Category: Uncategorized

For the first time since sometime in 2006, I don’t own any shares in Electronic Arts. I sold them all this morning. Over the years I’ve accumulated the shares through either the ESPP program, which allows me to buy shares at a discount, or through annual vesting of stock awards, which are free shares (taxes notwithstanding).

The ESPP shares never really were big money makers for me. Because of bad timing, the best return I’ve had for selling those have been maybe 15%. At worst, I broke even on some of them. The jewel in my portfolio were the stock award shares, the ones that were just gifted to me. I’ve held onto them all these years, some shares going back a decade now. I was patient with them. I didn’t sell when the economy went south in 2008. I didn’t even sell them when I bought my apartment and I need money for a down payment. I held onto them because I believed the share price would rally, even from the dark days of July 2012, when it threatened go below $10 at one point.

Perhaps it was dumb luck rather anything smart on my part but I was right. The stock hit the mid-70s in October, the highest it’s been in the history of the company. I probably should have sold then but I was greedy and thought that I should wait until after the quarter where Star Wars: Battlefront was included. Of course, that was a terrible idea. You can read about it here.

So as the stock got mired in the 60s for most of the new year, I waited until the quarterly results were announced this Tuesday. I honestly didn’t know what to expect or how Wall Street would react. My expectation was that the news would not be good. The last quarter didn’t have a big blockbuster title, just two smaller ones, the game I worked on and UFC. I didn’t even bother checking the financial sites in the afternoon.

Things changed when a friend of mine who still works at EA texted me. He told me that the share price was way up in after-hours trading. I immediately jumped online to figure what the earnings report look like. It turns out the last quarter was actually a pretty damn good one. Beating Wall Street estimates is always a good thing.

At this point, the after-hours price had jumped about $6 to just over $70. I was thrilled. This was it. I decided I wasn’t going to wait any longer. It was time to get rid of these shares and cash in. Maybe I would sell it at the historical high share price but it would be pretty damn close.

Since it was after-hours, I had some decisions to make. I could easily just log on and request a sell order at market price and my shares would be sold at whatever price it would be once the bell rung the next morning in New York. That seemed risky though since I wouldn’t be able to predict what the opening price would be. At a minimum I wanted to sell it for no less than $70.

The more investor savvy amongst you are probably asking why I just didn’t make a limit sell order for $70. I didn’t because I got greedy. I had a feeling there was a strong chance the opening bell would ring and the share price would just continue to rocket past $70 and keep on going up. So the magic question was, what number do I choose? $80? $75? I thought $80 was unrealistic. There was very little chance that it could go from $64 to $80 in one day. I then settled for $75 but then I thought I was greedy. I paused for a second and then put in $74. It was a good compromise. After a few more clicks it was done.

I thought about staying awake for the market open but I was really tired and the limit order was there so I didn’t have to keep an eye on a chart every minute. So I slept. I was sleeping as the market opened and the price started at $70 and kept going up. For some reason, I woke up way before I really needed to. Maybe I was too excited. I looked at the clock and realized the market had been open about 20 minutes. I checked my phone. I had no new e-mails, which meant the limit order hadn’t been executed, which meant the stock price hadn’t reached $74 yet.

Obviously curious, I pulled up the real-time data. The price hovered between $73 and $74 as the minutes ticked away. It did this for several minutes as it went tantalizing close to $74. At one point, I realized it was going to happen. It would be breach $74 and the order would execute. In the next minute it did exactly that as the price barely nosed into $74 territory. Like it was on schedule, an e-mail arrived on my phone from the broker.

At that moment I had sold all my EA shares. I also became very aware that I should no longer look at the real-time share price. It didn’t matter anymore. I was no longer a shareholder. It could have went to $100 the next hour and it would have no bearing on me. So, I closed the app and tried to go back to sleep.

You’re probably wondering how much money I made on all of this. I definitely did not even break six figures, not even close. On the other hand, this wasn’t exactly a handful of quarters you find in the sofa either. Given what transpired today, I could easily live comfortably for another 12 months without working. Is that what I’m going to do? Probably not at this point.

I’ll receive the money in US dollars which is great. For now, it’ll go in a US dollars savings account while I figure out what to do with it. Part of it will probably get converted to Canadian dollars but I’ll wait to see what happens to the exchange rate. If this was mid-January where the dollar was worth $0.55 US, I’d convert a major chunk but the dollar has rallied since then. What I definitely know is that my London trip will be comfortably paid for now with this. I was planning on having McDonald’s for most of my meals but I’m thinking I might be able to have one decent fish and chips lunch now.

