Month: February 2024

Over the decade that I’ve lived in my apartment I’ve had numerous fire alarms go off while I’ve been home. I’m fairly certain that this evening, for the first time, I had the alarm go off while I was naked and in the shower.

Now if you’ve lived in my building for any amount of time, you’ll realize that false alarms are a way of life. So when the alarm went off while I was cleaning my genitals, I didn’t even think once to end my shower early and proceed out of the building.

The alarm ended a minute after it started, which indicated it was indeed a false alarm. People, myself included, will go back to sleep if the alarm goes off in the middle of the night. If we ever get a real alarm, we’re all gonna be in big trouble.

For the last several weeks, I’ve scaled back my efforts on the frontlines of my war on the ants. When I open the doors of my bathroom and kitchen sink cabinets to get things, I’ll do a quick look around to see if I can observe any ants. These aren’t completely thorough observations but I haven’t seen any. It doesn’t mean they aren’t there though.

I have no doubt they are still transiting along the threshold between my bathroom and bedroom though. That’s where the battle was fought last, when I spent some appreciable time and effort into observation and sealing of cracks and holes. Since then, the ants have not affected my day-to-day life. That’s a subjective statement though. Who knows what they’re doing behind my walls. For ants, out of sight might mean out of mind, but that doesn’t mean they’re doing nothing.

I feel like once spring rolls around, I’ll need to sit down on the floor, and make new observations to see where they’re coming from and where they are going.

In a previous post, I wrote about how my information was once again exposed to hackers by MGM. I made a request to have my account deleted and more than a month later, they finally were able to process my request.

I had to prove who I was by entering in some of my personal info, which is kinda ironic since that personal info is already public due to MGM’s failure to keep that information private. What were they doing in those six weeks while I waited for them to delete my account?

Anyways, the account is now deleted and thanks to MGM, I now have a year’s worth of free credit monitoring. You know, MGM offered free credit monitoring to everyone who had they accounts hacked and I think that was hundreds of thousands of accounts. That must have cost them some money.

While nothing alarming has been reported by the credit monitoring, since the beginning of January, I’ve had at least two e-mails sent to me with password reset links for two popular social media sites. Someone is obviously trying to probe sites and entering in my e-mail address to see if there’s an account attached. Furthermore, at least a dozen times a day, people around the world try to access the e-mail account that was associated with that MGM account. At least for now, they can’t get in because they don’t have my password and I have two-factor authentication on. I do wonder if one day they’ll figure a way in. At least I won’t have to worry about MGM anymore.

Do you own a refrigerator? Do you have bottles and jars of condiments? If you have both, you might relate to this post.

As one does, after you open a bottle or jar of salad dressing, sauce, marinade, jam and the like, you need to put almost all of these items under refrigeration lest they start to go bad. More often than not, I never wind up using all of said item before it reaches its ultimate best before date.

So here’s the thing about a container of something in the fridge. One day it’s great, still edible, and thus it belongs in the fridge. It’s like that for many days and then one day its no longer any good. I don’t take notice of when that transition happens. As I bought more of these condiments, they just began to take up more space on the shelf that I designated as the “condiment shelf”.

It got to the point that I noticed nearly a quarter of the usable space in my fridge was taken up by these useless and out of date containers. The shelf was full of stuff that I’d never use again. Weeks would go by where I’d open the fridge to get something, see this shelf, and mutter something about needing to clean it up.

Well, one day, about a week ago, I designated one evening as “shelf clean up night”. I began that evening by hauling out every single container from that shelf and lined them all up on my stove. Now if this were the 1950s, I would have just tossed all of them into a garbage bag and tossed that into the nearest body of water. Instead, this is the 21st century and we’re barely more civilized since then, but at least we’re able to recycle.

Since all the containers were either glass or plastic, they were all great candidates for recycling. All I needed to do was to empty out the jars and bottles, rinse them, and toss them into a bag. It took me about 45 minutes to get everything emptied and cleaned. That’s how many containers there were. I didn’t care though because I was left with a great amount of satisfaction. Also, my fridge looks so empty now in comparison.

The wonderful thing is, the cycle will continue again. I have a jar of blueberry jam that is still months away from expiring and there’s a jar of capers I’m using when I make chicken piccata. They look almost lonely in my fridge. Who knows what’s gonna happen. Maybe I use all of those ingredients. Maybe I don’t and they’re joined by more jars and bottles.

In a year, we might be doing this all again.

I don’t have all my tax slips and receipts in my possession for tax year 2023, but I have enough of the ones that make the most impact on my tax return. Over the weekend, I entered all the information I knew into some tax software.

