My Real Racing 3 progress

In March, I downloaded a game on the App Store called Real Racing 3, which as the name says is a sequel to two previous games. The game is from Electronic Arts and Australian company Firemonkeys, and provides the player with a variety of racing events to compete in. The player competes against real-life people via a feature called Time-Shifted Multiplayer, which takes a player's performance in one event and transfers it over to another for others to compete against. There are many vehicle makes and models to choose from, with various performance levels based on power and speed. The player also earns virtual currency for their competition, which can be spent on things. I'm just past the halfway point in the game, and I've experienced many races and levels, with many more still to come. I kind of took a break during the summer, but now I've started playing it again. It's easily one of my favorite mobile games.

I keep ripping holes in my socks

A number of years ago, I started wearing socks around the house instead of going barefoot. I also got a habit of not changing my socks and wearing them for days on end. That's why a lot of my socks have holes in them. I've gotten new socks only to eventually rip holes in them. It sometimes gets annoying because I end up with only a handful of socks without holes in them. I've even resorted to wearing them the other way, with the hole at the top and the "good" part on the bottom. Today my mom was checking out my weekly room cleaning and she was going through my sock drawer. She made me let her get rid of a bunch of socks that had huge holes in them. I hadn't worn those ones in a couple of years so there was no point in me keeping them. Maybe I need to start wearing shoes all of the time too, or just change my socks every day, especially since they get dirty from me walking around in them.

One last burst of summer

The months of June and July this year were hot and humid where I live, with temperatures reaching the lower 90s, and heat indices (the "feels like" temperature) up to 110. By the beginning of this month, the highs had gone down to the upper 70s-lower 80s, with lows as far down as 55. For a couple of weeks, I suddenly didn't have to turn on my fan, and my mom didn't have to turn up the air conditioning, because we weren't all hot and sweaty. But now, despite summer winding down, the heat and humidity have returned. It got up to 87 here today and it is now 81 (at 11:00 at night!). There are a couple of 90-degree days ahead, including one in September, the day after Labor Day.

Another thing that's forecast to make a comeback are thunderstorms. We had a few of them in June and July and we've had a couple this month as well. Now we are supposed to get a few early September storms. This late burst of heat is sort of like how we had our last snow of this past cold, miserable winter on March 25, on the fifth full day of spring. But as I've said a number of times, I prefer an extension of summer over an extended winter, so to speak.

First day of school for some kids today

Today, school was back in session after summer vacation for kids where I live. But I was not one of them, because I graduated from high school a year ago, and I am now entering my second year of college. I go back next Thursday, and that is the only day I have classes this semester. So now there will be school buses everywhere and the schools will be filled with people, and cars in the parking lots. There are also tons of school supplies in all of the stores. Now that I'm past the public school level, the first day of school is a sign to me that the season of summer is ending, and it will soon become autumn. Like many other people, I wish it could be summer all year long, but it just doesn't work that way.

IndyCar race in California goes on despite earthquake

A 6.0-magnitude earthquake shook the Napa Valley region of northern California at about 3:20 AM Pacific time Sunday morning. While no deaths were reported, there were several injuries, and a number of buildings in the town of Napa were damaged. Since the area is home to a large wine industry, the earthquake also left many wineries with broken wine bottles, resulting in much of their product being lost.

The nearby town of Sonoma was scheduled to host a race in the IndyCar series (the same cars that race in the Indianapolis 500) at the Sonoma Raceway road couse on Sunday. Many of the drivers competing in the race were jolted awake by the quake, and were unable to get back to sleep. But the damage in Sonoma was not as bad as in Napa, so IndyCar officials announced that the race would go on as planned. The biggest effect of the earthquake in Sonoma was probably a power outage that struck much of the town, but not the racetrack. So the drivers, despite being shaken (no pun intended) by the earthquake, raced as if nothing had happened just a few hours earlier, and it turned out to be a pretty normal race. It was the penultimate round of the 2014 IndyCar season, with the finale scheduled to be held in Fontana, California, east of Los Angeles on August 30.

Late-night computer multitasking

It seems like late at night is when I'm the most motivated to be busy doing things on my laptop. I often have a bunch of ideas of things to do on most days, but for some reason I keep putting them off until about 10:00 at night when I remember that I made a goal to get it done before midnight. However, because of my procrastination, it sometimes carries over past midnight.

Right now, I'm getting ready to upload onto my main YouTube channel a video I just rendered in Windows Movie Maker of a thunderstorm that hit my house earlier today, along with a shorter, separate video related to it, while at the same time compiling a video for my NASCAR channel in Sony Vegas. It will take a while to render that since I do it in 1080p high-definition. I also want to do a quick cover picture for my Flickr account and upload a few pictures to it. All of this while eating a slice of cold pizza from the fridge. And this post is adding to all of this work.

