Flying Roof Shingles

by   •   What I'm Reading
 

This post is over 15 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.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.
 

Fun fact of the day: I got attacked by a flying roof shingle because of the high winds during the tornado watch in Illinois.

 

What I’m Reading

Within a day of finishing Snakehead, the seventh novel in the Alex Rider series, I also finished Crocodile Tears, the eighth novel.

The fourteen-year-old spy Alex Rider promised at the end of the previous novel that he would never get involved in another mission with MI6 again. Unfortunately, that ended up not becoming the case after a reporter finds out too much about Alex Rider and shows up at his house, prompting Alex to go to MI6 for assistance. In exchange for protection, Alex has to do one small mission for MI6 – to go into a genetic engineering plant during his school trip and seize information from a computer.

Alex was told that this would be a piece of cake, but it ended up becoming complicated, especially after this mission got tied in with a completely different and unexpected criminal. Eventually Alex ends up thousands of miles away from home, and once again, must save the world.

Like any other Alex Rider novel, Alex encounters a series of unbelievably fortunate events that helps him get through this mission. If you’ve been keeping up with the Alex Rider novels, this novel is definitely worth reading.

 

Picture of the Day

Strawburry Fruit Snacks

Strawburry Fruit Snacks

Hey look, I’m eating strawburry fruit snacks.

@Strawburry17

(Taken with an Apple iPod Touch)

 

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I Don’t Want to Invite a Friend

by   •   What I'm Reading
 

This post is over 15 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.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.
 

Just letting you know, I went to FedEx to send out my old laptop back to Dell to complete the exchange.

I haven’t received any emails, tweets, or messages reminding me to do that, but I’m just putting that out there, just in case. Because apparently at least one person is already stalking my to-do list closely enough that they know when I receive particular charges for payments (read yesterday’s blog post if you don’t know what I’m talking about).

Yes, I’m still a little intrigued about that.

In other news, as I was tidying up my GMail, I noticed that the “Invite a Friend” box is still there in my sidebar. I remember trying to get rid of it a long time ago. The solution I found was to send out all my invitations, but that only ended up working for about a day, and it came back.

I tried Googling it again but didn’t find any obvious answers except for installing more Firefox hacks (which is what I’m trying to avoid – the reason I was trimming down my GMail is to make it load faster and use up less memory).

If you know how to get rid of that invitation box (such as emailing Google Support a top-secret code, which is unlikely), then you should share it with me. If you’re a Google employee working in GMail development (which is also unlikely but would be awesome if a Google employee was reading my blog), then you should implement an option for people to get rid of that box if they’re not interested in inviting people.

 

What I’m Reading

Earlier today I finished reading the seventh book in the Alex Rider series, Snakehead, by Anthony Horowitz.

If you’re unfamiliar with the series, Alex Rider is a fourteen-year-old British spy working for MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service. He keeps telling himself that he will end his involvement with MI6, but he somehow keeps on getting dragged into more missions, forcing him to risk his life to save others and find important information about criminals’ plans.

This book starts off right after Ark Angel ends – Alex has landed back down to Earth from space and is recovering in Australia near where he landed. His plan was to fly straight back home to the United Kingdom and live a normal life as a normal schoolboy, but the Australian government picked up Alex and asked him to do a favor.

Alex intends on rejecting the offer, but there’s a twist. If Alex was to take this mission, he would get an opportunity to meet up with his godfather and possibly find out more about the death of his parents. Simply because of his desire to learn more about his dead family, Alex agrees to go on the mission.

By the end of the novel, Alex finds out exactly how his parents died, and it’s not at all how he expected.

I chose to read this book obviously because I’ve been keeping up with the Alex Rider novels since the original Stormbreaker and wanted to read the novels through until the end of the series. I still think Alex Rider is unrealistically lucky and probably the most clever teenager in the world, and this trend continues on through Snakehead. This book was targeted at young adults so it was less sophisticated than other books I’ve been reading lately, and it was nice to dive into an action-packed novel for a change. If you’ve liked the previous Alex Rider books, then this one will definitely not let you down, and will answer many questions raised from the previous novels.

 

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You Creepy People

by   •   Daily Post
 

This post is over 15 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.
 

