October 2, 2016

 My column was in the paper today and it was cool but also a bit of a bummer. It was cool because I've never written anything that has been in the newspaper before. It was a bit of a bummer because they used the wrong last name. My full name was displayed in the “From” field of my email, my full name and title were the only thing in the body of the email, my full name and title were in the signature of my email, and my attached picture was named with my full name, last name first. You would think that would make it kind of hard to get that wrong. I spent hours writing my article and they couldn't take five seconds to double-check that they spelled my name right. So that's a bummer. I'm going to send them an email tomorrow just to see if I can get a PDF copy or something of my column with my actual name on it. I was texting with the school librarian about it and decided that at least I can retain my anonymity (minus my picture being with it) and that will help keep all the fans and stalkers from tracking me down. She agreed and sent a GIF of a crowd dancing at a concert. It was pretty funny.

So, my day went from excitement to feeling bummed real quick. And despite it kind of being a disappoint and kind of a big deal now, I'll get over it eventually. It did kind of affect my day though, and I didn't really feel like doing anything after that. So nothing productive happened. I dug out Black Ops 3 again, and by that I mean I clicked on the icon on my desktop. I didn't get very far in the campaign because I was playing on the hardest difficulty and school started again. Today I started where I left off and immediately got killed several times before moving the difficulty down to Hardened so I could actually play the game. I actually wanted to play the game and enjoy it and that is really hard to do on the hardest difficulty because one bullet is instant death. And the worst part about dying a lot is hearing the same few lines of dialogue over and over again. I think when I was playing it before I actually turned the voices off because my frustration was multiplied exponentially by hearing the same line over and over and over again. I died occasionally on Hardened but I was able to soak up a few bullets and get behind cover most of the time. At some point I might jump back into multiplayer but not any time soon. We'll see if I can get through the campaign first.

I fixed my phone battery issue. It was draining super fast, to the point where I would have to plug it in at some point during the day just so it would last the whole day, even though it spends most of the day in my pocket doing nothing. I could see that it was related to Google Services and there were errors in syncing one of my Gmail accounts, but fixing those errors didn't have any effect. And trying to stop the various Google apps didn't do anything either. In the end I turned off auto sync and that seemed to do the trick. I'm not sure why Google all of a sudden decided it needed to constantly sync my stuff. It was either when I added another Gmail address or when I started using Google Photos. Regardless, turning it to manual syncing did the trick. I unplugged my phone Friday morning, haven't plugged it in all weekend, and it is now at 27%. For the last week or two it could hit 27% by noon. So this is a vast improvement and it means I don't have to worry about getting a new phone for awhile.

Tonight I watched the premiere of Westworld on HBO. I liked it. I really like the idea of virtual reality and being able to fully immerse yourself in a make-believe world. This show does not involve virtual reality, or augmented reality, but it created a make-believe world through realistic robotic humans that populate an old west town that real people can pay to visit and participate in. It's kind of like a really immersive theme park, and that is cool. This first episode did a good job of teasing the upcoming story, with some of the robotic humans experiencing glitches and memories from past lives in the world, and a man searching for something within the world. Hopefully I continue to watch it.