I don't know why I have trouble making videos and documents and stuff earlier in the day. I guess my brain just functions better at night or something. Lately during the day I usually prefer to watch TV. On my laptop I just do some random Internet browsing on Google and MSN and Yahoo, and watch some YouTube videos, but nothing that's really worth anything.

I have now uploaded those two videos onto my main YouTube channel. Now I need to end this blog post so I can work on my other things but not go to bed even later than I'm already going to.

I crashed my laptop three times

Being a fan of NASCAR, I have a computer game called NASCAR Racing 2003 Season. Even though it's 11 years old, it's still really popular because it works on newer versions of Windows and it's so modifiable (you can add older and newer cars and tracks to the game).

I have recorded videos of NR2003 with my camera, but I'm trying to find a way to record it with a screen recorder on my laptop, which is hard to do with a full-screen application due to the difference in resolution between the application and the desktop, where the recorder runs from. I decided to try out Bandicam, which I have a free version of. Although the free version of Bandicam puts a watermark at the top of videos and limits video length to 10 minutes, it records sound along with the screen, so I don't have to use Sound Recorder like I do with my primary recorder, CamStudio.

Next, I looked to see if there was a way to run NR2003 in a window within the desktop, rather than the standard full-screen setup. I clicked on the Graphics menu in the game and it brought up a window with a list of screen setups to choose from. Some of the setups did allow me to run the game in a window, so I chose one of those and clicked the "Run in window" box. The window was almost full-screen and my taskbar initially covered the very bottom of the window, but I was able to access the Bandicam controls and navigate through the NR2003 menus simultaneously.

I then selected the region of the screen for Bandicam to record, which was all but the window's title bar. After setting up and "driving" in the first few laps of a race in the game, I saved a replay of it, loaded the replay from the studio and put it in full screen for Bandicam to record. I was going to fast-forward to the end of the race to record it as the game showed it, but as I was doing that my laptop suddenly crashed, probably due to the unusual setup I had the game in. It actually turned off instead of just going back to Windows. So I restarted my laptop and went back to NR2003. I loaded the same replay and this time my laptop crashed during the first lap of the race.

So on my third try I decided to put NR2003 back in full-screen, standard resolution mode and run Bandicam "underneath" the game from my desktop. This meant I had to start recording before I launched NR2003 from my file manager. I started the replay and before the field even took the green flag, my laptop crashed again. I could not believe it. I gave up and decided that I will just have to keep recording replays with my camera from outside of my laptop. It may have been Bandicam and NR2003 running at the same time that kept causing my laptop to shut down completely, which means it could have been a processor issue caused by the programs. I ran NR2003 without Bandicam today and it worked fine, so I may be right. But anyhow, that's probably enough about my laptop troubles for tonight. :)

I did nothing this week

For almost a week, I have done almost nothing productive. My next work shift isn't until Saturday morning and I don't go back to college for more than two weeks. So I've just been sitting at home and wasting my time on my laptop and my iPod Touch. I have done a couple of chores around the house but that's about it. Now I know why getting out is so important.

New pillow

On Wednesday, my mom was out running errands. When she got home she said to me, "Do you want a new pillow?" She had bought two pillows from Kohl's, which took me by surprise. She had never said anything about wanting to buy them. But I knew I could make use of one of them, so I said yes, I wanted a new pillow.

The two pillows my mom bought were bigger than my old one. My old pillow was flatter and not really comfortable at all. These new pillow put my old one to shame. So I took one of the new pillows, took my old pillow off my bed, and put the new one on. When I went to bed, I instantly felt comfortable in the position I was in, unlike with my old pillow, which made me have to toss and turn constantly to find the right position. I had thought it was the actual bed that caused that issue, but now I think it was just that I needed a better pillow. I guess a new mattress would be nice too though...

My mom's birthday

Today was my mom's birthday. She is now 54 years old. Yesterday we had a cookout (about or fifth since Memorial Day) and my mom had me make brownies, and I guess that counted as our little party because today she had work. She said that two of her co-workers baked cakes for her, and she's bringing some home tomorrow. And she also got a pumpkin pie yesterday, so we have no shortage of desserts. All we did this morning was say "happy birthday" to her and then it was a normal day. But the only important thing is that she's another year older.

I took the opportunity today to make a "special" brownie with powdered sugar and whipped cream. It was delicious.

"The Line" iOS game

My current iPod game obsession is "The Line" by Ketchapp, the company responsible from bringing the popular tile game 2048 to worldwide success. In The Line, the player has to guide a blue dot along a long path with many turns. The dot can be moved by sliding one's finger along a green area at the bottom of the screen. The goal is to avoid hitting the red walls with the dot, which ends the game. Along the dot's path, there are several "rivers" represented by thick blue lines, and the player must let go of the screen to get the dot over the river.

