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At my place of employment, the company celebrates the end of each week by bringing in Tim Hortons doughnuts on Friday morning. Actually, there are bagels and muffins too, but it’s mostly doughnuts. The company is not obligated to do this but it’s a nice gesture on their part. I certainly do appreciate their efforts to keep us employees happy. Now having said that, I wish they wouldn’t bring in the doughnuts on Fridays. I’m not saying they should get rid of the doughnuts, they should just move them to another day. We should have doughnuts on Mondays for example. This is my reasoning for the change. People, including myself, are already feeling pretty good on Fridays because, hey, it’s the last day of the work week and the weekend is upon us. If you have to work, Fridays are the best work day even without doughnuts. Now, you know what days sucks the most? That’s Monday by a country mile. No one likes Mondays. So instead of giving us doughnuts on Fridays, they should be handing them out on Monday. It would be sorta saying “Hey, we know going back to work sucks on Monday, here, have some sugary treats.” That would be the better way of going about it. Monday doughnuts! I wish I could make it happen!

I’m sure there are some workplaces out there that have special treats on Mondays. Wherever those places are, you people are doing something special.

After work this evening, I went to London Drugs and bought a new scale. This time, I made sure it was not made of glass. Sure the glass ones look a lot better but I wasn’t going to take any chances this time around. With a non-glass scale in hand, I arrived back home. I still had to do another pass with the vacuum in the bathroom. I did pretty good the first time around, as I think I only saw two or three missed pieces of glass on the floor. I then took the whole garbage bag full of glass, the glass covered bath mat, and the remains of the scale down to the garbage room and threw away that whole messy memory.

It was delayed by almost 24 hours and a whole bunch of manual labour but I finally got to weight myself. If the scale is correct, I’m currently at 158 lbs, which is pretty amazing given how much and what I ate over the holidays. For those keeping score, I’m about 3 lbs over my slimmest during the summer. I’m still going to try to keep it below 160 lbs going forward.

Ladies and gentlemen, what you see above represents what was a whole bunch of sadness for me right before I wanted to go to bed last night. Let’s rewind to a few minutes before what happened above. I was taking my nightly evening shower as most Asians do. As I was cleansing my body, I decided it was time to weigh myself again as my holiday diet probably did not do me any favours. It was time to see what kind of damage I had done to myself. I finished showering, stepped out of the shower, dried myself, and then applied talc to all my sensitive areas.

While still naked, I opened the cabinet door underneath the bathroom sink and proceeded to grab the scale that I’ve been using for several months. I was able to grab it and pull it from underneath the sink when it happened. It’s here where it gets a bit hazy. I remember putting my left hand on the glass to support scale as I was initially grabbing it with the right. I don’t think I made contact with the scale with anything else but it’s possible I may have bumped it. In any case, the glass shattered with an amazing amount of explosive force in my hands. I was briefly stunned by the surprise. Here I was, naked and barefoot, holding onto the metal frame of the scale while so many pieces of glass covered my bathroom floor. I dared not to move my feet as I quickly checked to see if any of my parts had been injured by the flying glass. Luckily, no part of me appeared to have been cut by the seemingly hundreds of pieces of glass.

Because the scale was made from safety glass, some of the pieces had broken into large chunks, rather than sharp shards. That’s not to say there weren’t any of those sharp shards though. My heart sank as I saw that many of the pieces were really small and looked really sharp. As I analyzed the situation, I knew this was gonna be a pain in the ass to clean up. I was shocked at the amount of glass that was everywhere. It seemed to me that the glass might have doubled its volume upon shattering. I looked behind me and gingerly took a huge step backwards into my bedroom and onto carpet, away from the mess. I went and put on a pair of shoes, grabbed a pair of gloves, and a large garbage bin. I came back into the bathroom with the bin. Trying to not step on any of the many fragments, I used my hands to grab the largest chunks of glass and put them into the bin. Some of the pieces were too small to grab with my gloves and I was afraid they were going to puncture the gloves. With these pieces, I just had to sweep them into a pile.

