Month: September 2007

The guy that sits behind me at work has declared himself to be my “life coach“. He’s a pretty silly guy so he’s not serious… well, maybe he’s a tiny bit serious. Anyways, he coached me to go McDonald’s with him at lunch so we could use his 2-for-1 coupon. I’ve started to call him “El-See” now.

Also in work related news, I finally completed the online sexual harassment training course that I was initially supposed to complete about six months ago. It turns out I was slapping ass in the most inefficient way at work. Now, it’s effortless!

So as many of you know, I spend most of the summer indoors (skate. is now available in stores everywhere for Xbox 360 and PS3, get your copy now!). The one thing I did everyday though was to go up on the patio on the 19th floor and sit outside and get some fresh air. It’s a beautiful view up there. As I sat, I would look across Coal Harbour and Burrard Inlet. My eyes would invariably turn to Stanley Park. I could see people walking on the seawall by the Nine O’Clock Gun. They were outside, enjoying the weather and enjoying the park. I was envious. I’d then get up, go back inside and continued to work. Later on in the evening, at 9pm, the gun that I’d stared at would go off, indicating that I’d been there all day and into the evening. Sad.

Well now the game is done. Three weeks ago, on a gloriously hot and sunny summer day, I went to Stanley Park to walk the seawall myself and go visit the gun up close. I can’t remember the last time I was at Stanley Park I but spent a nice couple of hours there. In the second picture above, you can see this tiny thing in the middle of the image, that’s the Nine O’Clock Gun. That was taken from the 19th floor. In the third picture, I’m standing next to the Gun itself. By the way, the Gun is now silent at 9pm as part of the civil labour disruption. Apparently a city worker usually fires the thing and I guess s/he is a union person.

If anyone is interested, I took a few more pictures while I was there. The gallery is here.

If you’re like most people, you love blogs and you love being a voyeur. What if there was a way to combine those two things into a single application that could run on a web browser? Well, the smart folks over at Blogger/Google have done just that.

Blogger Play shows you what images bloggers are uploading to their blogs in real-time. If you click on show info, it will show you the blogger’s profile, plus a small snippet from the post to which the image was added. The best part is that while Blogger uses a smart filter to prevent naughty images from appearing, they can’t guarantee something spicy won’t show up while you’re watching! How exciting! Go see what other people are blogging because I couldn’t come up with anything interesting for this post!

Did you know that as early as two weeks ago here in Vancouver, it was still sunny and warm? Since about last week, it’s been cloudy and steadily getting colder and colder. Yes, I am aware that last weekend was the official end of the summer.

So that was summer whimpering away. I had a good three, possibly four weeks of summer where I actually had time to enjoy the weather. Other people had about three months but I had other things to do. From now on, it’s about six months of grey clouds, dreary and never-ending rain, punctuated by the odd flurry of snow.

You know, someone should figure out how to make a huge reflector in space and direct sunlight over Vancouver during the daytime. I’d paid at least a dollar to see that happen.

I hope none of you get too squeamish about this post. Anyways, after I got my tooth extracted, I asked my dentist if I could take the tooth home with me. He said yes but gave me strict instructions to disinfect the tooth first and to not touch the tooth with my barehands before it had been sanitized.

After a half day dip into isopropyl alchol and a thorough cleaning, I was able to take pics of the tooth. My camera’s macro mode isn’t the best so the images didn’t come out too clean except for one which was pretty good.

So in all the pics, the colour is really off. The exposed enamel looks it’s this dark shade of gray. In reality, the enamel is actually quite white in colour. The roots themselves are actually this light manilla colour. The first pic shows two roots that were in pretty good shape, which my dentist said made it a shame since it was only one root that was problematic. What you don’t see is this pulpy, fibrous crap that was stuck in between all three roots. I heard my dentist say it was part of the abscess that had formed because of the infection. It took a bit of work to tear that fibrous stuff out of there. As I was cleaning, I was thinking, man, my body made that stuff in there.

The second pic shows the “root” of the problem. There’s the root that went really bad. It’s as black as the pic shows, there’s no colour problem in that image. I was pretty amazed when I saw it for the first time. That thing had been stuck in my jaw for a few years, getting a shade darker as time marched on. Notice that the tip of black root has been cut off. My dentist wanted to see if his root canal had been as good as he wanted it. Indeed it was, it went as deep as it should have been. Also notice the bits of pulpy tissue that I couldn’t clean off. That stuff is stuck on there tightly. You’d need like a nail file or something to get all that off.

The third pic shows the top of the tooth. The improper colour makes it look like my dentist had filled in my root canal with tar. In fact, the filling is very white in colour.

The last pic, though fuzzy, shows all three roots of the tooth. Again, notice the cut off tip of the black root. You can see the material that my dentist used to fill in that root canal.

