Month: August 2010

Because I don’t know what else to do with my money I’m thinking about getting some more promotional items made up with my web site address on them. If you recall, I made up a batch of t-shirts with my domain on it. Over the years, I’ve flirted with the idea of getting some women’s panties with my web site address silk-screened on them. As exciting as that might be, I don’t think it would be very practical. At least half of my readers are dudes. What would they do with a pair of women’s panties? Do I want to know? Maybe. Anyways…

A more practical item would probably be more appreciated by all my readers, male or female. In light of that, please take a look at this page here. Tell me which items you think would go over well with my readers. Keep in mind, I don’t want to spend more than $5 per item. Also, don’t choose anything that requires some crazy minimum order count of like 250.

So what’s your pleasure? Stress ball? Key chain? LED flashlight? Stainless steel water bottle? Summit clock radio?

It was a scorcher of a day here in the Vancouver area with temperatures well above 30 degrees Celsius. I was fortunate enough to spend several hours out by Stanley Park where I played tennis. One half of the court was shaded while the other half was not. Despite playing in the shade half the time, it was still made for a sweaty, ball-stroking three sets of tennis.

Though I was smart enough to apply sunscreen, the error I made today was not drinking enough water. I now have a slight headache because of this and I am currently trying to replenish the fluids I lost today. In any case, it was beautiful day to be outside. We should enjoy the weather as much as we can, as in Vancouver, the rains can be less than a month away.

I’ve been checking out the traffic logs and I’ve noticed a few new visitors to this blog. I always encourage new readers and am very thankful for everyone’s loyalty. I’m close to having another free swag giveaway so please do continue to keep reading!

So here’s a shout out to my new readers from the country of Columbia and whoever was at Middlegate Honda a few days ago. I salute you!

I’m sure that you, my loyal readers, are aware that YouTube has spawned an odd new set of “celebrities”. These are people aren’t famous in the traditional sense (like TV or film stars) but are nonetheless known by thousands of people. If you live in Vancouver, you might be aware of one of these people. The YouTube personality known as “Peter Chao” is a creation of Vancouver Film School graduate Davin Tong. Peter Chao’s trademark is his heavily accented English. The Peter Chao character was famous enough that a local paper, The Georgia Straight, featured Tong in an article.

The interesting thing is that I once had a similar character that I put on for some select people around 2004. At the time, I was still in graduate school and living in the best graduate school residence in Canada. As a resident of St. John’s College, I made some very close and dear friends. One of those friends was a doctorate student named Patrick. Patrick is Filipino, so he and I had a common understanding of growing up in Canada in an Asian household. I used to tell Patrick that I wasn’t sure if I could get into the video games industry as a software engineer. It was my entire reason for being in graduate school. If it didn’t work out, I’d need to figure out what else to do. I told Patrick that the odds of him getting his doctorate and then getting tenure at a prestigious university were pretty good, so I would be his family servant. I’d run errands for him and his wife, pick up his kids from school, cook meals, arrange for his travel to conferences, and get his laundry from the dry cleaners.

For whatever reason, I decided my servant persona would be called “Chinaman” and I’d speak in heavily accented English. Each time I broke out into my Chinaman persona, I’d describe some aspect how I’d be useful to Patrick in a few years. In character, I’d tell him how I’d picked up his shirts from the dry cleaners, bought the specific ingredients that Mrs. Patrick wanted for dinner, and booked his flight to some conference in New Zealand. I’d always refer to him as “Doctor” while in character. I really went deep into the English with the Chinese accent. Patrick thought it was hilarious whenever I brought Chinaman out. I only really did the character in front of Patrick and one other person, Jin Hee, another resident at SJC. In fact, I think she was more enamoured with Chinaman than my own actual personality.

Anyways, the point of this post isn’t that I think the “Peter Chao” character was taken from me. Far from it in fact. It just goes to show you that sometimes it takes that little bit of extra effort (and luck) to turn something amusing into a real phenomenon.

Wow, it’s been years since I brought out Chinaman. I wonder if he’s still there?

I know my female readers love it when I refer to myself as “daddy” so I used it in the post title. I’m feeling a bit under the weather tonight so I’m going to go to bed a bit earlier that usual (but probably still later than most people). In the meantime, please enjoy the My Little Pony cartoon above.

I was totally ready to write this super long blog post but then I read this article. I need to get off my ass more during the day.

Sunday marked the exact four year anniversary of my employment at EA as a software engineer. If you count my time as a games tester, I’ve been working for EA for about six years in total.

Ironically, even though it was a Sunday, I spent the four year anniversary at work for about an hour. Someone needed my help and I showed up to give them assistance. It was when I arrived at the studio that I learned something interesting. I entered the facility through Phase II which was built in 2005. I encountered no problems until I started using the card readers in Phase I. Every single card reader wouldn’t accept my access card. This was very weird since I was able to get into the building and already get through several access-controlled doors.

