Month: January 2014

I’m not feeling so great this evening and it’s all because I ate too much for dinner. I had dinner plans with a friend and we wanted to go to Joey’s for a decent meal. I had envisioned perhaps sharing a small appetizer and then getting a reasonable main course, probably salmon. When we got to the restaurant, the hostess said it would be a 45 to 60 minute wait for two people. What? We were starving so went to a nearby Cactus Club. We found a 30 minute wait there.

We wound up at a Boston Pizza, which was half-empty, which should have told you something. Anyways, my friend and I both had an order of wings for starters. My main course was lasagna, which I finished completely.

I’ve been feeling bleh since getting home. That was so the opposite of getting salmon for dinner.

So regarding my last post, today I was able to listen to the rest of the half hour video that this Albert guy made below. I was astounded at how easily the con man was able to convince him of almost anything. He would just say yes or no to whatever Albert asked him and Albert didn’t even press him for details. I can see why senior citizens fall for scams now.

I also previously stated that Albert was naive about the whole situation but now I’m thinking he let himself get into this predicament willingly. He runs a YouTube channel that contains videos that have been spreading false Skate 4 rumours for the last several months. In one of these amazingly stupid videos, he calls up what he says is the Electronic Arts product support line and then asks some low-level call center dude about any developments with a new game in the series. How dumb is that? No call center guy knows anything games in development. So this guy says yeah, he thinks another game is coming soon. Albert just believes him without any proof at all and hypes his video as proof another game is coming.

Other gamers have written that Albert is making videos like this on purpose to get more page views for his channel, which leads to potentially more revenue from YouTube. This is a distinct possibility because he has made several videos where he states absolutely false statements about what is happening at Electronic Arts. People call him out on his BS but if it’s about the page views, he won’t care.

He doesn’t do himself any favours by posting these patently absurd statements and I’m afraid now that money is involved, he’s going to learn a very harsh lesson.

As many of you know I worked on a series of skateboarding games a few years ago, entitled simply Skate. Those three games hold a very special place in my heart. Out of the many games I’ve worked on, I’m most proud of the critical reception that the trilogy received. Most importantly, the Skate team, by a wide margin, is the best team I’ve ever had the honour of working on. We were and continue to be family.

Though not as popular as say, Call of Duty, the Skate series has a small but extremely loyal fan base. It’s been nearly four years since Skate 3 was released and the fans of the game have been waiting the next game. Unfortunately, there is no next game for the foreseeable future. The team that made these games have now been scattered across companies and by distance. This fact, however, doesn’t stop some gamers from hoping for the next title.

About two weeks ago, a project popped up on Kickstarter, something called Skate 4D. It took me a while to figure out what was going on but let me distill it into the major points. Apparently, someone named Albert, who makes Skate 3 videos and posts them online (just a regular fan of the games), was contacted by someone posing as an ex-Black Box developer. This “Syed Faisal Shah” was trying to make Albert think he was one of us, people who actually worked on the Skate games. He somehow convinced Albert that he was making another game in the series (without EA’s help) and he needed Albert’s assistance. Here’s where it gets interesting. The poser also convinced Albert to put his name on the Kickstarter project and also be the face and voice of the fundraising effort. This mysterious “developer” is remaining in the shadows, except for his shoddy web site. If you’re curious, the website is registered through Pakistan.

In the meantime, Albert has made his pitch through videos and Tweets, asking people to donate money to the project. He has put himself out there as the public face of this thing. What I can’t believe is how easily Albert was duped by this shady con man. He gave Albert some screenshots of the game “in development”. You can actually see these on the Kickstarter page. These are just screenshots of the Unity development engine, which anyone can download for free. In these screenshots, the scammer just inserted some sky textures (probably from a .jpg he got by Googling) and added some blocky geometry. I could probably replicate these shots in half an hour at most. The “crowd creator” is simply a single model in a T-pose copied several times and placed into an empty Unity scene. That would be a minute of work to do. Laughably, the trickster also promises that the game can be done by May of 2015.

Despite what Albert wants to believe, this dude never worked with us and he certainly isn’t working on any new skateboarding game. I really want to say that Albert should have known better but he’s young and he doesn’t know a damn thing about making video games. On social media, he’s been confronted with several comments that this is indeed a scam but he doesn’t want to believe it.

Here’s what I think the con man wanted to happen. He wanted Albert to be the public face of fund-raising because he’s already is known to the online community. Albert would have an easier time of convincing people to raise the $500,000. It’s a shame unfortunately (fortunately?!) that the majority of the Skate community is relatively young and have no money. By some miracle, if they did raise the half million, I’m convinced the charlatan would have convinced Albert to send the money to him (for development costs of course). It would be at this point that Albert would no longer hear from this mystery man. Albert would then be left to deal with the angry investors who lost all their money.

