Month: November 2020

On Friday afternoon, I headed back to the studio to get my company-resourced flu shot. Flu shots are in short supply this year and I’m thankful my employer arranged for us to get our shot and for free. I’ve now been to my workplace just twice since mid-March of 2020.

Getting the flu shot was quick and painless. I would have been in and out of there in five minutes but I was asked to stay in the lobby for 15 minutes after the shot to ensure I didn’t have a bad reaction to it.

Before leaving, everyone who got their flu shot was offered a small care package from the company. In it was an EA branded stress ball, EA branded lip balm, EA branded mints, EA branded candle, EA branded hand sanitizer, ginger lemon tea bags, and oddly ginger chew candies.

I’ve never had ginger chew candies before, so these were of great interest to me. When I think of candy, I don’t immediately think of ginger. I tried one and I didn’t immediately like it. The ginger is kinda spicy. After eating two more though, I understand why people enjoy them. Apparently, there are some medicinal benefits to ginger as well, so it’s a relatively healthy candy. I’d like to see if children would enjoy them. I’m betting they wouldn’t. This is more of an old person thing and I am old as well.

On Tuesday morning I went to turn on my desktop computer to begin the work day when I noticed Windows was not starting. Instead, I saw the BIOS screen saying it was trying to repair the boot drive. I immediately knew this was not good. Whatever it tried to fix the drive finished and it began the start up sequence again. Nothing happened. It took me a minute to figure out that it appeared that Windows had basically vanished as far as my computer knew. Did the boot drive fail? I could still see it in the list of drives, so that wasn’t it.

I had about 15 minutes before my first meeting and I knew this wasn’t the type of thing you fixed in 15 minutes. So, I was resigned to using my laptop for the day. I didn’t even bother trying to fix my desktop for the rest of the day.

As some of you might remember, my desktop also had some sorta of failure at the beginning of the pandemic. It also prevented me from getting into Windows. This was on a different drive however, plugged into a different slot, with a different interface.

Luckily, Wednesday was a holiday, which gave me some time to figure out that re-installing Windows was my only option. While re-installing was relatively painless, I have to now re-install all my programs and games that I previously had. What a huge hassle and a waste of time.

There’s something weird going on because these type of errors shouldn’t be happening less than a year apart. If I had to guess, there some sorta of power fluctuation going that’s causing these errors. It could be either the power supply, the motherboard which distributes the power to certain components (like my current boot drive), or perhaps the powerbar that my computer is plugged into.

I’ve learned my lesson as once everything is set up again, I will make a Windows 10 backup. I might also just get a new power supply. It can’t hurt, even though replacing a power supply is a tedious task.

I’m just glad I have my laptop as a backup computing device. I can’t believe that I once thought it was a non-essential purchase. This laptop has saved me from many potential headaches.

I was driving home from my parents’ place on Tuesday evening when I could see the lights from at least one police car from several blocks away. Was it an accident, road block, or a DUI check?

When I got to the intersection, it was something a little more unique. This particular area of the municipality has been plagued by closed roads due to construction. The local hospital is expanding and as such, it apparently required a new sewer line to be installed. The roads around the hospital have been closed for months, requiring traffic to be detoured around, sometimes inconveniently. In my case, it adds about ten minutes to my drive to my parents’ home.

Now, when I got to the intersection where the police were, I need to take a right-hand turn. Unfortunately, that was not possible as it was all blocked off. I could see a semi-trailer truck had already attempted to make the right-hand turn and failed in a spectacular way. Whoever was the driver took the turn way too tightly and the trailer mounted the sidewalk and was rubbing up against the traffic light pole. I guess the driver got stuck at this point and couldn’t move forward or backwards. If there was one thing they did right was that they didn’t make it worse once they got themselves into this jam.

That turn is pretty tight though and it doesn’t require a veteran trucker to know a trailer that long wouldn’t be able to make it. The road I was on has a left-hand turn lane, a through lane and a right-hand turn lane. Just by looking at the length of that trailer, I’d say the driver would have needed to make the right turn from the left-hand turn lane to have enough clearance for the trailer. How they thought it was going to be possible from the right-hand turn lane is a mystery to me.

This new detour on top of the regularly closed roads made me alter my route home unexpectedly but it wasn’t that bad. I don’t envy truck drivers. It’s a thankless job with a lot of negatives without a lot of positives that outweigh them. I wonder how they were able to get this trailer out of this mess.

When will Conan cut his hair?

Let me get this out of the way first and say, yes, I am relieved that Joe Biden will be the forty-sixth President of the United States. Having said that, the harsh reality of how difficult it was for him to get to this point is quite sobering. More than 70 million people voted for the outgoing guy. That’s 70 million people who had four years to see what he stood for, what he said (and didn’t say), what kind of character he had, and who he surrounded himself with. After that all that, they decided yeah, I want four more years of that. This is the guy they want again. Over 70 million people made that choice. If that doesn’t tell you how far the United States has fallen morally, then nothing else will.

