Category: Uncategorized

I took the day off today as part of my continuing to take a random day off during the summer. There’s no public long weekend holiday in the month of June, so I decided to make one for myself. I slept in until 11am which left me with a rested feeling upon waking up. I then spent the afternoon cleaning up my apartment and playing video games. For dinner, I had spaghetti and some BBQ ribs. It wasn’t a jam-packed day but a leisurely one and that’s the kind of day I wanted.

I wish I had employed this “day off” strategy when I was working at EA. I accumulated so much holiday when I was at Black Box. I was paid out for those days when I got laid off but I probably should have just taken a random day off here and there.

I’m looking forward to another extra long weekend in July.

This post will be of interest to anyone who owns a website domain and/or publishes a blog. In a previous post, I mentioned how my e-mail host, GoDaddy increased my annual hosting fee by several hundred percent. They also told me they weren’t going to support my current e-mail platform going forward. Wow, charging me more and telling me I won’t get any new features nor support? Sounds like a great deal! I have now fully transferred over my e-mail hosting to another company, which doesn’t charge me a cent. Over the last week, I moved well over five thousand e-mail messages from the old GoDaddy server to the new one. Just ten minutes ago, I changed over the MX records. MX records tell e-mail servers where to send messages for a particular address. Think about that card you fill out at the post office when you move. It let’s the post office know that all mail going to your old address should be forwarded to your new address. On the Internet, these changes can take as much as 48 hours to propagate through the system. It’s possible some messages will still wind up at the old server but that’s ok. If all goes well, in two days I’ll be able to cancel my e-mail hosting at GoDaddy and get a refund.

Coincidentally, over the weekend, I also had to help a friend with his own GoDaddy issue. My friend, who I will refer to as DeShawn, hosted a blog on GoDaddy using their horrendous Quick Blogcast platform. His blog means a lot to him and it has been a great way for him to express his thoughts. The blog also contained a lot of photos which he hosted on their platform. GoDaddy is retiring the Quick Blogcast platform this week but he only got the notice late last week. While DeShawn is an extremely smart man with PhD and MD degrees, blogging platforms and hosting details are not things he is an expert in. He called me to help him rescue his blog and all his content. He needed my help because GoDaddy was completely useless in assisting him transfer his content to another blogging platform. What little advice he was given was basically wrong. It took some trial and error but I was able to move DeShawn’s entire blog, including all his posts and his content from GoDaddy’s servers to a new WordPress blog.

DeShawn’s situation taught me a valuable lesson about Internet content. Be very wary of using proprietary systems to generate content for your blog or website. The company that owns that proprietary system can leave you at their mercy based on a whim, just like what happened to DeShawn. Always have an out. If you can’t export your blog, posts, images, videos, messages, e-mails or whatever in a reasonable amount of time, then you might have a problem. You have to be prepared that you’ll need to move all that content in just a few days.

As a final note, if anyone was thinking about e-mailing me, there’s a slight chance things might go a bit wonky so if you don’t hear from me, send me the message again.

Well, Conan went to another E3 this year and he taped his visit. For a guy who doesn’t particularly like video games, he sure does do a lot of video game segments. I was only slightly envious at one part, where he got to experience a Project Morpheus demo.

So as I mentioned in my previous post, I’m moving to a new e-mail host. Since about 2006, my personal domain e-mail has been hosted at GoDaddy. For this privilege, I started paying about $4 a year. This has gone up steadily where eight years later, I paid $8 last year to renew my e-mail hosting plan. The plan is up for renewal at the end of this week, so on the weekend, I decided to renew. After logging into my hosting account, I discovered the renewal few had gone up to $48. As far as I could see, no new functionality had been added. I was just going to pay a lot more for the same level of hosting.

It took two phone calls but I finally discovered GoDaddy is trying to move all their e-mail hosting clients to their new Office 365 platform. I don’t need fancy things like Office application integration across the cloud. They’ve jacked up the prices of their existing e-mail platform, hoping everyone will just move over to the new one since the prices are now so similar. Well, I wasn’t having any of that. I decided to move to a new e-mail host. They are many different companies to choose from. Some companies are competitors to GoDaddy who also do domain registration and web/e-mail hosting. Others just host e-mail. The price also varies from company to company.

I quickly chose a company that offers a free account with a lot of options. I get 5 Gb of storage for my e-mail, compared to the 1 Gb on GoDaddy. There’s also acronyms like IMAP access but let’s not talk about that. Moving e-mail hosts is actually pretty easy if you don’t care about your old e-mails. This is where the difficult part comes. I had to move over 3300 e-mail messages from my existing account to this new server. It was part manual labour and part automation. It went smoothly but I was nervous. I need to repeat the process for my “Sent” items and then again for any other folders I might have.

