Month: October 2013

So about a month ago I added ads to a few YouTube videos I have. I don’t even run a channel or do any work with those type of things. I don’t promote my videos, hell it’s been like almost six months since I uploaded my last stupid video. Yet, I’ve already started to accumulate revenue from the ads. Yes, it’s like way less than a dollar but I’m starting to get an idea of how much money professional content producers on YT make.

My hot water dispenser got delivered to work today. I took it home and it’s so nice to have a dispenser again. The machine is currently in energy-saving mode. It’ll wake itself up, boil the water, and have it warming for me by the time I wake up. What a time we live in.

The tweet you see above is from the social media account of the video game Ryse: Son of Rome. The game, an exclusive title for the soon-to-be-released Xbox One console, is currently in development for the November launch. I can understand the original intent of the tweet. The team is extremely hard at work to make the fast-approaching deadline to get the game done. The way the message was conveyed though, led to some extremely negative reactions from the Internet. It seems almost boastful and proud that Crytek, the company behind the game, is forcing its workers to stay late and eat dinner at work, so much so that over 11, 500 of such dinners will have been served before the game is done.

Perhaps ten years ago or more, such an admission would be acceptable or a badge of honour for team dedication. Today, such crunch is frowned upon. Many people view these long periods of crunch time as a failure of management to reign in the scope of the project. Crunch is no longer seen as something to proud of, rather as a sign of weakness. Everyone should expect to work a bit of OT on any video game but it’s in bad taste to boast about almost 12 thousand OT meals.

So, as with many things, people took to the Internet to voice their displeasure. If you search the hashtag #RyseFacts on Twitter, you’ll see a plethora of parody tweets and disdain for the original tweet. Like I wrote above, I understand why they wrote that tweet. I’d be naive to think crunch doesn’t happen on other teams. It was just a huge mistake to get their message across in the way they did. The game will now get massive amounts of attention but for all the wrong reasons.

Over the weekend, I ordered a new hot water dispenser from Amazon. In the past, I’ve written about my enjoyment of drinking hot water and the dispensers that provide such water. For a few years I had an older hot water dispenser. I retired it more than two years ago. The main reason I put it into storage was that I was simply wasting too much electricity. The newer models were able to adjust the temperature of the water so that you could keep the water less hot to conserve energy. Some even had energy-saving timers. You could tell it to shut off for an adjustable amount of time and then heat up again. This is perfect when you go to bed or leave for work. My dispenser had none of these features so I just left it plugged in all the time.

Using all that electricity didn’t hit me in the wallet that much but I still felt it was the right thing to do. Since then, I’ve been heating up my water on demand with a saucepan or the microwave. It’s serviceable but not that as convenient as having a dispenser.

I decided to get another dispenser that has more features than my old one. The new model most importantly has an energy-saving mode. I can now shut the dispenser off before going to bed and leaving for work. Once I wake up or get back home, hot water will be waiting for me. It also has a dispensing motor that automatically pumps the water out. My old dispenser used a manual pump so I had to push down on a large button like I was pumping a bicycle tire every time I wanted to get some water. Now I’m also able to leave the water at four different temperatures after it boils. Apparently, some teas are better steeped at different temperatures.

I’m excited to get my new 21st century hot water dispenser!

It’s the Thanksgiving long weekend in Canada and as such, everyone here has Monday off. I’ve sent home the entire staff here at et.com so that they can all enjoy pumpkin pie with their families. We’ll return to our regular programming tomorrow.

While I slept last night, a massive fire broke out about a block away from where I live. The first call to emergency services came in before 4am. The fire involved a historic building that was constructed just after the turn of the 20th century. Though it was old, it still housed several businesses, including a Vietnamese restaurant that I often patronized with a friend. It was the only place to get pho in the area.

I slept through the whole thing but I do remember in a sleepy haze thinking that there seemed to be a lot more sirens going off than usual. Even in my deep sleep, it appeared that the sound of sirens was almost constant for a lengthy period of time. Some time later, I heard the distinctive fire alarm coming from a nearby apartment but I drifted back off to sleep. I later learned it was the building next to me, the alarm going off possibly because of all the smoke nearby.

I awoke when my alarm went off. Staying in bed, I grabbed my phone and realized that I had been tagged in a Facebook post by a friend. This was the friend whom I had gone to the Vietnamese restaurant with. He lives just across the street from the fire and he took a spectacular picture of the still smoldering site from his top floor apartment. It was in the post that he informed me that our pho hangout was nothing but rubble now.

I was shocked that the fire happened overnight and I didn’t even realize it. By then, the news had already been reported on several web sites. Reading through the stories, I then got the scope of the fire. It had consumed half a block in buildings. Some had already listed it as the third worst fire in the history of the municipality. Apparently, you’d have to go back to the early 1900s to find a fire of comparable size. The firefighters had been battling the blaze since about 4am and at almost 9am they were still trying to control the fire. The fire was so large that the local fire department had requested assistance from neighbouring municipalities. At one point, fire vehicles had police escorts to get to the affected area. I am guessing that for some of the firefighters involved, this was probably the largest fire they have ever encountered in their careers.

It was when I got out of bed that I realized how large the fire was. My entire apartment smelled like smoke and my throat was a bit scratchy because I had been breathing in a bit of smoke while I had slept. I really wanted to continue to read the news or even go take a look at the fire from a distance but I had to go get ready for work. As I was about to leave my apartment I looked outside my windows again. Even though I face the wrong way and couldn’t see the fire, a huge cloud of smoke was moving past my balcony. It was clear to me that the fire was far from under control.

