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So last week my mother instructed me to look into getting a cell phone for my father. While my Mom has had a cell phone for many, many years, Dad has gone without, mainly because he’s not good with modern day technology. Mom thinks it would be really convenient if she could get a hold of her husband when he’s out and about. Currently that’s not possible unless he phones in from somewhere.

Because he’ll be using a phone sparingly, a pay-as-you-go plan is probably the most sensible way to go. Also, it’d be crazy for him to get the latest and greatest smartphone. That would be like using a rocket launcher to kill a fly, way over the top. To that end, I’m giving him my very first “smartphone”, the HTC Legend, which I bought sometime in 2010. This phone was barely adequate when it first came out but now five years along, it has not aged well. The screen resolution sucks and it’s stuck on Android 2.2 which makes it seem like an Atari 2600 compared to the Lollipop version of Android that powers my current phone.

I think this phone will be ok for my father’s needs for the short-term, until perhaps we get him a better one. Now when I say better, I mean most likely a bigger screen (for larger text) and a more advanced (and thus user-friendly) operating system. The concept of programs, applications, icons, and the meaning of various UI constructs is mostly lost on my father because he didn’t grow up learning any of these things. To that end, I’ll have to strip down the phone to the basics, and not litter the screen with a billion icons.

Well, at least my Mom will be able to remind my Dad to get eggs when he’s at the store.

I’m a huge fan of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog and he made a recent appearance on Conan with Jack McBrayer. Apparently, they’re starring in a new TV show together, making them one of unlikeliest duos in television. I think Robert Smigel is a genius though, so I’m looking forward to this.

So it’s that time of year for Canadians to buy RRSPs before the deadline. As part of the Home Buyers’ Plan, I have to buy RRSPs every year to repay what I took out when I bought my home. I could buy the safest RRSPs out there, investment choices where volatility is extremely low but so is the chance for growth. Because I’m terrible with money, I’ve decided to buy a mutual fund that has holdings in Mexico, Central and South America. The volatility of this fund is high and currently it’s not doing so well. If you had bought into this fund about six months ago, you’d be down about 17%. I think that’s great though because it’s got a good chance of going up. I’m using the “buy low, sell high” strategy here. Because it’s an RRSP, I’m not looking to sell this fund anytime soon.

I’m sure there are better choices out there in terms of RRSPs but I think this will be a good experiment. I just need social and economic stability from Latin America. That’s not too much to ask, right?

So it just dawned on me today that I haven’t told you, my loyal readers, that I’m going back to work. Yes, that’s correct, my current fantasy lifestyle is going to have to end for the time being. I’m super tired so I’ll have to expand on the details later. I start work on March 2, so there is little bit of time left for me to extract as much fun as possible before I revert back to a simple, working plebe.

This evening NBC celebrated the 40th anniversary of Saturday Night Live with a live special that easily could be the television event of the year. This was no simple retrospective show with a few old clips as every single cast member and every single host (even if they hosted just once) from the last four decades was invited back to New York City for the celebration. The resulting guest list of people in the audience and those scheduled to perform was a dazzling array of comedy legends, actors, actresses, musicians, athletes, and writers. It took three and a half hours to celebrate the forty years that SNL has been on the air.

Earlier in the day though, as I was reading through some #SNL40 tweets, it suddenly dawned on me how this anniversary made me feel old. The reason being is that I remember watching the SNL 15th anniversary like it was yesterday. I was in junior high at the time and had only really started watching SNL perhaps a year or two previously. I was only familiar with the current cast at the time, people like Dana Carvey and Mike Myers. The special showed me a glimpse of all the shows and cast members from the 70s and early 80s, stuff I’d never seen before. At the time, I’d only seen a fraction of the shows that had aired, missing out on a good twelve to thirteen years of live sketches. I taped the 15th anniversary special and it was so funny, I regularly watched it for about six months after it aired.

Fast-forward to this afternoon and I realized that fifteen had become forty. How did twenty-five years go by so fast? Where did the time go? In that quarter of a century since I taped that special, dozens and dozens of people have come and gone from SNL. Some became rich and world-famous, others went on to live more modest lives. If you were to count up the number of SNL shows I’ve seen, I’ve easily watched more than half of them now, quite a contrast to junior high me, who had just started watching the show.

Lots of things make me feel old these days but it’s a rare thing for a TV show to make me feel that way.

It’s that time of year again when you can see how much your friends and family made in public sector jobs in the province of British Columbia for the last fiscal year. The Vancouver Sun maintains a searchable database of nearly all the public sector employee salaries.

