Regaining Lost Trust

April 6, 2011, 8:29 PM PDT by Parkzer • 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This post is over 15 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.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.

It feels nice to have nearly a full day off (except for going to two classes).

I’ve done pretty much nothing productive all day (which probably isn’t a good thing, because I have an exam in my philosophy course tomorrow).

I’m gonna go eat some peanut butter sandwiches now and take a nap.

The Daily Post at WordPress.com

Topic #85: How do you recover lost trust? In a person? In an idea? If someone lets you down or betrays you, how do you learn to forgive? And can you possibly learn to trust them again? Why or why not?

Being an extremely cynical person, I generally don’t really trust anyone in the first place, so I don’t place myself into situations where I could potentially be betrayed or lose trust in someone else. If someone were to betray me, it would be nearly impossible to recover that trust because I believe strongly in the subconscious mind’s influence on the conscious body’s actions, and if the subconscious mind is there with the desire to perform betraying acts, then it will most likely overpower the conscious mind again in the future.

I have lost trust in ideas before when I have thought up of a plan and, after thinking about it some more and playing it out in my mind, realized that it had some sort of flaw or would leave open a vulnerability. Fortunately, I don’t treat ideas like humans, and I can comfortably go back to ideas to try and find out what the problem with the idea is. I usually think of solutions for the areas in which the idea is lacking and attempt to make it a better and more reliable idea.

So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 21

Number of times I did my own laundry: 2

Mass Election Chaos

April 5, 2011, 8:30 PM PDT by Parkzer • General

Today was a day of MASS CHAOS BECAUSE THE STATE OF WISCONSIN HAD ELECTIONS and I happen to work as the web director for a newspaper that’s starting to focus on improving its website and taking advantage of the Internet.

After I got back from my classes, most of my evening and my entire night was spent sitting in front of my computer at the office refreshing pages and reading emails to put out live coverage of the election on BadgerHerald.com.

Yes, that’s right. The statistics don’t update themselves. There is literally a person there manually putting in all the numbers and updating the page over and over again as the information becomes available.

We made a special page for the election, and if you want to check that out, you can find it at http://badgerherald.com/elections. It’s probably going to be dormant by the time you read this and click on the link, but it’s probably worth visiting anyway seeing as I spent a handful of hours constantly updating those pages. Also, depending on when you look at it, the Supreme Court results still might not be finalized, as it was still extremely close when I left the office (meaning, there were almost 1.5 million votes total and the difference between the two candidates was about 600 votes).

As a result of all this, I’m extremely tired and my eyeballs hurt from staring into a pair of monitors for a majority of my time at the office. … Not that I’m not already spending too much time staring at monitors and screens in the first place, but it’s a lot more straining when you’re trying to work as quickly as possible and your eyes are flying across the breadth of the monitors.

So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 21

Number of times I did my own laundry: 2

1080p 60fps Blu-ray

April 4, 2011, 8:31 PM PDT by Parkzer • Daily Shoot

(If you think this story I’m about to tell is extremely vague, then that’s good, because I intended it to be like that in order to protect the identities of the people involved in the story.)

Yesterday, someone sent me a video to work with. After I received the video and opened it up, I noticed that it was recorded at a 16:9 ratio but was rendered at a 4:3 ratio and 480p quality, sized at about 23 megabytes. (For those who don’t know, 16:9 ratio is widescreen and 4:3 ratio is the old TV ratio. If you render a 16:9 clip at 4:3, it creates black bars at the top and bottom.)

I just used the video that I received, but told her for future reference that she should render her videos in widescreen high-definition in the future to make them better-quality. I told her the one she sent now was fine, but she insisted on rerendering her video.

She asked me for specific instructions, but she uses Final Cut Pro and I use Sony Vegas Pro so I couldn’t really help her out that much. Instead, I went on Google and searched for how to render in high definition on Final Cut Pro. I emailed her a link to a screenshot showing the rendering settings.

Instead of using this screenshot intuitively to find out how to render in high definition, she used it literally and rendered her video at the same settings as shown in the screenshot – 1080p, 60 frames per second, Blu-ray quality. Her 2.5 minute clip ended up becoming almost half a gigabyte.

#Fail

The Daily Shoot Assignment of the Day

#DS505

Make a photograph from an unusual point of view.

From the Eyes of a Fridge: This is what my refrigerator door would see if it had eyes.

So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 21

Number of times I did my own laundry: 2

Downloading Skills

April 3, 2011, 8:31 PM PDT by Parkzer • Daily Post

Someone asked me today if I was going to participate in BEDA (Blog Every Day in April).

Really?

Have you not yet noticed that I’m already blogging every day of the year 2011 as a part of WordPress’ Post a Day?