The last part then involves redirecting all my new incoming e-mails to my new host. It’s quite an interesting process. If any of you own your domains, you might have to go through this yourself one day.

Ugh, I’ve spent the last several hours trying to figure out how to migrate my existing email account to a new host. It’s taken way too much of my time. I will explain tomorrow why this was necessary. This is one the time I wish I was using a Gmail account.

In a previous post, I mentioned how I was saving space by getting rid of all my old DVD cases and putting the discs into paper sleeves. This weekend, I finished the task of transferring the discs to the sleeves. It took about 110 of them. The picture above shows how much space I saved. I think the space savings would be illustrated better if I had been able to stack all the cases in a single pile but that wasn’t going to happen without a lot of effort. Anyways, with the cases off the bookshelf, I was able to find new places to put my laptops and I could finally put all my Blu-ray cases on the shelf, instead of on my coffee table.

As for the DVD cases, I still need to remove all the paper inserts so I can recycle them in their proper bins.

There’s a restaurant I like to patronize on Granville Street. It’s a seafood place. I love seafood so this establishment is right up my alley. They sell raw oysters, $1 per on a daily basis. I’ve gone there about four times now and each time I get a few of those raw bad boys. You don’t get to choose which oysters you get for these $1 ones but that’s ok. Every time they’ve been delicious.

I went there again today with a friend. We both got two raw oysters each to go with our main course. They were good and tasty. My albacore tuna was also very delicious. Of course, anytime you eat raw oysters you kinda roll the dice. In my case, most of the time, everything turns out ok. Today, things did not go in my favour. To be fair, it really could have been anything else that I had today. Maybe it was the tuna. Maybe it was the coffee I had at 3pm. Whatever it was, I had to make a couple of trips to the bathroom to clean out the old radiator. It was very mild and compared to the horrors I’ve experience before, this was just a minor inconvenience.

I’m going to continue to eat raw oysters because they are pretty tasty.

In less than a week I’ve dropped my phone from desk height onto concrete twice now. Luckily, it suffered no apparent damage, no thanks to the lack of a case or other protective covering.

I think dropping my phone left an impression on me because I had a dream where I dropped my phone again. In my dream, the phone was damaged horribly. The screen was all broken and I could see the innards of the phone. It was broken apart and in pieces but strangely enough in my dream, a call came in and I was still able to answer it but pressing a part of the printed circuit board. That didn’t make any sense at all.

I woke up before I could get any further into my dream. I do have a thin shell for my phone but I don’t use it because I like having my phone as small and as light as it can be. I’ll try using it for at least a day just to see what it’s like.

Just before noon, a coworker came over to the area near my desk and looked out the windows next to me. He had heard from someone that a shooting had occurred close by and he was trying to see if the crime scene was visible from our studio. We couldn’t see anything but it turned out the shooting happened about a block and a half from where we were.

Apparently the suspect shot the owner of a bicycle store just outside a Starbucks. Plainclothes officers just happened to be in the area and gave chase. The suspect then jumped onto a bike and proceeded down the seawall. Other police officers intercepted the suspect near Science World, a popular attraction for kids. There was an exchange of gunfire, during which the suspect was shot and incapacitated.

The video you see above is from near the original crime scene. You can see the suspect on the bike. The two people chasing after him are the plainclothes officers. It is unclear who fired the shots you can hear in the video.

This morning, Microsoft announced they are making Halo: The Master Chief Collection for the Xbox One. This game is a compilation of Halo 1, 2, 3, and 4 all running on the Xbox One. These games have never been available on Microsoft’s newest console, so this is the only way gamers can experience those titles on the latest hardware. In particular, Halo 2 is getting a high-definition makeover, so it will look unbelievable compared to its original incarnation.

This compilation game will feature a unified user interface that will allow players to customize their experience across all four games. I am part of a small team that is creating this unified user interface for players. We’ve been working diligently at this for months now.

As with any time your game is publicly revealed for the first time, you get nervous about how the public is going to react. The Internet usually provides a healthy level of disdain for almost anything but I was pleasantly surprised this morning. The reaction has been overwhelmingly positive no matter where I have looked. In fact, a fair number of people have stated they might buy an Xbox One just for this game. It’s amazing that a series of four previously released games is what would finally make some people jump to next-gen hardware.

The video you see above is showing the actual user interface that we’ve been developing. We did a bit of work for E3, so the state you see it in is pretty much how it is now. We still have a lot of work to do so it’ll be a race to the finish.

This is certainly the most high-profile game I’ve had a chance to work on. I just hope we live up to the Halo standard set by the previous games.