Category: Uncategorized

On Sunday I purchased the PlayStation VR system, more commonly known as PSVR. I’ve been thinking about buying PSVR for a few weeks now but this weekend was great timing as Sony was having a sale on almost all their PlayStation products. Their Skyrim bundle, which comes with the headset, the camera, two Move controllers, and Skyrim VR, normally retails for $450 but is currently discounted to $320. On top of that, I had a $110 credit at EB Games for some games I traded in. After tax, the bundle was just shy of $250. When the PSVR was released less than two years ago, the price was $548.

I haven’t had time to try many VR games but I tonight, I did try the Star Wars Battlefront: Rogue One X-Wing VR mission. I tell ya, it was thrilling to be seated in the cockpit of an X-Wing. The game even predicts that you’ll be just want to sit and look around, as it doesn’t force you into gameplay until you’re ready. You can just look at all the controls for an hour if you want to.

Anyways, the library at work has a good selection of PSVR games so I’ll have lots to play over the next few months.

My car returned from the shop this week. It turns out it was the thermostat that was faulty. It was stuck in a “closed” position, meaning that despite me topping up the coolant, not enough of it was circulating through the radiator to cool the engine.

With labour and parts, the total repair bill came to $375, which isn’t cheap but not terrible either. Unfortunately, since the engine was run in an overheated state, there is a potential for the head gasket to have been damaged. Such a repair for that would likely be in the thousands. I can only hope for the best going forward.

As for the car now, it runs fine and the temperatures are once again in the normal range.

So my Dad took the overheating car into the shop on Monday. No word from him on what problems they found, if they found any so far. I told him not to proceed with any repairs until I gave him the go-ahead. As with any car repairs, I hope it’s not anything expensive.

I play table shuffleboard at work with a co-worker. We play pretty much everyday around 3pm. It’s a break in the day that I look forward to all the time. The table itself is company property. If you’ve played shuffleboard before, you know that a well-maintained table is key to having a good experience. Part of the maintenance involves have a generous amount of “wax” on the table at all times. The wax looks like tiny beads of sand or cheese. They help the pucks slide much easier against the surface of the table. Without the wax, pucks would come to an abrupt stop as the friction would halt the motion quicker. With a fully waxed table, pucks slide and slow down as if they were on ice, which makes for a more fun (and possibly challenging) experience.

Unfortunately, the table is sometimes overlooked in regards to maintenance. The wax eventually gets pushed off the table, leaving gaps and “dry” spots on the surface. It makes for an unpredictable playing surface. To that end, my co-worker and I have discussed buying our own can of wax so we can set the table as we wish. After weeks of discussing it, I finally caved and bought a can on Amazon. It arrives on Friday and we are beyond excited to try it out. No more dead spots when we play!

This evening I bought a replacement item tracker for the stupid Tile I had that ran out of battery. The Tile is a decent product, except their whole revenue model relies upon a terrible design. It had a non-replaceable battery, which means once the battery is out of juice, they force you to buy a new Tile. This isn’t something that happened because of an engineering limitation, this was designed to be like this. Once my battery ran out, there was no way that I was going to buy a new Tile, even at a discounted price.

Thus I switched to a TrackR Pixel tonight. It has pretty much the same functionality, with smartphone app and crowd sourced tracking as well. The biggest difference is that the Pixel has a replaceable CR2016 battery. You can get these at less than $1 each. I potentially may not need to buy another Pixel for years to come. That presents a dilemma for me actually. The TrackR company designed a consumer-friendly device that doesn’t rip off its customers, the consequence being I don’t need to give them money whenever the battery runs out. Yet I feel like I need to support them with my dollars for being a good company. Perhaps this means I give TrackR products as gifts?

Anyways, I encourage you to check out their products.

Quite unexpectedly today, the team I work on got rebranded with a new identity. The work and people remain the same but for sake of identification, I’m now part of something called Motive Vancouver. Motive was originally just a single studio in Montreal, headed up by industry vet Jade Raymond. Her business unit encapsulated our old PopCap Vancouver studio brand but apparently that is no more now. So, we’re now Motive Vancouver, even though we’re still working on the same thing as we did yesterday. Is that confusing?

This week my manager had a short meeting with me to discuss my salary increase and bonus. Company-wide at EA, employees and managers have been having such meetings last week and this. It always happens this time of year.

For the most part, everyone gets a “cost of living” increase every year. In terms of percentages, think of just inflation. My increase was slightly higher, not because I was awesome or anything, just because my original salary was slightly lower to begin with. My manager is trying to make it up to me now.

As for my bonus, it was average. It wasn’t anything to write home about but also significant enough that I’m not going to complain. I chose to defer 50% of my bonus as an RRSP contribution. The rest will come in as plain old salary, which I’m taxed on of course.

If I really wanted to take home some bacon, I’d work on the FIFA team.

This evening I went and bought almost four litres of engine coolant to top off the stuff that was already in my car. I poured a lot into the radiator and if I had to guess, almost half the jug went in. It was a pretty simple process and I hoped it would solve the overheating problems.

I started the car and let it idle for a few minutes. I kept my eye on the temperature gauge and everything seemed alright. It moved a bit but that was to be expected. I then decided to take a test drive. I was hoping the temperature gauge would move to about the mid-point and stay there as I drove. It takes about two or three minutes to drive down to the parkade exit and in that time, things remained ok. As I exited the parkade and drove along actual streets, the needle move closer to the mid-point as the engine got hotter. I then drove a few blocks up a hill. This is where it got bad. The needle shot past the middle and quickly approached the red zone. While my car definitely needed coolant, it was still overheating.

I had to turn on the heat full blast to get the engine temperature down before it got into the danger zone. With the heat on and the car coasting down the hill, the temperature rapidly dropped back to the mid-point. As I turned onto a flat street to drive the three blocks back to my apartment, I turned off the heat again. The temperatures zoomed up once more, so the heat had to come back on and I left it there until I could get my car parked again.

It was too dangerous to check the coolant levels after the drive but I’ll check it tomorrow evening. This problem feels like it’s beyond my capabilities at this point so I’ll have to bring it into the shop.

I am not a car guy. I drive a car that is almost 25 years old. This car has been running hot lately and today, for the first time, I opened up the hood to look at the coolant levels. I did it smartly, of course, when the engine was cool. The levels were dangerously low and thus began my education on Honda Accord engine coolants. Through YouTube and the Internet, I now know how to top up the coolant.

This week, I’ll make time to get to an automotive department, probably at Walmart, buy some proper coolant, fill up the radiator, and hopefully that will stop the car from getting too hot. I’m excited!