On the weekend I was investigating the process for updating one of my laptop computers to Windows 10. It’s a pretty crappy laptop that I bought in 2011 to connect to my living room TV so I could stream movies and TV shows from the Internet or my own server. It’s woefully under-powered but I guess I shouldn’t have expected much for $250. Now that I have a PS3 to stream media, I don’t use it all that much.

I was in the process of updating the BIOS before doing the upgrade when I noticed a product recall for a large number of laptops that were manufactured in the 2010 to 2012 timeframe. Apparently the power cords sold with these laptops can potentially overheat causing a burn or fire hazard.

The recall was announced in August of 2014, so I’m almost two years late to the party here. I’ve had this cord plugged in probably almost the entire time since 2011 so maybe I just got lucky here. I immediately filled out the form to have a replacement cord sent to me, free of charge of course. It’s already on the way from California where it currently sits in a shipping facility in Compton (no joke). I’ve never participated in a product recall before and I guess that’s a good thing.

Hewlett-Packard suggests that while the replacement cord en route, I should unplug the power cord and refrain from using it. Once the new cord arrives, it will contain instructions for how to dispose of the old cord so that it cannot be used again. For reasons that escape me, I am going to tempt fate and keep the cord plugged in. I went five years with nothing happening to the cord, what’s another four or five days? Right? Right?!?!!?

Sometimes it doesn’t take much for me to view a day of as a rewarding one and today was one of those. I woke up at the embarrassing hour of 1pm but that’s ok because when I felt pretty refreshed when I did.

I had a ticket to see Captain America: Civil War for 3:30pm so it’s a good thing I didn’t sleep any later. After waking, I made some breakfast and did some futzing around on the Internet. It was getting close to 3pm so I decided to take a shower so I didn’t stink in the theatre. It was about 3:15pm and I was out of the shower and still had no clothes on when I realized I should probably get head down to the movies.

I will never tire of living directly over a movie theatre. Fifteen minutes before the trailers started, I was still getting out of the shower. Anyways, I will say that if you’re just a remotely small fan of superhero movies, you’ll enjoy the latest Captain America. It’s basically another Avengers movie but with Captain America being the central character.

After the movie ended, it was dinner time. I decided I was going to have either poutine or sushi for dinner, two different options from a health perspective. I went for poutine even though I probably shouldn’t have. It was really good though. The poutine did a number on me so I went down for a post-dinner nap.

It wasn’t a productive day but it was a simple one that I enjoyed quite a bit. Like I wrote, sometimes that’s all you need from a day.

Some people might be surprised but talk shows are rehearsed and practiced before taping. Even WikiBear needs some work before going on stage.

The trailer you see above is for the just announced Dawn of War III from Relic Entertainment. DoW III is a sequel to previous two games in the franchise and continues to be based on the Warhammer 40K universe.

You might recall I started working at Relic Entertainment in September of 2013. At the time I couldn’t say what I was working on but it was this game. When I arrived, the game did not have a title and they weren’t sure if this was going to be a true sequel to the previous game. Though the game was undoubtedly going to be set in the Warhammer 40K universe, there was some thought it was going to be different enough that it wouldn’t fit into the Dawn of War mold. With the announcement, it’s clear that they’ve decided it is a true sequel.

The timing of this announcement makes it the longest period I’ve had to wait for a game to be made publicly known by a wide margin. All the games I’ve worked on were announced no more than twelve to fourteen months after real production had started. This game needed two and a half years before they decided to reveal it to the public.

I was at Relic for barely five months and it was not a contract job. I left because I wanted to. You can probably infer how much I liked it there. As this is the Internet I will not go into any specific details about the job.

It was really interesting watching the trailer. First, it was just neat to see what they decided to name the game. Second, I’ve never felt so much detachment from a game I worked on. It was like watching a trailer for something I had nothing to do with. That makes a lot of sense because I’m guessing not a single line of code I wrote in those five months made it into the current iteration of the game. Again, I can’t go into many details but after I left, there were some significant changes made to the code base and a lot of work went out the window.

Since none of my code is in the game and I was there for such a short period of time, I don’t expect my name to be in the credits. I certainly won’t be invited to the wrap party. I’m ok with that though. I hope the game is a success.

Associate producer Jordan Schlansky has decided to review products on Conan’s show. They say these reviews aren’t sponsored by the product makers themselves and I want to believe them. In the review above, Jordan reviews Prep H wipes.

