Month: May 2010

If you’ve been to a mall in North America, you’ve no doubt seen at least a few kids zipping around on roller shoes. Roller shoes are like regular athletic shoes but have a large, wide wheel that extends slightly from the heel of each shoe. It allows the wearer to roll along like a roller skate but then transition to walking immediately (and then back to rolling). Some roller shoes have two wheels in each shoe.

The kids I see with these shoes always seem to be having a lot of fun when they roll along. They also move at a decent speed which, at least to me, adds to the fun. The thing is, I’ve never seen anyone other than kids wear roller shoes. I thought they just didn’t make them in adult sizes. That’s actually not true. I did some research tonight and they do indeed make them in larger sizes. It’s just that adults don’t buy roller shoes in great quantities. I’m guessing that sales for these things are predominantly for kids. Until I saw this video, I’d never seen an actual adult use roller shoes.

I admit, I’ve wanted a pair of roller shoes for a long time. The kids seem to dig having these things and I wanna zip along with my shoes as well. The problem is, I’m not sure if it’s socially acceptable for a dude in his 30s to wear roller shoes. I just can’t see myself rolling on my heel to the Orange Julius at the food court. Am I alone in wanting a pair of these things? Where could I roll around in relative seclusion and peace?

The wrap party for skate 3 is being held tomorrow evening. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone who worked on the game with me. In particular, I hope to see the people who were laid off right after the game was done. I used to see them everyday but not anymore.

I know not everyone will go. Sadly, this is the second time this has happened. When skate 2 shipped, they laid off a massive amount of people. When the wrap party came around a few weeks later, a majority of the people who got let go didn’t really want to go. I understood their feelings before but I know it even more now. Nonetheless, I hope that for night, we can all get together and remember what a great team we were.

I came home tonight after having dinner with a friend to find two police cars in front of my building. There were two police officers in the lobby observing a resident moving his stuff out onto the street. Actually, one of the cops was this attractive female with great hair but that’s besides the point. So anyways, the dude who was moving is someone who I’ve seen before. He’s always got a fake tan no matter what time of year it is. He also has one of those tattoos around one of his arms, you know the ones that people get to feel unique, just like everyone else? He’s got this borderline douchebag look. In fact, he actually appeared in the Vancouver section of TheDirty.com. One time I saw him buying drugs from some other dude at the Skytrain station.

To be fair, he’s never really done anything negative to me. In fact, he held the elevator door open for me once. As I got to the lobby, he was basically done his move. I went up to the security guy and asked him what was up with the dude. He told me he wasn’t exactly sure but apparently there was an incident on the weekend. Whatever it was, it was enough to get the landlord and the police involved to him kicked out in less than a week. In my opinion, that’s pretty awesome that we can kick troublemakers out of my building quickly.

Last but not least, he seemed to have a pretty nice TV. Toshiba guts.

Over the years I’ve had the pleasure of meeting and seeing some very interesting people as I go about my own business. This post is about one of those people.

I forget exactly when I started seeing this dude around town but it was definitely when I was living in Coquitlam and continued when I moved to Port Moody. He was always in and around the area of Lougheed Mall. He was either walking near the mall, in the mall, or taking a bus to/from the mall. You definitely would not miss him. He looked to be in his late 40s, maybe even early 50s. He was always in some football getup and by that I mean American football. He’d have his football jersey on, sometimes with full shoulder pads, sometimes not. He also had football pants on, along with cleats. He’d be holding a football helmet in one hand. It looked like he’d just stepped off the field from football practice or something, except there wasn’t a field within several kilometers in any direction.

His hair was jet black, as if his hair had captured the blackness of the darkest, moonless night. I’m pretty sure it was dyed black. He kinda grew it sorta long in the back and slicked all his hair back. It wasn’t really a mullet though. He reminded me of someone you might see in the movie Grease. That was the first impression I got from him. He was a living caricature of a 1950s character from a period piece film or TV show.

I never really did hear him speak but I saw him in a lot of places. I saw him walking up North Road one sunny day in full gear with his helmet in one hand. I saw him the checkout line at Wal-Mart. I even sat across from him on the bus a few years ago.