For those of you who don’t know anyone in this province, this might not be of much interest to you. Also, if all your friends work in the private sector then this database means nothing to you. If you’re like me though, then you have a good list of people to check up on. It’s good to see all my former engineering and computer science professors making good coin still. Some of friends now are lecturers and professors as well. I was also able to look up some of my former high school teachers too. One of them, who is probably my favorite teacher, has a great salary. She deserves every penny.

Anyways, have fun snooping!

In the above remote segment, Conan and Steven Yeun of The Walking Dead fame visit a LA Korean spa. What follows is a lot of pixellated male nudity and scrubbing.

When I was a child, typical things got me excited: french fries, sci-fi movies, and video games. I guess those things still excite me as an adult but I’ve discovered the most mundane things can be a cause to celebrate. Case in point happened about a week ago. I went to get my home insurance renewed. The insurance company had sent me a renewal package but I had shopped around for quotes. Ultimately though, it appeared my current insurance provider was still the cheapest. I was about to pay it online but I wanted to make sure all the terms of my coverage still made sense. I decided to drop by the office to speak with an agent.

Once I got there, an agent went through my current policy and we decided to change a few things. For one, I think I had listed my personal property at $50K. I’m not sure if I’ve ever owned $50K of stuff over the course of my lifetime, let alone currently in my apartment. So we changed that amount to something a lot more reasonable. The agent also found a few discounts that I was now eligible for. Some of these were significant. In the end, my original quoted renewal was $260 and that went down to $173. When the agent told me that I was like, hell yeah, let’s get that done right now. He’d reduced the amount I had to pay by over $85. That was the cheapest my insurance has ever been, eclipsing the $220 mark from several years ago.

Getting my insurance this year for that cheap made my day and I was super excited I was able to save that much money. I’m sure as a child the concept of buying insurance would have been a boring concept to me but this has been a highlight of the month so far!

As many of you know, an American company recently announced they would be retreating from Canada due to a failed expansion into this country. Of course, that company would be Target, whose demise in Canada has been well-documented.

Unfortunately, another American company has decided to call it quits in Canada as well. Just like Target, Redbox is leaving after a period of less than three years. Redbox operates thousands of automated kiosks that rents movies to the public. Achieving success in the US, the company decided to expand into Canada in early 2012. They intended to tap into a consumer market that no longer had any video stores to go to. You can read their announcement here but the gist of it is, there wasn’t enough demand for them to continue.

I was and continue to be a huge fan of Redbox. They chose to put a kiosk downstairs in the Safeway. I could go online and check the inventory of that kiosk without leaving my home. It was so convenient. Sometimes I’d rent from a Redbox somewhere else but I could return to any other Redbox. It was also cheap too. I always rented Blu-rays and they were just over $2 a rental after tax. Over the course of two years, I’d say I rented from my local Redbox about two or three times a month on average.

A lot of people question why someone would use Redbox when streaming services like Netflix exist. Let’s address Netflix first. Netflix doesn’t offer movies as recent as the ones you’d find in a Redbox. Sometimes you’ll have to wait a year or even longer for a movie to appear on there. In many cases, some movies will never arrive on Netflix. Because I live in Canada, the selection on Netflix sucks compared to other countries. In the last year, I don’t think any of my Redbox rentals have shown up on Netflix.

As for other streaming services, they are much more current than Netflix. Unfortunately, they’re more than double the price for a movie rental in standard definition. Yes, that’s right. Why would I rent something at twice the price with inferior image quality? High definition streaming rentals do exist but they’re $6, triple what a Redbox rental costs. Also keep in mind that if you go with a streaming rental, you also incur the cost of eating up any bandwidth caps you might have.

Lastly, there’s also the murky option of downloading movies using torrents. As someone who derives their living from making consumable digital entertainment, I just can’t justify getting a movie for free and then complaining that people are pirating the games I make. If I want to keep myself positioned on the moral high ground here, I can’t go the torrent route.

So, where does this leave me? No other kiosk rental services exist in Canada. Best Buy used to have a competing service but they wrapped that up nearly a year and a half ago. Some companies still operate the movie rentals by mail business. The problem is these services force you to pay a set fee every month, even if you decide not to get any movies for that month. With Redbox, I only paid whenever I rented.

I had no feelings either way when I read that Target was leaving Canada. With Redbox though, I’m genuinely sad. I was looking forward to seeing Interstellar on Blu-ray and getting it from my local Redbox at the end of March. That won’t happen now.

It’s a long weekend here in British Columbia, so the staff at et.com are at home for Family Day. This is the only third Family Day holiday in the history of the province so it’s still quite new to us residents. I imagine this is how people felt when they first started to celebrate Christmas and barely had any of the traditions established. Like on the third Christmas, it was just Santa and egg nog. Mistletoe wouldn’t arrive until the fifth Christmas and the tree didn’t make an appearance until Christmas XXV. Or, I could be wrong about that.