Author: Erwin

For thousands of students in the Lower Mainland, today marked the first day of school for the academic year. From the tiny ones in kindergarten to the first year noobs at UBC, lots of people were experiencing new things today.

I for one, expected traffic to be a lot more congested this morning. It turns out I was wrong. Yeah, there were a lot more cars on my street this morning but that’s because I live a block away from an elementary school. Other than that, it was a pretty good commute. My bus was actually less crowded than usual which was a most pleasant surprise. I got a nice comfy seat to myself. I hope this trend continues tomorrow.

On a bus related note, I managed to lose my bus pass for about five hours today. It somehow slipped out of my pocket at the place I was having lunch at. That almost caused me to be late going home but it’s a good thing the Cecil has a great lost and found department. Bada bing!

The long weekend is over and by most people’s standards, the summer is also over. I always align the beginning of May as the beginning of summer because for university students, that’s when classes end. May is also when the movie studios mark the start of their summer season.

Four months have come and gone. It seems like not a lot happened but then if you kinda squint at my summer, yeah, a few things changed here and there. I can tell you it was lot different than last summer. Oh the previous summer started off with me just finished my degree and being unemployed. Soon after, I got a job at Backbone and thus started my new career. Looking back at those four months, the summer of 2005 was pretty damn good. Lots of my friends were still in Vancouver and I still had my apartment on campus.

This summer was a bit different. I started May off on a vacation of sorts, a reward for working long hours on a game that had been in production for over a year. I’ll be honest here and say I have some serious doubts if that game will ever see the light of day. The rest of May was spent trying to get used to the new project I was on. By June, things were rolling alright at work but things weren’t perfect. Then July rolled around and things got crazy. For about three weeks, I had no idea if I was going to take a job with EA or if I was going to stay. The decision gnawed at me for a long time and I really burned a lot of time that I could used to enjoy the nice weather.

Well, with the decision made, I received a week off at the beginning of August to recharge and relax. I can’t even remember most of what the hell I did with that time. I know I didn’t go away but I do remember seeing Superman Returns and having a few drinks with Tim and Ron.

All of August has been essentially a blur to me. From the two weeks in Burnaby to the rest of the time downtown, it’s been a whirlwind of new terminology, new processes, new faces, and new places. Hell, it’s already the fifth of September tomorrow. A sixth of the month is already over.

Yes, the forecast calls for sunny skies tomorrow but by month’s end, the all too familiar crispness of Vancouver autumns will be creeping in. The grey won’t be far too behind with the rain. This fall, I’m going buy one of those full spectrum, natural light desk lamps for work. I don’t think I get depressed during the rainy season but hey, it can’t hurt.

Well, at least hockey is going to start soon!

I had lunch my friend and former co-worker Ron on Thursday. He was nice enough to come down to studio to meet up with me. We headed out to the nearby Lions Pub for lunch. I’d been there once before and the service was fast and the Montreal smoked meat sandwich was fantastic. This time around though, neither the service was fast nor was the food great. Don’t get the clubhouse sandwich if you’re ever there.

I enjoy Ron’s company whenever we hang out. I credit him and some other people at Backbone for making last year’s long and cold winter just bearable enough for me to survive into the spring. We talked about a lot of things at lunch but the conversation eventually drifted towards “The Bet” which remains one of my favourite posts of all-time. It garnered a lot of comments and discussion which I always love to see with posts.

Anyways, Ron asked me how things were going on that front. I told him progress had ground to a halt. Oh sure, I had gotten Jennifer Love Hewitt’s phone number but she refused to go out on even one date with me. When Ron’s mocking laughter had subsided, we realized that we were approaching the ninth month mark since the inception of this wager. Almost a year had gone by. Feeling sympathy for me, Ron announced he would waive one of the stipulations in the legal wording.

Previously, Ron had forbade me to use the Interent to pursue the fulfillment of “The Bet”. That meant that I could not use dating sites, chat room, forums, or Craigslist postings. From his point of view though, the removal of such a restriction was going to affect the bet as much as a drop of water fills a bucket.

I’d like to think the task got easier but I can certainly see his point. Well, in any case, Lavalife here I come! 🙂

So I’ve started to eat poutine on a regular basis. What was something I ate maybe every couple months has turned into a once a week snack for me. A delicious but oh so unhealthy snack. It all started a few weeks back when we all went out for Tyson’s farewell bash. The evening started out well with dinner but as far as drinking binges go, it was a pretty tame night. At 2am, with everyone way more sober than was reasonable, someone had the fabulous idea to go to Fritz’s European Fry House.

I gotta tell you, that place makes the most kick ass poutine. I sampled some of their wares and it was awesome. If it weren’t so far away, I’d go there for lunch on a regular basis. Wait, maybe I can take the bus! Well, anyways, since then I’ve been trying out poutine from a few different places.

Take it from me, do not get the poutine from New York Fries. It may seem logical that a place named New York Fries is incapable of making a dish from Quebec but I had to find out the hard way. Plus, is it just me or does 100% of people who buy from New York Fries are teenage girls? Fries in general are bad for you and should only be purchased when feeding a temporary craving.

Anyways, keeping that in mind, I’ve discovered a happy medium in the poutine from A&W. The gravy is tasty, maybe a tad too salty but that is a very minor complaint. I also like the cheese curds they use as well. They also don’t skimp on the gravy which is one of the reasons why NY Fries gets a thumbs down.

