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Last month I wrote a post about the pile driving that’s going on in my neighbourhood. There’s construction going on right next door and also about two blocks away, close to the riverside. As I mentioned, it’s a blight on weekday mornings as it wakes me up well before my alarm is supposed to go off. My only solace was the weekends where construction is paused. That solace was short-lived unfortunately.

On Saturday morning, I was rudely awoken by the sounds of pile driving next door at approximately 9am. Technically, the city by-laws allow construction to occur on the weekends except that they must start later. Though it totally sucks to be awoken by construction noise at 9am on a Saturday, the construction crew is within their right to do so. It kinda ruined my morning. I tried chasing after my lost sleep and stayed in bed until almost 2pm trying to get more rest. Thankfully, there was no pile driving on Sunday.

For your pleasure, I took cell phone video of the noise I hear every morning. In the video above, I simply stuck my phone outside on my balcony and recorded the sounds of disturbance. I apologize for the crappy audio but you can easily tell the noise is quite intense. If you listen carefully, you can actually make out two distinct pile driving noises. There’s the obvious louder one and also another less intense (but still noisy) one from the site two blocks away. It’s a double-whammy I get to experience every morning, now on Saturdays as well! Yay!

In the six years or so that I’ve lived in my apartment building I have never seen a mouse or a rat on the premises, that is until tonight.

I went to take out the garbage after midnight. The garbage and recycling room for this building is downstairs from the lobby. To get there, you have to exit the lobby which leads to this long hallway. I opened the door to this hallway tonight and I immediately saw something small and fast-moving near my feet. It was a mouse. I looked to me as if it was trying to figure out how to get past the door and into the lobby when I surprised it. Well, I suppose it surprised me too.

It took off like a rocket down the long hallway and to this door that leads to the outside. That door is closed all the time and as I watched it approach the door, I wondered what it would do. To my continued surprise, it disappeared through what must have been a gap at the bottom of the door. Mice when they get scared don’t go to unknown places. So when I surprised it, it would have run back to where it believed it was safe and that was the outside. I’m almost positive that door is where it entered the building.

I’m obviously not pleased to see a mouse inside the building. I also don’t think it’s a coincidence this first mouse sighting happened now and that construction began at the site next door. The construction site was a large and open field before, perfect for pests and rodents to make their homes. If I had to guess, the construction forced the mice to flee the field and make their way over to our building.

I’m hoping the mice will have a hard time getting up to my floor. I live almost 30 stories up. I’ve also sealed what used to be a huge gap underneath my front door. Even if mice managed to ride the elevator up to my hallway, I don’t think they could penetrate my front door. The only point of ingress would be through my balcony. Again, I live almost 30 stories up and there are no pipes on the outside of the building on which they could climb to get to my balcony.

I’ve written a letter to the property management company to inform them of what I saw. The proper thing to do, at least in my opinion, would be to seal that door better, eliminating any gaps at the bottom. I’d even lay a few traps in that hallway. It’s never used by anyone in the building.

Go away pests!

Every financial quarter the company I work for has a global town hall for employees. It’s usually conducted at the company headquarters where most of the executives work. Studios across the world can watch via live stream. Company news is discussed at the beginning but there’s always time for Q&A at the end. It’s a great time for any employee located anywhere in the world to ask a question to senior management, up to and including the president and CEO.

Today, one of the questions that were sent in was prefaced by a mention of the current U.S. political climate with the election going on. The exec that took the question said and I’m paraphrasing here, “I thought you were gonna ask us if we’re moving the company headquarters to Canada because we have talked about that.”

Of course, that scenario is very unlikely and only would be even considered if one and only that one particular U.S. presidential nominee would win the election. Realistically, there’s no way a large company like that would move an entire executive management team to Canada. Could they have explored the option as an exercise? Sure, companies run through different business scenarios all the time. I’d be worried if they didn’t. Just because they think about something though, doesn’t mean they’ll actually do it.

