Month: August 2019

I’ve been working on a game for almost three years now and it’s just about ready to hit the literal and digital store shelves. I can’t say too much about it now but I hope to reveal more in the next few weeks or even possibly days.

Three years is a long time to be working on a game, especially in this day and age. Even though things were still rushed in the end, three years is an absolute luxury. Some poor souls have to bang out a game in a year, which is just an impossible task if you want your game to be good and polished.

I hope I have just as much time for the next one.

Today the company that runs food services at work announced they are raising prices 7% across the board, starting on Monday. The reason for the increase, according to the company, is due to inflation. This is the second increase since this company has taken over, which happened about two years ago.

I have not hesitated to state that the quality of the food in the cafeteria has been substandard since this new company started serving us. I’ve mentioned this in numerous surveys and informally to other co-workers. Prices go up but the quality has stayed low.

Many people now bring lunches to work. In the past, I have not done this because I find it inconvenient to heat up food at work. Microwaves are available but I’m not a big fan of how microwaves heat food. They tend to dry out your food and the heating is uneven. When at home, I use a toaster oven to heat up leftovers about 99% of the time.

In response to the price increase announcement, I made a query to facilities about bringing in a toaster oven to the coffee station area on my floor. I was told that I could do so. My plan is to bring the toaster oven I currently have at home to work. I’ll then buy a new, fancier toaster oven for home.

I may not bring my lunch every single day but I’ll be happy to bring it once a week to start perhaps. The less I patronize and spend my money at the cafeteria, the better it’ll be.

YouTube chef Andrew Rea recreates the scene from the first Harold and Kumar movie where the titular characters finally reach a White Castle restaurant and order a massive amount of the iconic burgers. I didn’t actually know how White Castle make their burgers but Rea goes over that in his video. I won’t spoil it but the beef patties don’t actually touch the grill surface when cooked. Watch the video to see what I mean. As always, Rea makes a mouth-watering end product.

Late this afternoon, an unfinished trailer for the game I’ve been working on was released to the Internet. I won’t link to any copies of it because I feel like the trailer deserves to be seen when it’s done and not in a rough cut with missing elements. I haven’t been told how the leak happened but there are people who know more details than I do. I always wonder how things get out onto the Internet when they’re not supposed to. I hope to get the full story of what happened this afternoon.

Whoever leaked the trailer also knew some aspects of my employer’s future plans as well. The divulging of these details was less widely reported, but in my estimation, that info was much more damaging that the trailer itself.

When info, images, and trailers leak out early like this, lots of marketing plans go out the window. People have to scramble to adjust and it causes a lot of headaches and work. It will be an interesting a few days ahead.

Last week, I finally transferred my one CIBC RRSP account to Sunlife where I have 99% of my registered accounts. I opened my CIBC RRSP account a few years ago and I was dumb and did not do my research. CIBC will charge you an annual fee of $100 if your account is worth less than $25,000. I didn’t realize this and my account was significantly less than $25K. When I found this out, I didn’t want to dump a total of $25K into that one account, just to avoid a $100 annual fee. I also didn’t want to transfer out right away and incur a transfer fee.

Perhaps it was a stupid strategy but my goal was to sit on the account and hopefully my RRSP investments would appreciate enough that I could recoup any annual fees, plus the transfer fee and then I’d transfer out to a more customer friendly investment account. Unfortunately, that never really happened. At best, I made $100 a year so which just went to the annual fee. The investments just stagnated and last week, I felt like I had enough and decided to transfer out. I’ll have to eat the transfer fee, which I think CIBC charges you $150 for.

The lesson to be learned here is to be sure of every single fee a bank charges you, which I was not aware of.

Last night was a bit of an odd one for me. Around 10:30pm, I got very tired quite quickly and I just decided to crawl into bed. I was unusually tired, especially since it was not a very strenuous day for me. I also got a normal amount of sleep for me the previous night. Yet, I felt exhausted.

I got into bed with the lights on and closed my eyes. I fell asleep. The next thing I know I woke up and it was 1:30am. I had not showered, nor brushed my teeth, nor did any of the things I normally did before going to bed. It was too late to do these things however, so all I could do was get up, turned off the lights, and retire to bed once again.

I woke up this morning feeling normal. My day at work felt fine as well. After work, I started feeling a bit tired but I had enough energy to actually go on a short run near the waterfront. Maybe I’m still a little bit run-down from my long weekend trip to Calgary. I’ll be sure to sleep in all weekend.

The game that I’m working on isn’t finished yet (though it’s really close) but my portion of it has reached a level of completeness that doesn’t require me to do any more late nights anymore. It was a strange sense of relief that I had today when 6pm rolled around and I could just go home. Before I did, I saw a project manager was delivering the OT meals to some people’s desks. I didn’t need food, so I wasn’t gonna get any of that. It was a weird feeling.

This evening, it seemed like I had so much time on my hands. It was great.

I spent the weekend in Alberta with some grad school friends and I flew there. I left on Friday night and flew back Monday afternoon. As it was a quick trip, for the first time in my entire life, I did not check a bag in on any of the flights. Just a carry on that fit comfortably under the seat in front of me. It was quite liberating. The thing I liked about it the most was not needing to pay to check in a bag. Overall, I think it saved me about $50. I also did not miss having to line up at the airline counter or the check-in terminal to get my luggage tags and then have to wait in line to put my bag on the belt at security. At least for me, that’s where all the hassle is.

Just having carry-on baggage probably won’t be a regular thing for me but I’m glad to have done it on this trip.

I’m going out of province this long weekend to visit a friend from grad school. It’s his birthday celebration and several other friends from grad school will be joining us. Normally, this would an exciting time for me since I like seeing my friends. As life is sometimes, however, the timing of this trip is a bit unfortunate. I booked this trip about three months ago and my work calendar looked fine. Things change and what was a normal long weekend somehow became the most important weekend for the current project I’m working on.

The rest of my team is on-call for the whole weekend and could be called in at a moments notice to fix something critical. I will, however, be on vacation for said long weekend.

I feel a bit bad but at least everyone at work understands. I hope everything goes smoothly for the next few days.

Rhett and Link from Good Mythical Morning explore the age old conundrum, is wet dry food better tasting than dry wet food? Watch the video above to find out.