Author: Erwin

For a pretty small operation, I’m always surprised when this web site turns up as a top five Google search result for anything. For a few years now, this site is top five result for the search term “yub nub“. For a Star Wars related phrase, I’m quite happy about that.

Just in the last week or so, this site has been turning up as top five result for another search. If you Google “mucous seal“, I’m right near the top of the list. Each day, I get about two or more people visiting this site because they were looking for “mucous seal” information. All this results from this post which three years ago, chronicled the removal of a small, benign cyst from the bottom of my mouth.

Given the number of hits I get, this seems like a common thing for people to have. It’s a shame that the original comments for that post were lost. In those comments, Gwilli linked to a hilarious hand drawn picture of what he though a mucous seal was… a seal covered in gross mucous.

So last night I was taking a smoke break in between looking at porn when I spotted the Google ad you see above. It features an Asian woman being a caressed by a white dude who I’ll only describe as “interesting”. His embrace sends off creepy vibes to me. I’m not sure why.

Now, in the over ten years of surfing the Internet, I think I’ve clicked on maybe five ads in total. The ad above though, was too tempting to resist. Once clicked, I was taken to a special, special place called chnlove.com. I know for a fact there are a ton of mail-order bride web sites out there but this was the first one that I’d perused in detail.

The most compelling thing I found first was the “success stories” page. It’s filled with testimonials from happy couples who were formed using the site. It’s here where the whole thing takes on the nature of a slo-mo car wreck. You kinda don’t want to look but you have to. The first thing you see is that many couples have decided to post pics of themselves. Now maybe I shouldn’t be surprised but the majority of the couples are older, white, and at times, weird looking dudes paired up with Chinese ladies about 10+ years their junior. Some of the couples are just uncomfortable to look at. It’s like if I started to date say… Danica McKellar. What an odd choice for me to pick. I actually thought I’d choose Megan… ah… Danica McKellar… she’s so smart… I wonder if we’d do integrals together… what?

So yeah, just read what some of these dudes have written:

“If you want to find love, Chinese woman first are beautiful and they want to please the man that love them. It’s very important that you be honest as they are and they will love you forever. I couldn’t have done this without them. Thank you again.”

That comes from a dude who looks like Wilfred Brimley. Now granted, I’m of an open mind, meaning that I am quite sure that at least a few of these relationships aren’t motivated by citizenship desires. In fact, a few of the pictures show couples where the male is very close in age to the lady and he’s not hideous looking either.

Go have a look for yourself, it’s quite an eye-opening experience.

I’ve decided I’m going to hang both my skateboard decks I own on the big column next to my desk at work. So far, all the column has done for me is block all the natural lighting coming from the windows. At least this way, it’ll be doing me some good.

If you’re like me, you are probably wondering how you mount a deck on a wall. According to Google, this is the best way.

Image courtesy of myconfinedspace.com

Though the “official” start to summer is still about 16 days away, unofficially in years past the weather should be quite nice around this time of year. The problem is that the weather has been pretty much crap since about November.

In Vancouver this year, we didn’t really have a spring. “Spring” as it were, was just a continuation of winter, except just two or three degrees warmer and lots more rain. Granted, it doesn’t dip below freezing any more but it’s just as gray, wet, and dreary as your average fall day. Just this evening, it was pouring rain and not your nice summer rain either. It was a soul-stealing cold rain. While walking home, I even briefly thought about bringing my wool coat back into rotation since it would not look or feel out of place.

The one good thing about this poor weather is that once a nice string of sunny days comes along, everyone quickly forgets how bad the days were. The question is, when are the sunny days finally going to arrive?

A common practice in the video game industry is to award each member of the development team a plaque once the game ships. Usually, the plaque contains the cover art for the title, the disc of the title, and a small metal plate with the member’s name and the name of the title. Some people have their plaques at home but a lot keep them at work.

Though I helped ship Sonic Rivals, I never received anything for being on that team. Maybe it had something to do with me leaving the company at alpha. For skate. they decided to do something different. Since it was a skateboarding game, they decided to forgo the usual plaque and instead, had custom decks done up for all the dev team members. We had a choice of two pieces of artwork: a single skeleton reaching up towards the skate. logo or the skate. army which you see above. You also had a choice of getting your name printed on the deck. After all that hard work on the game, I decided I deserved at least that little bit of recognition.

Sorry about the flash removing some detail. The characters you see on the deck are all the pros we signed for the first game. I left the protective plastic wrap on it because I need to bring it back to work since that’s where I want to leave it long term. Click on the pic above for a much larger picture.

UPDATE: After some tinkering I’ve been able to safely republish my entire blog. If you’re curious, it amounted to 2175 individual files and about 24 Mb worth of data.

All old references to the previous commenting system has been removed, making archive page loading much faster now. As a consequence to the republishing, the current commenting system has been backported to all my old pages, so if you want, you can go back to pre-2007 pages and leave comments there. Also, you might see one or two new things in the formatting. Thanks for you patience.

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As some of you long time readers know, this blog has not always used Blogger’s built-in and awesome commenting system. Actually, Blogger’s own commenting system didn’t exist until about a year and half ago. Previous to that, I used a free and external commenting system that I was never happy about.

