JetBlue canceled my flight

February 14, 2018, 4:04 PM PST by Parkzer • Tempo

This post is over 8 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.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.

Apparently, a plane that was supposed to come get us from San Francisco International Airport ended up having a part malfunction and they couldn’t get it repaired in time to fly us down from SJC to LGB. So, a few hours before I was going to leave for the airport to catch my trip back home, I got an email from JetBlue letting me know that my flight was canceled and I was confirmed for the next available flight of the same route – Wednesday, February 14, 2018 at 6:30 AM.

I obviously wasn’t going to make the same mistake again that I made the first night I was in Santa Clara with our PUBG team at the NVIDIA GeForce esports boot camp. This time, I actually went back to the hotel and slept on the couch with a warm blanket (instead of freezing to death in the boot camp room for a second night in a row). I also took a refreshing shower, which was nice because I hadn’t showered yet since the previous day’s morning due to having slept in an office building.

During the wee hours of 5 AM, a time I didn’t even realize had humans already walking the face of the earth, I woke up, quickly washed up and brushed my teeth, and headed out to the front entrance of the hotel to get picked up by my Uber to the airport. Of course, just because my flight is delayed for another day doesn’t mean a jacket magically appears on me, so I proceeded to nearly freeze to death once again in the biting cold of pre-twilight.

I got to the airport and stepped into the TSA PreCheck line because of my Global Entry status, probably one of the best investments possible for frequent travelers. Since getting it, I never actually had to use it, because I was fortunate enough to either fly at a time with low travel volume, or fly out of Long Beach Airport… but this morning, it actually mattered. I casually strolled past some 100 or so people in the regular line, because apparently, 5 AM is the new hot time to fly.

When I whipped out my boarding pass, I slightly panicked as I saw that I only had 13% of my phone battery left. I was 99.9% sure that I had charged my phone overnight, but what happened? Did the power outlet randomly stop working? Is my battery on the verge of dying? Will this even last long enough for me to be able to call an Uber back home from Long Beach Airport once I land?

Then I realized that I had taken a screenshot of my mobile boarding pass last night. I closed the screenshot and my battery jumped to 98%. I also discovered that I don’t quite fully function optimally when the time shows both a “5” in the hour slot and an “AM” at the same time.

No problem, though. I looked up at the screen of flights and saw that I was boarding through Gate 2. No need to rush, because my gate is nearby – I have a chance to go to the bathroom and take it easy for a while.

Just kidding, Norman Y. Mineta San José International Airport numbers their gates backwards and Gate 2 is over by the edge of the planet.

Miraculously, I actually made it on the plane, and doubly miraculously, I managed to eat enough dinner and get enough sleep last night that I wasn’t feeling at all sick.

That’s a good thing, because apparently, the airport only had one runway open, so we ended up taxiing for somewhere around 18 minutes to take off, proceeded to take off facing north, then spun around 180° so we could face south and start traveling in the proper direction. That would’ve been a disaster if I was actually still feeling unwell, because rotating the direction of a plane 180° is probably one of the best ways to make a sick person vomit everywhere.

Also, the wifi never ended up working.

The rest of the trip went uneventfully (or at least, relatively uneventfully). As you may have guessed, I’m back in Southern California now in Tempo Storm’s team house where I’m staying temporarily until the construction on my new apartment is done. I took a nap shortly after returning to make up for the extra strain on my body from all the traveling, and woke up not too long ago.

I also found out that I am missing a pair of dirty socks that I may or may not have accidentally left behind in the boot camp room.

oops

It’s getting a little chilly in here

February 13, 2018, 3:53 PM PST by Parkzer • Highlights, Tempo

Like I mentioned yesterday, I went into this PUBG NVIDIA trip with insufficient sleep and ended up feeling unwell because of it. A side effect of me getting sick and energy-drained after a flight was that I was pretty tired … tired enough that I very easily fell asleep on a recliner in the esports boot camp room.

This trip was relatively unexpected and unplanned on my end – I basically decided to attend and booked my airline ticket with only a few days’ notice. Because of that, NVIDIA wasn’t exactly expecting me, so they didn’t have a hotel room prepared. That was perfectly fine with me, though – our players were booked suites, and I was ok with sleeping on one of the couches out in the common area. I tend to fall asleep pretty much anywhere and stay asleep pretty well, so a couch was more than enough.

The problem here was that I never actually made it to that phase. I ended up knocking out in the comfort of this recliner somewhere around 9-10 PM, back when the players were still busily practicing. The players didn’t finish up until almost 1 AM, and by that time, I was very deep asleep.

