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In the photo above, you can see my infected right eye in its glorious condition as of Sunday evening. Over the weekend, the slight pain of the infection went away. The area is no longer tender to the touch but the swelling and redness is still there. The photo doesn’t really show how red it is.

I think the fact that the pain is going away is a good sign, so I’m gonna hold off on the antibiotics for another day. If the swelling and the redness don’t show any improvement though, I’ll have to seriously consider filling out the prescription. I just want my eye to go back to normal.

It was the afternoon of yesterday when I noticed an odd discomfort near my right eye. The pain was slight and only flared up if I pressed near my eye socket. This was strange because I didn’t remember smashing my face against anything. I looked into a mirror in the bathroom but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary so I let it be until I got home. When arrived at my abode, I looked in a mirror again. The bottom eye lid was puffy, swollen, and a bit red. Something about this was not right.

It wasn’t that painful if I didn’t touch it but any contact in that area did stir up some sensitivity. I made a decision to see a doctor the next morning. This was something that I didn’t want to wait for my family doctor to see, so I just went to one of the two walk-in clinics that are a stone’s throw from my home. I waited about ten minutes for a doctor to tell me I had a hordeolum or more commonly and stupidly called a stye, an infection of one of the glands near the eyelids. One of the glands is blocked and infected. In my case, you can see a white dot on the bottom part of my eyelid, that’s where the problematic gland is and where the pus is trying come out. Nice eh?

The doctor told me that this is a very common infection and the standard course of treatment is warm compresses to the area. The heat is supposed to open up the gland so the infection can drain and I can get pus in my eye. If the compresses fail to make things better, the doctor gave me a prescription for antibiotics. I’m going to hold off on taking drugs for this because I’m a believer of not using antibiotics until absolutely necessary. I was warned, however, that if the area gets too infected, it will have to be lanced.

I’ve never had one of these before and I hope to never have one again. It’s more of an annoyance than anything but right eye looks stupid.

Every few months Jimmy Kimmel gets a group of celebrities to read mean tweets about themselves. This particular set of tweets don’t disappoint. What an amazing world we live in, where an average, normal, non-famous person can insult a celebrity from anywhere on the planet.

If memory serves me correct, I brought home my first DVD movie in 1999. I believe it was A Bug’s Life. I had just bought a DVD drive for my computer. They were still relatively new at the time and I remember being very excited to get one. The memory of the first time I saw a DVD movie playing on my 14″ CRT monitor is still very clear. The picture looked as sharp as anything I had ever seen, I was amazed. Of course on my 14″ CRT, with a resolution of 16 pixels by 16 pixels, it didn’t take much to be impressed but I was nonetheless impressed.

From then on, I stopped renting or buying VHS tapes. It was DVD all the way for me. I began buying DVDs for movies that I really enjoyed or hadn’t seen before. In total, there was about seven years where I collected DVDs. My collection isn’t that large, I’d figure about 100 in total. I stopped around 2006, when Blu-ray made its appearance. Knowing there was a high-definition format out there made it seem like a waste of money to keep on buying standard definition DVDs.

Since then, my DVD collection has sat on a bookshelf, taking up space. I can’t remember the last time I even popped a DVD movie into my computer, Xbox 360, or Blu-ray player for the express purpose of watching a movie. Over the weekend, I decided it was time to retire the collection. I thought about just giving them away but the hoarder in me doesn’t want to do that. Instead, I settled on just taking the discs, saving those, and recycling the disc cases. I bought one hundred disc sleeves, the cheap paper ones with cellophane window on the front. I’ve started to move the discs to sleeve but some of the disc cases give me pause. Some of them are quite nice, while others contain inserts that I’m not sure what to do with. What should I do with things like maps, posters, and unique promotional items? The easy answer is just recycle them too but perhaps I’ll have to give it some thought.

When I’m done, I’ll have freed up two whole shelves for other stuff. I may finally have room for my 8-track collection.

In the above rehearsal footage, Conan and Andy use a GoPro camera for a skit. One of the items they attach the camera too is a sandwich. It’s a sandwich but Conan takes it to a really, really different place.

It’s a long weekend here in Canada, so all the staff here at et.com are at home with their families. We’ll return tomorrow with our regular programming.

Up until this week, I had always eat bowls of hearty and delicious pho indoors. I’ve had pho inside restaurants and I’ve had pho in my own home but I’ve never had pho in the open air, with sunny skies above me. That changed this week with the nice weather outside.

There’s a pho joint a short distance from my work. Like many pho joints, they used much of the decor that was already at the location when they first set up shop. I’ve been to a pho place that was very clearly a former Italian restaurant. This place in two previous incarnations were burger joints. These establishments had a generous patio area with tables and seating. The pho place just left the patio as is.