Thank you to the creepy anonymous person who emailed me today reminding me to pay my summer college tuition. Those payments were actually automatic, but either way, I’m quite impressed that you found out on which date the payment would be charged, and even concluded that because the regular payment date was on a weekend, the charge would occur on the following business day. Now please stop stalking me that closely.

In other news, one of my textbooks for one of my summer courses arrived in the mail today. It’s a used book, and it sort of smells like dirty gym shoes.

 

The Daily Post at WordPress.com

Topic #150: See how long you can sit in silence. Before you start, check the clock and guess at how long you can do it for. Then when you’re done: how close was your guess? Surprised? What did you experience while siting? Was it pleasant or frustrating?

This topic is a little silly to me beacuse I sit in silence consecutively for hours a day out of my own free will because I don’t find the need to say anything.

I’m normally a very peaceful person when I’m alone, and I usually attempt to place myself into situations where I will be alone. I don’t think I can remain silent on the Internet because I’m always communicating in one form or another, but I actually prefer to be silent in real life rather than speak randomly with those around me.

Depending on the day, if I’m in my studio on my university campus on a weekend with no plans, I can stay silent for the entire day without a problem. So, if I were to guess how long I could stay silent, I would say about 32 hours – that’s two nights and one full day of not speaking.

I can’t really test that right now because I’m back at home and I’m frequently communicating with my parents, but if I remember this blog post when I’m back at university, I’ll try to test it out.

 

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How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer

by   •   Daily Post, What I'm Reading
 

This post is over 15 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.
 

 

What I’m Reading

Earlier today, I finished reading How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer, a book mainly about economic psy­chology, but also about the general concept of how we decide what to do on a moment-to-moment and day-to-day basis.

Most of us think that the best decisions are the ones we think through slowly, thoroughly, and carefully. Most of us believe that the more information we have about the elements of a choice we could make, the better our choice becomes. Even great philosophers like Socrates and Decartes believed this as well – that the way someone can live a near-perfect life is to supress impulses and think through every decision completely.

How We Decide argues that rational thought is not actually the best way to think through the decisions we make, and contrary to popular belief, impulses and emotional urges are extremely important when it comes to making some sorts of choices. Lehrer states that some choices are best thought through, like math problems, but other choices, like selecting what type of strawberry jam we want, are best left to our emotional minds. He states that if we think too analytically about things like picking strawberry jam or selecting a piece of artwork that we like, we’ll overanalyze unimportant details and end up making the wrong cohice.

I’ve read a lot about how important our emotions are if we interpret them properly, but How We Decide put together all the important points and supported them with great evidence to illustrate a complete and detailed picture. Lehrer cites what seems like hundreds of different sources of different experiments conducted by psychologists, sociologists, and economists that prove the point Lehrer is making.

I highly recommend everyone to read this book, even if psychology or economics might not be a point of interest. The information covered in this book can be applied to everyone’s life and could potentially help them change the way they make decisions for the better. Even just the vast amount of research and intriguing experiment results presented in this book makes it worth reading.

 

The Daily Post at WordPress.com

Topic #149: Do you believe in life on other planets? Why or why not? Why do you think most alien races in most movies are so dangerous rather than friendly?

I don’t necessarily specifically believe in life on other planets, but I do think that there is life somewhere other than Earth.

Based on specific science only, I think that it’s very possible that we have not yet discovered an area that has an environment fit enough for some sort of life. In addition, this other life could be of a completely different type, which might actually thrive in cold, desolate places rather than vegetative, sunny places like Earth.

From the fourth dimension point of view (which is my scientific alternative to religion), there are different worlds owned by different four-dimensional creators that we have not yet been able to find because of time and dimensional restrictions. This life could be completely different than what we think of as life, but it would still be considered life if the four-dimensional creator chose to call it life.

I think that the media depicts aliens as hostile and dangerous beings because we have the impression that aliens might be intelligent enough to take over our planet. In order to defend ourselves, we see aliens as dangerous and malicious to justify our motivation to protect our land.

 

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Insurance Finally Canceled

by   •   Daily Post
 

This post is over 15 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.
 

First of all, thanks to everyone who reminded me to call in to Allstate and cancel my renter’s insurance for my Madison property that will be unoccupied for the summer. I finally got a hold of an agent and got it done.