The video above is long and I haven’t watched all of it. It does show some important points. First, I’m really touched by how loyal Albert is to the games. We poured blood, sweat, and tears into those things and to have people like him still appreciate it after all these years does make me happy. Second, is that Albert recorded the Skype calls to this dude. It’s fascinating to hear him try to pull the wool over Albert’s eyes.

In summary, I feel bad for Albert. I really think he’s just naive and doesn’t know he’s been taken for a ride. I believe there will be another great skateboarding game in the future and I’ll cheer for whoever is trying to make it (if it’s a sincere attempt). I do, however, have serious problems with people trying to use our past efforts to scam people out of their money.

I’m a big Conan O’Brien fan and as many of you know, I love the bits he does with his associate producer, Jordan Schlansky. In a previous segment, Conan caught Jordan coming in late on Fridays. In this latest adventure, Conan forces Jordan to clean his office. What follows is good entertainment.

At my place of employment, the company celebrates the end of each week by bringing in Tim Hortons doughnuts on Friday morning. Actually, there are bagels and muffins too, but it’s mostly doughnuts. The company is not obligated to do this but it’s a nice gesture on their part. I certainly do appreciate their efforts to keep us employees happy. Now having said that, I wish they wouldn’t bring in the doughnuts on Fridays. I’m not saying they should get rid of the doughnuts, they should just move them to another day. We should have doughnuts on Mondays for example. This is my reasoning for the change. People, including myself, are already feeling pretty good on Fridays because, hey, it’s the last day of the work week and the weekend is upon us. If you have to work, Fridays are the best work day even without doughnuts. Now, you know what days sucks the most? That’s Monday by a country mile. No one likes Mondays. So instead of giving us doughnuts on Fridays, they should be handing them out on Monday. It would be sorta saying “Hey, we know going back to work sucks on Monday, here, have some sugary treats.” That would be the better way of going about it. Monday doughnuts! I wish I could make it happen!

I’m sure there are some workplaces out there that have special treats on Mondays. Wherever those places are, you people are doing something special.

After work this evening, I went to London Drugs and bought a new scale. This time, I made sure it was not made of glass. Sure the glass ones look a lot better but I wasn’t going to take any chances this time around. With a non-glass scale in hand, I arrived back home. I still had to do another pass with the vacuum in the bathroom. I did pretty good the first time around, as I think I only saw two or three missed pieces of glass on the floor. I then took the whole garbage bag full of glass, the glass covered bath mat, and the remains of the scale down to the garbage room and threw away that whole messy memory.

It was delayed by almost 24 hours and a whole bunch of manual labour but I finally got to weight myself. If the scale is correct, I’m currently at 158 lbs, which is pretty amazing given how much and what I ate over the holidays. For those keeping score, I’m about 3 lbs over my slimmest during the summer. I’m still going to try to keep it below 160 lbs going forward.

Ladies and gentlemen, what you see above represents what was a whole bunch of sadness for me right before I wanted to go to bed last night. Let’s rewind to a few minutes before what happened above. I was taking my nightly evening shower as most Asians do. As I was cleansing my body, I decided it was time to weigh myself again as my holiday diet probably did not do me any favours. It was time to see what kind of damage I had done to myself. I finished showering, stepped out of the shower, dried myself, and then applied talc to all my sensitive areas.

While still naked, I opened the cabinet door underneath the bathroom sink and proceeded to grab the scale that I’ve been using for several months. I was able to grab it and pull it from underneath the sink when it happened. It’s here where it gets a bit hazy. I remember putting my left hand on the glass to support scale as I was initially grabbing it with the right. I don’t think I made contact with the scale with anything else but it’s possible I may have bumped it. In any case, the glass shattered with an amazing amount of explosive force in my hands. I was briefly stunned by the surprise. Here I was, naked and barefoot, holding onto the metal frame of the scale while so many pieces of glass covered my bathroom floor. I dared not to move my feet as I quickly checked to see if any of my parts had been injured by the flying glass. Luckily, no part of me appeared to have been cut by the seemingly hundreds of pieces of glass.

