Category: Uncategorized

So I received a notice in the mail today which informed me that I was selected for jury duty. I agree that acting as a juror is part of everyone’s civic duty, just like voting. Had this summons come in during the “summer of me”, I gladly would have done it. Unfortunately, I’m working now and the trial that I might be selected for will last ten business days. Legally, my workplace does not have to pay me for those ten days. That’s two weeks of pay lost. As you might imagine, that’s a significant amount of money to anyone.

If the circumstances were different, I would not hesitate to serve on a jury. Unfortunately, serving that long does have a financial impact on me. I’m not sure what I’ll do at this point but I am considering asking to be excused from duty. If I had a lot of money, like Tom Hanks does, this would be less of a problem.

This is sorta like the opposite of winning the lottery.

For the last week or so, the great Vancouver area has been covered in a thick fog. On most mornings, I’ll wake up look outside my windows and see nothing but white fog. The apartments just across the street seem to be gone as they are cloaked by this soupy mess. It’s particularly foggy where I live since I’m in a low-lying area, right next to the water.

The weather actually has been “sunny” for all of these days but it’s impossible to tell since the fog sits on top of the city, hiding the sun from us. If you were able to get higher, it’d be a very nice day.

To document this, I got my old video camera out for another time-lapse. I started it before I went to bed when I could see nothing but white outside my windows. The fog lifted sometime in the afternoon, partially burned away by the sun, making it a sunny end to the day. You’ll be happy to know I cleaned the lens of my camera after this video.

When I wake up in the morning, I don’t jump out of bed right away. I take my phone or my tablet and I check my e-mail. I’ll also take a cursory glance at some social media. This morning I was reading some tweets when I encountered one that said Skytrain was a mess. For those who don’t know, Skytrain is the local automated rapid transit system, comprised of three lines. I live over one of the Expo stations, which is the oldest line at over 25 years. This also happened to be the line with the huge problems today. Huge as in about 70% of that line was down to a single track, which takes forever to get trains along. The good news was that the other lines, Millennium and Canada, were still working without problems. Even better, a Millennium line station is just a five minute walk from my place.

I initially had to fight off the impulse to just rush out there and jump on the first train or bus I saw. Then I realized that was stupid. When transit breaks down, it’s a bad idea to just get on a train or bus without knowing where it’s going or what’s waiting for you when it gets to your destination. I’m sure some people just got on a train even though it took them right to those problem stations, where tons of people were already waiting. I knew I was going to be late anyways, so I took the time to get as much information as possible to plan my alternative route to work. I actually left about ten minutes later than usual, just because I double-checked that my new route was going to avoid all the problems.

To my surprise, it turned out to be not that bad. I definitely had to walk farther than normal to get to the station. I usually just go downstairs to catch a train. When my train did come though, it had very few people on it. I had a seat to myself almost all the way. I took a Millennium line train the farthest west I could. This is where my intel got a bit hazy and I had to just throw caution to the wind. I was depending on a regular bus to take me about five minutes west so that I could get to a Canada Line station where it would take me right to work. I didn’t know if there was hundreds or just dozens of people waiting for that same bus. My heart sank a bit when I saw the lineup for my bus. It was definitely long. A lot longer than I had anticipated but not so bad that it seemed crazy. I also began to worry when I didn’t see the bus coming for about five minutes. It did arrive though but now I wondered if I was far along in the line that I could get on this bus. I was almost at the front when something weird happened. There was a whole group of people at the front who didn’t want to get on the bus, it was almost full but still had a tiny bit of room. I waited two seconds for them to get on before I realized they were choosing to stay behind. I rush past them and onto the bus. The bus driver only let on about three more people behind me. I had made it.

It was a relatively uneventful five minutes to the Canada Line station. From there it was one stop to work and a short walk to the studio. The whole trip had taken about an hour and ten minutes which surprised me. My normal commute time is about 38 minutes. After I got to work, I found out I was extremely lucky. Other commuters took two to four hours to get to their destinations, way over their normal time. One of my co-workers even turned back, went home, and drove instead. Her total commute time was four hours this morning.

The problem turned out to be an incorrectly installed power rail. The whole messy morning was captured by many Twitter users.

Though I’m glad I didn’t have that bad of a commute this morning, I’m hoping for a normal day tomorrow.

 

One of my favourite actors, Keanu Reeves, used the power of the Internet to answer some questions on Sunday afternoon. He fielded questions from anyone on the web site Reddit. It’s not the first time a celebrity or famous person has done such a thing on Reddit but it was certainly one of the most honest and heartfelt sessions. Many were impressed by the genuine sincerity coming from Mr. Reeves. One person asked him why he chooses to live such a relatively simple life despite his fame and considerable wealth. His answer was direct and to the point:

“You know, I’ve been very fortunate in my life. Which I am grateful for. And I guess it’s just to my tastes to keep life as simple as I can.”

Keanu goes on to explain his love for hockey, his time in Toronto, what he likes to eat, and his memories of working with the late River Phoenix and Dennis Hopper. You can find all his answers here, just click on the “context” to find out what the actual question was. It was very refreshing to read what he had to say about a number of topics. I’ve always had a great deal of respect for the man and I will continue to do so.

During the first couple of weeks at work I discovered two of my co-workers have an interesting arrangement with the studio. These guys only work four days of the week. They work normal hours on those days so they are making 80% of their normal salary. It’s probably not a coincidence that both of them are fathers to young children.

