Month: March 2022

Before Amy Sedaris appeared on The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett, she once gave David Letterman a tour of her neighbourhood at 4am in the morning.

So I’ve decided to get a new home theatre sound system for my modest apartment. Since about 2006, I have been using a very budget Pioneer sound system that was designed to be used with the Xbox 360. Some of you might know that we’re now two console generations beyond that now. Anyways, this was one of the cheapest 5.1 systems that I could find at the time. It had all the discrete speakers, a subwoofer, and it decoded both Dolby Digital and DTS signals, so it gave me a true surround sound experience for both games and movies, albeit at the most basic level. The speakers were and remain very average in terms of sound quality but it’s been “good enough” for an amazing sixteen years.

I am lucky enough to have the means to get an upgrade though and my experience of getting a new TV last summer really showed me that technology is definitely worth upgrading. I’m going to get an actual A/V receiver and also new speakers, something larger those small grey cubes I’m using right now.

Of course, with most things these days, it’s not as simple as just going online and ordering everything I want. Supply chain issues have impacted A/V receiver availability, mostly from the lack of microchips. My research showed me two receivers that matched both my budget and requirements but one of the choices is completely sold out, so I’m left with one choice really. Actually, the remaining choice doesn’t have any confirmed inventory in the Vancouver area, so I’m left to call individual stores to see if they have any in stock. This is a first-world problem of course and this is just a minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things.

My ears can’t wait to hear better gaming and movies in the near future.

The province of British Columbia hasn’t been that great at testing its citizens in the last six months or so. Rapid tests are in short supply. Currently, you have to be 50 years or older to receive free rapid tests. Even then, you only get five tests every 28 days. In comparison, Alberta, which has handled the pandemic worse than British Columbia, lets anyone over the age of 14 have five tests every 14 days. It boggles my mind how this province is so bad at testing. I’m not sure why Alberta can supply tests to more of their residents and more frequently.

Anyways, since I’m not 50 years old yet, only my parents have been able to get some free test kits. On the weekend, I showed my parents how to do the test. It’s pretty simple: a nose snab, some liquid, and a tester. My Mom wanted to do a test to practice, so we did one for her. She tested negative.

My parents gave me a box of their tests, so I have five now. I hope I can get some of my own soon as well.

According to my math, I got about ten hours of sleep on Saturday night. I’m not sure what got me so tired that I needed that much sleep. Maybe it was the time change or maybe it was the general fatigue of living through pandemic. In any case, it’s been a long time since I’ve gotten that much sleep.

I’ll probably feel a bit groggy on Monday morning as my body adjusts to the time change. It’s not really this late! I was robbed of an hour!

I’m super gassy tonight and I will probably fart in my sleep. I am an adult.

My Internet goes out for about ten minutes every second Tuesday of the month because my building does “generator” testing. I don’t know what that entails but I do know that the elevators and all the equipment that my ISP keeps in the building loses power when the testing happens. I’m not sure why the electricity stays on for the units themselves. Why can’t the ISP equipment be on that same circuit?

Usually the testing is done at 10am or so and luckily, I have no meetings on Tuesdays at that time. For the entire time I’ve been work for home, this hasn’t been a problem, until today.

I had to interview a candidate over Zoom today and the interview was to start at 10am. I didn’t realize today was the second Tuesday of this month. I had working Internet until basically 9:59am, which was also the moment I decided to click on the Zoom meeting link. I couldn’t connect and I instantly knew what it was.

I frantically was trying to figure out how to get the Zoom meeting link onto my phone. I kinda panicked when I should have just typed in the meeting ID and password. It took me about five minutes before I finally clued into that.

Luckily, there was another engineer in the interview, so the candidate wasn’t alone the whole time. I apologized for being late, explained to them what happened, and did the interview using just my phone. It wasn’t ideal but I made it work.

In the past, many companies, including my employer have created Slack channels with the term “war room” in the name. For companies in the games industry, such channels are usually used to discuss issues that are happening in a game that is already released. The issues in question are likely serious, impacting the game in a manner that affects many users. For a game launch, “war room” channels are a hot bed of activity as we need to monitor if servers are overloaded for example.

With the recent barbaric invasion of Ukraine by Russian armed forces, there are actual “war rooms” in action now, directing real military assets in life and death situations. I think one or more individuals decided our Slack channels shouldn’t evoke reminders of the actual war that is on-going, so some of they have been renamed. In one case, I’ve seen the term “war room” in the channel name be replaced with simply “hq”. I think “command-centre” would have been fine as well.

Conan O’Brien has said that his favourite skit that he’s ever been part of was the “Old Time Baseball” bit. In it, one of the actors who were part of the “old-fashioned” villagers caught the attention of a lot of viewers, due to her commitment to the character and good chemistry with Conan. Nearly twenty years later, Nell Del Giudice spoke to Team Coco about her experience on the day Conan came to film.

After talking to the LG support department, I received my new remote control for my TV today. It arrived via courier and I was impressed by how quickly everything got resolved. They didn’t bother to ask me to send back the old remote or anything. The invoice showed me that the retail price of this remote is $78.44, so I’m glad I got all this taken care of while under warranty.

I thought I’d have to do some pairing procedure to make my TV recognize my new remote but it handled it seamlessly. This new remote works much better than my old one as it does not have the sticky down button. Scrolling through menus is no longer an inconvenience.

One of the many consequences of the conflict in Europe is that the Russian government has blocked access to Twitter for its citizens. One can guess this is to prevent their citizens from finding out the true nature of the invasion. As a result though, this means that the plethora of Russian Twitter bots and trolls can no longer run their disinformation campaigns.

Many people on Twitter have remarked that disinformation rhetoric is down sharply. I can just imagine right-wing and conservative folks across North America are now lost, sitting quietly, wondering what and who they should be mad at next.

In general, I think Twitter is terrible and the company itself has been a stain on society. This just goes to show that if Twitter should have banned these bots and trolls a long time ago.