I’ve been curious all these years as to what his story is. I suppose there exists the chance that he really was on his way to or from some real football related activity. Wouldn’t that be something? I feel though, that’s something else behind all of this. Will I ever find out? Probably not but at least I hope you’re wondering now as well.

I think I got one spam comment a year while I was blogging user Blogger. Now with WordPress, I can get half a dozen spam comments in a single day. I have now activated Akismet, the active spam filtering system. I know the system isn’t perfect, so there might be some false positives or some spam that gets through.

Let’s see how this works because I’m getting tired of reading comments about sunglasses and athletic shoes.

Last evening EA paid for airtime on Jimmy Kimmel Live! where Jimmy and Guillermo talked about skate 3. It was slightly awkward and not all that funny but it’s cool to know that something I worked on got mentioned on a late night talk show.

In December of 2009 I bought a DVD set from the Discovery Channel online store. I bought season 5 of Mythbusters, one of the best shows on Discovery. The set is six discs. I thought I watched the entire set over the Christmas holidays.

I was thinking about selling the set at work through the EA classifieds so I looked at the whole set last week to ensure everything was good. It was only then I noticed that instead of disc six, I had another disc five. I had two disc fives. I don’t know how I missed that the first time around. I e-mailed customer support and they are shipping me an entire new set of discs. They don’t even want the old one back. I’ll have two sets now (minus that missing disc six in one of them).

I can’t wait to watch that sixth disc!

I went to lunch today with some co-workers at Earl’s on Kingsway. When we walked in, I noticed a small clipboard that listed a party of 20 and then another party of 10 were already having lunch. I began to wonder if our food was going to take forever to arrive. I was sorta right. We wound up waiting for about 25 minutes for our food, which wasn’t horrendous but certainly not great either. The manager felt bad for us and decided to comp our meals. That was a nice touch.

Totally off-topic but I’m getting a ton of spam comments with the new blog. Would it bug anyone if I added CAPTCHAs to the comment form?

This evening I attended the annual general meeting held by the strata council for the apartment building I live in. Though I was tempted to skip it, the responsible homeowner part of me decided it was in my best interest to show up.

To make a long story short, the meeting last three and a half hours. We debated and voted on issues relating to parking, moving, pets, fees, budgets, and other interesting things. I must mention that we made it a by-law that you can’t run a brothel in the building. Whoops, there goes my idea for a home business.

After being in that conference room for nearly four hours I can’t think straight anymore and I have a headache. I know they only have these meetings once a year but even at that frequency it seems to often.

After I bought my apartment my real estate agent told me not to look at property listings for a quite awhile. She was trying to prevent me from comparing prices after the deal was done, when nothing could be done about my purchase. Of course, I ignored her and have been looking at listings in my building and the other towers in my complex ever since.

This afternoon, I was returning from tennis outing when I noticed an open house sign outside my building lobby. I was curious as to what floor plan was for sale and for how much. It turned out that the realtor was in the lobby waiting for people to come by. He was a younger agent perhaps late 20s to early 30s. He offered to bring me up to a two-bedroom and show me around and also give me a price listing of the other apartments available in the building. I was able to see one of the two-bedroom layouts that I’d never seen before so that was quite interesting. I then inquired about the one-bedroom that was also for sale. Now this is the other one-bedroom layout in the building and it’s smaller in size than mine. The realtor told me the unit currently had a tenant so he couldn’t show it to me but he had some photos of the place on his digital camera.

He brought out his camera and proceeded to show me a wonderful view from the balcony of this apartment. He then pressed a button to show the previous picture. I was expecting another shot of the apartment but what we both saw was something entirely different. What I saw instead was a young woman with makeup on, reclining on what appeared to be a black leather couch of sorts. She was dressed in what appeared to be a black silk robe or teddy. She was posed both seductively and playfully. There was a mischievous smile on her face. One of her legs was bent, showing off a bit of leg. To be clear, there wasn’t any nudity and the picture wasn’t any more scandalous than any 50s pinup picture.

Nonetheless, the realtor appeared to be momentarily embarrassed and could only muster a “whoops” before quickly pressing another button to advance the picture back to the original balcony view. He then proceeded to show me the rest of the pictures which I no longer had any interest in. After I got the price list from him, I thanked him for his time and left.

Let this be a lesson for you. If you’re going to use a camera for business, don’t mix your personal stuff with your work related shots.