Before they left, our PUBG team’s captain poked me on the shoulder and woke me up, letting me know that it was time to head over to the hotel. In my sleepy state, I assessed the recliner to be comfortable enough to continue sleeping on throughout the remainder of the night, so I told him that I would just spend the night at the studio. The team asked if I was sure, laughed a bit, then headed off.

My assessment of the comfort of the recliner was actually correct. My assessment of the comfort of the air surrounding the recliner was incorrect. After the team left, I quickly fell back asleep without a problem. But, a few hours later, I woke up and thought to myself,

Hmm… it’s getting a little chilly in here.

I went over to the climate control, but realized that it was broken. The temperature was set to 50°F, but it clearly wasn’t actually 50°, and there was no air flowing out anywhere (nor were there even any vents visible in the room). I attempted to raise it to 74°F, but the needle seemed like it wasn’t really doing anything, and the thermostat didn’t seem like it was actually reacting, apart from the needle shifting positions.

This is when I realized that I failed to take into account the fact that the temperature of the air around the recliner was just as important as the comfort of the actual recliner itself. I also failed to take into account that the room was only an acceptable temperature this entire time because there were four other guys inside the room, running the CPUs and GPUs of four gaming computers at high load while playing PUBG. Once they were gone, the room started cooling rapidly.

But as I mentioned before, I’m pretty good at sleeping in pretty much any conditions. I sort of shrugged off the chilliness and went back to sleep. Unfortunately, the sleep was short-lived, because about an hour or so later, I woke up again, and thought to myself,

Hmm… it’s getting a little cold in here.

The temperature was still rapidly falling even further. I’m known to produce a lot of body heat when I sleep – enough that, if I close the door to my bedroom overnight, it will actually be a noticeable few degrees warmer in my bedroom than out in the common area. Unfortunately, the esports boot camp room was quite a bit larger than my bedroom, and my natural body heat couldn’t keep up with the fact that it was actually pretty cold outside at night in Northern California.

This is the point when I realized that it was a mistake to have not brought a jacket, even though it never actually crossed my mind that I would need a jacket for a 30-hour trip from California to California. I did, however, remember to bring an undershirt and a spare pair of socks. I put on my second pair of socks as a second layer over my first pair of socks, and wrapped the undershirt around my hands as gloves. It wasn’t much, but it made things marginally better, and I fell back asleep.

You guessed it. Another hour or so later, I woke up again, and thought to myself,

Hmm… it’s getting a little Antarctica in here.

By this point, it was getting uncomfortably freezing. The two layers of socks were doing their job, but the rest of my body was cold, and the undershirt was far too thin to have any effect on my hands.

In an effort to generate some natural body heat, I put on my boots, walked out of the esports boot camp room, and started jogging around the building towards the bathroom. Thinking to myself that the 24-hour security staff watching me through the camera system probably think I’m crazy, I made it to the bathroom, used the bathroom, then jogged my way back to the practice room. This quick burst of physical activity warmed me up enough that I was able to fall asleep again.

That is, only for another hour or so again.

I finally just gave up and stayed awake at that point.

In other news, we shot an interesting segment with Zanpah, the newest member of our PUBG roster; here’s a behind-the-scene look at one of the photos where he drops an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. Yes, he actually really did drop a piece of hardware worth around US$1,000.00 onto the ground, but no, it did not break.

Don’t travel with insufficient sleep and an empty stomach

February 12, 2018, 8:07 PM PST by Parkzer • Photo Album, Tempo

I’m not sure if I need to exercise more, if I’m just getting older, or if this was just a random and unrelated incident that I shouldn’t really think much about, but I feel like I’m not quite as invincible as I used to be when I was younger.

Tempo Storm’s PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS team is currently in Santa Clara, CA at the NVIDIA campus for a GeForce esports boot camp in preparation for Intel Extreme Masters Katowice later this month. Because one of our players lives on the other side of the country (instead of the team house), and because a different one of our players is new, I decided to quickly fly over there from Southern California for a short visit and a photo/video session with the guys.

With just a few days notice, I booked a plane ticket from Long Beach Airport in Long Beach, CA to Norman Y. Mineta San José International Airport in San José, CA via jetBlue Airways. I was planning on departing today (Monday, February 12, 2018) at 11:12 AM and arriving back home tomorrow (Tuesday, February 13, 2018) at 8:21 PM.

Because of something that kept me up working late into the night, I didn’t really get that much sleep. I woke up bright and early at 7:51 AM, 9 minutes before my alarm (which is sometime I tend to do often), hopped in the shower, finished packing everything up, drank a glass of water, called an Uber to LGB, then ran out the door.