Let’s just hope that we don’t experience a reality where that has to be something to be honestly considered. We’ll know in November.

Today EA released their latest earning report for the last financial quarter. For the first time in over a year and a half, I did not nervously await the contents of the said report and the reaction of Wall Street afterwards. I currently own zero shares in EA, so at this point the stock price only tangentially affects me as an employee. Sure, I don’t want to see the stock price drop 50% overnight but I do feel a sense of freedom not having to watch the chart the day after an earnings report.

As some of you know, I sold all my EA stock last quarter. As soon as I did that, I had no need to check the stock price every morning when I woke up. It was liberating not having to do that all the time.

Incidentally, the stock price dropped about $2 in after hours trading due to a lower than expected financial forecast. Previously, that would have caused me worry but I saw the news and shrugged.

Unfortunately (or fortunately?), this is only a short reprieve. In six months, the employee stock purchase plan kicks in and I get some stock again. Then next June, the first of my stock awards vests and I get more stock. Until February though, I’m all good!

It was a long weekend in this province so I didn’t have to work on Monday. Of course, I did all the things on a long weekend that make returning to work feel really bad. I stayed up super late Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night playing video games. I will not enjoy waking up tomorrow morning as my body rejects the early morning wake-up call. Never fear though, the previously mentioned pile driving next door will ensure I awake bright and early.

I also strayed slightly off my healthy diet, which has been going so well. I ate English muffins, Pop Tarts, burgers and french fries all weekend. It was so good. On Tuesday, it’s back to boiled chicken breast and lettuce for lunch.

I also didn’t win the lottery this long weekend either, which means I definitely have to go back to work. The only solace is that this is a short week.

As some of you know, the deadline to receive a free Windows 10 upgrade was this Friday at midnight. A few months ago, I upgraded my laptop to Windows 10 as a test run to see what problems might arise before upgrading my main computer. The laptop upgrade went well, without any problems at all. I then realized that I don’t really use my laptop for anything intensive. I don’t play games on it nor do I run a media server off of it, just a few things that I actually do with my main computer. I also don’t have the same programs on my laptop that I do on my main rig, so I couldn’t even figure out if all my programs would be compatible after a theoretical upgrade. So, it wasn’t exactly a great test bed.

Of course, the deadline to upgrade caught me off guard on Friday. I guess I should have known it was coming up but I came home from work and then realized I had mere hours to take advantage. In the end, I decided not to go through with it. I’m in the middle of playing a game and if I started the upgrade, I’d have re-download the game and re-install. Since I have slow Internet, that would take at least a whole day to do the download. I also hadn’t backed up any of my data. When doing an OS upgrade, it’s always advisable to back up all your important files beforehand. I’d done none of that. Lastly, I was just lazy. As it currently stands, there’s nothing wrong with Windows 7. I think it works great. I just didn’t like being forced into an upgrade on Microsoft’s terms. I think I should upgrade when I feel like it, not when some corporate entity decides.

So when midnight rolled around, my computer stayed running on Windows 7. I was prepared to shell out over $100 to upgrade on my terms at a later date, rather than upgrade now for free. It turns out though, there is a loophole to all this anyways. According to this article, the free Windows 10 upgrade is still available to people who require assistive technologies beyond the Friday deadline. As of this writing, it appears there is no requirement to prove that you need or use such technologies. So maybe I won’t need to spend money on Windows 10 after all.

My friend Garrett and I have maintained a friendship over sixteen years. We first met each other on a very important day in both of our lives, the same day we both started our careers in the games industry as QA testers. He eventually transitioned into being a UI artist and now I’m a software engineer but the roots of our friendship started in the lobby of EA campus in Burnaby.

Now when I returned to EA last year, Garrett was already working there but on the NHL team. He eventually joined the PvZ team late in the project. That was so cool! It was the first time in sixteen years we were on the same team, since we were both testing NHL on the PlayStation. He moved into the UI artist area, which was not really that close to where I sat but still close enough that I could visit.

