Month: May 2013

Recently, I’ve been buying ready-to-eat meatloaf from the Safeway downstairs. Up until now, I’ve consumed very little of the food. My parents never really made meatloaf when I was a kid and you don’t see it very often on a menu at a restaurant. The few times I’ve had it, perhaps twice, has been at a more “homestyle” type restaurant.

I can’t say I’m an expert at knowing meatloaf quality but I enjoy it. I know it’s not supposed to be a fancy dish, which explains why it’s almost half the price of the pot roast at Safeway. Still, there’s a comforting feel to it. I suspect the Safeway meatloaf isn’t the worst but there is probably better to be had out there. I sprinkle some hot sauce on a couple of slices and that’s a decent meal right there. Perhaps I might try making my own meatloaf. It doesn’t seem that complicated. Making meatloaf from scratch, that seems like a whole day right there!

For whatever reason I didn’t have a great night of sleep last night so I woke up not feeling 100% refreshed. I had a meeting downtown though in the afternoon, so I couldn’t just spend the day in bed. I attended the meeting and after I was done I was feeling alright, so I went for a bit of a walk because the weather was relatively nice. It was upon my return trip back home that I realized exactly how sleepy I was. I fell into quite a deep sleep on the Skytrain and even did an embarrassing head snap when my huge noggin pitched forward one time.

Once I got back home, I fixed myself a bit of din-din and still felt tired. Against, my better judgement I began a nap that started around 8pm. I woke up around 9:30pm. Now if I was keeping to a regular schedule like most normal people I would have been screwed but since I don’t have nothing to do tomorrow, I’ll be ok. This doesn’t change the fact though that it’s around 5am as I write this and I’m not feeling that tired yet. These are the problems of the unemployed!

Toki Fong aka Bobby Lee gives his thoughts on North Korea.

I had lunch with another unemployed friend today. When you don’t have a job, lunches can take a lot longer than your standard hour so we ate at our leisure. We’ve both known we’d be unemployed in advance so we have previously discussed the world of having no job. One of the things we focused on was taking the time to do things in a day without having to cram other things into that same day. For example, weekends can be quite busy for people as they try to do everything they need to do before their weekend is over and they have no more time for themselves. With no job in the way, such restrictions are lifted.

My friend and I have joked that even the simplest things can now take up the whole day. Why try to do two things in a day when you can just do the second thing the next day? Mailing a letter? That’s a day right there! Going to Home Depot? That’s a day right there! Doing a load of laundry? That’s a day right there!

Tomorrow is election day here in British Columbia, so you can probably guess my goal for all of tomorrow. If I do anything else tomorrow that will just be a bonus.

For those who don’t reside in British Columbia, you should know this province is currently just days away from another provincial election. Usually, I don’t like to write about politics (except if it’s to report on weeping Republicans) but I believe this election is extremely important. The BC Liberals have been in control of this province for over a decade. It irks me that the party is named as such because they resemble nothing like what I’d expect liberals to be like in government. In fact, they actually fall to the right of centre in the political spectrum. I think the BC Liberals have done a terrible job in governing the province, especially in the most recent years. The whole HST debacle should have done them in alone but I have other issues with the current regime.

In the early 2000s, the BC Liberals took for granted that Vancouver and by extension, British Columbia was the Canada’s leading sector for video game development, film production, and the then burgeoning visual effects industry. For years, if a big budget video game or movie was being made in Canada, it was almost assuredly done in Vancouver. The combination of a large pool of talent and some modest tax breaks allowed the creative and technical industries to flourish. Thousands of workers were employed in BC, who paid their taxes and spent their money in the province. Then other provinces saw how awesome it was to have these industries and they wanted a piece, a large piece of the pie. They played hard ball and offered substantial tax breaks for companies to set up shop in their backyards. Both Ontario and Quebec held nothing back and offered tax breaks that were almost double what BC was offering. Money speaks loudly and many companies listened. When it was time to open up larger studios or bring film shoots to Canada, companies completely bypassed Vancouver for places like Toronto and Montreal.

Before the end of the last decade, Montreal easily passed Vancouver as the video game development capital of Canada. If you go by pure number of workers it’s not even close. How did the BC Liberals respond to this? They did nothing. They just allowed it to happen. Hundreds of workers who used to ply their trade in BC, now were working in Montreal or Toronto. I’ve always been curious as to why a provincial government would let hundreds of well-educated and high-paid workers leave the province. Sometimes I think it’s because they don’t care but now I think it’s because they just don’t understand technology and digital media industries. For the most part, politicians still cut from the same cloth, old people. Old people don’t understand new economies and new ways to make money. They’d rather save a saw mill than a video game studio because they don’t understand how digital industries work. Some old white dude knows that a saw mill cuts lumber and that lumber gets sold. He doesn’t understand that making Watch Dogs in Vancouver would be a coup for the city both creatively and economically.

So what’s the solution? Well, I don’t have all the answers but I sure as hell know that doing nothing and watching Ontario and Quebec take our lunch isn’t it. And someone from the Vancouver video game industry agrees with me. In my first job as a software engineer in 2005, I met a co-worker named Matt Toner at Backbone Entertainment. He was the creative director for the game I was working on. I learned that Matt was a pretty well-rounded guy. Before getting into his creative pursuits he acquired a graduate degree in economics and worked for the Bank of Canada. He also was an officer in the Canadian Naval Reserve.

