Author: Erwin

MY TEACHERS – PART 1

I don’t consider myself an incredibly successful person but the reality is that I could have turned out a lot worse. While none of us are perfect, for the most part, I’m happy with both my traits and character. There’s no doubt my parents have some influence on that but a lot of the credit must go to my teachers.

Yes, it’s cliched but teachers do have a lot of impact on children’s lives. Beyond teaching them important stuff, great teachers provide children with a nurturing, safe environment so they can be themselves, grow, and explore. Of all the shepards of the world, teachers have the most important flock.

In my own life, I’ve had the pleasure to have been taught by some excellent teachers. In this post, I salute my elementary school teachers.

Grades one and two were taught to me by Mrs. Stevenson and Mrs. Weir. Both were quite young and in hindsight much later, both were quite hawt. Oh dear, that’s not the right way to put it. Um, they were both very kind and patient teachers. Being the new kid, Mrs. Stevenson really tried hard to ease my way into a new class. By the way, I still know one girl I met from the first day at my new school. Thanks to both teachers for keeping me safe in those formative years.

Mrs. Tanaka was my fourth grade teacher. She had a reputation that preceded her. We started hearing about how awesome she was while we were in third grade. That alone made me want to get the whole school year over with so that I could be in her class.

When the fourth grade arrived, I found out that the hype was well deserved. Mrs. Tanaka ran a wonderful classroom. She was enthusiastic about teaching and was great with her students. The best thing about her was that she worked hard to let everyone be themselves. The environment she provided allowed people to be not afraid of letting their personality shine through.

It was in Mrs. Tanaka’s class that I first realized I had a sense of humour that was perhaps a bit sharper than the average student of my age. I don’t think I was the class clown. A clown disrupts the class and often draws the ire of the teacher. I did more of the observational comedy stuff. This part I am absolutely not making up. On one report card, Mrs. Tanaka actually wrote that I was pretty good with the “one-liners”. If I still have that report card, I will scan and post it. How often does a fourth grade teacher compliment a nine year-old kid on his comedic prowness?

My sixth and seventh grades were taught by a woman named Mrs D. I can’t spell her last name because I don’t remember the spelling and it was a tough name to get right. My original sixth grade class was huge and it was necessary to split the class into two. It wasn’t so big, however, to split it evenly, so only five or six students had to leave the main class.

They were going to stick these overflow students in with the seventh grade class. Now, when you’re in elementary school, the seventh graders represent the mightiest of the mighty. They were the oldest students in the school and were either feared, respected or both. Some of them had even entered puberty!

Somehow, they chose the five or six students that they believed had the maturity and skills to cope being in a seventh grade class (even though we’d being doing our own sixth grade work). For some reason, I was chosen to be in that bunch.

It was hella scary at first. All the seventh grade guys seemed have deeper voices and they all had scary peach fuzz hair on their faces. Most of the seventh grade girls wore makeup and they had developed breasts which made my pants tight.

As scary as it was, Mrs. D. made sure the seventh graders never took any liberties with us, sorta like McSorley with Gretzky. Man, one time she unleashed a firestorm of a verbal tirade at some dude that looked at one of us wrong. She was also careful not to make us look like we needed too much protection because that’ll get you a shiv in the gut at recess.

On the academic side, Mrs. D. introduced us to some pretty cool books like A Wrinkle in Time. Oh that Charles Wallace! She also let us read radio plays like the classic Flight into Danger. We all got to pick several parts from the play and we’d read the whole production aloud to the class. Here’s a bit of trivia, Flight into Danger was the basis for the Airplane! movie. Years before I even knew who Leslie Nielsen was, I was asking one of my classmates if she had either the chicken or the fish.

In the seventh grade, I was also taught by Mrs. D. who seemed quite pleased to have us back as students. Many years later, while I was in undergrad, I heard that Mrs. D had passed away. To this day, she’s still the only teacher I know who’s not with us anymore.

So, there you have it, the teachers who guided and helped me along the way between 6 and 12. I know none of those teachers will ever get to read this but thanks for being there.

Next, the teachers who helped me along in my most awkward of years, my teens! Stay tuned for D&D goodness!

THOUGHTS IN MY HEAD RIGHT NOW

1. If there’s a muscle between your eyebrows, mine is randomly twitching and has been for the last two days. I wonder what that could mean?

2. I really want my Xbox 360.

3. I should probably order that widescreen LCD monitor for my Xbox 360.

4. I wish I had gone to bed earlier.

5. I might open a new bank account with an Indian-based bank.

6. I should probably get new shoelaces pretty soon.

7. I really want my Xbox 360.

8. I was probably the last person on Earth to get call display for their cell phone.

9. I’ll end this list one short of ten.

OH PATIENCE

I consider myself a patient person. I know it’s a virtue and it’s something I strive to maintain. I do exceedingly well in lineups. I realize there’s nothing I can do to make the line go faster, so if I want to pay for something then I’m going to have to wait. The only other choice is leave but without whatever I was waiting for. Realizing this keep me calm while others fume around me.

Traffic is harder to accept but if there isn’t a shortcut to be used, waiting is the only thing you can do. Honking the horn isn’t going to make things better. So you can either sit in traffic and be grumpy about it or you can sit in traffic and be calm about it.

