2015 Feb 21 | Videogame party



Had an extra stool from work, so Ogii uses it do to art while watching the hummingbirds.



Accident on the highway.



That's a pretty creepy ad. I thought it was for Children's Hospital of Los Angeles at first, but I guess it's for a TV show.



Erudite.



At least, I think that's how you spell it. Let's voice search Google. Hmm, Google doesn't quite seem to understand me.



There we go.



We went to the Bicycle Casino on Monday after Valentine's Day to play in the Live at the Bike game. The new hotel is finished and looks pretty nice.



The front.



We dressed up and wore wigs for Valentine's Day. We were even in a few pots together, like this one where I made three of a kind and Ogii made second pair.



Costco always has cheap gas.



But huge lines.



Arco has the next cheapest gas and no lines, only 4 cents more expensive.



Vision after cataract surgery improves pretty quickly. The patient was counting fingers at 4 feet before surgery, 20/200 the day after, and 20/60 without glasses and 20/30 with a week later.



The bum with the backpack always panhandles at this intersection. I guess this other guy was begging a little too close to him and he went and told him to leave his territory.



Time for a new folder; the old one is getting a bit ugly.



Ogii and I both like to listen to 90s dance music while exercising. The woman also provides encouragement; maybe we can look like her if we keep exercising.



I was rating someone who had helped me and the rating was 1 to 10, so hopefully it was picking up 10 and not just 1. They should really make it 1 to 9 just to make sure.



One possible logo. A lot of people like this but I think it's a little too unprofessional.



A different version. Kind of cool how he made the "s" into a palm tree, but again, not very professional.



I really like this one.



This one seems really upscale to me; I like the logo and the text.



This one is very modern and professional, too.



They updated the little task app I use, although I think it's actually worse now. For one, I have to hit the little save button in the upper-left corner or else it doesn't save anything; previously you just exited the app and it saved automatically, so one more button to press and one more thing to remember. For two, it's much harder to click at the end of the text for some reason, so it can be hard to edit a task.



On the plus side, I called in to Time Warner and upgraded to the 300/20 service for the same price we were paying for the 50/5 one. I also bought a new modem and router because the one we were using seemed to have a lot of problems according to reviews online.



However, we only get the 300 Mbps download speed when connected directly to the router with a LAN cable; using the wifi is slower. However, 50 down is still really good, especially considering we were actually getting like 5 before, and the upload speeds are about the same either way. The router has a 2.4Ghz broadcast and a 5.0Ghz one. The 2.4 is supposed to go slower but farther, although they both did pretty well around the apartment, and the 2.4 one actually did worse when I went out to by pool.



There are also channels that the wifi signals operate on. Routers usually come set up to use a certain one, so if you change that, you'll get less interference from neighboring wifi signals. For example, the 5Ghz was set on channel 149,but there were a lot of other signals on that same channel.



So I switched it over to 153, which nobody else was using.



Same thing with the 2.4Ghz; it came set up channel 6, but again, there were a lot of others on that channel because most routers come to broadcast on channel 6, so I changed it to 11, which had the fewest others.



Although everything else was less than half the strength of ours, so I don't think there'd be that much interference anyway. The closest one is P4RT0N, and that's only on channel 1, so we'll just make sure not to use that.



Checking with another app.



Yep, no interference on either channel.



And a ton of others fighting on channels 1 and 6. I think some routers are set to automatically move to other channels depending on what's open, as it looked like the moved around some, but 11 and 153 were always the most open.



I did have one problem, though; my new laptop couldn't see the 5Ghz broadcast, which is the faster one. After some Googling it sounds like some wireless cards simply can't use 5Ghz at all, so I checked my card.



And according to the internet, that card doesn't.



This site also listed another way to check.



And according to that, too, my card doesn't work on 5Ghz. Oh well, the 2.4Ghz is still good, 40/15 instead of 80/20 on the 5.0Ghz, so it should be fine. We'll just connect our phones to the 5 one so there's less on the 2.4 one, and if I need really fast speeds for anything, I can always just plug it in to get 300/20.



It's uploading much faster now.



I sold the old modem on Amazon. I thought about using Craigslist but thought it might not sell on there and buyers can be pretty unreliable, so I figured I'd pay a bit more for Amazon, and it got bought within a few hours from someone in Baldwin Park.



Which is only 30 minutes away, haha, considering it could be bought by anyone in the world.



I sent it via FedEx but it cost me nearly $20 to ship, wow. I was thinking I could just deliver it personally but I wasn't sure how to let Amazon know about that since you have to tell Amazon how it's shipped and the tracking number and I didn't want to lose money on the sale. Next time I'll try Craigslist first.



A guy rear ended a Porshe.



Big house.



Space is valuable in Beverly Hills; some of the shops have these little car elevators to double their parking. Although I really don't like most of the people in that area because they're extremely selfish. Most of the drivers have no regard for others and do whatever they want. I was waiting at an intersection while walking, the light changed, I started across, and some woman in a Land Rover slowly rolled through the red light, into the crosswalk, and hit me. She was only going a few miles per hour and just kind of pushed me sideways, but that's insane.



Plus, there are intersections like this, where it's almost impossible to get into the other lane because there's no red light.



This guy is blocking the intersection when he could have stopped a bit earlier and left it open.



Aw, a billiards and cyber cafe that closed in Koreatown. Although there are a ton of both of those there.



Friday night we watched MMA, although instead of UFC it was Bellator, which, being smaller, has to try to be more unique. So instead of the belt holders, they have old fighters, like Kimbo Slice and Ken Shamrock versus Royce Gracie, both of whom are around 50 years old. The Kimbo fight had both fighters exhausted and basically leaning on each other or the fence after the first round and the Shamrock/Gracie fight was over in like 20 seconds. Horrible fights, but it's fun watching people getting excited for the freak show nature of the fights.



We also had a video game party. Ogii and I played Street Fighter.



We bought some new Playstation games, but the only one they played was Worms. They played it all night, though, so it was obviously fun.



The players.



And people on the couches playing Wii.



We also played 4-player New Tetris on N64.



One new feature is that if you make exactly a 4x4 block of pieces, it turns either silver (if it's of different types of pieces) or gold (if it's all of the same piece) that gives you bonus points when you clear it. I managed to make two here and clear them at the same time.



So instead of getting 4 points, I got 85. If someone cleared a gold brick, it was impossible to beat them unless you also made your own or they died because they're worth so many points. It's a fun addition to the game.



Intense game on the couches.



Still downloading really fast.



Ocean lover.



My spot in the apartment garage is under some pipes, and they leak onto my car, getting my windshield and roof all dirty.



Even though it was uploading all day, it still didn't upload very much this time. When I came back to it the internet was off, though, so hopefully the internet doesn't start doing that again and it stays on more.



After another 5 hours, it seemed to be doing better.



Although then just a few overnight and the internet was off again in the morning.



New lasers for LASIK mean shorter drop usage times.



The people in this ad are way too excited to get free crap to try out in exchange for a review.



A proposed logo for the Olympics if Los Angeles gets them. Kind of neat, like a sun.



This ad takes up 95% percent of the screen on my phone; I can only read one line of the article of the time.



A fun checkmate.



Forking his king and rook.



And then I went on the other side and did the same to the other rook, haha.



Aw, crap, stalemate. I should have just checkmated him with my two rooks instead.



Queen to king pin, nice!



Except he can block with his pawn. Oh well.



I have an easily won game except I got dumb right here.



And he gets checkmate. Whoops.