When I’m not feeling well, I can usually just cope with it and hang in there until I’m able to reach a place where I can rest. However, for basically the first time in my life, I was feeling so randomly unwell that I actually had to ask my Uber driver to exit the freeway early and pull over at any location with a bathroom. He happened to pick Burger King, which was fine with me; I jogged into the bathroom while my driver sat in the parking lot waiting for me to finish being sick. Luckily, it only took a handful of minutes.

I’ve been using Uber for a really long time – since back when the concept of tipping wasn’t really a thing for Uber. Since then, the fares in general have risen, so I generally don’t tip my Uber drivers … but I figured this particular driver who let me successfully make it to a bathroom was deserving of a tip.

My entire life, I’ve always traveled via huge airports. Having originally been from the Chicagoland suburbs and traveling to Los Angeles a lot, my most traveled airports are O’Hare International Airport and Los Angeles International Airport – both huge hubs, ranking #3 and #2, respectively, in terms of the busiest airports in the United States.

You can probably imagine my surprise when I arrived at Long Beach Airport, the airport that looks more like a cruise ship museum than an airport. Because of the extra stop I had to take, I was a little bit later than I expected, so I didn’t even take a photograph and just rushed into the airport to get to my gate as quickly as possible. The fact that I have Global Entry coupled with the fact that the airport is tiny resulted in me making it to my gate about 3.5 minutes after I got out of my Uber.

This was the first time I ever boarded an airplane through an exposed ramp, rather than an enclosed boarding tube. I snapped a photo from inside the plane.

The flight was relatively uneventful, except for the fact that I wasn’t actually completely done being sick. As we were about to land, we faced a noticeable amount of turbulence, which made my dizziness return.

I obviously didn’t want to vomit on the plane, so I started vigorously massaging the fleshy part between my thumb and index finger, slightly deeper in from the webbed part – pressure point LI-4 that I thought was associated with eliminating motion sickness and nausea. I later found out that I was massaging the wrong pressure point – LI-4 relieves headaches, while it’s P6 on the inner wrist that relieves motion sickness.

Regardless, I managed not to vomit, then proceeded to exit into SJC and sit in a common area, sipping some water out of a water bottle, waiting for my body to stop spinning the world.

I miraculously made it to the NVIDIA campus without further troubles. This is also where I discovered that a lot of this might have been the result of a lack of food, as I instantly felt about 90% better after I ate a burger that was too tall for its own good.

And now, here we are. I rested a bit on a pretty comfortable couch, and snapped some photos of the very green room.

Like usual, I’ll be live posting photos I take here onto my Flickr account; here’s a link to the album I have set up for the event:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/adamparkzer/albums/72157690406315752

The happiest ice cream

February 8, 2018, 8:42 PM PST by Parkzer • Food

My aunt and uncle came to visit me today, and we went to an all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant. This is what they gave me for dessert.

And of course, this can’t be a post about sushi if I don’t actually show some sushi, so here’s a photo of salmon nigiri:

I had a lot of that

I just moved for the fourth time in 14 months

January 23, 2018, 11:28 PM PST by Parkzer • General

I’m not a very materialistic person. In fact, I’m actually quite the opposite – I like to cut down on my possessions to only the essentials. I’m pretty lucky I’m like that, because I’ve moved four times in the past 14 months.

Back in November 2016, I got an opportunity to do what most other people only dream of – I got to start doing my hobby as a full-time job. With our involvement with League of Legends and Overwatch, Tempo Storm was getting two team houses, and I was offered a spot in one of the houses. I obviously seized the opportunity, which started my chain of moves, relocating from my hometown of the Chicagoland suburbs to one of the team houses.

After I finished setting up the first team house and players moved in, it ended up getting full of League of Legends players, so I moved again to our other team house in December 2016. I repeated the process, setting up the other team house for our Overwatch players.

During this entire process, I realized something – I am very incompatible with living with a bunch of other guys in their upper teens and low 20s. I didn’t realize how messy, dirty, and inconsiderate people could be, especially considering that I am an only child and I lived alone (without roommates) throughout all my years of university. Although I was being given free housing in the team house, I noticed it probably wasn’t worth taking it, because it was having an effect on my mental well-being, so I decided to move to my own apartment.

I executed my decision the following month, moving from the second team house to my own apartment in January 2017. I was feeling better already, as having quiet, alone time is pretty important to me, and I’m on the extreme end of cleanliness and organization. I signed a one-year lease and happily lived in my apartment until today, in January 2018.

