Month: March 2010

The OT meal at work tomorrow is going to be KFC. I may not have to work late tomorrow but part of me hopes a single, easy bug gets assigned to me late so I can have me some fried chicken.

I cannot recommend Fortune House restaurant at Metrotown. Making a reservation there doesn’t really mean “making a reservation” as it means with other restaurants. At Fortune House, having a reservation means you get to wait in line with other people that have “reservations”. Sure, there’s another line for “walk-ins” and you supposedly get priority over that line but that’s no consolation. Having a reservation shouldn’t mean I get the privilege of standing in line for over 20 minutes for my table. If you want to sample Chinese food at Metrotown, go somewhere else other than Fortune House.

One of the halogen bulbs burnt out in one of my track lights this evening. It took me ten minutes how to figure out to take the bulb out. I’m thinking about replacing it with an LED bulb.

I had pho for lunch today. It was average in quality. If I had my way, I’d go to White Spot for lunch tomorrow.

This is the last sentence of this post.

During the Olympics there were so many things to do and see. Some of the things were grand in scale, like flying through Robson Square or touching and seeing an actual gold medal. Other activities were simple in nature, like just seeing the cauldron with your own eyes.

One of the simple Olympic activities I enjoyed was seeing the various street performers around town. There was one that stood out in my mind. During the first week of the Games, a friend and I were walking along Granville when happened upon a man dressed as Batman. Yes, the Caped Crusader himself. He was standing on a box of some sort. I noticed his costume, while admirable, was not entirely authentic nor form-fitting, yet you could not mistake him for anything else other than the Dark Knight.

My friend wondered aloud why Batman would be at the Olympics. People didn’t seem to care as he had attracted a small crowd around him, with children along with adults among them. We kept on walking and as we got a few steps past him, we heard him yell.

“WHERE ARE THEY?!?!?!?!?!?!”

Both my friend and I paused ever so briefly as we looked at each other and laughed. Vancouver Batman had, for just a few seconds, channeled the deep Christian Bale Batman voice. He had done it well. It was impressive enough that my friend and I endeavoured to go back and see him, to drop off some change for the man behind the mask.

Unfortunately, I never was able to find him again in the next two weeks afterwards. Fortunately, many other people did see him. Click here for one of many photos taken of Vancouver’s Batman. I wonder who is the man behind that mask. Was he in town just for the Olympics? Where is he from? Is he still out there now? These are mysteries that are almost as compelling as the real Batman himself.

I awoke this morning to discover that Conan O’Brien had announced a 30 city tour of North America. I also discovered that he was coming to Vancouver. I immediately went to the Ticketmaster site to see if tickets were still available. Tickets were indeed still available. I must have been still in a sleepy stupor because I was given two tickets in row 12 (or was it 15?) and then released them because I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to go.

I proceeded to spend the next 40 minutes trying to get seats that were just as good once I realized what a moron I was. At one point, I settled for some pretty decent seats but had the Canadian Ticketmaster web site crash on me. I had to quickly switch over to the US site before finally getting two tickets in the 19th row. The seats are decent but not spectacular. Well, at least I get to see the show. I’m excited! Some people go see bands live, I see talk show hosts. After seeing Letterman two years ago, this will be a great follow-up!

Did you know the Honey Badger has been labeled as the world’s most fearless animal and the most fearsome land mammal on the planet?

This carnivore is well-known for its fierce fighting skills and adept hunting methods. Honey Badgers have an amazing ability to kill snakes, even poisonous ones, for food. They have also been known to take on larger animals, such as lions, tigers, and bears, coming out victorious in glorious nature battle.

Though purely an urban myth, there are stories of man-eating badgers that roam around the Middle East.

It’s a good thing Honey Badgers are not native to North America.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4XRwWBBayU&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

A lot of video games feature Hollywood talent, either for the voices, models for in-game characters, or both. Until skate 3, none of the games I’ve worked on had a well-known actor attached to it.

With skate 3, we’re proud to have partnered up with actor and former pro skaterboarder, Jason Lee. In our game, he extends his “Coach Frank” character which you can see in the above video. “Coach Frank” is the guy who tells you what to do in the tutorial section of the game.

I’d love to say it was a blast having Jason Lee around the studio but the truth is, he stayed in LA. We went down to him to get his voice recordings done. A select few of my coworkers actually got to work with him in person but I certainly was not among that group.

In any case, I’ve always enjoyed Jason Lee’s work and his “Coach Frank” character is awesome. If having a Hollywood actor associated with our game sells a few more copies, then I’m ok with that.

A few weeks back, I wrote about my desire to update the look of this blog by choosing a new template. The current template you see here is derived from a standard template that was available to the public from around 2002. I’ve made my own modifications to it since then and you can bet your ass she’ll make point five past lightspeed.

I was still in the process of looking at new templates when I received an e-mail from Blogger, the blogging service I use (who are owned by Google). It turns out Blogger is removing the option to do FTP publication for blogs after May 1. If you’re curious as to what “FTP publication” means, I’ll let you in on how this little dog and pony show works. When I want to write a post, I log into Blogger and then type my grade school vocabulary words into my browser. I then hit the “publish” button. That causes files over at Blogger to be created and then those files are transferred over via File Transfer Protocol to my own web server. The great thing about this is that all my posts and my blog files are stored on my own server. Should anything happen to Blogger or Google, I have all the files in my control.

Blogger is now going to remove the option to do FTP publication. Instead, they want to publish all blog files to their own servers. Some of you may have seen blogs hosted on the blogspot.com domain. This is where Blogger wants me to put my blog now. All blog files going forward will now be stored on a server that I don’t have any control over. Also, I’d have to go through some hoops so that blog.erwintang.com would still direct you to my blog. As you can see, there are some drawbacks to this development.