It now appears that external commenting system has now gone down for good. Sadly, this means that any comments from about 2002 to about 2007 are now lost into the digital ether. I sincerely apologize to each and every one of you who took the time out to comment on this little dog and pony show. There were some classic comments made on this blog over the years.

The bad news continues in the form of longer load times on pages where it still references the old commenting system. Because of technical details I won’t go into, I can automatically strip out those references but it’ll invalidate the archive links you see to your right.

I’m still working out a solution. In the meantime, I’m sorry for the inconvenience.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJ-QSJmEgHU&hl=en]

Do you sometimes wonder what I do at work on an average day? Are you curious about how games are made? These two videos above are an exact, 100% accurate representation of the things I do while I’m at work. No joke.

When it comes to jobs, some people work alone and some people work in a team environment. I rather enjoy working on a team. A team environment though, necessitates that you adopt an understanding, thoughtful, and communal way of interacting with your fellow co-workers. That means you don’t leave the coffee machine messy when you’re done making your beverage. You don’t put all your dirty dishes in the sink, you put them in the dishwasher to get washed. You don’t check in broken code and then take off to Vegas for the weekend.

It should also go without saying that if you’re gonna share washrooms with your c0-workers, you kinda have to wash your hands when you’re done doing your business. That is just common and dare I say it, expected courtesy. Yet there a dude on my team who doesn’t wash his hands when he’s done taking a leak. I’ve seen it twice with my own eyes. I’ve been side by side with him at the urinals. When we were both done, I went to the sink and he just left the washroom. Incredible! I’m pretty sure his penis hand was also the door-opening hand.

The thing I don’t understand is that he’s a clean cut looking dude. He’s not slovenly nor unkempt. Just by looking at him you wouldn’t know he’s not a hand washer. Now here’s another thing, I don’t want to act all high and mighty. Have I not washed after taking a leak before? Yes, I have but that was in the privacy of my own home. If I’m ever out in public, I always do what I would want another dude to do. No one should be walking around with penis tainted hands.

I don’t even want to know what he does after a deuce.

I’m in the market for a new digital camera since the one I currently own was made in 2002 and is the size of a car battery and requires roughly the same amount of juice. Staples is actually a great place for digital cameras as their prices can be very low. About two weekends ago, I headed down to my local suburban Staples with the intention of buying a particular model.

Upon entering the store, I made a beeline to the digital cameras. I made a quick glance of their selection and to my dismay, the camera I wanted was not there. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone saunter up next to me.

“Looking to buy a new digital camera today?”

I looked over. It was a young dude, probably no more than in his early twenties. He had a nametag on which I didn’t read too carefully.

“Yes actually but the camera I wanted isn’t on sale here.”

“Well, if you do make a purchase today, I hope you consider doing it with our Staples MasterCard. It’s got a really low interest rate and if you sign up today, you’ll get $100 worth of Staples merchandise for free, just for signing up.”

I immediately felt bad for this guy. It was a sunny, beautiful weekend and he was stuck inside a Staples trying to get people to sign up for new credit cards. Was this the only job he could get? Maybe he enjoys it. All I knew was that I wasn’t going to sign up for more debt today.

If it were my father in this situation, he’d just tell the guy flat out no and then dismiss him. I’m not my father, so I can’t just do things like that, which probably explains why things went the way they did from this point on.

“Yeah, I don’t need another credit card. I’m trying to decrease the amount of debt I carry and I already have two credit cards.”

This was of course, all true. Actually, I’m not in debt anymore but hey, I’d like to stay that way and having two Visas is more than enough.

“I understand but our rates are less than five percent for the first six months, with no annual fees, and remember the free $100 worth of Staples stuff. Here, why don’t you take the free $100 card and we’ll get started on the paperwork?”

He held out this card for me to take. This guy wasn’t taking no for an answer just yet.

“No thanks but I have a real problem when it comes to large amounts of credit and temptation. I’ve actually maxed out credit cards buying booze and other expensive items.”

I swear those words just came out of my mouth and I had no idea I was going to say them. It was out there though and I kinda just ran with it.

“I see. You know, you don’t have to buy those things with this credit card. Why don’t you just keep your purchases small?”

“I don’t think this is a good idea. To be honest, I’m a recovering alcoholic and this is making me uncomfortable. I have a real problem with temptation and indulgence.”

“Really?”

The dude didn’t look like he was completely buying it but I think I had come outta nowhere with this stuff that he wasn’t sure what to think.

“Yeah. This isn’t good. In situations like these, I’m supposed to call my AA sponsor and he’s at Cultus Lake with his family. Gee, I better call him now…”

I reached down to my pockets of my shorts to get my phone but before I could, he stopped me.

“Ok, well you have a good day then.”

With that he walked away to leave me in peace and with my credit rating intact. I don’t feel all that bad about lying to him because I’m sure other people are way more rude to him than I was. I just sometimes say no in a different way.

As a final note, I am still looking for a new digital camera.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RA-yRX666L0&hl=en]

Alan Kalter continues to kick ass.