Month: November 2013

You’d think that during the short week after a long weekend I wouldn’t be tired but that’s not the case here. I feel like I’ve been exhausted since Wednesday. I got lots of sleep on the long weekend and I’ve had no late nights this week. Yet here I am all tired.

I’m gonna try to go to bed a bit earlier tonight. In the meantime, watch Sarah Silverman appear on Jimmy Kimmel’s show. For those not in the know, Sarah and Jimmy used to date for many years but broke up in 2009. Most people try not to run into their exes at the grocery store, here they appear on a TV talk show together.

So after waiting a month since the last time I stepped on my scale, I reluctantly weighed myself last night. During my last check, I was doing ok, just two pounds above my lowest weight during the summer. Now, more than two months since I started work, I was convinced that I had probably packed on a few more pounds. Was the mirror lying? How much had I really put on?

The only way to figure out was to step back on scale. I gingerly tiptoed on the glass surface and waited for the readout. To my surprise, it read 158 lbs. That’s just a pound more since the beginning of October and only three pounds off my skinniest in the summer. Since your weight can fluctuate within a pound or so at anytime, this was a really pleasing development. I’m keeping the weight off, even though my exercise levels have trailed off compared to the summer. This only reinforces that diet is the key to getting to a healthy weight. It’s a lot easier to not eat those french fries than it is to have to burn those fries off with exercise later.

Ok, let’s do this again sometime in December.

Over the weekend, comedian Sacha Baron Cohen won the Charlie Chaplin Award For Excellence at the Britannia Awards. In the video you see above, Cohen is supposedly receiving one of Chaplin’s famous canes from what is supposedly one of the last living child actors to have worked with Chaplin itself. I could describe what happens next but you’re better off just watching the video.

So this weekend, two national electronics stores, Future Shop and Best Buy had a pretty good promo going on. It allowed people to take in a used game and trade it in for either Call of Duty: Ghosts, Battlefield 4, or Assassin’s Creed 4. The fine print was supposed to be one used game per new game, per store, per day. That meant you could hit three different stores in a single day to get all three games.

As you might expect, it was madness around most of the country starting Saturday morning. All three games were recent releases and all three were highly anticipated by a large portion of the gaming community. Some questioned why Future Shop and parent company Best Buy would put on such a promo. Most didn’t care and just got in line, and lines there were. Just reading some social media on Saturday morning, I saw that people were lined up before stores were even open. In some cases, those early birds, still waited almost two hours to get their games. The shortest wait I heard about was 30 minutes but that was far from the norm. There was plenty of reports of lineups that took more than two hours to get through, with some lasting over five hours. Five hours standing in line! Apparently in some isolated cases, people started to faint.

While both stores won over some of the buying public, the act of essentially giving away free and popular games actually pissed off a significant amount of people. Many reported that the rule of one new game per trade in was not followed at all. Some stores were giving away all three new games with just a single trade in of an old game. This caused store stock to deplete much quicker than it should have. This meant that many people who had lined up for hours got nothing for their time as the people at the front of the line got most of the stock. As you might imagine, if you had just stood in line for hours at the start of a long weekend, only to get nothing, you’d be angry too.

On a personal note, I was originally planning on trading in some games but I decided to monitor social media first before heading out. I was still battling my cold on Saturday morning and wasn’t feeling that great. The notion of standing in line for hours did not appeal to me. Once I read that some people I knew had been in line for hours I just decided to stay in bed. Then when I read that lines were taking up to five hours to clear, I knew it was time to do something else on Saturday. I may not be a millionaire but my time is worth way more than the $60 per game.

In the end, I didn’t get any of the games. Most of the stock across Canada was gone by the end of Saturday. Also, I can get Battlefield 4 from my EA friends for only $20. I’ll also be able to sign out Call of Duty and Assassin’s Creed when it comes to the studio library at work. So in a way, I can play these games for nearly free anyways. I wonder if anyone standing in line for hours did the math on their time spent.

