Month: August 2021

So I’ve removed almost all the carpet in my apartment in preparation of getting new flooring. There’s just exposed concrete all over my home. This interim state of my floors has left me with a new revelation. I need to be careful about dropping things on my floor now.

With carpet and an underpad I was able to drop electronics and other things on the floor and not really worry about them. I’ve dropped phones, game controllers, tablets, and remote controls on my carpet without a single problem. I can’t do that anymore. Even though I have a case on my phone, the concrete is unforgiving. I’ve already had a few close calls where I almost dropped my phone.

I also understand that even when I get my floors installed (vinyl plank? laminate?), things aren’t gonna get that much better. I guess people are just more careful when their floors are hard?

I have a four-day weekend coming up so I’m gonna sleep in, try to endure this latest heat wave, and eat fried foods. I hope everyone stays safe and is well.

This afternoon I had to go run an errand and I knew I wouldn’t make it home in time for a Zoom meeting. I did the next best thing and I parked my car in a mostly empty parking lot and joined the meeting there.

I was extra prepared and brought my wireless headset and plugged it into my phone. Zoom on a smartphone suffices unless people screen share, which then makes it a bit more difficult. Fortunately for me, my meeting had no screen sharing and lasted only fifteen minutes. I kept my camera off, so I don’t think anyone even knew I was in my car in a parking lot.

I’ve seen lots of people now partake in Zoom meetings while in a car, some even driving. I don’t recommend it but people still do it. The pandemic has allowed us to take calls almost everywhere now.

It’s gross and I can’t imagine how much sodium he consumed.

I currently have airline tickets booked for Florida in November. They are fully refundable and from what I can tell, it seems very likely that I’ll be asking for a refund.

We just had a long weekend this week but I have another one coming up. I get Thursday and Friday off next week because my team has decided to give everyone two days off to relax and get rested. It’s a very kind and generous gesture. It’s also a sign that they don’t want us to be working too hard.

I’ve already determined that I will spend most of those days ripping up carpet in my bedroom now that the task is basically complete in my living room.

After I bought my car last September, I went to Walmart and bought a tire pressure gauge because I knew it was important to maintain proper air pressure in your tires. I took the gauge home, put it in the glove compartment of my car, and promptly forgot about it for almost a year.

Last week, I was out shopping when I noticed my front tires looked a bit underinflated. I got home, fished out the tire pressure gauge, and it was then I realized I had never measured the pressure in a tire before. It was easy to do fortunately and I discovered that all my tires were basically at 28 psi, several hours after waiting for the tires to cool down. The people at Toyota suggest the optimal tire pressure for my car is 32 psi, so all my tires needed some air.

This maybe embarrassing to admit, but I’ve never put air in a car tire before. I’ve been driving on and off since I was a teenager but never had to do tire maintenance before. Now that I own my vehicle, this is the type of stuff that I’m having to deal with. Of course, I know that most gas stations have a spot where they have a compressor when you can add air to your tires. When I was kid and for most of my adult life, this air was free of charge. Recently, in an effort to squeeze as much money out of people as possible, gas stations have begun to charge people for air.

I also live fairly close to two different car tire shops and I know both will check your tire pressure and inflate your tires for free. I didn’t think this was the best idea since you have to rely on them to be not busy and they probably want to do work that makes them money rather than filling up some random person’s tires with air. Most importantly, I wanted to do it myself, rather let someone else do it.

So I decided to bite the bullet and headed off to the nearest gas station for some air. When I got there, I saw it cost $1.50 for about five minutes of compressor time. You don’t want to waste all that time, so I took the caps off all the valve stems on my tires before paying. After I tapped my credit card, the compressor roared to life, noisy and rumbly. I grabbed the hose and proceeded to give the first time a short burst of air. I checked the pressure with my gauge. It was nearly at 30 psi, so I gave it another blast. That was enough to get it right up to 32 psi. I repeated the same thing with the three other tires. It wasn’t that difficult at all.

I finished quickly enough that when I put the hose back, the next person in line for air was able to fill up his tires before the time expired. That guy got a freebie from me.

I am learning lots about car maintenance and I believe at this rate, I will be able to rebuild my engine by September.

In a previous post, I detailed that when I eventually “return” to work, it won’t be to the Burnaby studio as my employer has procured another location in Vancouver proper for several teams. The details of this new location are now public.

Electronic Arts to open massive expansion office in Vancouver’s False Creek Flats | Urbanized

The former MEC headquarters at 1077 Great Northern Way in Vancouver’s False Creek Flats will become a major office of Electronic Arts (EA).

The above article has a lot of info on the building and the location but the highlights are:

• the building used to be the headquarters for MEC
• it’s a short walk to the VCC-Clark Skytrain station
• EA will be leasing the entire building and will house several teams there
• it will probably be spring 2022 before the building will be ready

There are a lot more details to be determined but at least the info is public now.

It was a long weekend here in British Columbia so I didn’t have to work today. I spent most of the long weekend in just my underwear with a respirator, ripping up the carpet in my living room. It was hot all weekend, with temperatures reaching up to 27 degrees Celsius in my apartment. I tried to work mainly in the evening when it was supposed to be cool but getting sweaty was unavoidable.

The good news is that I have essentially removed all the carpet from my living room. I removed all the underpad and put it all in garbage bags. For some of the high traffic areas, I just laid the carpet strips I cut back where they were originally, just because I didn’t want to walk on bare, rough concrete all the time. I can roll up these strips in less than a minute though. In the less travelled areas, I removed everything. For example, places where I have furniture, those pieces now just sit on the concrete.

There is also some bad news. As I suspected, my concrete floor is not very even. My dining room table now sits on concrete. The first thing I noticed when I put the table back was that it now rocks back and forth. There is a possibility that one leg is perhaps shorter than the rest but the odds of that are pretty low. I know the table is from Ikea but even Ikea furniture isn’t that bad. I also had a bookcase in the same spot while I was moving things around and the bookcase also rocked back and forth. There is some strong indication that is part of the concrete is fairly uneven. I can’t see like a local high spot or hill either, so it’s not like I can just grind down a small spot to make things better. This is the type of unevenness that is spread over several feet. It seems like this is the worst-case scenario.

Like I said in my previous post, the best way to solve this is to pour a thin layer of concrete across the entire living room to level it out completely. This afternoon, I played a mental game of Tetris to see if it was possible to move all my furniture out of my living room and into the other parts of my apartment. It wouldn’t be pretty and some areas wouldn’t be accessible anymore but I feel like between my kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, and balcony, I could get everything out of there. The key would be using as much vertical space as possible. I’d also need to utilize the surface of my bed to store things as well.

In the next few days, I need to plan on how I’m gonna rip up the carpet in my bedroom. There’s less furniture in there but my bed is the biggest piece in my entire apartment and it’s heavy and difficult to move.