, remember to think before you act.

Earlier this evening, I was looking through the photos on my iPod and making sure that everything was backed up for the iOS 6 update that’s coming out in a few days, when I came across a screenshot I took a few weeks ago.

Yes, on Wednesday, September 5, 2012, I took over 12,000 steps and went up over 30 flights of stairs. I thought this would be a good way to go into my epic story of how inefficient the laboratory key rental system is at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

In the morning of this epic day, I had a lab meeting with my research group, where I learned more about the research we would be doing during the semester, and got administrative information about the credits that went along with participating in the lab, as well as getting keys to access the laboratory experiment rooms.

At first, it seemed to be simple. All we had to do is go to the second floor of the psychology building and talk with Gary, who would give us our keys. But, there was a catch – we needed to put down a $10 cash deposit ($5 for each key) before we were able to get our keys. Unfortunately, I never carry any cash around with me, so I had to go to an ATM to withdraw some money. From the Brogden Psychology Building, I went to Ingraham Hall, which was where the closest no-fee ATM was for my credit union.

From Ingraham Hall, I went all the way back down to the psychology building after withdrawing $10 in cash. I went to the second floor and finally found Gary. I told him which keys I needed and gave him the $10 in cash. Then he told me a tragic story.

I have to pay my deposit at the bursar’s office, not at the psychology building. The worst part is that the bursar’s office is about half-way across the entire campus, and Ingraham Hall, where I got my cash, is more or less on the way to the bursar’s office.

So, I had to head all the way over to the bursar’s office, passing again the street I used to head to Ingraham Hall.

After making my deposit at the bursar’s office and getting a receipt, I had to walk all the way back to the psychology building to show proof of payment and get my keys.

This epic trek across my campus to get my laboratory keys, as well as going to classes and going to the Herald office to work, ended up getting me over 12,000 steps taken today.

At least I got some exercise. -__-

I’m sure most of you already know that the issues I’ve been having with my laptop overheating has been a re­curring problem for the past five or so years.

After taking a suggestion from one of my buddies who live casts competitive Tetris with me once in a while, I tried to take apart my laptop to clean out the dust inside my laptop. He told me that the problem was most likely a bit of dust stuck inside near the fan that was preventing it from properly expelling hot air.

I whipped out my handy dandy mini screwdriver and started getting to work on removing the 20 or so screws holding the bottom half of the base of my laptop to the upper half of the base of my laptop. After getting through 19 of the 20 screws (numbers not exact, of course, but the point is that I had one screw left), I stuck the screwdriver in the hole containing the last screw. I applied a bit of pressure and started twisting, but it felt like the screwdriver was spinning freely inside.

I applied a bit more pressure, and realized that the screw was damaged up to a point that I wouldn’t be able to unscrew it. I thought to myself that it wouldn’t really matter, seeing as I had taken out about 95% of the screws, so I tried to split the base of my laptop anyway without removing the last screw.

It wouldn’t budge.

I stuck the opposite end of my screwdriver, which conveniently happens to be a flat-head chisel-like tip, into the crevice between the two parts of the base of the laptop. I fidgeted the screwdriver around quite a bit, but it felt like the two parts were being held together by superglue.

I had spent quite a bit of time unscrewing 19 screws, and I wasn’t able to successfully follow through with my plans because of a single broken screw. Then, I realized something.

What is the point of having 20 screws if, clearly, one screw is enough to hold the entire base of the laptop together without a hint of failure? Did Dell purposely design their laptops such that people like me would go through the struggle of unscrewing 19 screws, then get to the last one and explode in rage?

In frustration, I peeked into the fan area and tried to get the dust out without opening the laptop by just blowing as hard as I could into the opening.

Not exactly the best idea.

All of a sudden, tiny specks and particles (of dust, I’m assuming) fluttered out of the fan and into my mouth and up my nose. I had a sneezing fit for like 40 seconds straight, then realized that it had actually worked.

I put all 19 unnecessary screws back into my laptop. I had to drink about two glasses of milk to finally flush down all the random dust particles lodged inside my nasal passages and in my throat, but it seemed to work out. My laptop runs at a (relatively) cool 80 degrees Celsius or so when doing processor-intensive things, like when I play League of Legends. I haven’t tested out streaming yet, but I’m assuming the results will work in streaming as well.

So, the moral of the story is to not even try to unscrew all the screws on your laptop, because it will be an utter fail and a pathetic waste of your time. Instead, blow as hard as you can into the fan opening, and make sure you have plenty of milk to flush down all the foreign substances that you are about to inhale and swallow.

(Or just get a can of compressed air.)

If you watch any of my live stream shows (which is a little difficult not to if you read my website, seeing as I post replays of my live stream shows all the time, but then again, I guess you could just easily ignore them), you might already know that whenever I’m live streaming, my laptop overheats to dangerously high temper­a­tures, generally between 90°C and 98°C (which is around 200-210°F). Usually during stream, you’ll hear me saying, “I think my laptop is melting.”

Of course, the surface of the laptop isn’t this hot, or else I would be burning my hands as I type – this is the temperature of the processor inside.

The processor is what’s doing most of the work inside of my laptop, so if something goes wrong with it, it will force the laptop to shut down so it stops processing information and gets an opportunity to cool down. This usually happens when it reaches around 100-102°C, which is past the point at which water boils.

Of course, I realized that my processor is working hard to stream what’s on my screen, but I just couldn’t understand why it would do this when all I had open was a Flash game on Google Chrome, Skype, and the streaming client. Based off the background knowledge I had, I knew that there was something wrong, but I just couldn’t figure out what.

Then, XSplit notified me yesterday that it had an update. I updated the software, then went into the settings to see if there were any new options or features that I could change. Then, I made a sudden discovery as to what the problem was.

I noticed that the option to save a local recording of everything to my hard drive was selected. I went to the directory in which it claimed it would save my files, and there they were – every single stream I have ever done in the past, saved locally as Flash video files.

If you’re not familiar with video production, this might sound a bit confusing or meaningless. In simpler terms, my laptop was taking the stuff that was on my screen and making two copies of it, one to send to Twitch.TV to broadcast publicly, and one to save to my personal archives. Basically, it was unnecessarily doing twice the work that it had to do, without me telling it to do the extra work.

I turned off the local recording option and did another test stream, and saw incredible results. My laptop never exceeded 90°C, and usually fluctuated around 80-82°C (which is still really hot, but an excellent improvement and nowhere near the danger zone that might cause my laptop to commit suicide or melt).

So, if you happen to have problems with XSplit right now and the fact that it’s making your laptop or computer overheat, try looking in the settings to see if you have local recordings turned on.

Some people might actually want to keep a local copy for their personal archive, but it’s completely un­nec­es­sary to do this in real time while you’re streaming to the Internet. Once you’re done with your stream, you can head on over to Twich.TV and pull up your video replay. Then, you can use something like the Download Helper plug-in on Mozilla Firefox to download your replay after you’re done streaming. Yes, it does take a little bit of extra time, but this is something that you can set and forget about overnight, and it drastically decreases the load on your computer.