End of January post

Today is the last day of January so I am going to do a little end-of-month post. This month, the first of 2014, was pretty eventful and even a little crazy. A few things have improved from last month but other things haven't really changed. I wonder what February will have in store for me. There are a few significant events coming up then and I am looking forward to them. And that will close up my blogging for the month of January.

I think I'm addicted to Fruit Ninja

I've spent the last few days playing a lot of Fruit Ninja, the extremely popular fruit slicing game for mobile devices. I got it for free on my iPod Touch in October. Last month, it was updated to include a challenge system, and I've been working on these challenges since I got the update.

My first major accomplishment was slicing every plum and nothing else in arcade mode yesterday morning.

A bit later, I activated all three powerup bananas in arcade mode at once.

I also had a couple of challenges that involved not dropping any fruit, one in zen mode and the other in classic.

I think I'll keep playing Fruit Ninja for a while and go through all of the challenges. There is a theoretically infinite number of them, as far as I'm concerned. So it will keep me occupied for several more days.

First day of spring semester of college

Today was the first day of my spring semester of college after a month and a half of winter break. I'm just taking an online class that has no set times. The class is about career and life planning. I think this semester will be a lot better than my fall semester.

An emotional day in my world

Today has been marked by a couple of horrific events that have overshadowed the rest of the day.

At about 11:15 this morning, someone fatally shot two people and then himself at the shopping mall in Columbia, Maryland, less than 40 miles southwest of my house in a place in Maryland called Forest Hill. I have an aunt and uncle who live in Clarksville, just west of Columbia. I also have a few friends who live in Columbia. So the news of the shooting really shocked me.

Later this afternoon, the Rolex 24, a 24-hour endurance race at Daytona International Speedway in Daytona Beach, Florida, started at 2:10 pm local time. I've been watching small parts of it because I'm a big auto racing fan. I thought it would get my mind off the shooting, but then another horrible event took place. Just before 5:00, slightly under three hours into the race, a violent crash occurred between two cars, sending both drivers to the nearby hospital. One of them had to be cut out of his car. It caused the race to be red-flagged (stopped) for an hour while everything was taken care of.

These two events happening less than six hours apart today has really made me sad. I'm wishing the best for everyone who has been affected by these unfortunate incidents. Hopefully tomorrow will be a better day for me, the people of Columbia, and the drivers at Daytona, where the 24-hour race is set to finish just after 2:00 in the afternoon. And those are my thoughts about today.

YouTube changed their text on Google Chrome but not Internet Explorer

Today, I noticed that YouTube made a change to the text of the video titles on their search results list on Google Chrome browsers. The update made the text a bit bigger and removed the bold formatting. This update was not applied to Internet Explorer browsers.

Here are two screenshots showing the differences on the YouTube search results pages between the two browsers.

Internet Explorer 11

Google Chrome

GoAnimate made another change

GoAnimate, a digital animation website I use to make some of my videos, yesterday made yet another change to a couple of its video makers. About 90 percent of the change involved the voice section of the character settings menu. The voice selections (text-to-speech, microphone recording and file upload) used to be integrated into the sidebar at the left. They now display in their own window. In addition, the male and female text-to-speech voices, which used to be shown in one list, have been separated into their own lists.

This change is far less drastic than previous ones over the past year, which have included a major site overhaul in September that made several previously pay-only features available to free basic users, among other things. GoAnimate has also made two very unpopular moves in that time period with their removal of their Community Library gallery at the end of July, followed by the removal of a selection of songs from the website Tribe of Noise a few days later. This latest change is just a minor display alteration, so there shouldn't be any complaining about it.

More snow coming!

My area is under a winter storm warning tomorrow for another round of snow. We could get as much as eight inches. It sounds like it's going to be a normal snowstorm with a bit of a unique twist. I'll see how it all plays out tomorrow. Until then, good night!

It's going to be a Broncos-Seahawks Super Bowl

I'm typing this post not long after the conclusion of the 2013-14 NFC Championship Game between the San Francisco 49ers and the Seattle Seahawks at CenturyLink Field in Seattle, Washington. The Seahawks intercepted a 49ers touchdown attempt during the final moments en route to a 23-17 win. They are now on their way to their second Super Bowl and their first since 2006 (2005 season), when they lost to the Pittsburgh Steelers in Super Bowl XL (that's 40 in Roman numerals). The 49ers were appearing in their third straight conference championship game; they lost to the New York Giants in the 2011-12 NFC title game and then beat the Atlanta Falcons in last year's game.

Earlier today at Sports Authority Field at Mile High in Denver, Colorado, the Denver Broncos took on the Boston, Massachusetts area-based New England Patriots in the AFC Championship Game and won 26-16. The Broncos are now headed to their seventh Super Bowl and their first since 1999 (1998 season), when they defeated the Atlanta Falcons in Super Bowl XXXIII (33) for their second Super Bowl victory in a row. Like the 49ers, the Patriots were making their third conference title game appearance in a row. They beat the Baltimore Ravens in the 2011-12 AFC title game and then lost to the Ravens (who eventually won the Super Bowl) in last year's game.