I find myself agreeing with many of Jordan’s views on how one should cleanse themselves after a bowel movement. I feel like I might buy a box of these wipes if and when I find a new job.

As I alluded to in a previous post I am going to London, England near the end of this month. I have two friends who live in the London area and I’ve always wanted to return to Europe. I have not set foot on that continent since I was three years old when my parents decided to bring me on their European vacation. I have lots to write about my upcoming trip but today’s post deals with time zones and traveling through them.

Since I became an adult, my travels haven’t brought me any further than three hours ahead or three hours behind my local time zone. As such, the effects of jet lag haven’t really factored into my adult travels. Traveling east is always much more difficult in that respect than going west but every single time I go to the east coast, you get used to the time changes within hours. When I went to Hawaii last month, it was even easier given it was going west and because of my tendency to go to bed really late.

The last time I had to deal with actual jet lag was when I was about twelve years old. That was the last time I went to Hong Kong where their time zone is fifteen hours ahead of Vancouver’s. As a kid, my parents took the whole family to Hong Kong several times but I don’t remember having to deal with the jet lag. It must have been a factor though, as it’s quite difficult for the body to instantly sync with the new time zone.

London is eight hours ahead of Vancouver which presents a big problem for me personally. Since the end of February, I’ve been going to sleep around 4am and waking up around noon. In terms of London time, that means I’ve been going to bed at noon and waking up around 8pm. If I don’t change my sleeping habits, then that’s exactly what I would face once I got off the plane. That’s probably the worst case scenario where my body wants to sleep during the middle of the day and I’d miss everything in the daytime.

I’ve read various ways to combat jet lag. One strategy is to just slowly and naturally adjust your body clock to the new time zone. I’ve read that it takes about one day to adjust your body clock one hour. Now given that I’m only in London eight days, if I went with this strategy, I’d be all good on the last day of my trip, right before I was about go home. Obviously, that would suck and I’m certainly not going to spend the first few days of my trip sleeping during the daytime in my hotel room. I’ve also discovered some strategies where you accelerate the adjustment using melatonin and not giving into the desire to sleep until it’s actually night-time at your new destination. This seems more reasonable but I bet it totally sucks the first few days when you really want to sleep during the afternoon.

Another strategy involves adjusting your sleep schedule before you arrive at your destination. For some people, this is impractical. If you’ve got a job or other time sensitive responsibilities, you can’t be training your body to start sleeping in the afternoon for example. Fortunately, I have neither a job nor anything like that. Now if I were going to Australia, I wouldn’t have to do any adjustment of sleep schedule. I mentioned in a previous post that my 4am to 12pm sleep schedule lines up pretty well with most of Australia. If I went there, I’d get off the plane and my body would automatically be set for a 11pm to 7am sleep period (or thereabouts).

I’m going to London though, so I’m going to have to make some major adjustments. My target would be to go to sleep around 4pm and wake up around midnight. Now keep in mind I go to bed at 4am right now so I’m in the worst case scenario. In a 24 hour clock, the 12 hour adjustment is the most difficult. Any other time zone on this planet would have been easier to adjust to. Now how am I gonna get this done? I suppose I could go to bed an hour earlier each day. I’d walk my bedtime back so that I’d eventually go to sleep at 4pm. In practice, I think that’s going to be tough. I hate going to bed early. I have a hard time going to sleep at 11pm. I can’t imagine trying to sleep at 6pm.

The more likely scenario is that I’m going to push my bedtime forward an hour or so each day. My body seems to have an easier time with this. I can probably make it to a 7am or 8am bedtime easily in a day or two. I guess I’m going to have to adjust my meal schedule was well. Lunch time here will be my London dinner. London breakfast will be some weird midnight snack here. London lunch will a very early breakfast here.

It should be an interesting week before I go to London.

This evening I had dinner with two friends. One of them wanted to go to a ramen place downtown. I was fine with that since I quite fond of noodles and soup of all forms. I did warn him though that the last five or six times I’ve had ramen, I’ve had to poop with varying levels of urgency within two hours of eating it.

I’m not sure what’s with ramen that causes such a reaction. I’ve definitely had ramen without any ill effects but that was a long time ago and I can’t remember the last time it went down without an incident.

My most recent encounters with ramen have been quite an adventure. More than a year ago, I had ramen at this new place and I didn’t even make it to the end of the meal. Things started rumbling and crashing inside me about ten minutes after I finished my bowl. Luckily, this place had really nice single occupant washrooms. I won’t go into the details of what transpired in there, except to say it was explosive.

