Category: Uncategorized

Some of you are not aware but I pay money to a company every year to keep this domain registered in my name. If you’re curious, you can read up on what domain name registars do. Anyways, for almost the entire time that this domain has been active, it’s been registered with GoDaddy. Now renewing the domain used to really cheap. I remember it being less than $10 a year. Over time, that renewal fee has increased. Since my renewal date is coming up at the end of this month, I logged on to see what my renewal fee would be for this year. It would be about $20 this year.

I decided to do some research before renewing. Some registars have different pricing structures and I had a feeling GoDaddy sure wasn’t the cheapest one. By golly, my hunch was right. One of the larger registars would only charge me $13 to transfer my domain to them and also renew for another year, a great deal. This afternoon I started the transfer and completed it in less than an hour. I get the impression that in the earlier days of the Internet, domain transfers could take several days to complete but the process seems very automated now. I’m also happy to report that renewals are $14 a year at this new registrar.

I still host my site at GoDaddy but my hosting package is up for renewal this June. If I decide to renew, it will cost me $100 a year. Interestingly, this new company also offers hosting with double the disk space at about half the price. It looks like I’ll be moving all my products away from GoDaddy in the future.

By my estimation, I slept for nearly nine hours last night after feeling exhausted for most of Sunday evening. I woke up amazingly refreshed for a Monday morning. I know they say that the day after the DST change is one where people can feel groggy and tired but I have to say I can’t remember feeling that awake for a Monday in years. It’s a shame the rest of my day sucked as everything I was working on seemed to just malfunction. After eight hours, I don’t think I was any further ahead on my tasks. Well, at least I wasn’t sleepy all day.

I’ve been tired and sleepy all evening. I came home from having dinner with my parents around 7:30pm and was immediately fighting the desire to take a nap. I’m usually not that sleepy on Sunday evenings. Was it the time change? I slept an extra hour this afternoon to make up for it. Not sure what it was.

Well, I’m going to bed two hours earlier than normal tonight.

I’ve been taking over the counter medicine for the symptoms of my cold. I found this interesting commercial on YouTube. If this is really what the future holds for humanity, I’m disappointed by two things. First, that we haven’t figured out a cure for the common cold. Second, the man in the commercial is wearing what looks like an aluminum foil jumpsuit.

I can’t wait to be healthy again.

In the above video, we see and hear Kansas City Royal great George Brett tell a story for the ages. I just recently saw this video for the first time and I’m wondering how I went years without seeing this before. What honesty!

I was about five seconds from hitting the publish button for tonight’s post when my internet decided to cut out. I’m not even sure if a draft got saved. Sorry folks, there’s not much I can do on a phone. We’ll be back tomorrow.

I know some of my readers don’t like it when I refer to myself as “daddy” but this is my show so we’ll continue to go with it. Yes, after the hell month that was January, where I was ill with both a sinus infection and a month-long spell of diarrhea, I had healthy February. I felt fine the entire span of those 28 short days. Alas, my luck would not continue into March.

On Saturday I noticed a slight tickle in my throat, that tell-tale sign that something was wrong. I ignored it as I had a weekend to enjoy and I hoped that a good night of sleep would make it go away. That hope was misplaced as I woke up to a slightly sore throat. As the day wore on I also detected some slight nasal congestion.

This morning I woke up and my sore throat was gone but now my sinuses are even more congested. I didn’t feel terrible enough to make it a sick day but I wasn’t exactly feeling wonderful either. I had a pretty meh day at work where I sneezed a couple of times.

This evening my sinuses continued to get more congested. It’s still not anywhere close to what I experienced in January where I had to breath through my mouth or else I wouldn’t get any oxygen. If one were to look for a silver lining perhaps that’s it.

Being sick sucks. Maybe I’ll take a sick day tomorrow.

This weekend I declared the home reno to remove my fireplace as completed (for now) and proceeded to clean up my living room. I vacuumed up the work area, moved my new TV stand in place, put my TV on top of said stand, and began the arduous process of putting back the rest of my furniture and wiring up all my equipment again. Even in a simple but modern home entertainment system, there are so many damn wires to connect.

When it was all done though, I sat down on my couch, turned on the TV, and the first thing I watched was live hockey broadcast. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I was watching TV at eye level and my neck was at a comfortable and normal angle. I wasn’t craning my head up to watch my TV while it was on top of a stupid fake fireplace mantle. My TV screen seemed bigger and I guess if you do the math, it is actually closer to the couch bit a few inches for sure. The image also seemed sharper, crisper, and more vivid. Now that probably is my imagination. While it was on top of the fireplace the viewing angle wasn’t optimal, sure, but since my TV is a plasma, off-angle performance is still phenomenal. Damn it though, the picture does seem a bit better.

I just can’t put into words how happy I am that my TV is now in the right spot. I’m also so pleased with the TV stand I bought. The colour matches the rest of the furniture in my living room. When I look at the room, everything just seems to be correct. The TV stand also has drawers and cubby holes, which allows me to have new options to store stuff. To celebrate this momentous weekend, I watched two movies on Netflix and started playing a new game on my PS4.

Now that I look back upon this, I realize that I should have done this many years ago. I talked about getting rid of the fireplace for about seven years, which in hindsight is ridiculous. Don’t drag your feet on your dreams and aspirations kids! One more thing, I obviously haven’t painted the drywall repairs from the home reno. I’m going to do that this summer. Lastly, if you want to see a comparison, here’s a then and now.

I haven’t written about this at all but sometime in December I got loaned to another team at EA for a period of about six months. I didn’t really have any choice in the matter but as EA aligns itself with the same technologies across the entire company, sharing of processes and personnel is becoming more common. At this time, I don’t really want to say which team it is, except to say the team is in another country and several times zones away. I obviously still work at the same studio physically but all my work is done remotely.

Just a few weeks ago, I was shown some of the work in the areas of the game I’m not working on. It was then I realized some of the Hollywood talent we had procured for the game. One particular person I took notice immediately since they had an Oscar nomination and I had seen some of their fantastic work in recent months. Well, last Sunday, this person won an Oscar. Now since we usually don’t hire non-actors for our games, this pretty much narrows the list of people who I’m writing about down to four. This is an amazing development for our game and to be honest, it will probably sell a few more copies now just because this person has an Oscar in their trophy case. That’s on top of their incredible talent as a performer.

I’ll have more to share in the coming months.