I decided to make my way down to the security desk where I told them my problem. They checked my name and it only took a few seconds before the security guy said, “oh yeah, four year anniversary”. Apparently when EA issues your access card on your first day of orientation, the system is set to allow your card to only work for a period of four years into the future. This apparently is the default setting for all employees. The problem is, there is no standard procedure for extending the validity date before the four years is up. According to the security guard, lots of employees are still working for EA four years down the road and on that special day, they are locked out of a large proportion of the building. The reason I was able to get into the studio in the first place is that Phase II uses a different access control system which doesn’t care that today was my “special” day. The security guy was able to set the expiry date of my access card to 2020. We both laughed at that because the odds of me still working for EA in 2020 are extremely low. Most people don’t wind up working at EA that long, plus isn’t Skynet supposed to become sentient by then?

Anyways, it’s been an interesting four years. This is the longest I’ve worked for any company by far. I’ve learned a lot in this time. The first three years were awesome. I’ve never had so much fun and satisfaction at a job. I don’t think it was a coincidence that those three years were spent working in the downtown Vancouver studio. The fourth year, where I spent working in Burnaby, wasn’t so great. In fact, the last four months leading up to this anniversary haven’t been fun at all. I’m hoping that things get better going forward though. If not, the world is full of interesting opportunities.

I’d like to thank everyone who made the first three years the best time I’ve ever had making games. You guys and gals know who you are. Much love to everyone, wherever you might be now.

I’m usually quite up to date on the latest happenings on the Internets but once in a while a site or service gets lost in the sea of digital flotsam out there. Only later do I find out about it, when millions have already used it. Have you guys seen those AOL discs you get in the mail? Seriously though… In 2005, Amazon launched a new web site called Amazon Mechanical Turk. In essence, the site was and remains a digital “work from home” portal. People or corporations post small jobs on the site and people get paid to complete these jobs.

Amazon calls these jobs, HITs or “Human Intelligence Tasks”. These are jobs that can be done cheaper or faster by humans than a computer. For example, it’s much easier to get a human to analyze a photo or image than to write a custom program that does the same thing. The jobs range from looking at photos to writing short pieces of prose. There are some dubious jobs though, as I’ve seen some that are summarized as “write a short comment on a blog”. That seems to me like getting paid to spam blogs. That’s not cool in my books.

Jobs can pay very little, down to a single cent upwards to on the order of several dollars for a single task. Workers can be paid out in Amazon gift certificates, money deposited in their US bank accounts, or paid to their Paypal accounts. I can see how people might view this a virtual sweatshop but workers are free to choose whatever and how many jobs to take on.

Just out of curiosity, I signed on using my existing Amazon account. I only needed to check a few boxes and I was signed up as a “worker”. Just for craps and tee-hees I might take on a task that seems reasonable and not too time consuming. Maybe this is the second job I’ve been always looking for!

There aren’t that many instances where I live out the bachelor stereotype but this morning was one of those times. I woke up this morning and when I went to get something to eat for breakfast, I realized I basically had nothing suitable to eat for the morning meal. I usually have a granola bar or something similar but I was all out of that stuff. I would have settled for some potato chips but I didn’t even have that.

I was that close to making some microwave popcorn when I decided to just hurry to work where I could get a decent breakfast there. When I finally did get to the studio, I was starving. I settled for the big daddy of breakfast items at the EA cafeteria, which is the breakfast wrap. It’s got eggs, cheese, bacon, hashbrowns, and salsa. I’m pretty sure the thing weighs about half a pound. After devouring that thing, I didn’t even have a slight hankering for lunch well-past 1pm.

Don’t worry folks, I went shopping after work and will have Vegemite on toast tomorrow morning.

Over the long weekend I downloaded the Android SDK which will allow me to develop apps for Android-based smartphones. From what little I’ve read so far from the SDK documentation it seems fairly straightforward to make an Android app. The question remains, what do I want to make an app for? I posed this question to you, my loyal readers, in a previous post. Joanna had some good ideas. The photometer was probably the one I liked the best but I’m not sure how many Android phones have ambient light meters in them. I know my phone has one but I’m not sure if the data from that is made available to other apps.

I’ve decided I want my first app to be standalone and not require accessing data from an external server. Going this route would simply the development process and I can always save this for a later project. A friend of mine suggested I make a tic-tac-toe game. That’s certainly an excellent suggestion for a first app. There are a billion tic-tac-toe game in the Android market unfortunately. I’d like my first app to be something that I can learn from and also something I can release for free (and be somewhat popular).

Someone mentioned I should go the porn route. It is very true that porn gets noticed by a lot of people on the Internet. I certainly have nothing against porn but I think I’d like to not go that way this time around.

Maybe I should just remake old Atari 2600 games.