Next, I went and grabbed my vacuum, being careful to leave my shoes in the bathroom as I didn’t want to track any fragments into the rest of my apartment. Using the hose attachment, I tried to systematically suck up all the remaining bits of glass from the floor. The familiar tinkle coming from the inside of the hose told me that I’d found some tiny bits of glass. It was a cacophony of noise at first as the hose sucked all the smallest bits of glass on the tile. A proper and thorough cleaning required much more time than I had so I just did the best I could do in the time remaining. Another causality of this accident was my bathmat, which I didn’t trust anymore, even if I had vacuumed it. It was the one thing I constantly step onto with my bare feet. I needed a new one anyways, so into the garbage it went.

After work tomorrow, I’m going to have to go over every inch of the tile again with my vacuum just to be sure I got all the pieces of glass. I checked the bottom of my shoes and there were bits of glass in the tread which I had to pick out. There’s got to be some tiny bits that I missed. In the meantime, I’ll have to wear the shoes in the morning when I’m getting ready for work.

What a pain in the ass this is and I still don’t even know how fat I am now!!! I also need a new scale as well. I’m not sure the next one I get will have a glass platform. I really should have known better than to bring the glass scale into a warm environment and touch it with my warm hands. Let this be a lesson to you all.

So much of North America, at least in the most heavily populated areas of it, is currently bearing the brunt of freezing cold weather. A meteorological term has arisen, the “polar vortex”, which explains the chilly weather. Up until yesterday, I’d never even heard of that.

The weather closed the Toronto airport for several long hours, disrupting many travelers plans as people tried to get home from their holidays elsewhere. On social media sites, people are posting photos of rats freezing on the streets of NYC, toilet water freezing inside homes, and frost forming on inside light switches. It’s safe to say, that probably millions of people are feelings the effects of the cold.

I don’t want to seem like a dick but the weather has been very mild in Vancouver in comparison. Sure it’s been a bit rainy the last few days but the temperatures have been nearing double-digits. Some guy at work has been wearing shorts since last week.

For the rest of the continent, I feel your pain and do appreciate how lucky we have it here right now.

A new year brings new beginnings but it also brings a new assessment to any real estate that you own in this province. Here‘s what happened last year.

This year my assessment went up by $2000, a lot less than the $12K jump from last year. I’m ok with that as I hope this means my property tax will hold steady for this year too. If you’re interested in seeing what everyone’s place is worth in BC, click here. If you know my address, you can even look up my own assessment!

David Clarkson is a professional hockey player who is a member of the Toronto Maple Leafs. This is his first year with Toronto, after signing a contract in the summer worth just under $37M USD. Already a millionaire from his previous contracts with New Jersey, Clarkson is not hurting for money.

The HBO show 24/7 followed Clarkson and his team mates for several days before and during the 2014 Winter Classic. The episodes provided a rare look into the lives of players on and off the ice. In one particular segment, the show tags along with Clarkson as he makes his way to the Air Canada Centre for a Toronto home game. For most pro hockey players, getting to the rink for a home game involves getting in their expensive vehicles and driving to the arena where they park in secured spots in the facility. Clarkson sometimes takes a decidedly different route to work.

A native of the Toronto area, Clarkson drives to a subway station outside of the downtown core. There, he parks his car like a normal, non-millionaire person, walks down to the platform and takes the subway to the arena. In the clip above, you can see Clarkson do just that. He even has to stand at one point. Clarkson rides in almost total anonymity as perhaps people couldn’t even fathom a Leaf taking a subway to the game. That’s almost impossible to believe in a hockey crazy town like Toronto. Clarkson perhaps benefits from being a very new player to the team as opposed to an established star like Phil Kessel. I applaud Clarkson for taking a more pedestrian way to work. I wonder if he’ll continue to ride the subway now that people know his routine.