At this point, I’m not sure what I’m going to do. I have two choices. First, I can go ahead with the Blogger migration and move my blog over to their servers and try to make the change as transparent as possible for my readers. Even if it is transparent to you, my loyal readers, I still don’t like the idea of my blog files being stored elsewhere. My second option is to move my blog to another blog service which allows me to retain full control over my blog. This sounds great in theory but the change over requires a bit of effort. I’d have to setup up my new blog and also ensure that my old blog is still accessible. Ideally, I could convert all my old posts into the new format. If I were to go this route, WordPress would be the likely candidate for my new service.

I need more time to explore each of those options and weigh the pros and cons. Thanks for your patience. In the coming weeks, you might see some interesting changes around here.

I usually don’t watch the Academy Awards on TV but I tuned in tonight for final two awards. Those awards were “Best Director” and “Best Picture”. The reason I decided to see who won those awards was because I wanted to be sure that James Cameron didn’t win either.

Yeah, it’s a pretty crappy thing to do, not wanting someone to win something but let me explain. There is no doubt Cameron is a truly talented and visionary director. I will always be in his debt for bringing to the world Terminator 2 and Aliens, both of which are among my favourite movies. Unfortunately, Cameron acts like such a dumbass sometimes. When he accepted the “Best Director” award for Titanic, he proclaimed himself “king of the world”. Dude, for starters, don’t try to shoehorn specific lines from your movie into your acceptance speech. Also, don’t proclaim yourself better than everyone, because everyone already understands that. You just got the damn “Best Director” award, we get it, you’re the best director for that year. Last but certainly not least, proclaiming yourself the king of world because you made a movie about hundreds of people losing their lives tragically is a douchebag way of going about things.

Ok, so maybe that was a long time ago and perhaps we can forgive Cameron for that. Whoops. Cameron just had to spice up his acceptance speech at the 2010 Golden Globes with a quote using his made up Navi language from his movie Avatar. That was dumb. It just makes him seems self-absorbed with his own creations. Things like that prevent people from taking fantasy and sci-fi films seriously. Consider this. How many times did Peter Jackson drop some Elvish lines the multiple times he went on stage for the Lord of the Rings trilogy? That’s right, none. Is it coincidence that The Return of the King won “Best Picture”?

In the end tonight, Kathryn Bigelow and her movie, The Hurt Locker won “Best Director” and “Best Picture” respectively. This made me quite pleased. To be clear, I haven’t seen either Locker nor Avatar but the fact that we didn’t have to hear Cameron yammering on stage was good enough for me. Plus, she beat out her ex-husband at the very thing that he is so passionate about. Ha!

To be fair, I think Bigelow is a very talented director and her win tonight stands on her own, with or without the Cameron subtext. One last thing, if anyone can figure out how, at the age of 58, she manages to look like she’s still in her late 30s, please let me know.

The last time I used my dishwasher at home was sometime in June when I got all new dishware, utensils, and glassware for my new apartment. It was a lot of items to have to wash, so it made sense to load up the dishwasher and let modern technology do the work for me.

Since then though, I never really found any justification to use my dishwasher. As I live alone and don’t have a wife and a brood with me, the number of dishes, cups, glasses, pots, pans, and utensils I use in a day is very limited. While I could use my dishwasher to clean four plates, two forks, three knives, and two glasses after one day of use, is that the best way? By washing by hand, I save water, energy, soap, and the environment. I suppose I could just wait until my sink just piled up with enough dishes that using the dishwasher would be the better way to go but I think that’s kinda gross. At the rate, I use things, it would take a good five to seven days to get to that point. I really don’t like letting my dishes sit any more than two days. Any leftover food starts to get funky at that point.

I am concerned, however, that not using dishwasher for long periods of time is not good for it. It contains many mechanical parts, some of the complex variety. Much like a car, I believe it’s good just to run it once in a while just to keep things in good working order. I wonder though how many of you are like me who own a dishwasher but don’t use it. Do you run yours once in a while?

Thanks for reading this entire post, which essentially described me wondering if I should use my dishwasher.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KigcU2jDAmA&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

On Monday, Jay Leno returned to The Tonight Show desk, after displacing Conan O’Brien in a move that cemented his reputation as a late night weasel.

Leno re-took his spot as host of The Tonight Show after his spectacular failure in prime time. His failure was of such magnitude it cost NBC millions upon millions of dollars in revenue because of his low ratings. NBC affiliates were screaming at NBC executives to do something about Leno. In a move that only TV executives could make, they rewarded Leno for his failure, installing him back on The Tonight Show. This would be akin to me gambling away people’s retirement money then being rewarded for doing so with a truckload of money.

Sadly, middle America, with its bland sense of humour embraced Leno once again because they couldn’t get enough of his underwhelming monologues. They clambered for his crutch, the Jay-walking segments, where the apparent source of humour is asking questions to people who are ironically, just a few IQ points lower than the people watching. Leno’s ratings were good enough to beat David Letterman but we’ll see what happens once the weeks go on and things settle down. I’m afraid that middle America will continue to reward Leno for playing it safe night in and night out. They wouldn’t know real, genuine humour even if it hit them like a Ford Taurus SHO going at full speed.

I will always remain a fan of David Letterman and eagerly await Conan O’Brien’s return to television. On Monday, Dave gave me a reminder of why he’s still one of the best in my books, as evidenced in the video above.

It’s amazing how quick the biggest party that Vancouver has ever seen can end. On Monday, it was almost as if the Olympics were never here. How odd it was to not see huge crowds in downtown Vancouver anymore. Didn’t we always party on Monday nights?

I bet there are more than just a few people going through Olympics withdrawal right now.