I left to go on my awesome travel-filled four-month vacation soon afterwards though. When I returned, I discovered that they put my new desk right next to Garrett! So since the beginning of June, we’ve had the pleasure of sitting next to each other at work. It’s genuinely great to sit next to a real friend at work. It’s easy to talk to each other and go on coffee breaks together.

Unfortunately, we have a team move coming up and some people needed to move early, including Garrett. He had to pack his stuff today and move like twenty feet in another direction to another cluster of cubicles. Twenty feet might not seem like far but it might have been in another building. I was honestly a bit sad when I looked over to his empty desk.

I’ll be moving desks next week too. I’ll be on the other side of one of Garrett’s cubicle walls. We’ll be close but now we’ll have that wall between us. There will be a physical wall but there will never be a wall in our friendship.

I totally understand that living in a modern, large city comes with both conveniences and inconveniences. I sure enjoy the conveniences but man, some of the inconveniences can drive you crazy. One such thing is construction.

I’ve been fairly lucky where I live because in the last six years or so I’ve dealt with very little construction noise. When I first moved in, the two other towers on my block were already well underway in terms of development. In the intervening years, my block has been quiet. That all changed about two weeks ago.

There’s been an empty lot next to my building for years. The developer who built my apartment building has been trying to get city council approval to build on that land for years. It’s taken years because said developer had no clue what the hell they were doing. They finally got approval this year and they’re starting building what undoubtedly be an ugly blight on this street.

Anyways, there’s nothing I can do about the construction. I’m not sure if you’re aware of how large and tall apartment towers are built but it starts with the foundation, specifically pile driving supports. This rhythmic action is loud and disruptive and they start as early as 7am at times. It’s loud enough to be heard almost twenty blocks away and I live right next to the site.

I estimate I’m woken up anywhere between an hour to an hour and a half early everyday now. It sucks but there’s not much I can do. The construction company is working within the city by-laws for construction times. I make sure that most of my windows are almost completely closed before I go to bed. That helps a lot but this type of noise cannot be totally shut out, even with all your windows closed.

The only solace that I can take from this is that the pile driving stage of construction won’t last forever. I expect this to go on for a few more weeks and that will be the loudest part of the construction hopefully. That’s not to say it will be completely silent at that point. The rest of the building will have to completed and you can just imagine the noise that will come from pouring concrete and everything else that goes into making a tall glass tower.

My hope is that the building will be finished within a year. Then I get to deal with the increased traffic on this street!

This week it’s the Democrats turn to hold their national convention in Philadelphia. To give them equal opportunity, Stephen Colbert also visited the convention in his Julius Flickerman character.

As with the Republican convention, Colbert attempts to get to the podium. It’s even more entertaining this time!

I can think of at least two things I did wrong this evening. The first problem involved me taking a one hour nap and waking up at 10:30am. At around 9:30pm I felt really tired, so much so that I almost fell asleep while playing a video game. I decided to let my body do what it wanted, so I crawled into bed and fell asleep. I had intended to only nap for about 20 minutes or so. How I was going to accomplish that without setting an alarm escapes me at the moment. I woke up at 10:30pm, feeling both refreshed and disappointed at the same time. Now I’d be even more awake than usual before bedtime. This problem can be solved with a sleeping pill but my second mistake requires something else.

Since I had a simple salad for dinner tonight at 7pm, I knew I was going to be hungry later. Sure enough I was but rather than eat again at say 11pm, I didn’t get around to heating up some leftovers until close to 1am. I ate a significant amount of food really late and quite close to my bed time. Some people can eat and then go to sleep right away. Perhaps I could have done that when I was much younger but I can’t now. If I do that, I get terrible heartburn during the night. So the solution is to just wait, stay vertical, and let my digestive system do some work before I lie down for the night. It’s almost 2:30am now, so I think I’ll be ok now. Sure, it’s super late for a school night but I can wake up past 9am and still get to work on time.