Matt is no career politician but he believed the digital media industries in BC needed a voice in the provincial government. Rather than wait for someone to come along to be that voice, he decided to take action himself. Matt Toner is the NDP candidate for the riding of Vancouver-False Creek. Getting into politics isn’t something us video game people usually do but Matt felt that something had to be done.

If you live in the Vancouver-False Creek riding, I urge you to consider Matt Toner for your vote. Matt isn’t a one-dimensional candidate who just has video games on his mind. His degree in economics and work with the Bank of Canada should tell you that. If you’re tired of what the current provincial regime had done for the last decade, then perhaps a vote for Matt is the thing you’re looking for.

On Tuesday, I’m hoping the province of British Columbia will move forward with a new government that is enlightened in all areas.

The clock struck midnight tonight and I checked my bank account online shortly afterwards. EA had deposited my severance money into my account. There appears to be a slight discrepancy but I’m going to phone payroll tomorrow to straighten things out. Hopefully it won’t be too big of a deal. In the meantime, this large sum of money now sits in my bank account. It sure looks like I’m rich now but one has to keep in mind this is the only money I’ll have to use until I get another job. When viewed through those glasses, the desire to spend that money in a carefree manner diminishes quite quickly.

The plan is to still take it easy and work on my own personal projects. I still want to become a better preparer of food. There’s a few programming projects I’d like to start. There are quite a few mornings where I’d like to sleep in. So the plan marches forward as before but now with funding.

It’s been two weeks now since I stopped going to work and I can say time flies when you’re jobless. It seems like it happened yesterday. As expected, I quickly settled into my routine of staying up super late. I had to be in downtown Vancouver at 11am this morning for something and I decided to get up at 9am just so that I wouldn’t be rushed. Of course I stayed up too late and didn’t budget a lot of sleep for myself. Getting up at 9am was rough. My body didn’t know what the hell was going on. I felt very tired.

When I returned home sometime in the afternoon I needed a nap because I felt exhausted. The joy of having an afternoon nap is one of life’s most simplest pleasures. I gladly partook in that. Tomorrow I get to go back to my normal routine as I have no plans in the morning. If you’re on the west coast and having lunch, think of me as I will probably be still in bed.

This evening the Vancouver Canucks lost their fourth straight playoff game against the San Jose Sharks and were swept from the 2013 post-season. As I do every year, I bet against the Canucks as an insurance policy. If they win, great and if they lose, then I win a bit of money. I usually bet on the series and not individual games but as my recent post indicated, I hesitated so I was only left with individual games to bet on.

Now I had a strong feeling that they’d lose tonight’s game, which is why I decided to wager some money. It all seemed to go accordingly to plan when the Canucks entered the third period trailing the Sharks by a score of 2-1. Strangely, Vancouver showed some fight and spirit that had been missing for most of the series. They managed to tie it up on a power-play goal. Not only did they tie the game up, just mere minutes after that goal, they actually scored again to take a lead. I believe that was only the second time that they had a lead in the entire series. That got me worried because there was less than nine minutes left in the game when they went ahead. It turns out my worries were misplaced since an undisciplined penalty by the Canucks led to a SJ power-play. Of course, the Sharks tied it up in an effortless fashion and the game was once again deadlocked.

The game went into OT but again, a penalty to the Canucks led to another SJ power-play. It was this power-play that led to the series ending goal. As you can see above, the results of the game led me to win a bit of money. The bookies seemed to know this was coming as well. Had the Canucks won this game, which they almost did, you would have won three times as much if you had bet on them. My $200 wager would have won me close to $300 instead.

Well, another year of hockey has gone by and another insurance policy has been cashed in. It would be great if one year I didn’t have to win any playoff hockey money.

If you ever wonder how super star athletes live, then look no further than Roberto Luongo’s penthouse home in Vancouver. It’s been listed for sale at $4.2M. You can look at some photos of the place here.

Just to be clear, he made enough money during this season to pay off that home and then some (assuming he hadn’t already paid it off earlier).

Tonight, the San Jose Sharks defeated the Vancouver Canucks by a score of 5-2 in the third game of their first round series of the 2013 NHL playoffs. Though the Canucks came into the series seeded 3rd vs the 6th seed, they have been outplayed for most of the games, at times quite badly. It’s hard to believe that the Canucks were one win away from winning the Stanley Cup in June of 2011. The core of the team is essentially the same from that summer but they’ve been terrible in the playoffs since then. In fact, it seems like a switch was thrown in game seven of the 2011 Stanley Cup Finals where they failed to score even a single goal. Including that game, the Canucks have played 10 subsequent playoff games. They have only won one of those. Imagine getting to within one win of the Cup and then not being able to win playoff games after that.

It’s clear to me now that the Canucks’ miserable season will come to an end on Tuesday, where they will likely be the only team to be swept in four games in the first round. That will be a dubious distinction indeed. Prior to the start of the series, I had planned on betting $200 that the Sharks would take the series. A trusted friend of mine convinced me not to. I’m now kicking myself for not doing what I knew to be right in the first place. As a consolation though, I’m planning on betting on the game four on Tuesday. Betting on single games is way riskier though. Series bets have the advantage of averages. Averaged out over four games or more, the likelihood of the better team to win is much more predictable than the outcome of a single game. With the Sharks now up three games to none, what are the odds that the Sharks will win the series? Very high. What are the odds of the Sharks winning game four? Well, pretty high but not as high as the odds for winning the series (which is almost assured). So I’m going to take a chance and bet on the game four.

Now some people are going to wonder if I feel bad for betting against my home team. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, the Canucks have disappointed me all my life, I feel no shame in making some money off their misfortunes. Tuesday will be no different.