So a co-worker and I sat outside on the patio and ordered some delicious pho. With a cool breeze wafting the aromas of our broth along the sidewalk, we ate our lunch. On that sunny day, people walked by us on the sidewalk, we watching them, they watching us eat our noodles. It was a nice way to spend our lunch time. If you get a chance, try eating a bowl of pho outside next time.

The last time I worked for United Front Games, I didn’t make it past two and a half months of employment as Activision cancelled the game they were bankrolling. This left the company with no other alternative but to lay off a whole bunch of people. It was an unfortunate development but I understood the reality of the situation. This is my second tour of duty with UFG and I was determined to break through the 2.5 month barrier.

By my calculations, I have now exceeded my previous best. It’s been about 2.5 months since I started working at UFG. Given that my first stint included a long Christmas break, I’m well past the old mark now. It’s not often you can genuinely celebrate staying with a job longer than 2.5 months but in my case, I shall take this small victory.

My next goal is to stick with this until the end of my contract, which happens to be in October!

Over a decade ago, I wrote a post entitled “The Last Person on Earth“. For those astute readers out there, I imagined a theoretical situation where I became the only remaining living human being on this planet through some unknown event. It would happen without a nuclear holocaust, zombie apocalypse, nor through some worldwide epidemic. One second there would be billions of people and then a second later everyone would be gone except for me. I believe in the comments (which were deleted after I moved to WordPress), we came to the conclusion that animals and plants would still exist.

In my post, I discussed about walking around everywhere in my underwear. I also discussed getting food before it all rotted. I mentioned that I might even get lonely. At least for me, it was fascinating thought experiment about how one would spend their time in such a scenario.

Well, that scenario is coming to a TV near you in the near future. Orville Willis Forte IV, or aka Will Forte, is starring in a new Fox series called The Last Man on Earth. The premise of the show is almost identical to the situation I described in my decade old post. Forte’s character finds himself as the last man on earth, without really knowing how everyone else disappeared. In the trailer above, you can see many of the things he does echoes with my own musings in such a world. You bet your ass I’d probably load up on all that free porn. Um, anyways… The show does hint that Forte’s character might discover a woman later on and I’m sure that will provide material for much of the show.

I’m curious to see how this all turns out!

Several weeks ago, a new sushi restaurant opened up directly across the street from my apartment building, making it the fifth sushi restaurant in a short, one block radius around my home. Because I quite enjoy Japanese food, I tried it out last week. I ate my meal at the new restaurant and was pleased with what I had. There was a particular menu item I liked, a selection of tuna done in different ways: ahi, spicy, sashimi, and this nice cone thing. I was impressed enough that I recommended it to a friend of mine who lives near by.

This evening I went to check my mail in the mail room downstairs when I noticed a takeout menu for the restaurant in question on the bulletin board. I wanted to grab it but it was the only one there, so instead I flipped through it looking for a web site address. I didn’t find any URLs but what I did find was a curious quote at the very back of the menu, right at the bottom:

“Jesus is loving us”

I immediately did not like what I had read. Now don’t get me wrong, I believe people in our society should be free to practice religion, as long as they don’t try to impose their beliefs on the rest of the society. I really didn’t like how they just slipped that phrase on the back of the menu, it just seems sneaky. I have no problem with things like church bake sales or Salvation Army stores. In those cases, people are upfront about the purpose of their enterprise. Church members are selling baked good so that the proceeds can support and help their place of worship. Everyone knows if you go buy a cookie from a church bake sale, your money is going towards that church. Everyone is upfront about that.

Now where it gets messy is examples like the new sushi restaurant. The name of the restaurant isn’t “Jesus’ Sushi”. I went and had a meal there and had no idea the restaurant had some underlying Christian faith to it somehow. I just don’t think it’s a good idea to mix business and religion in the manner they did. What is that phrase on the back of the menu supposed to represent? Is that telling me that if I go eat there, my dollars are going towards a church? Is it just a statement of the owner’s religious faith? Again, whatever it is, I don’t think it was a wise move. People in general who are looking to eat sushi, want to do so in a non-denominational manner. I don’t go to Denny’s to read excerpts from the Quran. No one goes to Wal-mart to see passages of the Pentateuch in the flyers.

Undoubtedly in the past, I have given my sorta hard-earned dollars to business owners who are religious. The difference is, these business owners didn’t mix their religious beliefs with the running of their business in some sneaky way. I don’t care if some deli owner who made my clubhouse sandwich went to church earlier in the day. That’s because he or she didn’t slip a King James bible into my take out container.

I’m not really sure if I’ll go back to this sushi restaurant now. I know for sure my friend won’t go. He is a hardcore atheist and this is the type of stuff that gets him angry. I’m not sure if I’m being overly sensitive about this but again, there’s a reason why most restaurants don’t slip in religious phrases on the back of their menus.