When I first found out about this, I had several thoughts. First, I was really happy to see that the studio was accepting of flexible working arrangements like this. They could have said no and I am sure in the stone-age days of the 1950s, a man asking to only work four days a week so that they could tend to their children would have been laughed at. Second, I was instantly a bit envious of my co-workers. Having a four-day work week definitely has its benefits.

Now, I do understand it’s not a trivial thing to take a 20% pay cut. How many of us could afford to do so? Is that extra time off worth the amount of money you are giving up? For some people, such a thing just could not be a viable option. We’d all like to only work four days a week but that’s a lot of money to give up. I am guessing though, for these guys, the ability to spend more time with their kids is priceless.

On a personal level, I quickly asked myself if I could live with 20% less salary. Well, I didn’t have to think too hard about that because sometime in the last four years, I was making about 18% less than what I’m making now. I want to point out that I didn’t get a huge pay raise with my current job. It’s just that one of the jobs I took in the last four years didn’t pay as much as I was used to. I don’t hold any ill will towards that company because that’s all the money they had to pay me. Anyways, so did my lifestyle change drastically when I was at that job? Not in the least. I was still able to pay my mortgage, I went on a vacation, and I didn’t eat instant noodles every night. So if I magically made 20% less tomorrow, there would be no change in the way I lived my life. The only difference would be my bank account wouldn’t get as big at each paycheque.

At least for me, it would really just boil to down to the question of, how valuable would that extra day off be? Well, I have to admit, I value time off quite a bit. Every long weekend that comes along leaves me feeling really refreshed and re-energized. I can just imagine how great it would be to know that every week gave you that extra day to either rest, attend to personal errands, or hell, even take a quick trick somewhere. My approach is from someone who doesn’t have kids but I’m sure a parent could appreciate the extra day in their own way.

I don’t think I’ll be asking my employer to alter my contract any time soon but the fact that this is even possible has me wondering about how great this could be.

Actor Steven Yeun explains to Conan how his father called him after watching him do a sex scene on The Walking Dead.

So about a month ago I added ads to a few YouTube videos I have. I don’t even run a channel or do any work with those type of things. I don’t promote my videos, hell it’s been like almost six months since I uploaded my last stupid video. Yet, I’ve already started to accumulate revenue from the ads. Yes, it’s like way less than a dollar but I’m starting to get an idea of how much money professional content producers on YT make.

My hot water dispenser got delivered to work today. I took it home and it’s so nice to have a dispenser again. The machine is currently in energy-saving mode. It’ll wake itself up, boil the water, and have it warming for me by the time I wake up. What a time we live in.

The tweet you see above is from the social media account of the video game Ryse: Son of Rome. The game, an exclusive title for the soon-to-be-released Xbox One console, is currently in development for the November launch. I can understand the original intent of the tweet. The team is extremely hard at work to make the fast-approaching deadline to get the game done. The way the message was conveyed though, led to some extremely negative reactions from the Internet. It seems almost boastful and proud that Crytek, the company behind the game, is forcing its workers to stay late and eat dinner at work, so much so that over 11, 500 of such dinners will have been served before the game is done.

Perhaps ten years ago or more, such an admission would be acceptable or a badge of honour for team dedication. Today, such crunch is frowned upon. Many people view these long periods of crunch time as a failure of management to reign in the scope of the project. Crunch is no longer seen as something to proud of, rather as a sign of weakness. Everyone should expect to work a bit of OT on any video game but it’s in bad taste to boast about almost 12 thousand OT meals.

So, as with many things, people took to the Internet to voice their displeasure. If you search the hashtag #RyseFacts on Twitter, you’ll see a plethora of parody tweets and disdain for the original tweet. Like I wrote above, I understand why they wrote that tweet. I’d be naive to think crunch doesn’t happen on other teams. It was just a huge mistake to get their message across in the way they did. The game will now get massive amounts of attention but for all the wrong reasons.

Over the weekend, I ordered a new hot water dispenser from Amazon. In the past, I’ve written about my enjoyment of drinking hot water and the dispensers that provide such water. For a few years I had an older hot water dispenser. I retired it more than two years ago. The main reason I put it into storage was that I was simply wasting too much electricity. The newer models were able to adjust the temperature of the water so that you could keep the water less hot to conserve energy. Some even had energy-saving timers. You could tell it to shut off for an adjustable amount of time and then heat up again. This is perfect when you go to bed or leave for work. My dispenser had none of these features so I just left it plugged in all the time.

Using all that electricity didn’t hit me in the wallet that much but I still felt it was the right thing to do. Since then, I’ve been heating up my water on demand with a saucepan or the microwave. It’s serviceable but not that as convenient as having a dispenser.

I decided to get another dispenser that has more features than my old one. The new model most importantly has an energy-saving mode. I can now shut the dispenser off before going to bed and leaving for work. Once I wake up or get back home, hot water will be waiting for me. It also has a dispensing motor that automatically pumps the water out. My old dispenser used a manual pump so I had to push down on a large button like I was pumping a bicycle tire every time I wanted to get some water. Now I’m also able to leave the water at four different temperatures after it boils. Apparently, some teas are better steeped at different temperatures.

I’m excited to get my new 21st century hot water dispenser!

It’s the Thanksgiving long weekend in Canada and as such, everyone here has Monday off. I’ve sent home the entire staff here at et.com so that they can all enjoy pumpkin pie with their families. We’ll return to our regular programming tomorrow.