As it is Remembrance Day on Monday, I’ve sent the staff here at et.com home for the long weekend. I hope everyone who enjoys the extra day off takes a moment to honour those who served and sacrificed in past conflicts. We’ll return tomorrow with our regular programming.

I wasn’t feeling very well this morning so I took a sick day. In my younger days, I probably would have tried to go to work. Perhaps I wanted to prove I was a dedicated worker that didn’t need to take days off for anything. Now that I’m older, I understand the company you work for isn’t going to fall apart if you’re not there for a day. It also sucks to be at work when you feel like crap. Lastly, being sick at work means you’re potentially spreading your sickly germs around.

I spent most of the day in bed and under the covers. I slept in very late and in fact, I didn’t get out of bed until 2pm or so. It was hunger that drove me to get up. A hearty soup kept me warm for lunch.

I think I feel well enough to go back to work tomorrow. I am glad, however, that the weekend is right around the corner and it’s a long one at that. I hope to have this cold done by Tuesday.

I’m still sick as a dog. In the meantime, look at these bloopers from season four of Parks and Rec.

I can’t remember the last time I had a cold but I sure have one now. I was feeling a bit odd last night but thought nothing of it and went to bed. I woke up around 6am this morning and my throat was very sore. One of my sinuses was also a bit congested too. I almost contemplated not going to work but I got up, drank some water, got dressed, and sucked it up. I felt a bit better once I got to work.

My throat is still sore and there’s a bit of congestion that remains in my sinuses. I don’t expect it to go away full by tomorrow but let’s hope it does. I made it into November before getting sick! I was shooting for January and beyond too.

So in my previous post, I wrote about being tempted by the new Nexus 5 smartphone that just came out. At the time of writing it didn’t really matter how tempted I was because the phone was sold out at the Google Play store. Over the weekend though, the phone miraculously was somewhat in stock again. Orders placed now would be shipped in four to five weeks.

During a moment of weakness, I added the cheapest version of the phone to my virtual cart. It didn’t help that Google already has my credit card info stored on their servers because it saved me from that step of needing to enter in all my data. The next thing I knew, the damn order was confirmed. If there was a silver lining to this, it’s that I won’t be charged until the order ships and I can cancel the order until then. There is a possibility I will actually cancel the order. Unfortunately, I just checked my order status again and it might ship in as little as three weeks now! If I’m going to develop enough regret to cancel the order, I better do it quickly!

This evening I returned home from a dinner with my parents at their place. I borrowed my father’s car so I could drive home. I get into my parkade and go up to the level where my parking spot is located. I’m about 20 feet or so from said spot when I see a van parked where I need to be. Someone was parked in my spot. I decide to pull into the spot to the right of the van because I haven’t seen anyone parked there for about three years. I get out and take a look at the van. It doesn’t have a parking pass so I guessed it was some visitor who got access to the parkade from a resident.

On my way up, I saw a security guard patrolling one of the lower levels. I run down to see if he’s still there but I can’t find him. I decide to go back up to my apartment so I can call security and figure out what to do next. As I’m walking out to the elevators in the parkade, I see this older couple get out of an elevator. They seem to be a bit flustered. I’ve never seen them before. Instead of going upstairs, I stay near the elevators to see if these are the parking violators. Sure enough, they walk up to the van. I walk back up to them and tell them they’ve parked in my spot.

The lady is very apologetic. She says they are here visiting their daughter and they just figured out they were parked in the wrong spot. At the time, I forgot to tell them that they need a parking pass for the van and the pass has the spot number printed on it. I watch them pull the van out and then park in a spot just a few feet away. I get into my father’s car and put it back where it’s supposed to be.

I guess if I had been just five minutes later, I wouldn’t have even known anything was wrong. If I was way earlier, they wouldn’t have been able to park in my spot at all. Since I don’t have a car with my all the time, I wonder how many times someone has used my spot without me knowing.