Month: August 2022

Last week I attended the largest conference (by attendance) on computer graphics, known as SIGGRAPH. After having just a virtual conference for the last two years, the conference returned to an in-person format. Vancouver lucked out in that the virtual-only conference years weren’t originally scheduled for Vancouver. If that had been the case, SIGGRAPH could have been away from Vancouver for about eight years, instead of the usual three or four.

I’m a cheap person, so I only attend the exhibits part of the conference. I usually walk around the show floor and look at the shiny things and also grab as much swag as I can. The exhibitors list this year was much smaller than years past. It just wasn’t all that exciting. Some of the bigger names that used to have an exhibit, like Google or Unreal, chose not to have any representation this year. I didn’t get a whole lot of swag either.

I also got an e-mail today that out of the over 10,000 people that registered to be there, 10 people self-reported testing positive for COVID-19 since attending the conference. That’s a fairly small number of people considering how many people went and how many were maskless inside. I am sure the real number of people who caught it at the conference is a bit higher than that. I wore an N95 inside the whole time, so I’m not worried at all.

I’m hoping the next time SIGGRAPH comes back to Vancouver that it will have more of the shine and dazzle that it did in the past.

I know I’ve made this rant before but just humour me and let me make it again. I tried to log onto two financial web sites tonight that I very rarely visit and I totally forgot their passwords. I can’t remember the last time I actually was able to log into those sites without having to reset the password every single time.

I know I sound like an old man when I complain about that. Most people either use the browser to remember the passwords or use a password manager. I imagine I’ll do that as well in the not-so distant future when I’m an old man with failing memory and a hazy understanding of what is going on. To be honest, at work, I just get the browser to remember all my passwords. All that confidential info on unreleased games, technical info, and other privileged docs, is just gated by my Firefox password manager. It’s pretty convenient.

I should just take my own advice and apply that to my personal browser.

About a year before the pandemic started, perhaps even longer than that, I noticed a set of two vehicles about three stalls down from my car in my parkade. It was a newer model Honda Odyssey and an Infinity SUV. Both were expensive and nice vehicles. What caught my attention was that these vehicles had obviously not been driven in a while.

Both vehicles had a thick layer of dirt and dust on them. A few weeks after I noticed them, a pile of parking tickets started to accumulate on their windshields. In our parkade, we have assigned parking spots and these two vehicles were parked in each other’s spots. These vehicles were clearly from the same home and the owners were just using their assigned spots interchangeably. Nevertheless, the a-hole parking authorities kept writing parking tickets.

A few months later, the parking tickets were removed the from dirty windshields of the vehicles. They were still dirty as hell and no one had driven them yet, but at least the parking tickets were gone. By now, we were into the pandemic, and someone had started drawing smiley faces on the dirty vehicles. These cars were just filthy now. Worse yet, the tires on both vehicles had started to deflate. I could only imagine what state these engines were in after not being used for a long time now.

Every year, the parkade gets power-washed but whoever was doing that, made sure to not come near these vehicles with the water, lest they damage them. As such, piles of dirt would accumulate around the deflated tires.

The years dragged on and these vehicles just sat there, until about a month ago. One day, I was walking to my car when I noticed both vehicles had been washed and their tires had either been replaced or filled with more air. It was clear that whoever owned these vehicles had returned and took care of whatever maintenance was required.

I can only guess whoever owned these cars were overseas for a while and couldn’t drive them. Then the pandemic hit and they were most likely trapped wherever they were for an extended period of time. Only now did they return.

I really wish I could ask the owners how they managed to drive these vehicles out of the parkade. Did they put more air into the tires before driving off? What state were the engines in? How much work did they need to do to get them roadworthy again?

Against my better judgement, I took a nap at 10:00pm. I was so tired that I could not but help crawl into bed and sleep. Part of me thought about just going to sleep for real at that time but I had stuff to do that I hadn’t done yet. So, I napped for about 30 minutes.

I thought that would make me wide awake for the rest of the night but it’s my real bedtime now and I am still exhausted. Time for real sleep.

I purchased a carbon dioxide monitoring device from Amazon recently. It was relatively affordable, about $100. It has a colour LED display which shows the CO2 reading in ppm, the temperature, and humidity. It also connects to wifi and it logs all the data it collects into an app I have on my tablet.

I purchased this device because I’ve been curious about the air quality in my apartment since I spend so much time at home now. I previously bought a device that measures the particulates in the air, as in how polluted or clean the air is. That device will tell you if the air is bad from say, forest fires, which has been common here in British Columbia in years past. The CO2 meter is a compliment to that and I guess it measures how “stuffy” the air is.

The good news is that the air in my apartment is generally very clean and very fresh. The CO2 meter is almost always below 500 ppm. Another good thing about this meter is that it is very portable, so it’s useful to bring on a trip, to measure how fresh the air is in a hotel for example. It also has an audible alarm that will ring if the CO2 level increases past a certain threshold. This is obviously useful for instances where high CO2 levels could be dangerous.

I encourage you to investigate if such a device could be useful for you.

After about a week of cooler and more tolerable temperatures, it got hot again today, just in time for the end of the weekend. I had to hook up my AC again and run it during the evening. I let it get to around 27 degrees Celsius before I couldn’t stand it and needed to cool down.

It’s supposed to be hot for the next two days before rain takes over again on Wednesday. I can’t wait for that.

It rained this evening and it was an old-fashioned, drenching, prolonged rain that is so typical of Vancouver weather. It was so welcoming to feel the cool rain as it seems like it has been weeks since we got any precipitation. After the stifling and draining heat wave we just had, to get this cooling reprieve was awesome.

I was actually outside in a hoodie and shorts when the rain started and it was so pleasant. It smelled like rain and the temperature felt normal again, not like the surface of the sun. I could tell the roads were dirty and slick with oil because I heard several cars spin their wheels along the steep hill that is close by to where I live. The initial bit of rain makes the roads slippery before more rain washes everything away.

It was a pleasant cool night and I hopefully will sleep well tonight.

The thermometer says it’s 26 degrees Celsius in my bedroom currently and while that isn’t exactly a cool, comfortable evening temperature, it definitely feels cooler than it has been in many days.

It feels cool enough that I turned off my AC for most of the evening. I hope to have the first good night of sleep in a while tonight.