Category: Uncategorized

Through social media, I found out that the local Boston Pizza in my area and possibly every BP across the country is donating $5 from every medium and large pizza sold on Monday to the relief efforts going on Philippines. This sounded like a great way to both get some food and to help out people in need. One of the individual Boston Pizza restaurants however, indicated that the money raised will go to World Vision. I don’t know why they did not choose to give the money to the Red Cross.

I know some people don’t care about this type of stuff but I strongly prefer to give my money to organizations that have no religious ties. The aid given to people in need shouldn’t have strings attached to it. People shouldn’t have to learn about Jesus just so they can get a bottle of water to stave off dehydration. This is the exact reason why I didn’t just choose the first organization I found to sponsor a child in need. My sponsor child in Africa get assistance without the need to read the Holy Bible.

I am going to follow-up with Boston Pizza corporate to see if they are indeed giving all the money to World Vision. If they are, I’ll skip the pie and just donate to the Red Cross.

This month is November or as most people in the local video game industry call it, Movember. If you recall, I participated in Movember last year even though I knew the results were going to be disastrous, which they were.

As I am with a different studio this year, I expected them to do Movember as well. Every place I’ve worked at has done it and with the casual atmosphere of video game studios, Movember is pretty much almost expected. When the end of October rolled around, I was shocked to find out no one was sending out registration e-mails. My current studio is several times larger than PopCap Vancouver was, yet no one seemed to be into raising money for a good cause. It was a bit weird to be honest.

I briefly thought about organizing a team myself but as the new guy, it’s tough to get people onboard with this type of stuff when no one knows who you are. Maybe next year.

It’s officially cold as balls in Vancouver as temperatures have fallen to just below freezing for the first time this fall. For Vancouver that’s cold as we have the most reasonable temperatures on average in Canada for a big city. This means I’ve switched to my winter coat and the new North Face jacket I’ve been wearing is going to get its insert installed tomorrow morning. I probably should have put that insert in earlier as it was freezing cold today.

I know the rest of Canada usually mocks Vancouver when we complain about the mercury dropping to close to freezing. In Calgary, they’ve already had a huge helping of snow on the ground. Out east, temperatures have already fallen well below zero. I’m delicate though! My skin can’t take this dry, wintry air.

So on the way home this evening I exited the Skytrain without my umbrella. I hate forgetting my umbrella on transit. It’s been several years since the last time I’ve done this but it doesn’t get any easier each time it happens.

Leaving your umbrella on transit is essentially just throwing your money away. My last few umbrellas have cost about $30 or more. I usually buy the small and compact ones, that also have a button that both opens and closes the umbrella. I had the umbrella today because it was raining quite hard. Thankfully, the weather is going to be somewhat clear for the next few days. Even if it wasn’t, I still have my backup umbrella. It’s a cheap one that I keep around just in case I do something stupid like I did today.

I will check the transit lost and found tomorrow, just because it’s on the way to work. I won’t be surprised, however, if there is an umbrella shopping trip in my near future.

Over the weekend I nearly destroyed my main computer. I got this harebrained idea about a week ago that I wanted to watch HDTV on my computer, even though I could already do that on the TV in my living room. I figured that I could multitask on my computer, surfing the Internet, writing e-mails, and watching TV at the same time. So I ordered an internal TV tuner card.

I picked it up from the post office on the weekend. I’ve installed dozens of cards over the course of nearly two decades in many different computers. I thought this was going to be quick and easy. Things went wrong almost immediately. There was an available slot in my computer but because this card just a tiny bit too big, I had to trade slots with my sound card. This was a tiny hassle compared to what I would have to deal with next. Thinking I was done, I started up my computer again and it promptly got stuck on the POST screen. It just hung there and never got any further than that. I feared the worst because it meant I could have broken any number of components while I was installing the TV tuner card. I began taking the cards back out and putting things back to the way they were originally. To my relief, my computer was able to get to Windows again. So I started putting things back in, one card at a time. After a lot of time, I realized that my computer would not boot up with both my sound and TV tuner card installed. It had to be one or the other. Then I tried something new. I took the power away from my Blu-ray drive and left both cards in. To my surprise, my computer got into Windows successfully. Of course, I then realized Windows couldn’t detect my sound card anymore. I turned off my computer, jiggled the card, and restarted. Now I could get sound again.