Thanks for reading and sharing in my extraction experience!

You know, extracting a tooth, especially a chronically infected one is pretty damn easy. I got in the chair and a topical anaesthetic was applied to the surrounding gums. A minute later, the real local anaesthetic was injected into me via a needle, all painless.

We waited about three minutes and then my dentist pushed my tooth around and asked me if I could feel anything. I said no and so he went for it. He pulled on it for like ten seconds or so, I felt a bit of pressure and the damn thing came out. The time between when I got into the chair to when the tooth came out was probably less than 15 minutes.

He cleaned out the socket a bit and there was a lot of suctioning around my mouth (there’s a joke in there somewhere). Then they rolled up a bit of gauze and stuck it into the now empty socket. I was told to bite down, which I did.

My dentist then show me the extracted tooth. Man, those roots are long! One of the roots was all black. Ewwww! That thing had been festering in my mouth for probably a couple of years. I’ll post a pic when I get home. Oh yeah, I’m still at work.

Anyways, the bleeding stopped fairly quickly and there’s only a tiny bit of swelling. It’s only a bit sore as well so I think I don’t even need any pain medication. Just like last time, I think if I really wanted to, I could play basketball tonight.

I’ve also eaten since the tooth extraction. I had french fries from McD’s which was perfect since they’re so small, they can be easily chewed on one side of my mouth.

Now granted, I’m probably going be in for an ass-kicking tomorrow since that’s when your body makes you pay for a fairly intensive medical procedure.

More later.

UPDATE: This post seems quite popular among the search engines. In that case, let me provide links to a description of my actual procedure and then post-op photos of the extracted tooth.

I’m getting back-most upper right tooth extracted tomorrow. It’s the same tooth that I’ve had first and only root canal on. There are some pretty good reasons to get it removed. First, the tooth is kinda dead and it’s turning more gray than white now. Second and probably most important, there’s a huge periodontal pocket behind it which is very prone to infection. Anytime a bit of food gets stuck in there, it’s not good times.

I’m not worried about the removal itself. I had three wisdom teeth removed when I was just out of high school. There were below the surface of the gums and they had to be cracked while still in the gum to faciliate removal. All of this happened under local freezing. I suffered absolutely no swelling at all and I actually played basketball the same evening. I thought that getting your wisdom teeth out was that easy for everybody. I didn’t realize until later that most people get chipmunk cheeks and can be out of commission for a while.

Anyways, I’m hoping I just react very well to getting my teeth taken out. My only concern is that now that I have a tooth missing, the tooth next to it won’t have structural support when chewing forces are applied to it. If it can’t support the forces, there could be buckling or bending and that’ll lead to a whole new set of problems.

I can get an artificial tooth put in but that costs $3000 and I’ve been warned most dental plans don’t cover any of this. $3K for a tooth that no one sees. I’m still deciding whether or not to get the fake tooth.

I’ll update everyone tomorrow.

So there is currently only one washroom available on the entire floor I work on. Not only is there only one washroom, that washroom is the “executive” one, meaning only a single person can use at a time.

The other washrooms are being renovated right now. The building owners have decided to renovate all the washrooms in the building. They are putting in new floor tiles, toilet paper dispensers, and new lighting.

The work started about two weeks ago and was only supposed to take a few days. I’d be ok with the renos but for days and days, I haven’t seen any work being done. I don’t see any tradespeople on our floor. In fact, building materials are just sitting outside the washrooms. I wonder if we can just go in and use them.

Anyways, what that means is that an entire floor of people have to share a single toilet. Even though more than half the people are on vacation, that single washroom is always occupied. Everyone has to go up at least five floors to 17 or above just relieve themselves.

In the grand scheme of things, it’s not a big deal but I just wanted everyone to know what I go through several times a day when I have to pee.

This will probably be one of my last skate. related posts for a while but it was an exciting day for the team as our own personal copies of the game arrived today. This also coincided with the full retail launch of the game in Canada for the Xbox 360.

The box is sitting here next to me on my desk. It’s quite odd seeing it. I almost can’t believe we managed to get that thing out the door. It’s also the first “real” game I’ve shipped now. I’ll be proud to put this on my resume.

The day, at least for me, was slightly dampened by the fact we got three somewhat lukewarm reviews today. GamePro and GameSpot both gave us 75s while The Onion gave us a C+ which Metacritic translated into a 58. Again, I might be biased but a 58? Come on. This drops our Metacritic rating down to an 84 which is quite respectable but I think the team as a whole thinks we’ve done better than that.

So why is the Metacritic rating so damn important? Well internally, EA takes that rating very seriously. It is something the company uses a metric to see how well a title has performed and
that score is used along with other data to make some pretty important decisions.

Anyways, let’s hope we get some better numbers in the days ahead.