Month: October 2005

Somewhat like the premise of the classic TV show The Fugitive, I have been accused of a crime I did not commit. Luckily, I hold proof of my innocence and my quest to clear my name has begun.

Before I continue further, there are some details that must be explained. Adam, Tyson, and Joel have been frequent visitors to the Swiss Chalet located on W. Broadway and Trutch for several months now. They patronize the establishment usually on weekends and for some reason or another usually get seated in one particular section. This section is patrolled by a server named Meghan. Ah Meghan. As you can imagine, after coming in to partake of the chicken so often, Meghan has gotten to know the boys a little. At the very least, she recognizes them on sight and can almost guess when they will visit. Also, you didn’t hear it from me, but Joel seems to have developed quite a rapport with this young lady.

Anyways, because of my exile out in wastelands of Tatooine, I’ve only joined them at the Chalet here and there. Nonetheless, I’ve been there enough that I’m pretty sure Meghan could recognize I was part of the crew.

I take you back, my readers, to the evening of Friday, September 30, 2005. After a long week at work, my co-workers and I decided to have dinner and a few beers at the Frog and Firkin next door to our office. Adam and Tyson have invited me to the Chalet as well. I decide finish up dinner at the Firkin and then head over to the house that chicken built. I arrive at the Chalet. Joel cannot make it but Adam and Tyson are there. We ask to get seated in Meghan’s section of the restaurant.

Since I’ve already had dinner, I decide to order an appetizer, the chicken spring rolls. They are delicious if anyone is wondering. The meal goes without incident, or so I thought, we pay and leave.

Fast forward to two days ago, Friday night. Adam and Tyson are again at the Chalet but not in Meghan’s section. She sees them and comes over to inform them that we stiffed her on the bill the last time we were there. Specifically, she accused me of not paying for my chicken spring rolls. To cover the bill, she had to kick in $1.32 of her own money.

When I was informed of this, I thought it was quite odd since it’s not like me to forget to pay for a meal. How can you forget to pay? It just seemed kind of fishy to me. I then remembered she left us the bill and then didn’t return for quite a while. I was also paying by debit card so instead of waiting for her, I just went up to the front and paid there.

The lady up front seemed kind of wary I was there to pay with debit but she processed the payment anyways. I’m almost positive that I also told her it was specifically for the chicken spring rolls. I took my receipt and then went back to the table. Now I’m not sure if I left the receipt on the table so that Meghan knew I had paid via debit. I may have taken the receipt with me but that’s my copy of the transaction! Technically, the lady up front already has the restaurant copy.

Just to be sure I wasn’t going crazy, I looked up my bank records on-line. I indeed use debit on that weekend. The rolls were $4.99 and I paid in total $6.50. The dates are off because the bank doesn’t do the processing until the Monday after. Nonetheless, here’s the proof:

This Friday, I am going back to the Chalet with a copy of these records and I am going to clear my name. I’ll update you then. Stay tuned!

So last evening I had a social function to attend to at UBC. Rather than have to bus it all the way home from UBC late at night, I decided to drive to work so I could have the car for the trip home. After work, I make my way to the West Parkade which I’ve parked in many times previously.

Now each time I’ve parked there, I’ve had to pay to enter the parkade. You tell the machine how long you want to stay and then it processes your payment. Afterwards, you can then drive in. This time, however, things were different. I drive up and the machine thingy has changed. It simply says on it, “Press to receive ticket”. Ok, so I press the big green button and it spits out this ticket. I’ve never seen this type of ticket before. Printed on it is “Place face up on dash”. I do as I’m told.

After getting out of my car, I notice other cars have the same type of ticket on the dash. Now I’m wondering when I’ll pay for the privilege of parking in the parkade. I see there’s an attendant in the booth near the exit. I’m thinking they must have changed the system so that the attendant uses your ticket to see how long you’ve parked there and then charges you accordingly.

Then I realize the attendant can stay there all night. They’ve got to go home sometime. So how will they get my money if I leave late? An automated pay system for after hours then? If so, why not use that all the time and not have an attendant? I decide I’ve spent too much time thinking about this and I better get my ass inside SJC where people are waiting for me.

Several hours pass and events occur that may or may not have been photographed in a digital form. It’s about 1am and I leave SJC for the parkade. Now I’m all curious again. I take a slight detour by walking over to the exit arms of the parkade. The attendant is gone. Two of the lanes are for cars with parking passes. There is one lane for visitors which is what I am. In that lane, there’s no machine that you can put any money in or slide a credit card in. There’s no sign telling people what to do if you’re here after hours. There is this “drop box” but I have no idea what it’s for. There are no envelopes nor is there any sign telling you what the rates are.

I walk back to my car, jump in, and drive off to the exit lane. I stop in front of the arm. It raises up. I drive off without paying a dime. As I deal with the torrential rainstorm while driving my mind spins. In this day and age, it’s highly unlikely UBC would ever let anyone do anything for free on-campus that they could charge even a penny for.