I’ve often wondered if any of the Vancouver Canucks could take the Skytrain to Rogers Arena for a game. Logistically, it’s possible since a station is located right outside the rink. Practically though, I’m not sure if it could work. Vancouver is a town that loves its hockey and even the fourth-liners get recognized fairly often in public. I cannot imagine one of the Sedins or Ryan Kesler taking the Expo line to Stadium station.

In today’s world of ubiquitous technology, almost everyone knows about the concept of a software update. A long, long time ago or when I was in my late teens or early 20s, software updates were something I always looked forward to. An update meant good things. The program being updated either had new features, bug fixes, was generally faster, or some combination of these. In almost all cases, from a user perspective, you’d be missing out on something if you didn’t update your software.

In these current times, software now goes beyond a simple PC or game console. Software is now run on phones and tablets. It’s these apps that have made me wary of updates. App updates no longer are a guarantee of a better user experience. In fact, owning a smartphone and a tablet has now made me very wary of updates. In the last year, I’ve discovered that many apps should not be updated as their updates clearly do not benefit the user.

My first example involves the Hotmail app which I used on my phone. It allowed users to check multiple Hotmail and/or Live e-mail accounts in a single app on your phone or tablet. It was very convenient to have. A few months ago, an update came along and I installed it without paying too much attention. This update was not an update in a traditional sense. What it did, in fact, was disable the Hotmail app so you could not use it anymore and pointed you to the new Outlook app which replaced it. Ok, so what’s wrong with that? Well, the Outlook app initially did not support multiple e-mail accounts. So for people like me who were checking different accounts, we actually lost functionality. There was no way to uninstall the update, so I was out of luck. This is actually common amongst apps, where updates remove functionality that users previously enjoyed. Sometimes that functionality is then added as a paid service.

While the loss of functionality is bad for sure, even worse is the loss of privacy. Sometimes, app developers will provide an update that seemingly is there only to invade more of your privacy. On the Android platform, users are aware at all times what permissions an app is trying to get from you whenever you install or update the app. Sometimes I won’t even install an app after looking at its initial permissions list because they want too much access to my info. The worst, however, is when an update out of the blue wants to access info it didn’t want before. A dastardly example of this is the latest Facebook update for Android. It tried to slip in permissions to read people’s text messages. In the release notes, it said it needed to do this because it wanted to read text messages that might have been sent from Facebook itself. No, that’s not ok. How about I read the text messages from Facebook myself and I’ll pass along any codes or whatever to the Facebook app manually? It boggles my mind how many people have gone ahead and installed this update. I know this update will never get installed on my phone.

At the least on the Android platform, there is some talk of Google implementing a feature to allow users to selectively block permissions on a per-app basis. This actually exists in some non-official flavours of Android but isn’t part of the stock Android ROM just yet.

So there ya go, updates ain’t what they used to be.

As 2013 draws to a close, some neat blogging gizmos generated a summary report for this blog for the last 12 months. I know this little dog and pony show ain’t the most popular corner of the Internet but I appreciate each and every one of those 10,000 visits during the last year, even if people were mainly looking for pictures of women in volleyball outfits. Thanks for your support and I hope you continue to come back in the new year!

I hope everyone is enjoying the holidays thus far. For those of you who’ve had to work since Christmas Day, I feel for ya. I’ve been off since last Monday. I’ve spent the time visiting friends, spending time with my family, watching movies, and playing video games. I’ve also been staying up late which should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me. I’m fast approaching that weird limit where I’m about to jet-lag myself without going anywhere. I’m waking up beyond noon now which isn’t a good sign since I gotta be back at work on Thursday. I need to get to bed earlier starting tomorrow. If this were the summer, the sun would be rising as I write this.

From everyone here at et.com, we wish you and your loved ones the happiest of holidays and all the best in the new year!