This makes Super Bowl XLVIII (48) a showdown between the Broncos and Seahawks. They both play on the western side of the United States, unlike last year's Super Bowl teams (Ravens and 49ers) who are on opposite sides of the country. The Broncos and Seahawks will face each other on Sunday, February 2 at MetLife Stadium in the New York City suburb of East Rutherford, New Jersey, home of the Giants and their AFC counterpart the Jets.

The Seahawks have been on their way to this Super Bowl appearance almost since their first appearance in the game eight years ago. They have been one of the league's most consistent teams in the time period since then. They have shown that by beating my Washington Redskins in the playoffs in the Redskins' last three playoff appearances (divisional in 2005-06, and wild card in 2007-08 and last year, when the Redskins won their first NFC East title since 1999). Three years ago (2010), the Seahawks became the first team in NFL history to make the playoffs with a losing record (they won the NFC West with a 7-9 record because their three rivals were even worse).

On the other hand, the Broncos have experienced their current wave of success much more suddenly. They had tying records (8-8) in three of the four seasons between 2008 and 2011, which they won the AFC West title with in 2011, two years ago. They finished the 2010 season with a 4-12 record, so to be contenders again this quickly for them is a bit surprising. Coincidentally, their last really successful season, 2005-06, saw them come within one win of going to the Super Bowl with the Seahawks (which is now happening this year).

I don't care who wins the Super Bowl two weeks from now. The Broncos and the Seahawks are both very good teams at this moment, as they've show over the past couple of seasons. This should make for a very great game!

I had a very productive day at work

I went to ShopRite today for a rare Saturday shift and I kept myself occupied all day. The highlight of the day came just before 3:00 when I was about to go on break (go figure). There was a HUGE tomato sauce spill at the front of an aisle that was caused by several jars of sauce falling. There was tomato sauce and glass everywhere! I was barely prepared to handle a mess that big. It took us nearly half an hour to clean it all up. I finally went on break but the tomato sauce incident made me decide to cut it short because I had to go outside and put carts back to the front of the store. I always do carts right before and right after I go on break, so that's what I had been doing before the tomato sauce situation, as I had naturally anticipated that I would go on break within a few minutes after I finished moving that round of carts. But at the very moment I was called over to help with the situation, and just two minutes before I was going to go inside anyway to go on break, I was helping a customer with the Redbox machine at the front of the store that rents DVDs, Blu-ray Discs and video games to people. But someone else took over that for me.

Some of my other accomplishments today: I took more than five big carts and more than six small carts back to the front of the store at once for the first time (those are the maximums we're allowed to do at once so I technically broke a rule lol), utilized a budget for once while buying stuff for my break and operated the machine that compresses our used cardboard boxes for recycling.

I get to go back tomorrow for five more hours and do the same things! It will be another day full of responsibilities and challenges. And that's what I like about this job. I can handle many things that need my attention.

Times I've been on certain websites

I just thought I'd type the dates I joined the websites I'm a member of and how long I've been on them as of this post.

YouTube: July 1, 2008 (5 years, 6.5 months)
Yahoo! Answers: July 5, 2009 (4 years, 6.5 months)
Wikipedia: March 8, 2011 (2 years, 10 months)
Tumblr: October 18, 2012 (1 year, 3 months)
Panoramio: January 22, 2013 (1 week shy of 1 year)
Twitter: February 13, 2013 (11 months)
GoAnimate: March 11, 2013 (10 months)
SodaHead: April 4, 2013 (9.5 months)
Pinterest: May 5, 2013 (8.5 months)
Flickr: April 14, 2013 (9 months)
Reddit: June 3, 2013 (7.5 months)
Blogger: July 16, 2013 (6 months)
DeviantArt: November 27, 2013 (1.5 months)

In the past year I've joined 9 major websites. I'm getting a big presence here on the internet!

About the extreme cold snap in much of the United States

A few days ago, it snowed yet again at my house in Maryland. We got a few inches and then some of the roads iced over. A lot of the creeks, streams, ponds and other bodies of water froze too.

Now, we are having very, very cold temperatures accompanied by strong wind gusts. There have been negative wind chills all day today. I woke up to a temperature of 4 degrees Fahrenheit this morning. The temperature was in the negative single digits without the wind chill factored in to the west in parts of the Appalachian mountains. It was bad enough that many schools here in the Baltimore area were closed today. There has been a huge risk of hypothermia and frostbite, which I got six years ago on a winter camping trip (with temperatures way up in the 30s). I have never seen a cold snap without any precipitation like this before in my life.

This cold wave happens to coincide with the 18th anniversary of the "Blizzard of '96", which dumped multiple feet of snow in many east coast states. I was seven and a half months old when it happened, and I think I actually have a very short memory of that blizzard even though I was so young. I remember somehow having a view outside and just seeing a blanket of snow covering the whole yard. The memory is literally two seconds long and I'm not entirely sure that it was the 1996 blizzard, but I know I was very young when the memory happened.

Just under a year ago there were a couple of days where the high temperature here didn't even get up to 30 degrees and I went outside and made a video about it. Now with today's probably historic conditions, 22 degrees is nothing compared to this.

2014!!!!

Happy new year to everyone on Blogger! It's 2014, the year following 2013 and preceding 2015. I'm coming off what may be the most eventful year of my life to date. Will this year be the same? I guess I'll just have to wait and see!