Month: October 2006

I played ball hockey at SJC on Saturday. It was the first time I played since probably July. There’s a new resident who’s running the show now. He sent out an e-mail out a few weeks ago asking if anyone was interested in playing. I replied and told him how we did things way back in the day. I also mentioned that he was free to do whatever he wanted to with hockey now that he was in charge.

He was nice enough to let me play for the first outing of the season. When I showed up, there were only two others guys there who had played at SJC before. It was Penson and some Swiss guy that played twice last year. Not coincidentally, we were also the only three guys who wore gloves.

The others that showed up came in various states of athletic gear. Two guys wore jeans. That kinda reminded me of the time Bone showed up drunk one night and played in his white jeans. The rest wore shorts but no one had shin guards.

There was some spirited competition and we played for nearly two hours straight. I can’t imagine how some of the guys survived the whole two hours without water. I went through nearly a litre of water myself.

Two guys got hit in the eye with the ball but they weren’t serious injuries so they continued to play. That’s the nature of SJC ball hockey. You haven’t lived until you’ve gotten a ball to either the eye or the junk. If that’s true, I lived twice vicariously through my own crotch.

While it was a good two hours of running around, I still think of the golden era of SJC hockey. You know, the days where Phil patrolled that wing along the wall. Joel was always fond of mentioning that. The days where hockey was played twice a week, once on a weekday evening. The days where UBC Parking would come harass us and then we’d have to speak to the RCMP. Oh those heady days.

Anyways, I would like to play again because this is a somewhat convenient venue for me to run around and get sweaty on a regular basis.

Here’s to continued hockey.

I knew one of the things I was going to give up when I took the job at EA was the best set of workplace bathrooms I had ever seen. The Backbone office had seven individual bathrooms for a staff of about 80 people. Each bathroom was designed to be used for just one person. They were spacious and inviting, allowing you to do your business (whatever that might be) in amazing comfort and privacy. It nearly made eliminating waste at workplace a perk.

When shifted workplace locations to an office building downtown, I thought the days of private bathrooms were over. Indeed, for a while they were over. The bathrooms I were shown during my orientation tour were for use by multiple people at the same time. No more privacy.

Then I noticed that I would never see certain guys in the bathroom. Was it just luck? Maybe we never went to the bathroom at the same time. Maybe they went to a different floor. Curious, I pulled up a schematic for my floor. And there it was, right on blueprint. A single, private bathroom on my floor. It looked huge according to plan.

After work on Friday, I entered said bathroom for the first time. It was a sight to behold. It was indeed a large bathroom for just one person. The toilet was located at the deepest point of the room, far from the door, enabling even the noisiest of users to have some privacy. At the foot of the toilet was a beautiful wicker basket, the kind you’d find at Pottery Barn. Inside the basket was a fine selection of gaming magazines. There was a single sink, in a pedestal style. It reminded me of a sink you might find in a hotel. I noticed that there was a switch on the wall but the lights were already on. I pushed the switch and a single shaft of golden light illuminated the sink, as if from heaven.

From now on, this will be my “Fortress of Solitude“. From what I’ve seen of other floor plans, no other EA floor in the building has a single, private bathroom like this one. I find this hard to believe since I can’t see the bigwigs up on 20 sharing a bathroom.

And that’s my post about pooping at work.

Photo courtesy of whatjeffkilled.com

Please allow me to share with you an interesting site I found a few weeks ago. It is simply entitled What Jeff Killed. According to the owners of the site, Jeff is an orange cat who lives in California. Jeff is not a house cat. He lives in the wild. The site owners supposedly supply Jeff with some food and water but do not own Jeff nor let him inside their home. All their interactions with Jeff happen in or around their back patio.

For some reason, Jeff kills animals of varying sizes and brings them to the patio for the home owners to see. The people who run the site thought it would be neat to document and photograph each of the kills.

Judging by the size of Jeff’s kills, he is an efficient and probably vicious hunter. Looking at his pictures though, he seems nothing but a lazy, docile house cat. I personally found the site fascinating. Somewhat like a wildlife show, it shows the seemingly cruel ways in which animals hunt each other.

Yes, some of the pictures will make some people squeamish but I guarantee you you’ve seen worse if you grew up anywhere near a farm. The site does get hate mail but please, Jeff is gonna kill those animals whether or not anyone takes photos of the kill. There’s nothing glamourous or sensational about those photos.

Nature at work!

Man, I had a nasty case of insomnia last night. I wasn’t really sure what caused it. I was well hydrated and stayed away from any caffeine all day. Maybe it was because I ate some spare ribs before I went to bed. It was like four pieces. Next time I won’t soak them in coffee.

Anyways, it made for a hell of a morning. I thought work was going to be bad but it turned out alright. I was fairly productive and I only felt tired at lunch which was the best time to feel the fatigue. On the way home, I didn’t even nap on the bus.

I am feeling wicked tired now though. I’m going to bed fairly soon. My mind is running all over the place. I thought of half a dozen different topics to write about tonight. There’s my next selection for my book of the month club. I was also going to write about one of my favourite South Park characters. I briefly thought I’d write about my experiences with spending and saving money as well.

I’m not coherent enough to write about any of those topics, instead here’s Neil Patrick Harris’ funniest scene from Harold and Kumar (contains language that would make your Mom blush, but that’s why it’s so funny).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0MvZyMTBnQ]

Big B, also known as Brian, from my heady undergraduate days in engineering, if you sent me a text message over the weekend, let me know.

If it was you, why didn’t you just send an e-mail?

So let me sum up my long weekend in a few words. I had some grand plans to do a hike along the Trans Canada Trail. I also had planned on playing some tennis.

Unfortunately, I fell a little under the weather so I couldn’t play tennis and only managed a very abbreviated version of my hike.

I did have a rather pleasant Thanksgiving dinner with my family on Sunday. It was one of the best I’ve had in recent memory. Everything was rather delicious.

I picked up a “best of” collection of South Park episodes on DVD. For less than $20, it’s a good deal for over 300 minutes of entertainment. It includes one of my all-time favourite episodes, “The Return of the Lord of the Rings to the Two Towers“.

Last but not least, I drank a lot of caffeine-free Coke.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUo3D6XTjsA]

Look at the footage some dude captured while he was in his backyard.

If you look closely, you can see Todd Bertuzzi celebrating his first goal as a Panther… if you look closely.

There are some nights where I write a pretty run-of-the-mill post and then I crawl into bed. As I lay there trying to fall asleep, my mind begins to wander. Free from constraints of work and the stresses of the day, I can finally do my own thinking.

I usually think of some pretty good ideas for blog posts. Sometimes I’ll regret writing what I did, since my sleepy-time ideas were much better. I believe one time I worked out the problem of faster than light transportation. Or wait, was it how to get free candy from a vending machine? It was one of those two things.

Anyways, by the time morning rolls around, I’ll have forgotten all my ideas. Which explains why you’re reading the quality post before your eyes now.

I’m here all week, remember to tip your waitress!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQhfGniF6t0]