Month: June 2005

As you may have noticed, I did not blog during my lunch hour. In fact, it would have been incorrect to call it a “lunch” hour today. I had booked my haircut for 12:15pm today. When I arrived at 12:15pm on the dot, I was told my stylist was running behind schedule. It’s a good thing that the haircut place is only two blocks from my work.

Anyways, I didn’t get into the chair until 12:45pm. I was out the door by 1:15pm which essentially ate up my entire “lunch” hour. Having no time to get food, I had no choice but to return to work, albeit with less hair on my head. I think if I had more seniority, I could have buggered off a little longer, but I’m still the new guy around here.

When I got back, I don’t think anyone even realized that I was gone for more than an hour. If anyone did, they didn’t tell me. I guess it’s all good.

So something got me thinking today. You see, I paid off my entire Visa bill just a few days ago. I put a little too much money towards the balance, so I actually have a credit on my balance. Does this mean CIBC Visa will now pay me 19.5% interest on my credit? Man, that would be sweet. I can’t be the first one to think of this. You more experienced financial types out there, please enlighten me if you can. We could make millions together!

I left work today at the normal time of 6pm. It felt great. Today was the first day that I didn’t feel like I absolutely had to get something done and out the door before the day was going to end. That’s not to say we don’t have a lot of work ahead of us because we sure do. There’s going to be some tough weeks ahead but at least for today, things were ok.

I made it back to SJC for dinner by 6:30pm which was excellent in terms of time. It was nice having dinner among friends instead of eating out of take-out containers at the office. When I returned to my apartment it felt so early in the evening. It seemed like I had so much time to spend. I’m still really tired though. I’m really looking forward to the weekend. I need to learn to sleep in again.

Here’s some company news, the higher-ups are moving our offices. Where exactly is still in question. The building we’re in now has always been a temp location and is being treated as such. I’ve been told there are two locations we might be moving to: same general area of the temp building or downtown (possibly Yaletown). We won’t know until September or October apparently. This is unfortunate since I have to move at end of August. It would have been ideal to know our new office location before doing the move, but that’s not going to happen.

I’ve been told that the odds are leaning towards staying in the general area, but no one knows for sure. I’ve been thinking that I should hedge my bets and get a place near W. Broadway and Granville. That way, it’ll be an equal commute to either the current location or downtown.

Finding a new place to live is such a pain and I’ll get to do that while working overtime for the project too. Not fun.

Anyways, time for me to go bed. I’m going to try to blog during my lunch hour tomorrow.

I arrived at work today with supreme confidence that I wouldn’t have to work OT in the evening. I was wrong of course, but hey, at least I got to eat Stephos for dinner, and I didn’t even have to lineup!

Yep, my first milestone day as a real video game developer. Save for a couple of scary moments before 6pm, I actually got my stuff ready to go and checked in at relatively decent time. It’s just that when everyone is checking their code in all at once, things tend to break. I actually didn’t do a lot of work past 6pm, I was just waiting around to see if anyone needed my help. No one did and so finally I got the ok to head on home around 8:45pm.

I arrived home just in time to see a beautiful sunset on campus. It was gorgeous as any sunset on Cloud City. The way the sky was tinged with red and pink, it was enough to convince me and Ponyboy both to stay gold.

I know this is my 5 millionth proclaimation, but I swear I’m not going to work a single day of OT for the rest of the week. There’s no need for it with the next milestone date being more than three weeks away.

And for the people who I played croquet with yesterday, yes, that was the largest crystal meth lab in the history of this city that we walked by yesterday.

Well, I’m tired, time to wash off all the OT and get to bed.

Wow, I just washed a ton of dishes, plates, cups, and utensils. My kitchen is ready to go… for what I’m still not sure.

In blog news, Blogger has totally screwed up the formatting for my posts. After I hit the “publish” button, Blogger automatically inserts this HTML tag that completely throws off the CSS stylesheet that I use for my blog template. In short, I can no longer control what fonts appear. I have to manually remove the offending tag from every single paragraph of text to get it back to normal. I’ve e-mail Blogger, they’re smart people, maybe they will know what to do.

Nevertheless, I had a weekend that was moderately packed with fun. Despite my unexpected evening of OT on Friday night, I still got to make it to Caroline’s b-day BBQ on the SJC patio deck. Then Joel was kind enough to make me some gin and tonics while we watched the Showcase channel.

I ran some errands on Saturday afternoon, which also included opening up a line of credit with CIBC. I’ve realized how fiscally irresponsible I’ve been with my money. I’ve been carrying a balance on Visa bill for years now which was costing me an arm and a leg with the high interest rates. After being chastized by some friends, I finally smartened up and used the line of credit to pay off the damn Visa bill. The interest rate is less than half of the interest rate on my Visa card. I’m also considering switching to a lower interest rate Visa card.

On Saturday evening I had drinks with some friends on Granville Island. I had a strawberry daiquiri for the first time. I’m not sure if mine contained any alcohol.

On Sunday morning, I bought groceries and bus tickets. It seems like I get bus tickets like every other day. I can’t wait to buy my first bus pass next week. In the afternoon, I joined some friends down at Spanish Banks to play some croquet on the beach. It was good weather… not too hot, not too cold. I also got to visit the new concession stand at Spanish Banks. It looks really nice now. I tried the Vancouver Parks Board’s finest onion rings. It was an excellent snack that powered me to a 2nd place finish at croquet.

After a wicked climb back up to 4th Ave. to catch the bus back home, I napped briefly before going to dinner at SJC. What a poor dinner it was. Like Commander Body says, they just phone it in on Sunday nights. After consuming “dinner”, I was cajoled into playing another round of croquet. Joel did fine for his first time out. It’s not important who won, but if you must know, it was me… lol.