Without any major changes to my financial situation, I still owe the government over $4200 in taxes. For someone who makes millions of dollars a year, that amount might be trivial for a tax bill, but it’s a decent amount of money for me. The only way I can change the situation is to contribute more to my RRSP. I only wish there was some favourable ratio to the amount I owe with the amount I contribute. Unfortunately, in my current situation, it appears that for every dollar I owe, I need to contribute about two dollars to my RRSP to offset that dollar. So, to essentially break even, I need to contribute $8000.

The question facing me now is, do I want to spend $4200 and never see that again, or shuffle away $8000 for a later date? There’s pros and cons for both. If I didn’t have $8000, I’d either have to pay the $4200 somehow or then entertain borrowing $8000 for an RRSP loan. If I contribute the $8000, I won’t see that money for a while, since it’s normally earmarked for retirement. Or do I look at the tax bill as $4200 gone but about $4000 still in my bank account, rather $8000 gone in total?

Maybe I should just bite the bullet and contribute the whole $8000 to my RRSP. One reason for doing so is that the RRSP I’d contribute to is an investment portfolio that I have set up through work. The returns on my portfolio have been quite impressive. In the last three months of 2023, the return on that portfolio was over 10%. Other than the money I spent on my apartment, the money invested there has been one of the best financial choices I’ve made. So in all likelihood, if the $8000 goes in there, it will almost certainly be worth more than $8000 in just a few months.

I recognize that I am very lucky to just have a liquid $8k available to me. This is a large sum of money that perhaps other wouldn’t have on hand this quickly. I am leaning towards just using it to contribute to my RRSP. First, it saves me from having to give the government more money. Second, barring any crazy stock market shenanigans, it should begin to make more money almost immediately. Averaged over time, it will undoubtedly be worth more than $8000 in a year or two.

One more final thing that this has made me think about. I feel like I should perhaps visit a tax professional because there’s gotta be some other tax shelter that I haven’t considered other than RRSPs. Like how do rich people get away with not paying taxes?

Do you think twice or hesitate when you need to restart or reboot your computer? Normally, when it comes to my home computers, it’s not a big deal. The need doesn’t arise very often and when it does, I’m back up and running in a minute or so. Unfortunately, when it comes to my work computer, rebooting is a pain in the ass.

The reason for this is because for game development, I require a large number of programs to be running at the same time to be productive. At any given moment, my work computer is running two code editors (also known as an IDE), source control program (Perforce for us), e-mail client (Outlook), a web browser with dozens of tabs, Slack, a few File Explorer windows, and at least three proprietary programs that assist with making the game. When I reboot my workstation, all those programs need to shut down, and when Windows boots up again, all of those programs need to be started again.

It’s kinda a pain in the ass to have to launch all of those programs. Also, some of them don’t just start immediately and can be used. Some of them are quite resource intensive and take a while to start and even when they are running, they then need to index a large data set before the program can be used fully. Some times my browser doesn’t remember all the tabs it had open. Even when it does, each tab actually needs to load the page again when you click on it, which most of the time requires re-authenticating with my credentials.

So while it may take less than a minute for Windows to shut down and restart again. It can take well over five minutes to get all my programs running again and web pages reloaded before I can begin to be productive again.

I’m quite envious of the people who can do their jobs with just one or two program and a few browser tabs.

I went to the dentist for a cleaning last week and while I normally hate visiting the dentist, my visit this time was one of the more pleasant ones.

When I arrived for my 11am appointment, there was only one person at the desk, and she knew I was coming because she addressed me by my name immediately. Usually, the front desk is bustling with activity, with sometimes up to three people working the phones and handling patients.

I was then directly to the waiting area, which was empty. Usually there’s at least one or two people waiting but I had the whole place to myself. From where I was sitting, I could sorta see into the back area where they conduct the oral torture. I didn’t see a whole lot going in there and it was very quiet for a dental office. I could only discern one dental assistant working back there and that was the one who came to get shortly after.

My cleaning went smoothly and the entire time I was in the chair, I couldn’t hear any other activity from the other chairs and treatment rooms. Normally, I hear other people talking or the sounds of the suction or the drills. I think I was the only patient there the entire time.

When I was done with the cleaning, I went back out to the front to settle up with the lone receptionist. The waiting room was still devoid of people. The whole experience was quite pleasant, as far as dentist visits go. It felt like I had a private clinic set up that was only for me and I didn’t have to mix with the rest of the public. Is this how rich people do dentistry? They are so lucky!