Category: Uncategorized

Prior to getting my new floors installed, I had a small moth infestation in my apartment. Here is the story of how all this happened and how it got resolved.

I am actually not sure when I got the moths but I do know where they came from. The common hallway outside my apartment is carpeted and I remember that quite frequently, I would see these small flying insects in the hallway. I’d step outside the elevator and I’d see one or two of these things buzzing through the air.

I didn’t pay attention to these things because they were small and I’d see at most two of them at a time. One day, however, I noticed one of these damn things in my bedroom. It landed on a wall and I killed it. I didn’t think anything of it, partially because it was small, there was only one, and I didn’t know what it actually was.

It turns out, it was a common clothes moth. A few days later, I noticed another one in my bedroom, which I also killed. This got my attention because now I was seeing a pattern. On a hunch, I checked one of the closets in my bedroom. I got a flashlight and I rustled some of the clothes hanging in there. I immediately saw two of these damn things flying off. It was then I realized I had a problem and these were tiny moths. Worse yet, there were eating my clothes for food and almost assuredly reproducing in my closet.

What followed what a week long process of washing clothes and then putting the clean clothes in sealed bags. Textiles that I couldn’t wash, went into sealed bags with moth balls in them. I emptied my closets because I read that I needed to remove everything that they could eat or hide in. At the time, I still had carpet and my closets were also carpeted. The internet told me I had to vacuum the carpet to get rid of any potential eggs that might have been laid in the carpet. Gross.

Once the closets were empty, I noticed many dead moths on top of boxes that were in the closet and on the closet carpets as well. I wasn’t sure if that was a good sign that they were dying in there or it was bad sign that they were enough moths to start piling up dead.

I did a thorough vacuum of both my bedroom closets and left them empty for a few days. I left my clean clothes in garbage bags and just got my clothes directly from the bags. After a few days, I felt it was safe enough to take a few items of clothing and hang them back in my closet. A day later or so, I noticed two or three moths flying in my bedroom. It was hard to say if these moths had been hiding out in the carpet in the rest of my bedroom or if I hadn’t been thorough enough with the closet carpets.

I again vacuumed the closet carpets and also vacuumed my bedroom carpet. By this time though, I had already made the decision to get vinyl flooring. So, not long after, I began ripping up my carpet. It took a while but eventually a junk service took away rolls of my old carpet.

I never saw any moths in my apartment after that and all my clothes hang in my closets again. Do you know where I actually did see moths again though? I saw them in the hallway outside my apartment. In fact, I distinctly remember coming home one day and as I was about to put my key into the lock, I saw a moth fluttering in front of my door, as if it knew I was about to open my door and it was waiting to fly inside. I smacked it against the door jamb and killed it.

I have a theory that somehow these moths got into the hallway and that one day, when I wasn’t vigilant, I came home, opened my door, and one of these moths got into my apartment. My home is moth-free for the time being and I haven’t seen any hallway moths for several months now. I hope it stays that way.

This weekend I had the fun task of doing a preliminary draft of my income tax return. It’s preliminary because I don’t have all my tax receipts, including the most important one, which is my T4. As such, some of the numbers I plugged in are just guesses or educated ones at least.

I’ve been doing these preliminary returns for a few years now because I need to find out if I’m gonna owe the government more money (and how much) or if I’m gonna get a refund. If the tax program tells me I owe money, then I try to figure out how much more of an RRSP contribution I need to make to roughly break even.

This year, if the calculations are to be believed and if I do nothing else, I am still owing the government about $300. If I then contribute another $750 to an RRSP, I will wind up with a refund of less than $20.

I feel fortunate that I have the contribution room and the actual money to dump another $750 to an RRSP. I have until the end of February to get this done, so I have plenty of time.

If you’ve looked at any of the headlines relating to business and/or technology recently, you must have noticed that the tech industry has experienced mass layoffs across some of the biggest companies in the world. To name just a few, Amazon, Unity, Salesforce, DoorDash, and Meta have all laid off significant numbers of people. Just today, Microsoft announced they’ll be letting go ten thousand people, some of whom found out today they no longer have a job.

My LinkedIn feed is full of people with posts about losing their jobs, just one after another. It doesn’t seem like there’s any other topic on that site.

For a while, at least during the summer, it seemed like maybe the video game industry would be immune to this but I’ve seen a few job losses in my industry too. It started off with some smaller studios having to let go some people but now, even Microsoft has decided to cut jobs at some of their studios, including those who worked on Halo and Gears of War.

From a personal point of view, I am astounded that none of this seems to have affected my current employer. EA used to be the leader in layoffs during every financial quarter during the very lean and dark years of the early 2010s. My co-workers and I would fear the end of each financial quarter, because that’s when the layoffs would most likely happen. I survived countless cuts but even I got laid off twice from the company I work for now.

I am not saying no one has been laid off in the last twelve months from my company but if it has happened, it hasn’t been the hundreds of people that used to get axed every year. We used to read about whole teams losing their jobs on the Internet, before the official e-mail even was sent to the rest of the employees. That is not happening now.

It oddly feels safe to be where I am now as thousands of people worldwide struggle to find new work in the tech industry. This is a bizzaro world because a decade ago, I was the one who was always on shaky ground and the Amazons and Microsofts of the world were source of the stable jobs. How is it this has flipped now?

Of course, since I wrote about this now, I have jinxed myself. Our quarterly financial results will be released on January 31, in less than two weeks. I have tempted fate by writing this post, let’s see what happens.