These people don’t go away just because there will be a new administration in the White House. They won’t disappear overnight, nor will their prejudices and hate. The last four years have emboldened them. They wear their hate and ignorance on their sleeve now, as if it’s some proud flag to wave. Again, that’s not something that just will go away.

Also, let us not forget that the chief idiot didn’t get to the White House four years ago and was able to stay there for four years without some help. A particular right-wing American political party propped him up, deferred to him, excused his behaviour, and bent over backwards for his every whim. They were spineless when it came to making a choice of doing what was right for their country versus doing what was right for their political party. These enablers also won’t go away overnight. In some cases, they were re-elected for their trouble.

So yes, we can breathe a little bit easier but don’t be fooled into thinking America will change overnight. Its problems run deep, right down into the roots of their people.

Tomorrow is my third day with my new team and I am still onboarding. The process was slowed down a bit because I actually didn’t get access to my new accounts until mid-day today. That meant I didn’t have access to e-mail, wiki pages, code repository, certain tools, and calendar invites. All of the onboarding documents is in the wiki, so I was flying blind for a day and a half. With only half a day today with full access, I’m still in the middle of setting up my new workstation with all the necessary software packages and tools I’ll need.

I will most likely spend the entirety of Friday with continuing to setup everything. If I’m lucky, I’ll be able to start reading wiki pages on how this particular game works. There is a lot to learn and I can tell onboarding for this team will take a bit longer than when I joined FIFA. That’s ok and I think everyone understands that.

Today was my first day on a new team, while working at home, during a global pandemic, yet that was probably one of the least important things on my mind. Yes, I was eager to get started, read documents, setup my workstation, and sync files but when the direction of the world still hangs in the balance, things get put into perspective.

It’s technically Thursday now but uncertainty still remains. I understand why, but it doesn’t make it any easier. For a lot of people, we’re just distracting ourselves from this sense of anxiety until we get some final results. I don’t really have much more to say until then.

I am going to bed now and will attempt to read a book.

I am writing this before 11:30pm and there has been no winner declared yet as not all the votes have been counted. I’ve had a sense of anxiety all day but once all the polls closed, it became just a gnawing sense of dread and nauseousness. I just feel terrible.

This is all I can write for now. Part of me just wants to go to bed without looking at the Internet. I don’t even want to know. Maybe I’ll be better equipped to deal with this in the morning. Oh, and on a personal note, tomorrow is my first day with my new team at work. Will I be able to even focus tomorrow?

I’m not sure how everyone else is coping but I wish all of you good luck.

Today is election day for the United States of America. Registered voters will choose their next president. I’ve had this opinion for many years and it is that I despise US presidential elections. For better or worse, what the U.S. does or doesn’t do has a significant influence on the world stage. The U.S. president obviously has a major hand in their policies, both foreign and domestic. Yet, only Americans can vote for the U.S. president. Every four years, the rest of the world sits impotent, hoping the idiots in America don’t screw it up for the planet.

As many of you know, they managed to spectacularly screw it up in 2016. Despite the polls leading up to election day saying it wouldn’t go that way, the morons came out in full force to unleash a shit stain upon the world. I foolishly believed the polls, so I didn’t put some money down on the election. It seemed like just throwing money away. I was so wrong.

The odds were so much against the moron that I would have made some sweet cash as the world began its descent into madness. I had four years to think about that. Well, here we are again and I am determined to learn from my mistakes. I am hedging my bet tomorrow. This time around, if America decides it wants to continue to crumble into oblivion, at least I can make some money out of it.

It is my honest and most hopeful wish that I lose my money but something tells me I won’t be so lucky.

About a year ago, I signed up for Disney+. I did it mainly for The Mandalorian. After I watched season one of that, I really did not find much else for me to watch. I watched a few Pixar movies I hadn’t seen in the theatres and a series of behind the scenes episodes for The Mandalorian. Those were the only things I watched that I felt like were of real interest to me. I was foolish and bought an annual subscription.

If you’re talking pure value, at least for me personally, Netflix has been a better choice. At the end of December, is when my annual subscription to Disney+ is up for renewal. I cancelled it. Season two of The Mandalorian is being dripped out week by week now. If there are eight episodes for season two, like there was for season one, I should be able to finish it all before I have no more Disney+.

Two weeks ago, I signed up for Amazon Prime, so that I could watch the new Borat movie. I was thinking I’d do the free month and then cancel but I have been pleasantly surprised. Amazon Prime is really good. The mix of original content and other movies and TV shows appeals to me. There’s a lot more there that appeals to my taste in entertainment. I’ve already binged all four seasons of The Man in the High Castle. I’ve now started watching The Boys as well. I will probably start paying for Amazon Prime, at least into the new year and see how it goes.

If Disney+ ever gets more content that I’d like to see, I’ll just wait until all episodes are available and just subscribe for a single month and then cancel again.