-.-

The Daily Post at WordPress.com

Topic #84: If you could master any skill instantly, what would it be? In the movie The Matrix people could download any skill for use inside the virtual world. Is there any skill you think would be impossible to download? Why?

If I could master any skill instantly, I would pick the skill of memory. That way, I would have complete control over my memory, and be able to remember and forget things at will. This would help me succeed in pretty much anything academic, because I would only have to read through the course material once and be able to remember all the specific details. This would obviously not only help me succeed in exams, but would also help me remember important information to apply it to my life later on.

I noted that I want to master memory in general and have the ability to forget rather than mastering the ability to remember everything, because I recall seeing in some sort of documentary once that people who remember everything due to a mental abnormality (I think they’re called savants) actually suffer from their condition because they remember so much. So, I still want to be able to forget irrelevant things that I don’t need, such as the color of shirt my co-worker was wearing three weeks ago.

I don’t think that there would be any skills that are impossible to download. Assuming that downloading a skill means providing your brain with enough information about that skill to perform well in it, there isn’t anything that you can do that cannot theoretically be forced into your brain. Skills generally take knowledge, talent, and practice. The knowledge can be stored as memories, the talent can be stored as talent itself that each person has, and practice can be stored as the reinforcing of particular actions in your brain (meaning your brain would gain the experience that practice would give it).

So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 21

Number of times I did my own laundry: 2

wtfpwned by a Bus Driver

April 1, 2011, 8:34 PM PDT by Parkzer • General

At 1:46 AM today, I finished working and went out to the bus stop to wait for the bus. I saw the bus approaching, but for some odd reason, it was going a lot faster than normal. Assuming that the bus driver didn’t see me, I waved a little bit to get his attention. He drove right past me.

Suddenly, he screeches to a halt a little while later, and opens the doors to the bus. I put on my -___- face and start walking toward the bus.

Several seconds later, when I’m about to reach the doors of the bus, the bus starts moving again, and I have to do an awkward speed-skip-hop-jump-run to make sure I get on.

Apparently the bus driver had been working straight since March 31 at 5:45 AM, was getting tired, and he wanted to play some April Fools jokes on the riders.

After I finally got on the bus, he noticed that there were a handful of people waiting at one of the later stops. As they entered, he pulled out a device and pretended like he was radioing someone.

“Yeah, I got them right here, they’re entering the bus.”

Then he asks the group, “Were you at all involved with the incident that just occurred at Langdon [Street]? I have the police department here and they want to know.”

The group denies their involvement and starts getting nervous as the driver says into his radio device, “They say they don’t know anything about it.”

Then, he pinpoints an individual and says, “Are you returning from a party?”

“Uh… no.”

“Have you been drinking tonight?”

“Uh… no.”

“Was there underage drinking at this party?”

“No!”

“Ah ha, so you were at a party. Why are you lying to me?”

“…”

And he proceeded to continue and freak out everyone else until he yells “APRIL FOOLS!” and starts driving again.

I’ve never seen a bus driver pull an April Fools joke on anyone before, and I would have to say that it was quite an interesting end to my night.

… Then it snowed this morning. Even the weather is pulling jokes on me.

So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 21

Number of times I did my own laundry: 2

Invisible Businesses

March 31, 2011, 2:58 PM PDT by Parkzer • Daily Post

Do you know what I hate? Businesses that are impossible to find.

I got a free $10 coupon for a random smoothie shop called Red Mango in Madison, WI, USA. I looked it up on Google Maps and pinpointed the location, and even looked at it via street view so I could tell what it looked like from the front.

Today, when I was going to work, I got off at an earlier bus stop so I could stop by Red Mango on my way to work and use my $10 coupon. The only problem was, Red Mango disappeared off the street.

I ended up walking and looking and walking and looking and kept walking and looking until my workplace showed up. I went in and frustratedly said “Where the hell is Red Mango? I walked an extra two blocks so I could go there and the building evaporated.”

Apparently, according to a co-worker, it’s still there and I’m just blind.

Tip of the Day

If you ever choose to take a very quick nap in a library, make sure that you position yourself so you can breathe freely. Or else you’ll be like me, there will be six people in the section of the library where you were when you fall asleep, there will be nobody there when you wake up, and you’ll wonder if they all left because you were snoring.

The Daily Post at WordPress.com

Topic #83: What’s the most on fire you’ve ever been? Figuratively, literally, whatever.

I have no idea what “on fire” means figuratively. I generally don’t know what any phrases mean in their figurative form, and I hate sayings that don’t make any sense literally because they’re confusing and a waste of my hippocampus to memorize all of them.

I have never literally been on fire. I’ve held my hands over a fire before to warm them up, but they never caught on fire, and they never even touched the fire in the first place.

So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 21

Number of times I did my own laundry: 2