Month: September 2010

I’m feeling terrible tonight. I think I may be getting sick. I’m gonna go lie down.

Today I got mistaken for a junior engineer again. This has happened several times since I had to take EA’s handout of a job back in May. Being in the Sports label has shown me how they do things is so very different than we did things in the Games label. In the Sports label, if you’re doing front end work, everyone thinks either you suck or you’re junior (and don’t know much else).

Just because I’m working on the front end of a game doesn’t make me a complete nOOb. I know no game play engineer in his/her right mind would ever choose to work in front end after having four years of game play experience but I didn’t really have a choice in the matter. Of course almost all the engineers on my new team don’t know this.

I need a drink.

As a testament as to how exciting my Sunday was, I spent most of the day looking up old Saturday Night Live skits online. If you’ve never seen the Harry Potter skit with Lindsay Lohan as Hermoine, give it a look. I’ve also watched Will Ferrell as Neil Diamond about a billion times but it never gets old. I’ve linked to this particular skit before but I think it’s as entertaining today as it was when it first came out. Killing a drifter to get an erection, now who would have thought of that in the first place?

This led me to IGN’s list of their 25 funniest Will Ferrell characters. I don’t disagree with any of their choices but I personally would not have put Ron Burgundy in the number one slot. Sure, it’s a great character but I’m not sure if it’s better than say his George W. Bush.

Oh SNL, how saucy! Here’s the original commercial.

For the last ten work days, I believe I’ve had a salad for lunch for at least six of those days. It’s the exact same salad too: “Pecans, Dried Cranberries, Crumbled Goat Cheese, Chicken Breast and Strawberry Poppy Seed Vinaigrette on a Bed of Mixed Greens”.  I pulled that straight from the cafeteria menu. It’s quite delicious and relatively healthy.

I’m not sure why but I’ve been really craving leafy green vegetables lately. I’m not on any particular health kick right now as I had french fries at least twice in the last week. I just enjoy having a decent and healthy salad for lunch. Though I now remember about two weeks back I had poutine for dinner one night and I felt rather guilty about it afterwards. Maybe that was the catalyst for my salad lunches.

Ok, thanks for reading about me and my salad. Here’s a picture of a kitten.

What you see above is an official two-second preview for a movie called Battle: Los Angeles. The movie has been frequently described as Black Hawk Down meets Independence Day. Let’s just hope it’s not the parts of Independence Day that sucked. B: LA is a war movie, with the combatants being humans and aliens. The film stars, among others, Aaron Eckhart and Michelle Rodriguez.

I’m a sucker for movies where humanity has to deal with aliens on a global scale on Earth. I can’t express how excited I was to see Independence Day. I had very high hopes for that movie. Unfortunately, after seeing ID4, I slowly came to the realization it wasn’t really that great of a film. Though it had many things wrong with it, people universally agree that the biggest blunder was trying to make the audience believe Jeff Goldblum could completely disable advanced alien technology using a virus he wrote on a Mac. To even suggest that he was able to setup a proper protocol to communicate with the alien systems would be a huge stretch but to go one light year further and say that the aliens didn’t have their version of Norton working is a slap to my geek face.

Anyways, enough about the mid-1990s. B: LA is out in 2011 and I expect it to be way better than ID4.

Every year the beginning of September signals another start to the school year. The new school year means the next couple of weeks will make for crap commutes both in the morning and in the evening. The sparsely populated buses and Skytrain cars that were part of the summer will now be replaced with sleepy kids sitting where I’m supposed to be.

We are, however, getting a co-op student at work. Hopefully we take the dude out for lunch and I can get in on the company-sponsored eats.

On Saturday, I went to a Taco Del Mar for lunch. Upon returning from the Mexican food establishment, I realized I was no longer in possession of my debit card. I had used said debit card to pay for my burrito and remembered sticking it (the debit card, not the burrito) back in the pocket of my shorts but not actually in my wallet. In the short trip back to my apartment, my debit card must have tumbled out of my shorts. I’m not sure where that happened exactly.

After searching my apartment and my clothes to ensure the card wasn’t hiding somewhere, I resigned myself to canceling my debit card over the phone. A short five minute conversation later, the card was canceled. I was now left with no way of directly accessing my main bank account. Because it was the long weekend and it was already too late to get to a bank, I’d have to wait until Tuesday morning to get a new debit card.

Not having my debit card is an inconvenience for sure but I wasn’t worried. I still have my Visa card, so I can basically pay for anything that I would have used my debit card for. Getting cash is not a problem as well. Using an ATM to get a cash advance using my Visa is simple. I also have my ING bank account, though there is only one ING ATM in all of British Columbia.

I have to get through one more day without my debit card but I don’t think that will be a problem.

Welcome to another edition of “Did You Know?”!!!

Did you know that former world number one tennis great Stefan Edberg indirectly killed a man when he was 17 years old? Edberg at the time was playing as a junior in the 1983 US Open. One of his serves made a direct hit into the groin of one of the linesman, a man named Dick Wertheim. The impact of the serve caused Wertheim to fall and hit his head. He was rendered unconscious by the fall and was rushed to hospital. He never recovered and died due to the head injury.

Edberg went onto an illustrious tennis career and was seen as one of the classiest and most sporting players on the tour.

I’ve just added new functionality that will allow readers using mobile devices to read this blog with greater ease. Essentially, the tubes which carry the words and letters to your screen will now detect which type of browser you are using. If a mobile browser if detected, you’ll be served up the mobile version of this blog. The mobile version loads quicker and is laid out to be easier to read on smaller screens. I’m not entirely happy with the mobile theme but I’m going to take some time to choose a better one. In the meantime, it is functional.

For those on the latest generation of smartphones, you might prefer the desktop version of this blog. At the bottom of each page is a link to switch back to the full site with all the bells and whistles. Let me know if you see anything weird with the new layout.