I’ve had the last three weeks off work and I’m going back tomorrow. I took the three weeks off because I can’t carry over any more vacation time and I needed to take that much time off to get under the limit.
I wish I didn’t have to go back! I’m gonna buy a lottery ticket before I go to sleep tonight.
About a month ago, we were having Thanksgiving dinner in shorts in the greater Vancouver area. Since then, we sorta skipped autumn all together and jumped straight into freezing temperatures and snow. There was perhaps a brief week or so of what I would normally consider “autumn” temperatures.
Last week it snowed but not enough for it stick thankfully. The temperatures are now hovering around freezing or slightly below at night. Some of the higher elevations got enough snow that it did stick around.
Since it got so cold so quickly, I am refusing to turn on the heat so soon. In the past, I’ve bundled up with hoodies or a North Face jacket but this year I am trying something new. My parents got me a really nice robe last year and I’m now wearing it nearly every day. It’s fluffy and soft, so it’s very pleasant to wear. It’s long enough to cover my legs, so more of my body heat gets retained. It’s got that classic tartan pattern to it, so I wouldn’t look out of place as an old man picking up a newspaper off a front porch (if I wasn’t so poor that I could afford an actual house). I quite enjoy lounging around in my robe while it’s so cold outside. I think I just need a pair of slipper to go with it and I’ll be all set.
The above clip is one of my recent favourites from Conan’s podcast. In this excerpt, Conan makes fun of one of the podcast producers, Matt Gourley, for liking a particular dessert at a local shop.
The following e-mail was apparently sent out to all Twitter employees today. There are rumours that as many as 50% of the company will be laid off.
I’ve been part of several layoffs and waiting to see if you have a job is obviously terrible. The longer you have to wait, the more it becomes like torture. Though I’ve been reading that many employees already know they don’t have a job since they’ve lost all access to their accounts. It seems like it’s not a great time to be associated with Twitter in any way.
Since buying my car in August of 2020, I’ve only done oil changes in terms of maintenance work. This week, I brought my car in for a more thorough inspection.
My mechanic didn’t find much at all. He changed the oil, replaced the cabin air filter, and rotated my tires. His only recommendation was that in about six months I will need new front brake pads and possibly a new battery. For now, I’m good to go.
It’s true when they say Toyota vehicles are reliable.
For almost the entire summer and well into the fall, I was developing a large-scale feature for the game I work on. Our game has featured an in-game store since it launched, allowing players to buy cosmetic items for themselves. Other games feature similar in-game stores but they also allow players to buy items for their friends as gifts. For the last several months, I assisted in developing a gifting feature for our store.
Specifically, I wrote all the back-end logic in our game so that we could communicate to the servers that handle our economy system that a player wanted to gift their friend an item or items. I’ve been a game developer for a long time and the schedule that initially was presented to me on when they wanted all of this to be done was aggressive to say the least. The desired date for this feature to be launched was today actually and I’m pleased to say, we did release this feature today. The required effort to get this done was, however, monumental, not just from me but from several teams over the last few months. There were lots of meetings, last second discoveries, many questions, and a plethora of moving parts and dependencies.
I’ve been told and I’m not sure if this is true but we are the first major title at the company to have a gifting feature in their store and that many other teams are looking to see how all this works out for us in the coming weeks and months. Being a pioneer for anything has both pros and cons but it is kinda cool to be the first ones to do something.
I’m not sure how much more money this will make for us but if it is an appreciable amount, I hope they remember that when they decide what my bonus will be next year. If you’re interested in reading more about this gifting feature, click here.