I finally got around to trying to watch TV on my computer but of course, the software couldn’t detect any channels with the antenna I was using. All that work and I still couldn’t get TV on my computer. I decided to cut my losses and just watch TV on my real TV for at least one more night.

You’d think that during the short week after a long weekend I wouldn’t be tired but that’s not the case here. I feel like I’ve been exhausted since Wednesday. I got lots of sleep on the long weekend and I’ve had no late nights this week. Yet here I am all tired.

I’m gonna try to go to bed a bit earlier tonight. In the meantime, watch Sarah Silverman appear on Jimmy Kimmel’s show. For those not in the know, Sarah and Jimmy used to date for many years but broke up in 2009. Most people try not to run into their exes at the grocery store, here they appear on a TV talk show together.

So after waiting a month since the last time I stepped on my scale, I reluctantly weighed myself last night. During my last check, I was doing ok, just two pounds above my lowest weight during the summer. Now, more than two months since I started work, I was convinced that I had probably packed on a few more pounds. Was the mirror lying? How much had I really put on?

The only way to figure out was to step back on scale. I gingerly tiptoed on the glass surface and waited for the readout. To my surprise, it read 158 lbs. That’s just a pound more since the beginning of October and only three pounds off my skinniest in the summer. Since your weight can fluctuate within a pound or so at anytime, this was a really pleasing development. I’m keeping the weight off, even though my exercise levels have trailed off compared to the summer. This only reinforces that diet is the key to getting to a healthy weight. It’s a lot easier to not eat those french fries than it is to have to burn those fries off with exercise later.

Ok, let’s do this again sometime in December.

Over the weekend, comedian Sacha Baron Cohen won the Charlie Chaplin Award For Excellence at the Britannia Awards. In the video you see above, Cohen is supposedly receiving one of Chaplin’s famous canes from what is supposedly one of the last living child actors to have worked with Chaplin itself. I could describe what happens next but you’re better off just watching the video.

So this weekend, two national electronics stores, Future Shop and Best Buy had a pretty good promo going on. It allowed people to take in a used game and trade it in for either Call of Duty: Ghosts, Battlefield 4, or Assassin’s Creed 4. The fine print was supposed to be one used game per new game, per store, per day. That meant you could hit three different stores in a single day to get all three games.

As you might expect, it was madness around most of the country starting Saturday morning. All three games were recent releases and all three were highly anticipated by a large portion of the gaming community. Some questioned why Future Shop and parent company Best Buy would put on such a promo. Most didn’t care and just got in line, and lines there were. Just reading some social media on Saturday morning, I saw that people were lined up before stores were even open. In some cases, those early birds, still waited almost two hours to get their games. The shortest wait I heard about was 30 minutes but that was far from the norm. There was plenty of reports of lineups that took more than two hours to get through, with some lasting over five hours. Five hours standing in line! Apparently in some isolated cases, people started to faint.

While both stores won over some of the buying public, the act of essentially giving away free and popular games actually pissed off a significant amount of people. Many reported that the rule of one new game per trade in was not followed at all. Some stores were giving away all three new games with just a single trade in of an old game. This caused store stock to deplete much quicker than it should have. This meant that many people who had lined up for hours got nothing for their time as the people at the front of the line got most of the stock. As you might imagine, if you had just stood in line for hours at the start of a long weekend, only to get nothing, you’d be angry too.

On a personal note, I was originally planning on trading in some games but I decided to monitor social media first before heading out. I was still battling my cold on Saturday morning and wasn’t feeling that great. The notion of standing in line for hours did not appeal to me. Once I read that some people I knew had been in line for hours I just decided to stay in bed. Then when I read that lines were taking up to five hours to clear, I knew it was time to do something else on Saturday. I may not be a millionaire but my time is worth way more than the $60 per game.

In the end, I didn’t get any of the games. Most of the stock across Canada was gone by the end of Saturday. Also, I can get Battlefield 4 from my EA friends for only $20. I’ll also be able to sign out Call of Duty and Assassin’s Creed when it comes to the studio library at work. So in a way, I can play these games for nearly free anyways. I wonder if anyone standing in line for hours did the math on their time spent.

As it is Remembrance Day on Monday, I’ve sent the staff here at et.com home for the long weekend. I hope everyone who enjoys the extra day off takes a moment to honour those who served and sacrificed in past conflicts. We’ll return tomorrow with our regular programming.