Now in most cases, I’d like to think I’m kinda like Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn in The Phantom Menance. When dueling with the evil Darth Maul, the two got separated and trapped between timed force fields. While the Maul paced impatiently like a caged animal, Jinn dropped down into a meditative pose to calm his nerves and focus his energies. Now forget for a second that moments after the force fields switched off, Maul put a large hole in Jinn’s chest and killed him.

As patient as I think I might be, this damn Xbox thing has gotten to me. My 360 was supposed to ship either last Friday or today, but now sources tell me that they won’t ship until probably next week. As a sign that I’m crumbling under the anticipation, I bought a $45 VGA cable for the Xbox 360 I don’t even own yet. The other end of the cable is going to a widescreen LCD monitor that I haven’t even ordered yet. The next step is probably going to see me buy games for it.

And in other news, I’d like everyone to welcome a new blogger to scene. Hot on the heels of GK.com, gwilli, Bone, and many, many others, comes Joel himself. After a delay of many months, his blog is now live. While you may not agree with some of his opinions, please go say hi to him.

MALLS

As if by some unspoken signal, people decided to flock to the malls this weekend in massive numbers. On Saturday afternoon, I met up with my good friend Garrett at Coquitlam Centre. I had to park my car near the outer edges of the lot because there were so many people there. It really surprised me at how crowded the mall was. I guess there are only four weekends until Christmas (three now).

Anyways, I kinda got annoyed at the amount of people I had to contend with inside the mall. I was still in the mode of shopping for myself, not for presents, so really I should have been exempt from the crowds. We later decided to get a snack at the food court after GK got his item. The area was packed with people and I had to line up for several minutes to get my poutine. It was delicious but I wished I had gotten the large size. By the way, I ate very little in the way of healthy food this weekend. Poutine on Saturday and several pieces of KFC on Sunday.

Then I tried to tempt fate again on Sunday. I busted one of my shoelaces last week, so I’ve been walking around with an unsecured shoe. I unfortunately forgot to buy some when I was at the mall on Saturday so I had this crazy idea Lougheed Mall wouldn’t be packed today. I decided I’d go take a look at how packed the parking lot was.

When I got there, it didn’t take me long to realize things were probably a madhouse inside the mall. People were parked in areas they shouldn’t be in and there were vehicles circling all over the place. I decided to leave immediately and saw there were even lineups to get out of the parking lot. I had to use a little known shortcut to avoid waiting for at least ten minutes for the traffic to clear.

I have decided I will not visit any suburban malls until after Christmas is over. I might duck into Pacific Centre since it’s so close to work and it’s traditionally less busier than other malls. And that’s your weekend forecast.

ESCAPE FROM HOTH

It began to snow again in the late afternoon and it was the kind that began sticking. There were many people in the Lower Mainland who decided to leave work early, hoping either to get home sooner or to give themselves more time to commute home.

Since it’s milestone week for my team, we had some serious work to get done and even if it were blazing sunshine outside, we’d have to stay late tonight. A few of us ventured outside around 6pm on our dinner break. It was a bit of mess outside, wet snow was being blown sideways so it was constantly in your face. Snow had accumulated in earnest on the ground again.

At 9pm, I looked outside the windows from my vantage point on the 12th floor. I was looking east along Pender. I could tell there was a lot of snow on the ground. There were very few pedestrians walking about and even fewer vehicles. It seemed if you were smart, you had long gone inside or home. Then, I turned around and saw all the people still at work.

The whole situation seemed really familiar to me but it took me a few minutes to grasp it. You know the part in The Empire Strikes Back where Imperial troops have landed on Hoth? The part where the last few Rebels are still inside their base even as snowtroopers are breaching the walls? Yeah, well, we were the crazy ass Rebels tonight. Even as the temperature was falling, snow was piling up, and transit was being delayed or cancelled we continued to pound away at our keyboards for some reason.

At 9:30pm, I caught the last transport off of Hoth and returned to the Outer Rim territories. We’d didn’t have to run any Imperial blockades but I did have a kickass bus driver who was passing cars left and right. I think he may have done the Kessel run in record time.

Wow, that was a post heavily steeped in Star Wars terminology.

PLAYTESTING

Thanks to a very generous co-worker, I was able to borrow a PSP and take it home. This allowed me to play Sonic Rivals for the first time since the end of July. I will admit I looked at the credits as the first order of business. Man, what an ego I have!

Next was the actual game play. They did a ton of work on the game after I left. It’s been polished and improved in many places that needed it. One set of tracks got a fantastic makeover. I looked for several in game objects that I was responsible for programming the behaviour. Though the game is a race essentially, I stopped several times to examine those objects in detail. Oh there was spike horizontal log, which exhibited the damped harmonic motion I so happily wrote in. Then there was the catapult which caused me so much consternation but thanks to Rich, it finally worked. Who could forget frozen air geyser, which froze characters just like I remembered it.

I’m still working through the game but I can see they cut a few things. For example, I had this jack-in-the-box that sprung open when you jumped on it. It’s still there but nothing happens when you touch it. Why that is, I’m not sure. I’m still eagerly awaiting the appearance of the black holes which were a pain to get working. They were still kinda wonky when I left so maybe that got cut too. I’m most looking forward to the monkey boss. What a ton of work that was. Imagine a huge mechanical monkey that shoots missiles that embed into the ground that also has a detachable flying head that does a beam attack. I left it in a somewhat shaky state so I feel sorry for who had to clean it up after me. I wonder how it’ll look.

Rivals now has an overall score of 72 over on metacritic. That ain’t bad but it’s slightly under good.