It’s possible they could have written down my license plate number and then just send me a bill to my home. That would require them getting my home address from my plate however and that seems like a lot of work (and some privacy issues) for a measly couple of bucks.

The other option that comes to mind is this, they just don’t care about people who leave after the attendant’s shift is over. Many, many years ago, the B-Lots on-campus were staffed with attendants at the exits. Anyone could drive in, but you had to pay when you left. The neat thing was that the attendants were only there until 11pm. After 11pm, if you were still parked you could leave for free. Everyone knew this, so there would be an entire parking lot full of cars with people waiting for 11pm to come around.

Perhaps this is a variation of the old B-Lot loophole. It could be but I’m still very wary of getting something free from UBC. And thus ends my lengthy post on free parking.

In a previous post, I mentioned that it would not be anytime soon before I could say what game I was working on. It turns out I was wrong or specifically I was given some wrong info. Today, Nokia issued a press release regarding the game I’ve been slaving away on for months now. Here’s an excerpt:

Shadow-Born Poised To Push The Boundaries Of Mobile Gaming On The N-Gage platform
October 13, 2005

Barcelona, Spain – Nokia today announced Shadow-Born for the N-Gage platform. Developed by Backbone Entertainment, Shadow-Born is set to change the way gamers use their mobile phones for gaming by integrating smartphone functionalities into the game. Imagine a game where characters leave text messages, schedule calendar appointments or set alarms in your smartphone. Shadow-Born promises a genuinely immersive and interactive experience, taking game play to a new level of involvement.

You can read the whole thing here. Keep in mind the marketing types write this stuff, not us. Read it with a grain of salt.

I got home from work at 7:30pm last night and 8:30pm tonight. There seems to be so much time left in the evening now. What do you people do with so much time to do stuff?

I still managed to waste the time away doing nothing but at least I wasn’t at work. A little video gaming here and a Mythbusters episode there, pretty soon it’s 1am. Holy crap, I better go to bed.

Me wonders if I’ll get home on-time tomorrow as well.

Today, I had traditional pad thai from Thai House for lunch.

I’m going to attempt to blog from work today. Stay tuned.

Sorry for the lack of posts but the erwintang.com offices were closed for the Thanksgiving long weekend. Speaking of the long weekend, I did nothing of any interest for the three whole days. I didn’t go east of Lougheed Mall in Burnaby, nor did I see any of my friends. It was quite lame actually. I did, however, get some laundry done including the requisite ironing done. With all the overtime I was doing, I was running out of clean clothes. I had to double-shift some of my socks, though thankfully the same did not apply to my underwear. I also re-arranged some of the furniture in my bedroom so that I now finally have an unimpeded path to my closet. I’m now prediciting that at least one-quarter of the clothes that leave my closet will eventually get hung back up.

In other news, my mother returned today from a week long trip to North Africa. She went to a few different countries but the most interesting, at least for me, was Tunisia. Some of you might realize what significance that country has with regard to a series of six films made by independent filmmaker George Lucas. Tunisia doubled as the arid planet of Tatooine, a much referenced place in both the original trilogy and the prequels. My mother not only travelled to Tunisia but visited the actual area where they filmed. Now I know Mom ain’t the biggest Star Wars fan in the galaxy so she probably viewed this hole in the ground as another minor detail in the whole North African tour. This would be in stark contrast to my own reaction to visiting the site which I would hold in reverence. To her credit, she did take some photos of the Owen homestead. The first is her own picture, followed by a screencap from A New Hope, filmed nearly thirty years ago.

I left work today around 11pm. That was a long day. The programmers were helping out other team members who needed assistance. The producer appreciated our efforts, enough so that he’s taking us code-writing people out for beers tomorrow. If you’re near the Frog and Firkin tomorrow, look for us at around 7pm.

As some of you might know, I tested video games for two years at EA. I found and wrote up a lot of bugs in my time there. I think I may have written up a couple hundred bugs across four titles. Most of those bugs were eventually assigned to a software engineer to get fixed. I always wondered who got my bugs and how they went about fixing them. Despite the numerous bugs I found, I never was the one to fix the bug. I could describe what happened and even theorize the cause, but I was never in the position to do the actual work that eliminated the bug.

Today, I got my first bug assigned to me as a software engineer. It wasn’t a particularly interesting defect in the game but it was a personal milestone. I’ve come full circle in a way. The other side of the coin. The other end of the take-out window. It’s a nice feeling, though now, I gotta go figure out how to fix these damn bugs that keep getting assigned to me.

In other news, probably the only academic paper I’ll ever have my name on gets presented today in Italy at the International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI) at a poster session. One of the co-authors of our paper, Jen, will be at said session. I hope she represents us well and that she dazzles everyone with our work. Hopefully in a few weeks, our paper will be archived the ACM Digital Library.

According to this report, Vancouver is once again, the best city on the planet to live in. The report lists some criteria from which they concluded this, but I was too tired to read it. I think I’ll just trust them on that.

At the bottom of the list was Port Moresby. Ouch.