I spent some of my valuable weekend afternoon hours recently to go to the dentist. I was due for a cleaning, so this was a regularly scheduled appointment. Due to bad genetics and bad luck, I have to work hard to keep my teeth clean all the time. At a minimum, I have to brush two times a day with an electric toothbrush and I always floss at least once a day. Even if I religiously keep to that schedule, it’s never a guarantee that the dentist won’t find something wrong with my teeth every six months.

So, while last weekend’s cleaning went very well and quickly (they barely had to scrape off any plaque at all), I was waiting for the dentist to tell me what new cavities or oral malady he found this time around. To my surprise, he found none. I get another reprieve for about six months. Again, that’s not a sign that I can neglect my dental care going forward. I need to continue to brush and floss every single day. Do you know there are people who don’t brush twice day and never floss, rarely go to the dentist, yet still don’t get cavities? I’m not one of those lucky sons of bitches. Genetic lottery winners.

Recently, I wrote about a post about when the new studio location would be ready for people to work in (if they wanted to go in for work). They said it was going be February but I knew that wasn’t realistic. It turns out they weren’t too far off of that. We received updated news this week that the Vancouver portion of the team that I work with is slated to be given the ok to work in the new location starting March 6th.

Of course we live in different times now compared to when we were all together last. Some people have moved away from Vancouver and will stay remote. Others are still in or around Vancouver but still have no interest in returning to the studio. Some will do a hybrid of remote and on location. Lastly, some will go old school and do five days a week at the new location.

I know that many, many months ago when we were all asked to choose one of those options, I marked down that I wanted to be hybrid. That makes less sense now. Most of the people I work with directly are not located in Vancouver. No matter if I worked from home or in the new studio, my main methods of communication would still be Slack and Zoom. The only question is, do I want to wake up early, slog through a commute on both ends of my day, just so I can do Slack and Zoom at the studio. Most of the time, the answer to that will be no.

The only real reason for me to go in will be perhaps for social reasons, To chat with people I haven’t seen in a while. Maybe there might be a free food day or something. Otherwise, I’ll get more sleep, be more efficient, and have more time for myself if I continue to work from home.

I’m open to change however, so I’ll see how the studio opening goes. I might drop by in March, just to take a look. I’ll take pictures of course.

My internet service provider has informed me that I lose access to the internet in about two minutes so that emergency maintenance can occur tonight. They say it might take up to four hours, which basically means I won’t have internet for the rest of evening. I am glad I watched a few streaming shows before the shutdown.

I need to hurry and press the “publish” button now.

I logged into my main stock trading account today for the first time in many months, probably at least six months. I haven’t looked at the account for a while because 2022 just wasn’t a great year for most investments and I just didn’t want to look at all the red in my account. Sure enough, despite some of my investments still showing a profit, enough of the bad ones have me in the negative overall. There’s nothing for me to do but just sit tight and hope they all rebound.

The other thing I noticed is that I have about $10k in cash just sitting in one of these accounts. I believe I dumped all that cash in there about two years ago so I could easily invest quickly without having to wait to fund an account if I needed to act quickly. When I saw that cash in there tonight, my first feeling was some disappointment that I hadn’t actually invested in anything with that money. Then I quickly realized that if I had, especially if I had done it in late 2021 or early 2022, that $10k in cash would be worth less than $10k right now. I had inadvertently done the right thing by just letting it sit there.

The question is now is it still the right thing to do to let it sit there? Lots of stocks and ETFs are down (by many measures), so is it time to get back into it? Or have we yet to see the bottom? Obviously, if I knew how to answer questions like that, I’d already be rich.

It’s mid-January and across the traditional winter wonderlands of the Prairies, Ontario, and Quebec, the temperatures are well below freezing and snow is on the ground in most of those areas. In Vancouver, for the last several weeks, it’s been rainy with highs in near or at the double digits. The lows are well above freezing. Tomorrow, the low is supposed to be 10 degrees Celsius. Amazing.

This is the traditional Vancouver winter everyone is used to and is ok with having. The weather is really mild. A light jacket is all you need to go out, day or night. Sure, the rain kinda sucks but at least rain doesn’t cripple the transportation network in this city.

I could deal with this weather until the spring comes.

In a Zoom meeting, with a comment that was said so quickly, most people might have missed it, it was announced that the new studio that we’ve been waiting for more than a year would be ready for occupancy in February of 2023, as in, next month.

I am skeptical of the comment and I really don’t believe the new studio location will be ready in less than four weeks as of this writing. First, the last time we got an official update, we were told that because of supply chain issues, the earliest the studio would be ready was sometime in the spring of 2023. I seriously doubt the global shortage of everything has improved recently. Second, we’ve received no official emails about what to expect if indeed the location was going to be ready for occupancy in February. Third, in a contradictory message, someone who actually is helping with the studio opening re-affirmed that spring is the realistic timeline, not February.

Of course, the point is kinda moot for me. Most of the people I work with are located outside of Vancouver. So does it really matter if I take my Zoom meetings from home or at this new studio? To most of my co-workers, they won’t even notice the difference.

One of my goals in 2023 is to finally eat an Uncrustable. This snack, hailing from America (of course it would be), is essentially a crustless sandwich filled with sweet ingredients. They don’t sell these damn things in Canada, so my only options are to either visit the crazy United States or have someone bring them back to Canada for me. Neither option seems likely to happen in the next little while unfortunately.

There doesn’t exist another “option”, which is to buy this contraption on the Internet, so that I can make my own Uncrustables. The issue is that I don’t normally have peanut butter and jam in my home and I don’t want to buy a whole jars of peanut butter and jam just to make this homemade Uncrustable. In the best case scenario, even if I enjoy a homemade Uncrustable, I’d have to make a ton more to finish off a whole jar of peanut butter and jam.

I just want to try two or three authentic Uncrustables.