That was probably the worst experience and my other ones have been less severe. Sometimes it’ll be anywhere between half an hour to an hour before I feel anything and once that happens the urgency will be anything from mild to great concern. At any rate though, it’s serious enough that it has to be dealt with before I can do anything else. Like I wouldn’t even think about having ramen and then going to a movie. That’s just asking for trouble.

So for dinner tonight, I decided to see if I could change things up. Usually when I have ramen, I get it with a tonkotsu broth, which is a very rich, fatty, and flavourful pork-based broth. It’s my theory that the richness and fat of the pork in the broth is more than my digestive system can handle. To test this, I ordered a ramen with a chicken-based broth. It was much more clear, clean and less rich compared to tonkotsu.

Our whole meal went without incident. I was thinking maybe I was onto something by avoiding the fatty broth. My friends and I left the restaurant and then went somewhere else to hang out and talk. I felt fine the entire time. About an hour and half after we finished dinner, we all headed home. As usual, I took the train home, quite content that I didn’t have to deal with ramen poops for once. Then approximately ten minutes from my stop, I felt that very familiar rumbling in my intestines that signaled that something was up.

Luckily, the build up of the intensity was relatively slow so it wasn’t a full-on emergency while I was on public transportation. While that was certainly true, make no mistake, this was definitely something had to be dealt with fairly soon. I made it back home without incident but by this time there was a level of discomfort there. I dropped by keys and wallet on the kitchen counter and made it a bee-line to the bathroom where I sought the release of what was ailing me.

So, while it was delayed this time by about two hours, I did not actually escape the ramen poops. What is it about ramen that causes me to have this reaction? I’m not sure. When it comes to other noodle soups, I’m fine. I’ve never had problems after eating a bowl of won-ton noodle soup. I eat pho on a very regular basis. I had it last week actually. I feel totally fine after a bowl of pho.

My situation with ramen has come to the point where I really question if I should have it if I won’t have easy access to a bathroom within 10 to 30 minutes after I eat it. Perhaps I should avoid it for the near future? I would really like to know what in the bowl of ramen causes this problem.

On the weekend there was a bike race of some sort in Brooklyn called the Red Hook Criterium. Apparently they intended to use a scooter or a motorbike to pace the race but the vehicle stalled or would not start. For whatever reason, the person on the vehicle didn’t move it to the side and the racers came flying by it from behind. The first few bikes had the benefit of clear vision ahead and were able to go around it. The rest of the pack was not so lucky. What follows is what you see above. Crazy.

I apologize for the lack of a post yesterday as my web host, GoDaddy, was down for several hours without any explanation. As a suggestion, think twice about using them, at least from a web hosting perspective.

Anyways, so this afternoon I had to call the Hilton hotels people. I needed some clarification about a reservation I had made for next month. I’m going to London, which I’ll write about later. They didn’t really solve my problem to my complete satisfaction but whatever. The woman I was speaking to wanted to know if I was willing to answer a short survey at the end of my call. She said that by participating in the survey I might be eligible for up to $200 of my next Hilton booking, discounts at Hilton resorts, and at a minimum 500 Hilton reward points. As I wasn’t in a hurry, I said yes to the survey.

I got switched to another woman who was going to conduct the survey. She double-checked some of my info and then told me that all my answers would be multiple choice ones, either A, B, or C. Then she started with the first question. She wanted to know what my total household income was and proceeded to give me three ranges of income, to go along with the A, B, and C multiple choice answers. The lowest range, the A answer went from $0 to a crazy high six-figure dollar amount. Obviously the ranges for B and C went even higher. I’ve seen a lot of surveys relating to household income but never where the first range was so high.

I obviously belonged to the A answer as I barely make over $0. There was a slight pause on the other end before the lady told me I wasn’t eligible to continue on with the survey. I had to stifle a laugh because I found the situation quite hilarious. I guess they were looking for high-rollers and millionaires for their data points and not some idiot like me. There was no $200 discount on my next hotel booking nor was there a mention of a resort discount. I did however, get my 500 Hilton reward points which qualifies me for absolutely nothing.

I can’t remember the last time I experienced something like this for being poor but it certainly was an eye-opener. The thing I don’t get is what about people who don’t make a lot of money in a calendar year but still are rich? Like what if I won the lottery two years ago? I technically wouldn’t have any income this year yet I’d have millions of dollars in the bank. I guess those people are out of luck too?