No Real Bell? No Problem.

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This post is over 14 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.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 just noticed today how bad my sink smells.

 

Quote of the Day

"Ding ding. Ding ding." —A bicyclist pretending to have a bell

 

The Daily Post at WordPress.com

Topic #284: Would you rather have the first word, or the last in an argument? Some people prefer to speak first, others insist they have the advantage only if they get in the last word. Where do you stand?

For me, it’s not important if I have either the first word or the last word in any argument.

I think the first word should not really be important to anyone at all, because the first word is what starts an argument. I’m pretty sure the first word in an argument usually isn’t intentionally said to initiate an argument; rather, it is something that is said during a regular conversation, but one of the parties thinks that it is wrong and rebuts against it.

Many people think they have succeeded in an argument only if they are the final person to talk, but I think that’s a method people use to give themselves a sense of false victory.

I think an argument is complete and one person is victorious only if either one person is able to prove their point beyond doubt with evidence, or if one person admits that they are incorrect. Thus, if someone says something and walks away, they are not necessarily victorious because the other person might have had evidence or an explanation that could have made the claim invalid. So, someone can be victorious in both circumstances – if someone is unable to provide a rebuttal, the other person is victorious, but if someone accepts defeat, the other person is still victorious, even though they did not get the last word.

 

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I Hate Rain

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It’s been raining all day.

I have a psychology exam tomorrow, so I’ve been in a frenzy to get caught up with all the material. Unfortunately, this means going from building to building for various purposes, including lecture halls for classes, libraries to study, and the psychology building to meet with my teaching assistant to ask him questions.

This also means every time I stay long enough in a building to dry off, it becomes time to leave the build­ing again to go to a different one.

I think I’ve changed my socks like three times today.

That’s all for today, I’m going to continue studying.

 

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Blue Scorpions

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Fun fact of the day: scorpions glow blue under a black light.

Blue Scorpion under Black Light

I found out today during my zoology lab.

In other news, my apartment’s maintenance staff came into my room today to attach a cover on my air conditioner. The air conditioner I have is one that is stuck in the wall and is directly connected to the outside. Because it has a vent, cold air comes through during the winter, so the cover is supposed to stop the breeze from entering my room.

Attaching a cover seems like an extremely easy task, and it is. All you have to do is stick the cover over the air conditioner and rotate some screws on the edge until the cover is in place.

Apparently the maintenance staff is unable to do that and had a bit of difficulty.

It seems like they had difficulty walking in my room in a civilized manner in the first place, as there was a trail of clumps of dust leading from the door to below the air conditioner. Below the air conditioner, there were more clumps of dust and foam all over the floor. The cover they gave me was cracked along the edge and the en­tire left side of the cover wasn’t installed properly so all the air that would have came out directly was just being redirected into the opening on the left of the cover.

It took me less than half a minute to fix it myself.

I don’t understand how such lazy people even get hired in the first place.

 

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Sending Out a Mass Email Fail

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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.
 

Tip of the Day: If you are going to bother all your classmates and send out a mass email asking if someone can send you notes from lecture because you were absent, at least remember to include in the email for which class you need notes.

Or else one of your classmates is going to take a screenshot of your email, post it on his blog, and call you a failure.

Mass email fail

 

The Daily Post at WordPress.com

Topic #284: What is the best way to tax people? Countries around the world use different approaches. Which do you think is best? Or should their be no taxes at all? What does it mean for everyone to pay their fair share?

I think the best way to tax people is to place taxes on goods that are strictly for luxury or pleasure, similar to how the United States government implemented heavy taxes on cigarettes.

Although I’m fine with various taxes like income tax and property tax, I don’t think it’s a good idea to have a consistent tax for sales. Sales tax in my region ranges anywhere between 6% and 9%, and I believe it is mostly consistent regardless of what it is that you purchase. For example, someone purchasing necessary basic food like bread and rice to feed their family pays the same amount of tax that someone purchasing a gaming system does. I think it would be helpful to increase the taxes on entertainment and reduce the taxes on necessities.

Something I’ve heard about in the past is to also have a variable tax on types of foods. Having a higher tax on unhealthy foods, such as foods with high sodium or unsaturated fat content, would encourage people to save money and purchase healthier foods, allowing the govern­ment to spend less money on paying for people’s hospital bills when they get heart attacks from eating too much sodium or fat.

I think that everyone paying their fair share of taxes means that people’s contributions to the govern­ment are on a variable gradient scale that is adjusted based on how fortunate they are. If someone is so poor that they are unable to pay for their own family’s survival, they should be taxed less as long as they are showing a directed and focused effort on making money. If someone is so rich that they’re not sure what to do with their own money and instead go around wasting it, they should be taxed higher. On a slight variation, if someone is rich but they are using their money for a good purpose (such as donating it to organizations that fund advancement projects), they should be taxed less because they are already using their money for the greater good.

 

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I Hate Useless Code

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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.
 

My brain feels like it is going to implode.

I just spent a few hours today attempting to implement a Most Commented feature into the Badger Herald website (for my new readers who don’t know already, I work there as the web director).

And I failed.

When the former web director designed the website, he made the CSS so complicated and so unnecessarily complex that plain code being inserted into the website becomes so extravagantly formatted that it would drive anyone crazy and stop all levels of productivity.

If you are unable to see for yourself, the Badger Herald uses Disqus for commenting, and Disqus comes with widgets where I can stick in the provided code into our website and it’ll automatically fetch all the most commented articles from our website and put them in a list. The list contains the headline of the article in medium-sized text, and contains meta data with the number of comments and the date of publication in small-sized text.

When I put this on a random page on my website to test it out, it worked perfectly fine and the meta text was about 70% of the size of of the headline text.

When I transferred the exact same code onto the Badger Herald’s website, the size of the meta text became about 250% of the size of the headline text.

I opened up our .css file so I could figure out what was causing this to happen, and realized that the .css file is 34 kilobytes. I copied and pasted the content into a word processor and it ended up being 14 pages.

I gave up on it because I felt as if it would be a waste of my life reading through 14 pages of ridiculous code.

So if you ever end up working for me and have to program something under my management, and your project involves either me helping you or me programming in collaboration with you, don’t write stupid code like that.

 

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Glowing Hot Red; Help Me Find a Book

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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 read my blog post from yesterday, you know that my parents came to visit me for the first time since I left for university this academic year (which was a few months ago). In addition to bringing me food, they also brought me two pots for me to use with my range. I didn’t originally have one because I didn’t know I was going to have a range in my studio, as I didn’t have one last year.

So I tried using the range for the first time today using one of the pots that my parents brought me, and noticed that my range is one of those spiral heating pads that glows red when it’s hot.

Glowing hot heating pad under pot

In other news, I have to get a book called Elementary Forms of Religious Life by Emile Durkheim for my classical sociological theory course. I usually don’t like buying books because we usually end up not reading the whole thing, and instead read tiny excerpts from all over the book. For me, it’s especially a waste of money because I get free printing (or, if I print excessively, then it’s not free but still cheap) so I can get an electronic version and print it myself, and print only the pages that I need for the class.

Unfortunately, for Elementary Forms of Religious Life, I haven’t been able to find a free version online. I’m not sure if it’s past its copyright period yet, and it’s possible that it might not be, which is why I’m not able to find it online, but if any of you are able to find it online and would like to email it to me (or send me a link to it), it would be greatly appreciated. If you do, I’ll give you a shout-out in a future blog post.

 

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