In the hallway of my apartment, the air was considerably stronger with the smell of smoke. It hung in the elevator while I went downstairs and certainly was in the air when I got outside on the train platform. It was only after I got to work that the fire was finally under control and the other businesses were no longer in danger.

It’s very unfortunate for every one of those business owners but I feel especially bad for the people who ran the Vietnamese restaurant. Next month would have been just their second anniversary. I do wonder if there is some way for people to lend all the business owners some assistance. If there is one thing to be thankful for in all of this, it’s that no one was injured in the fire. The firefighters battling the blaze did a tremendous job as did everyone involved, including the police and utilities crews.

At around 9pm this evening I went to see the affected area and I got close enough to see that it’s just a pile of debris now. Equipment had been brought in to knock everything down. I can’t even see the booths where I used to sit and slurp my beef broth. It’s my hope that corner gets rebuilt and not rebuilt as a condo tower. There’s already too much of that in this city. I hope a brave and ambitious developer does something different with the area.

If you’re curious, the video above shows the fire well over an hour after it started.

So this is a thing that Jimmy Kimmel does where he gets famous people to read mean tweets about themselves. In previous installments, people have been suspicious about the tweets as some of them can’t be verified as real tweets. Just because I have too much time on my hands, I verified the first two at least and they are valid. I cannot verify the Brad Paisley tweet unfortunately because they blurred out part of the handle for that user. The tweet though is probably the best of the bunch, up there with the Kid Rock one.

So I walk into a public washroom today to do my business. I won’t disclose the location of this bathroom but I will mention that I’ve been to it before. There’s some urinals and a stall at the end. As I’m walking to one of the urinals I face the stall. I can see someone is in it because in North America, we have stupid stall partitions that don’t go all the way to the floor. I then notice I can see a significant portion of the dude on the toilet through a gap between the door and wall. That dreaded gap that makes pooping in public that much more fun. Now I thought my eyes were deceiving me because it seemed to me this gap was a lot larger than normal. I stopped myself from staring because I realized I was about to stare intently at some dude pooping. I get to my urinal and make a 90 degree turn to do my thing.

As I’m relieving myself, my curiosity forces to me look over at the stall again. Now that I’m closer, I realize why the gap looked so big. The dude hadn’t locked the door to the stall. He merely just closed it shut but not all the way. I could see the latch was not engaged. So there he was sitting in an unlocked stall, pooping away. Who does that? Why? Maybe he had to go so bad he had no time to even lock the door? Maybe this guy was actually so badass, he doesn’t even feel the need to lock the stall. No one is gonna interrupt his pooping and some lock don’t mean nothing to him.

I didn’t stick around to find out who this guy was. All I know is if I’m pooping public, I’m locking the stall door.

It has been over a month now since I started working again. One of my biggest fears was that I’d get fat again once I returned to the world of the employed. I did a weigh in about a week or so in but I wanted to wait at least a month before making any judgments. So I’ve had over twenty times to choose a reasonable lunch and just as many dinners where I may have returned home hungry and tired. Being at work at least eight hours a day also means I have less time to be active.

I cautiously got on the scale again this evening. I didn’t look fat in the mirror but then again, I didn’t think I looked fat when I weighed 173 lbs in April. To my surprise, the scale displayed 157 lbs tonight which is great. That’s well within the range I’m satisfied with. I need to continue to watch my diet and try to be active as possible. There are a couple of key highlights. Since starting work, I have not had fast food for lunch once. Even though the McDonald’s is about a block away, I’ve resisted getting a Big Mac meal for lunch. Though I try to avoid carbs as much as possible, it’s just too tough to eliminate them completely. I had a sandwich today for lunch but I’m ok with that. A few days ago, I got a big container of stir-fry noodles with chicken for lunch. It was delicious but I made sure to eat all the chicken and vegetables first. I consumed about half the noodles but left the rest. Too many noodles means too many carbs.

Let’s see where I am after two months!

When you live in an apartment, you have to expect some aspects of communal living. One of these aspects is the need for service people to come check out various parts of your apartment. Every year, the smoke detector guy and dryer vent guy need access to my place to do their thing. For every year that I’ve been living in my home, I was at home to let these guys in. I’ve been lucky because they always do this stuff during the weekday and the jobs I’ve had in the past have allowed me to stay at home until the service call is over. I usually work remotely from home or in some cases, my manager didn’t even care and would let me just sit at home and go to work afterwards.

Tomorrow the dryer vent guy is doing his yearly service call and I won’t be there to let him in. I just started my new job a month ago, so I don’t have the privilege to work remotely just yet. At some places, you need to earn that first. I also didn’t feel like taking a vacation day to wait for some dude to come around. I guess I could have asked one of my parents to come over but man, that sucks. Who really wants to do that? The only option that made sense for me was to leave my spare key with the property manager who’d let the dude in.

I have no problem with this arrangement except that I realized on the weekend my kitchen and living room were a bit of a mess. Not wanting people to think I was a slob, I cleaned it up slightly to an acceptable level. I’m cheating in a few places because I’m gonna dump some stuff in my bedroom and then close the door. After I get home, that mess will then get transferred back out to where it was originally.

The one cool thing is that I’ll be able to watch the dryer vent guy in my apartment because of new security cam!

So I went to Tim Hortons today and purchased the above product. Based on this previous post, I’m not sure if this was a good development. I do know that I’m already looking forward to the weekend. It doesn’t take much to keep me amused these days.