And now I’m here this evening writing for you fine folks. Before I leave, I’d like to pimp out Greg Williams’ new blog. Please check it out because it’s pretty cool and it involves a fantastic user-controlled web cam located in downtown Vancouver.

Alright, have a good Monday everybody.

Thank you to the person who let me eat their three hot dogs last night at the BBQ. Actually, thanks to Caroline who offered me food left and right like she was my Mom. Happy birthday as well.

I hope this post fixes the fonts on my blog.

UPDATE: Something about this new Blogger image upload has screwed up the fonts for my blog. I’m too tired to fix it. For now, endure the Times New Roman ugliness.

So I’m determined not to work any more OT for this milestone we’re on at work. I think I’ve worked hard enough to go home at the regular appointed time on Friday. That is, if none of the designers come up with last minute changes to the portion of the game I’m working on. I’ve been there less than two weeks and already my biggest complaint is people who think of something at the last moment to add. “Oh Erwin, can you make this change for me?” Yeah, I can, but what took you five seconds to think of will take me like an hour or more to code and I won’t even know if it’ll work.

Well, enough of the work rant. In other news, Canadians still have an unfavourable view of Americans. Big surprise. Next report: sky is blue.

In more obscure news, George Lucas will be the keynote speaker at this year’s SIGGRAPH conference. For all those going, I envy you… extra envy if your paper got accepted.

I worked my third day of OT today. Dinner tonight was Swiss Chalet. I showed my newbie status with my order. At EA, we were limited to meals totalling to $10 or less. I guess I still had that in mind, since I only ordered a quarter chicken dinner with fries. When the food arrived, I saw everyone had ordered at least half a chicken and some people even got an extra side on top of that. People were looking at me and wondering if I was on a diet or something. I gotta remember I’m not at EA now and I’ve been given a little more leeway on things.

For lunch, even though I just planned on grabbing some Quiznos to go, I went out with some of the boys to Connie’s Cook House on W. 4th Ave. It’s a great place to get some cheap, but good Chinese food. They have this awesome $5.95 lunch special where you get soup and an entree. I chose wonton soup and a huge plate of chicken chow mein. I’m looking forward to returning to try out some of their other items.

Geez, this post is all about food. Well, at least if I have to stay late at work, I get dinner paid for.

In other news, my favourite reality TV show, Beauty and the Geek was renewed for a second season. There will be even more episodes next season. For those who can’t be bothered to download the episodes from the Internet, the show is now on CTV on your local cable dial. They showed the premiere last week, but you can catch the second episode this Friday.

Ok, I’m exhausted, more tomorrow.

Doesn’t the kid above look like the real life Eric Cartman? Anyways…

I worked my second day of OT at work today. It feels a lot like my days at EA. Around 6:30pm someone came around to ask me what I wanted for dinner. Yesterday it was pizza. Today it was Indian food, butter chicken specifically. It’s nice of the company to spring for dinner if you have to work late. I can tell OT is somewhat a common occurence, they have a binder which is full of menus from local restaurants.

I’m not expecting to work OT next week. Things should be back to normal by then. Everyone is trying to meet a milestone next Monday. Because of all the extra time I’ve been putting in, I’m pretty confident I’ll be able to finish what I’m responsible for by Monday. The only question now is how polished it’ll be.

I’ve noticed that the office is divided into two distinctive areas. My team is on one side and the other teams are on the other. Sometimes, people cross the great divide to visit, but it rarely happens. I never visit because I don’t know anyone over there. It’ll be a while before I meet everyone in the company.

Though I’m trying to be frugal, I’m slowly exploring the lunch options around the office. So far, I’ve been to two Thai places, a cafe that serves lunch all day (I had the bacon hash today), Sushi Aoki, and Quiznos. There’s still lots of places left to try out. I’m mustering the courage to go eat at the Church’s Fried Chicken near the office.

A combination of an 11 hour workday and my server being down prevented me from posting late night. All is well now and I have just returned from lunch where I had breakfast.

More later if I don’t work late tonight, which I might.

I had the longest day on Friday. After working a full day, I rushed home to UBC around 7pm. The boys wanted to have some din-din and then go see Batman Begins. I went straight to SJC where we all piled into T-Bone’s car and made our way to Sushi Aoki for dinner. Had I known we were going there, I would have just stayed at work. Oh well.

After dinner, we had time to kill, so we headed over to Future Shop. Who did we run into? It was Bryan and Sarah. We invited them to join us for the movie. While Bryan was totally for it, it took Sarah some convincing, but she eventually agreed. At this point, we had to split the group up temporarily. S&B had to drop some stuff off at their place, so T-Bone, S&B, and myself went in the car. Joel and Adam graciously took the bus downtown ahead of us.

It all worked out in the end, as everyone re-assembled at the Paramount downtown. It was my first visit to the supposedly flagship Famous Players theatre for Vancouver. While it was nice, it did not overwhelm. The movie itself was much better. I would say it’s the best Batman movie of the bunch. Christian Bale did a fine job portraying the pointy-eared crusader.

On Saturday evening, I attended Kirsten and Tim’s birthday party. They are two friends of mine that I met in undergrad. Their marriage remains a model of what I can only hope for if and when I get married myself. Anyways, they rented out the back room of a Greek restaurant along W. Broadway. The food was really good. Kirsten and Tim know how to throw a party and were the consumate hosts. There were a lot of people from my undergrad days there. Some of these people I hadn’t seen in many years. Maybe it’s because I’ve changed since those times, but a few people really got on my nerves. Actually, maybe it was only one guy, but I tend to think my asshole detector is pretty spot on. Bub, if you’re reading this, I don’t see you as the chairman of the board of any Fortune 500 companies right now, so you can go choke on a pretzel and get brain damage.

Well, on that happy note, it’s getting late so I’m off to bed.