I am hoping this thing I have for poutine will soon pass because it’s not a very healthy thing to be doing. There’s 26g of fat in a small A&W poutine alone. Four grams of that is the bad trans fat! I think I’ll go to Fritz’s this weekend and get it this poutine thing out of my system. Get it??!?! Out of my system?!?! That’s a POOP joke!

And I’m going to go drink some non-caffeinated Coke.

I was supposed to write about the PNE tonight, maybe I’ll do that tomorrow. I spent the last few minutes on The Generator Blog. It’s a pretty sweet blog. It lists links to various sites that allow to make silly signs or pictures that are all customized to your liking. I made a custom seal that you see above.

They also have things like a cassette tape generator and an A-Team episode generator. The acronym generator told me that Erwin stands for “Enhanced Random Wide Input Network”. Well, that’s nice to know.

I was going to write about the PNE tonight but maybe I’ll do that tomorrow. So I’m into my second real week of work at EA. There are a lot of differences between my old job and my new one but there is one thing that stands out. Most of the people on my team, the software engineers especially, are very experienced, senior people.

When I told some people that I was going to be working at the downtown studio, one person said that was surprising since they had heard they only hired SE II and above for that location. When I accepted the position, I signed on as an SE I.

It’s clear to me now that there is some truth to the seniority thing. Most of the engineers on my team have at least three or more years of experience in making games, most of that with EA. I’d say the average is probably closer to five years of experience. They’ve written a lot of code and done a lot of things that make they very valuable to the company.

The one thing that strikes me is that the engineers have an almost casual attitude of solving really hard problems on a daily basis. It’s not that they don’t care but that they don’t get to worked up about things because in the end, they know they’ll find some solution. I work with some extremely intelligent people.

I can only confirm that there’s just one other SE I on the team other than myself. That guy just finished university. We were talking one day and none of us could figure out if there was anyone else at our level. This is a bit of a departure for me since at my last job, there were predominantly junior people on my team, from engineering, to art, and to production. There was this “we’re all in this together” type of attitude. Now, I got a dozen people I could learn a million things from each day.

And finally, in other news, a truck full of Tang overturned in Queens, NY. Not sure why I reported that, I just probably wanted to type out my last name.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwCOUgjECtI]

Ever popular funny man Conan O’Brien hosted the 2006 Emmys award show on Sunday night. The awards were to be different this year with new rules in place that were supposed to give shows a better chance at winning.

Conan did a great job at hosting and it was one of the least stuffy award shows I’ve seen in years. His opening monologue after the intro sequence can be viewed here. Also, YouTube is filled with clips featuring Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart from the show. Oh if the Internet were a country, those two would be co-Presidents or co-Prime Ministers.

I got paid on Friday for the first time at my new job. Three weeks or so of pay on my first cheque. It was an actual cheque too. Despite bringing a voided cheque to orientation on my first day of work, EA decided cut me a cheque. Weird. The HR assistant was puzzled too and told me to bring another voided cheque so this doesn’t happen again.

So now I’m thinking of what to do with my first paycheque. The responsible things to do would probably be save it or invest it. I could put it into my ING Direct account, you know like those commercials ask you to. Or I could invest it in a number of different ways. There are RRSPs, mutual funds, and some other funds that my financial advisor keeps telling me about.

While those are responsible things, they seem rather boring as well. On the fun side, I’m thinking of buying a Palm T|X. I’ve owned only one other PDA in my life and I barely used it. It was more of a novelty than anything else. Despite being a tool to “organize” my life, I still kept everyone’s phone numbers on scraps of paper. The T|X will be different though. I know I won’t use it to store phone numbers or addresses. It can display photos, play videos, play music, and connect to the Internet. It will make my somewhat short bus ride seem even shorter. Plus, it will be my first foray into the world of wifi.

I’m also thinking of buying an Xbox 360 but I don’t think I’m very serious about that. I don’t even have a decent TV to hook it up to, so that’s gonna cost a lot more.

Ok, so now I’m gonna go play Lego Star Wars.

A good friend of mine recently came into possession of his own domain name. He has some specific ideas for his web site and my skills as a web designer cannot give him what he needs.

My friend is willing to pay a web designer for this work. If you yourself are a web designer or you know anyone who is looking for some contract work as a web designer, please send me an e-mail.

The domain owner is keen on getting his site up and running as he has deemed several events in the last few weeks as very “blog-worthy”. Please pass along this request to anyone who might be of help. Thanks!

Tonight, I had the infinite pleasure of dining with an old friend from my undergrad days. Dave and his lovely (and very pregnant) wife Abigail are back in Vancouver after spending two years in Halifax while he learned the ins and outs of endocrinology. A bit of trivia, Abigail now sees patients at the medical clinic where my own person physician works. Small world!

Speaking of my own personal physician, he called Dave up earlier today to see if he wanted to go out for all you can eat sushi. Dave told him he’d already agreed to go out to dinner with me. When he heard that, my doctor said to bring me along! Man, that would have been weird, eating sushi with my own doctor, his family, Dave, Dave’s parents, and some other people.

Dave decided we should probably go on with our original plans which I thought was a good idea since I haven’t seen him in two years so it would be nice to catch up on things. We settled on Capone’s in Yaletown for our restaurant.

It was nice seeing Dave and hearing about what’s going on in his life these days. It was especially generous of Dave to spend some time with me since he’s studying for an important exam. Not only did he spend time, he also paid for our meal! Thanks Dave.

You know, the trend lately in my life has been me losing friends left and right but it’s nice to know you can gain them back as well. Hey, Dave and I might even start playing Xbox together!