EARLY

After being exhausted last night, I somehow woke up at 6am this morning for some unknown reason. It took me about 45 minutes to get back to sleep but that was 45 minutes I wouldn’t get back.

I’ve been working really hard for the last several weeks and so have many of my co-workers. I think lots of us are really tired and hopefully we’ll be done soon. If there is a silver lining, I haven’t had to spend money on dinner for a while now. Money in the bank!

HOW TO MAKE LARB

Did you enjoy the scene where Aunt May has dinner with Peter in Spider-Man: Homecoming? Did you wonder what larb was? I did! In the above video, YouTube chef Andrew Rea shows us what larb is and how to make it. He even makes sticky rice pudding, which I thought would have rice that was more sticky and broken down but it looks delicious anyways.

PLANTS

I went to Ikea today and bought some plants, just like I said I would in a previous post. I wound up getting two small dracaena marginata plants and a single sansevieria plant. Both plants are great indoor plants, don’t need too much light, require infrequent watering, and don’t need lots of extra plant food or fertilizer.

I can’t remember the last time I had plants in my care, so I’m gonna see how these ones do before I start getting more. It should be fairly straightforward with their care.

NO, I MUST NOT

This week I briefly toyed with the idea of getting a whole new home theatre system, consisting of a new OLED 4K TV, new A/V receiver, and speakers. Beyond the price, I decided it was a bad idea mainly because of the TV.

I think it’s lost on some people that when they buy a 4K TV, which is becoming the most common TV resolution, it’s native resolution is 4K, meaning that everything shown on the TV will have that many pixels of resolution no matter what input source you give it. All your old 1080p inputs, like over the air TV signals, your old Blu-ray movies, regular Netflix account (more on this later) and so forth will need to be upscaled to 4K. It won’t look terrible, certainly not like when your parents use their 1080p TV with 480i content, but it won’t be true 4K content either, which won’t show off the true potential of your TV. So what’s the purpose of buying a new TV?

To really make your purchase worthwhile, you’ll need to start consuming 4K content. The easiest way to do this is streaming it. It maybe easy but it’ll cost you. Netflix in 4K costs more than a regular HD account. Not all streaming services offer 4K. Even if you do find a streaming service that supports 4K, you need to have an Internet connection that’s fast enough to support 4K streaming. If you don’t, you’ll have to pay more money. Also, keep in mind 4K streaming eats up massive amounts of data, so those with data caps might wind up paying more money.

You could also just play 4K Blu-ray discs but in my case, my PS4 Pro does not have 4K Blu-ray player, it only does plain old 1080p discs. So, I would have to buy a new BD player, plus new 4K discs, which are usually more expensive than regular Blu-ray discs.

Lastly, while my PS4 Pro supports 4K resolution for games, running in games in 4K usually means taking a framerate hit or some other optimization in order to hit the 4K resolution. It’s possible that while the game might look sharper, it may not run as smooth.

As sad as this might seem, I feel like 1080p right now is good enough for me while it gets easier to consume 4K content. I feel like an old man for saying this as I saw plenty of old people cling to their massive CRTs TVs while the world moved into the HD era. They didn’t see the need to change what they enjoyed watching. I wonder if I’m now those old people.

FOGGY

I don’t have a photo but there appears to be a bit of fog covering some of the area around my apartment building. I don’t remember seeing fog in the summertime before in the Vancouver area. It’s not too cold right now as it’s 22 degrees Celsius (by my measurement) but it did rain a bit earlier in the day. Fog in the summertime, neat.

SUMMER

It’s nearly mid-July and this year’s cool summer continues. A lengthy rainstorm has started in the great Vancouver area. The air is cool and the ground is wet right now. I’ve worn shorts three times this year if my memory serves me correct.

I’ve come to terms that this will be one of those summers where the sun and hot temperatures won’t be part of the season. It’s ok because I’m working lots, so it doesn’t really matter what the weather is since I’m inside most of the time anyways. I gotta pack an umbrella for tomorrow.

BLEH

I’ve eaten from Pacific Poke several times and have enjoyed their food but tonight was a real downer. I tried changing it up and selected their “Keto” bowl and it gave me three bouts of diarrhea tonight. It wasn’t even that good. I discovered that at least to me, jicama tastes terrible. It’s some sorta jam and it was not good. Just thinking about it makes me wanna poop again.

HOUSEPLANT

I’ve decided to get a houseplant. Studies have shown it’s good for removing indoor air pollution and also having positive psychological effects. I’m not much of a gardening dude but I imagine I’ll need to choose the right plant, get some soil, and a proper pot for said plant.

It’s gonna be an interesting weekend coming up.

EMPANADAS

I had empanadas for the first time tonight. They were delicious. The ones I had were from Empanada Papa. A friend of mine called them “fancy Hot Pockets” but that kinda cheapens the experience. The meat inside was tender and flavourful. They also came with all sorts of sauces which made it so good. I’d have them again.

NO GOOD DEED…

The game I’m working on is final approach and we’re trying to get it out the door in the next few months. This means we’re in bug fixing mode, trying to fix everything that a mouth-breathing gamer might complain about on the Internet in between handfuls of Cheetos and swigs of Mountain Dew.

Today, I got down to one bug assigned to me; just one. That’s great and all but it really means nothing. I’m part of a team and what really matters is if everyone is down to one bug, which unfortunately isn’t the case. Someone will notice pretty soon that I won’t have anything to work on and when that happens, they’ll start assigning me bugs from other people’s bins to me. For most of them, I won’t have a clue about how to fix those. I’ll either flail around and someone will eventually take those bugs away from me or I’ll come up with some hack job fix that will just introduce more bugs into the game.

We’ll see what happens. Maybe I’ll just get a ton of bugs tomorrow that are actually for me to fix anyways.