Since November 2016, Tempo Storm hired a lot more people who are local to the Southern California area, and my duties shifted significantly from being an all-around administration and operations guy to focusing in specifically on editorial and digital media projects within the production division. This specific task didn’t require me to be present in person, and as a result, I was given the freedom to work from wherever I wanted. Because of the extremely high cost of living in Southern California, I decided to move away to somewhere nearby without such high prices for … pretty much everything.

Thus, I decided not to renew my lease, which ends tomorrow, and to instead move to Las Vegas. I was able to pick out a new apartment complex still under construction with an ultimate-tier luxurious lifestyle, most utilities included, free breakfast, a gym/pool, and a ton of other amenities for far lower than the cost of what I was paying for a 26-year-old building in Southern California. I’m pretty picky about stuff like this, so I ended up selecting the perfect place for me … which unfortunately doesn’t get released from construction until late February or early March.

I still needed to get out of my current apartment, though, because of an ending lease. Fortunately, the timing worked out so one of the team houses had a vacancy for me, so today, I moved over my stuff into a free bedroom in our team house, for the fourth move in 14 months.

So yes, logically, this means that I will be moving for a fifth time in under 1.5 years once my new apartment in Las Vegas is ready. But as a result of my tedious, detail-oriented focus on picking out my next place to live, I think I’ll be staying in this particular apartment building in Las Vegas long-term (or at least until I purchase my own property).

It’s been an interesting year and a half with a whole lot of moves, but I’m glad I did it – it’s not something I would otherwise do, and forcing myself into these new and different situations is always a great learning experience.

The YouTube Partner Program needs to be more exclusive again

January 18, 2018, 9:49 PM PST by Parkzer • General

Back when YouTube was still young, being a YouTube Partner actually meant something. Not only did it allow you to add custom thumbnails and a header to your YouTube channel (back when it was more customizable), it also allowed you to make money off your videos. The only way you would be allowed to make money off your videos if it they were even worth monetizing – so being a YouTube Partner acted as validation for a lot of people.

Then, for some reason, YouTube opened up its “Partner” program to … pretty much everyone. Anybody was basically able to create a YouTube channel, verify that they’re a real person, then start “making money” off the videos right off the bat. There was no build-up process to ensure that YouTube partnership was actually a prestigious title given to only reputable creators.

Two days ago, YouTube posted an update on their Creator Blog titled “Additional changes to the YouTube Partner Program (YPP) to better protect creators.” In this blog post, they said that they will be limiting access to the Partner Program only to channels with over 1,000 subscribers and over 4,000 hours of watchtime in the past year.

When I read this, I was pretty excited. It seemed like YouTube was going back to ensuring that their Partner Program is actually a real special program, and not just something build straight into the “base version” of YouTube. However, after reading the comments on the post and look at people’s responses on social media, I was a bit confused at how much outrage there was about this change.

I personally stopped uploading to YouTube a while back because I didn’t agree with YouTube’s visions on their website. I hated how little it seemed like they cared about their creators, with strange policies like opening up partnership and monetization to the general public being one of many contributing factors. Because of that, I haven’t really been keeping up with the newest updates to YouTube, but based off what I know, there are a few reasons why most of the people complaining about this change are wrong.

This protects creators from losing out on money because of people reuploading their videos. Back when I was more deeply involved in YouTube, a big problem that came up with popular creators is that people would just rip videos off the creator’s channel and steal it for their own, brand new channel. This was a no-risk maneuver because they could just create a new channel and instantly be able to monetize content if a different channel got banned.
People who have fewer than 1,000 subscribers and less than 4,000 hours of watchtime per YEAR should not even be trying to make money from YouTube. This requirement isn’t actually that high, and I sort of wish YouTube had set the bar a little bit higher. A majority of people who are enrolled in monetization are most likely making less than single-digit dollars per year, and I personally think it’s not even worth it for Google AdSense to be even keeping track of these people’s money. It’s easy for people to pretend like they’re “YouTubers,” but it’s time to snap out of it and realize that vlogging as a hobby to just friends doesn’t make them a YouTuber.
Real creators are probably going to start making more money. YouTube has been rampant with completely random and unjustified demonetization on perfectly acceptable videos, so they need all the money they can get. By guaranteeing to advertisers that their ads will be displayed on videos from reputable channels, rather than completely random videos from insignificant, single-digit-subscriber channels, advertisers are more likely to want to invest more money, because they know their ads will have a greater impact than before.

This isn’t enough to bring me back to regularly uploading to my own YouTube channel (although I obviously will be uploading on my employer’s channels as part of my job). However, if YouTube continues to take these kinds of steps to actually make sure real creators are being protected and filtering out those who just abuse the system, I may reconsider in the future.