This is a text-heavy and imageless blog post, so if you only visit my blog to watch my videos or look at my photos, then this blog post probably won’t be of very much interest to you.

If you’ve been keeping up with my blog lately for the past month or so, you will have realized that I have been experimenting with my sidebar over to your right. At first, I listed some of the other websites that I used and put some custom advertisements for websites that I supported. However, after I made my own profile page, that became redundant and unnecessary. As a result, I put a link to my profile in the sidebar.

After a while, my profile page aged like the rest of my website, and it became less worthy of being featured on the side bar. Earlier today, I decided to remove the link and add it to the navigation bar at the top, like all my other links.

But then the sidebar was blank again.

Sadly, the only other thing I could think of to add to the sidebar was an advertisement. If you have an advertisement blocker enabled, you probably don’t see the awesome advertisement for Amazon.com. You should add Parkzer.com to your list of domains that are approved to display advertisements, because my advertisements are never obnoxious, intrusive, or malicious.

If you have any other suggestions for what I should put in the sidebar, let me know by either contacting me using the information in my profile page, or using the contact page.

Also, yes, I did ponder putting that in the Site News section where it seems to belong, but it seemed too small and insignificant of a change to create a new article for it. So I put it here.

The Daily Post at WordPress.com

Topic #10: How do you stay entertained when you are snowed in?

This isn’t a very good question, because I pretty much never get snowed in. Even if I do get snowed in, I would carry on my regular schedule indoors regardless.

I’ve noticed in the past several years that getting snowed in, or having a “snow day” as most edu­cational institutions call it, occurs very ironically. You would expect places in the north, such as where I live, to have more snow days because it snows a lot more. You would expect the more southern states (from a USA perspective) to have less snow days because it snows significantly less. I’ve realized that this isn’t exactly necessarily the case.

Places like Madison, Wisconsin (where I go to university) get heaps of snow each year. Even my state of birth, Illinois, gets plenty of snow all throughout winter. However, an Illinois or Wisconsin resident won’t exactly see that many snow days, as these areas are accustomed to massive amounts of snow, and everyone is prepared to fight it off. At my university, there were snow plowing trucks and salt prepared before the first snowfall. Even if it’s not prepared in advanced, there are already sufficient investments in the necessary equipment that in the case emergency action is needed, doing so will actually solve the problem.

On the other hand, there are more southern states, such as Tennessee, where one of my good friends (who is also the owner of my current hosting company), Justin White, lives. They’re not generally accustomed to having large amounts of snowfall, so when they do get a little snow, their entire neighborhood goes crazy. Justin has been telling me for the past several weeks how much it has snowed, and from my perspective, it doesn’t seem that severe – large amounts of snowfall is not uncommon where I live. However, his town (and even neighboring areas) are on snow emergencies, dismissing their students early from classes and shutting down school districts. Even if we were to have theoretically gotten the same amount of snow (in Wisconsin as Tennessee), Tennessee is making a much larger deal about it because they are not as well-prepared as Wisconsin is.

That being said, I’m sure it’s clear now (and probably too clear, seeing as I spent three paragraphs’ worth of text explaining,) that I don’t really have that many snow days. However, that doesn’t mean we have absolutely no snow days at all – in the case where it’s consistently blizzarding throughout the day with temperatures far below freezing (as in negatives on the Fahrenheit scale or below -18 on the Celsius scale) and icy road conditions, there could still be a snow day where I live.

On those days, I usually stay inside and do what I normally do, as I generally don’t get outside as much anyway. I used to like playing in the snow when I was younger, but as I’m getting older, I’m disliking snow more and more. Another problem is that now that I have no choice but to drive more frequently, not only will cold temperatures and snow affect my health, it will also affect my safety. Because of this, and because I don’t like being uncomfortable in general, I stay inside a majority of my day during the winter, even if I’m not necessarily snowed in.

So Far in 2011…

(Note: these numbers will start going up once I get back to my university campus.)

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 0

Number of times I did my own laundry: 0

I’m actually a little bit too sleepy to blog today because I’ve been up since 7 AM (which is very early for me compared to my standard schedule) and haven’t taken my usual nap, but I want to see how long I can keep up with the WordPress Post a Day Challenge, so I’m posting today anyway.

The Daily Post at WordPress.com

Topic #8: How do you stay focused on a task or activity? What do you do when you need to concen­trate or get things done?

I usually don’t have problems focusing in general. When I’m doing something that’s important, I know while doing the task that it’s something that needs to be finished. I also look for things that could happen immediately (or shortly) after doing this task that is considered a reward. For example, writing more content for my website will increase its popularity, or doing homework and studying consistently will get me good grades. (The grades motivator worked in high school, but now that I’m in university, most of my grades are composed of exams and papers, so that motivational tool doesn’t work as well anymore.)

If for any reason I can’t focus in a time when I really need to focus (such as when I’m looking forward to a large event that’s quickly approaching, or when I have a lot of things to do in a short amount of time and I’m constantly trying to organize them in my head), I listen to Brain Sync. Brain Sync is a form of brain wave therapy that sends various signals to your brain stimulating various mental states. For example, there are some that induce creativity, while others relax the body. I’m not sure if this is a psychological effect (similar to how sugar pills work), but they seem to be somewhat effective.

So Far in 2011…

(Note: these numbers will start going up once I get back to my university campus.)

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 0

Number of times I did my own laundry: 0

Thank you to the anonymous reader who used my contact form to point out that the link to the previous date at the bottom of my blog posts had the wrong year. That has now been fixed. Apparently you did not want to be credited by name.

Quote of the Day

I sent a text message to my buddy Malory Goldin on December 27, 2010, but she never responded. At 2:03 AM today, I received a reply:

Sorry, I was in Jamaica.

Best excuse ever for responding late to a text.

Picture of the Day

Azteca Restaurant

I took this picture of the Azteca Restaurant in Mundelein, IL a few days ago from my iPod Touch while I was waiting for my food so I could add it to its foursquare page. I had nowhere else to put this, so I uploaded it here before I deleted it from my iPod.

http://foursquare.com/venue/12210956

The Azteca Restaurant is a Mexican restaurant near where our family-owned business is. The prices are pretty high and it takes a long time for them to make your food, but I’m going to hold off on writing a full review on Google Maps until I go there a couple more times.