Because the scale was made from safety glass, some of the pieces had broken into large chunks, rather than sharp shards. That’s not to say there weren’t any of those sharp shards though. My heart sank as I saw that many of the pieces were really small and looked really sharp. As I analyzed the situation, I knew this was gonna be a pain in the ass to clean up. I was shocked at the amount of glass that was everywhere. It seemed to me that the glass might have doubled its volume upon shattering. I looked behind me and gingerly took a huge step backwards into my bedroom and onto carpet, away from the mess. I went and put on a pair of shoes, grabbed a pair of gloves, and a large garbage bin. I came back into the bathroom with the bin. Trying to not step on any of the many fragments, I used my hands to grab the largest chunks of glass and put them into the bin. Some of the pieces were too small to grab with my gloves and I was afraid they were going to puncture the gloves. With these pieces, I just had to sweep them into a pile.

Next, I went and grabbed my vacuum, being careful to leave my shoes in the bathroom as I didn’t want to track any fragments into the rest of my apartment. Using the hose attachment, I tried to systematically suck up all the remaining bits of glass from the floor. The familiar tinkle coming from the inside of the hose told me that I’d found some tiny bits of glass. It was a cacophony of noise at first as the hose sucked all the smallest bits of glass on the tile. A proper and thorough cleaning required much more time than I had so I just did the best I could do in the time remaining. Another causality of this accident was my bathmat, which I didn’t trust anymore, even if I had vacuumed it. It was the one thing I constantly step onto with my bare feet. I needed a new one anyways, so into the garbage it went.

After work tomorrow, I’m going to have to go over every inch of the tile again with my vacuum just to be sure I got all the pieces of glass. I checked the bottom of my shoes and there were bits of glass in the tread which I had to pick out. There’s got to be some tiny bits that I missed. In the meantime, I’ll have to wear the shoes in the morning when I’m getting ready for work.

What a pain in the ass this is and I still don’t even know how fat I am now!!! I also need a new scale as well. I’m not sure the next one I get will have a glass platform. I really should have known better than to bring the glass scale into a warm environment and touch it with my warm hands. Let this be a lesson to you all.

So much of North America, at least in the most heavily populated areas of it, is currently bearing the brunt of freezing cold weather. A meteorological term has arisen, the “polar vortex”, which explains the chilly weather. Up until yesterday, I’d never even heard of that.

The weather closed the Toronto airport for several long hours, disrupting many travelers plans as people tried to get home from their holidays elsewhere. On social media sites, people are posting photos of rats freezing on the streets of NYC, toilet water freezing inside homes, and frost forming on inside light switches. It’s safe to say, that probably millions of people are feelings the effects of the cold.

I don’t want to seem like a dick but the weather has been very mild in Vancouver in comparison. Sure it’s been a bit rainy the last few days but the temperatures have been nearing double-digits. Some guy at work has been wearing shorts since last week.

For the rest of the continent, I feel your pain and do appreciate how lucky we have it here right now.

A new year brings new beginnings but it also brings a new assessment to any real estate that you own in this province. Here‘s what happened last year.

This year my assessment went up by $2000, a lot less than the $12K jump from last year. I’m ok with that as I hope this means my property tax will hold steady for this year too. If you’re interested in seeing what everyone’s place is worth in BC, click here. If you know my address, you can even look up my own assessment!

David Clarkson is a professional hockey player who is a member of the Toronto Maple Leafs. This is his first year with Toronto, after signing a contract in the summer worth just under $37M USD. Already a millionaire from his previous contracts with New Jersey, Clarkson is not hurting for money.

The HBO show 24/7 followed Clarkson and his team mates for several days before and during the 2014 Winter Classic. The episodes provided a rare look into the lives of players on and off the ice. In one particular segment, the show tags along with Clarkson as he makes his way to the Air Canada Centre for a Toronto home game. For most pro hockey players, getting to the rink for a home game involves getting in their expensive vehicles and driving to the arena where they park in secured spots in the facility. Clarkson sometimes takes a decidedly different route to work.

A native of the Toronto area, Clarkson drives to a subway station outside of the downtown core. There, he parks his car like a normal, non-millionaire person, walks down to the platform and takes the subway to the arena. In the clip above, you can see Clarkson do just that. He even has to stand at one point. Clarkson rides in almost total anonymity as perhaps people couldn’t even fathom a Leaf taking a subway to the game. That’s almost impossible to believe in a hockey crazy town like Toronto. Clarkson perhaps benefits from being a very new player to the team as opposed to an established star like Phil Kessel. I applaud Clarkson for taking a more pedestrian way to work. I wonder if he’ll continue to ride the subway now that people know his routine.

I’ve often wondered if any of the Vancouver Canucks could take the Skytrain to Rogers Arena for a game. Logistically, it’s possible since a station is located right outside the rink. Practically though, I’m not sure if it could work. Vancouver is a town that loves its hockey and even the fourth-liners get recognized fairly often in public. I cannot imagine one of the Sedins or Ryan Kesler taking the Expo line to Stadium station.