I also finally got in touch with an adviser at my local community college to get my schedule for this summer’s courses finalized. All my exemptions from my standardized testing and completed courses from my regular university were finally recorded into their system. For those of you who were wondering, I will be taking a physical science course online, and a psychology course (PSY 275) and a literature course (ENG 240) in-building on Mondays and Wednesdays from 9:00 AM to 11:50 PM and 1:00 PM to 3:50 PM. Although highly unlikely, if you’re enrolled in the same courses as I am, let me know.

In other news, you may or may not have noticed the change with GMail’s AIM function. I actually don’t use the in-GMail chat so I didn’t realize it until someone told me about it, but you can no longer sign in to your AIM account through GMail. Instead, you have to import your contacts into your GChat buddy list.

Be very careful when doing this if you use a client like Pidgin that combines multiple protocols into one buddy list. I accidentally imported my AIM buddy list into my GChat buddy list today without thinking, and had to manually remove duplicates of my couple hundred AIM contacts from my Pidgin buddy list.

 

The Badger Herald, Summer 2011 Projects

Thanks to everyone who helped me find out all the bugs in my document submission form (read yesterday’s blog post if you don’t know what I’m referring to).

A bug that a lot of people easily found was a file size check error. I forgot to set a minimum, so people were able to submit empty files or not even select any files at all and successfully submit the form. I also set the maximum wrong; I intended the maximum file size to be 20 MB, but accidentally set it to 20 KB.

Something many people thought was a bug but actually is not is the fact that you are able to submit .exe (executable) files. Although that’s a virus threat, all submitted files will be run through me before anyone else gets a hold of them, so I decided not to place any restrictions on the types of files one can submit. Either way, if someone submits a suspicious file, I’m most likely going to delete it on the spot anyway without even downloading it to see what it is.

 

The Daily Post at WordPress.com

Topic #147: Whose responsibility is it to change the world? And what will be your contribution?

I think everyone has the responsibility to help change the world in some way, though, it may be helpful if those with bad intentions pass on their responsibilities to others with good intentions.

I don’t think that claiming to be stupid or incapable is a valid excuse not to contribute to improving the world somehow because each individual has some ability to do something, even if it’s something that wouldn’t be considered something significant by many people.

I’m not completely sure what my ultimate contribution to the world will be. I realize that it’s important to set a life goal for yourself – a goal that will act as a sentence describing your best accomplishment – but I don’t think I’m ready to set one yet. Most of my goals right now are self-centered as I try to secure a good position in society. Of course, I’ve made small contributions already, both by making sure that the world maintains its order and by not doing anything harmful, but I think I’ll need to wait after I find a stable occupation to truly decide what my real contribution will be.

 

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Help Me Break This Submission Form

by   •   Daily Shoot
 

This post is over 15 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.
 

Today has been a relatively uneventful day; I spent most of the morning and afternoon reading and studying, and most of the evening working at the family business and doing martial arts.

 

The Badger Herald, Summer 2011 Projects

I decided to throw in this Badger Herald section in my blog once in a while whenever I feel as if I need some feedback about something I’m working on – because really, who would give better advice than my readers? (Actually, a lot of people, but I’m trying to make you feel special, so go with it.) For those who don’t know, I work at the Badger Herald as the Web Director during the academic year while I’m at university, and over breaks, I do small projects related to the website.

The first small thing I finished today (which I intended on finishing about a month ago, but forgot about) is a document submission form. The editor-in-chief-to-be gave me the idea; she thought it would be a good way to let people send us PDFs, Microsoft Word documents, or any other files anonymously through our website.

Right now, it’s located at http://badgerherald.com/contact/.

If you have the time, please test it out and try to break it. Someone already helped me find a bug in it, and it would be helpful to find all of them now so we don’t run into any problems with it in the future. If you find an exploit, I can usually figure out how it was caused, but if you don’t mind, sending me a message through the Contact form on my website would be helpful.

If you find something and would like credit for it, feel free to send me a description of the bug you found with your name, and I’ll give you a shoutout in a future blog post.

 

The Daily Shoot Assignment of the Day

#DS564: Illustrate symmetry in a photograph today.

Microsoft Mouse

It’s symmetrical if you ignore the dust.

 

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