There are also small blinking squares along the way which can either make the dot smaller for ten seconds, allowing for more room to move the dot around, or give the dot the temporary ability to break through the walls. Another special bonus is the occasional x6 path, which increases the player's score by six points instead of just one when the dot is passed through it. The score increases continuously at a very fast pace until the game ends. My weakness is getting the dot around corners; no matter how much I try I keep hitting them. But I have gotten some pretty high scores in the game, although I have tons of room for improvement.

Pacific Ocean filled with tropical cyclones

There are currently three hurricanes in the Pacific Ocean, one of which is about to cross over to the western Pacific and become a typhoon, and at least one of which is forecast to impact Hawaii, who usually dodges bullets when it comes to hurricanes. This has put increased attention on the eastern Pacific basin, which is unusual as attention from the United States mainland is usually focused on the Atlantic basin, which produces nearly all U.S.-landfalling tropical cyclones.

The biggest concern is Hurricane Iselle, on a path toward the Hawaiian Islands, which has prompted a tropical storm warning on Maui, and a hurricane warning on the "big island". Behind Iselle is Hurricane Julio, which is on a similar westward path as Iselle, but is not expected to get quite as close to Hawaii. Then there's Genevieve, which has a very unusual history. It formed nearly two weeks ago, but only hit tropical storm status briefly before weakening to a depression and then a post-depression. Genevieve then strengthened back to a depression and tropical storm twice, and managed to become a hurricane today. It is now in the process of crossing the International Date Line into the western Pacific region, which will make it a typhoon.

There is also a tropical storm in the Atlantic, Bertha, which is off the east coast and is forecast to maintain tropical storm strength up toward the British Isles. Bertha brought some rain to Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands and appeared to be headed toward southern Florida, but forecast models soon had it turning north parallel to the coast, so Bertha never had any threat to the United States, unlike Arthur last month. So the Atlantic is having it good in the way of hurricanes compared to the Pacific right now.

Misadventures in video making

I really enjoy recording, editing and uploading videos but sometimes I run into problems. And lately I've been having more of those problems than usual. They have been so counterproductive to me that I have come to dread the rendering and uploading bits of the process.

One particular situation last week involved a project I did on Sony Vegas for my second channel. Because of my laziness, I didn't get started on it until 11:00 in the evening. The program decided to stop responding midway through and I restarted it, losing about ten seconds of unsaved work but luckily nothing more. I finished the video around 12:20 and rendered it. It took about 20 minutes, but that's normal for a somewhat long 1080p HD Windows Media video (my default specs). Then I went onto YouTube but when I selected the finished video file, the uploader displayed a message saying that it couldn't connect to YouTube's server. I tried twice more only to get the same message. Since it was 1:00 in the morning I figured that was the issue and called it quits for the night. I slept, woke up and at about 10:30 I tried uploading the video again and this time succeeded. It was a weird problem I had never seen before.

And then yesterday I imported a nine-and-a-half minute video from my camera to my laptop. I was going to remove the first five minutes because I didn't want that part in the finished video clip. I went on Windows Movie Maker because that's where I do simple edits. I removed the part of the video I didn't want but when I was rendering it my laptop suddenly shut down. I turned it back on, went back to Movie Maker and the same thing happened. So I almost went to Vegas but then I decided that was going to take forever. So I just decided to upload the full nine-and-a-half minutes to YouTube and then go into the video editor and trim the video there.

I loaded the video onto the YouTube uploaded and the uploading part took about 5 minutes, and the processing about 7, which I think is a bit long for a standard-definition video (and I upload a lot of mine in HD). I then went to the video editor (which now has to be accessed first by going to the Creator Studio, then the video manager, then clicking Edit on a video) and removed the first half of the video. It took several minutes for YouTube to process my edits but finally the video was the length I wanted it to be. I'm used to YouTube being slow like that, but not that slow.

So maybe I just need to be more patient with any issues I face while working with my videos. Or maybe I should make them shorter, or only in standard definition, to speed up rendering and uploading, or just work on them earlier in the day. But since I've made quality a huge concern in my videos during the past couple of years, I guess I'll always have to deal with these problems every now and then.

I'm getting good at Tetris

Tetris is that colorful tile-matching game that was introduced three decades ago, and has made many people addicted to it, one of whom is myself. But even though I like Tetris, I used to not be very good at it. I just didn't have a great understanding of the concept of the game, and I was especially bad at switching tiles to make them fit next to the squares around them.

However, I've been playing several different versions of Tetris lately, and I seem to have learned a bunch of things about it pretty fast. I'm now better at keeping up with the ever-increasing speed of the tiles as the game progresses, and that has helped me to reach some new levels. But I'm still prone to just letting them all stack up to the top of the board and end the game. Still, I enjoy Tetris even more now than I did before because I'm better at it. I think it's just a coincidence that this comes just after the game's 30th anniversary, which just happened in June.