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While I slept last night, a massive fire broke out about a block away from where I live. The first call to emergency services came in before 4am. The fire involved a historic building that was constructed just after the turn of the 20th century. Though it was old, it still housed several businesses, including a Vietnamese restaurant that I often patronized with a friend. It was the only place to get pho in the area.

I slept through the whole thing but I do remember in a sleepy haze thinking that there seemed to be a lot more sirens going off than usual. Even in my deep sleep, it appeared that the sound of sirens was almost constant for a lengthy period of time. Some time later, I heard the distinctive fire alarm coming from a nearby apartment but I drifted back off to sleep. I later learned it was the building next to me, the alarm going off possibly because of all the smoke nearby.

I awoke when my alarm went off. Staying in bed, I grabbed my phone and realized that I had been tagged in a Facebook post by a friend. This was the friend whom I had gone to the Vietnamese restaurant with. He lives just across the street from the fire and he took a spectacular picture of the still smoldering site from his top floor apartment. It was in the post that he informed me that our pho hangout was nothing but rubble now.

I was shocked that the fire happened overnight and I didn’t even realize it. By then, the news had already been reported on several web sites. Reading through the stories, I then got the scope of the fire. It had consumed half a block in buildings. Some had already listed it as the third worst fire in the history of the municipality. Apparently, you’d have to go back to the early 1900s to find a fire of comparable size. The firefighters had been battling the blaze since about 4am and at almost 9am they were still trying to control the fire. The fire was so large that the local fire department had requested assistance from neighbouring municipalities. At one point, fire vehicles had police escorts to get to the affected area. I am guessing that for some of the firefighters involved, this was probably the largest fire they have ever encountered in their careers.

It was when I got out of bed that I realized how large the fire was. My entire apartment smelled like smoke and my throat was a bit scratchy because I had been breathing in a bit of smoke while I had slept. I really wanted to continue to read the news or even go take a look at the fire from a distance but I had to go get ready for work. As I was about to leave my apartment I looked outside my windows again. Even though I face the wrong way and couldn’t see the fire, a huge cloud of smoke was moving past my balcony. It was clear to me that the fire was far from under control.

In the hallway of my apartment, the air was considerably stronger with the smell of smoke. It hung in the elevator while I went downstairs and certainly was in the air when I got outside on the train platform. It was only after I got to work that the fire was finally under control and the other businesses were no longer in danger.

It’s very unfortunate for every one of those business owners but I feel especially bad for the people who ran the Vietnamese restaurant. Next month would have been just their second anniversary. I do wonder if there is some way for people to lend all the business owners some assistance. If there is one thing to be thankful for in all of this, it’s that no one was injured in the fire. The firefighters battling the blaze did a tremendous job as did everyone involved, including the police and utilities crews.

At around 9pm this evening I went to see the affected area and I got close enough to see that it’s just a pile of debris now. Equipment had been brought in to knock everything down. I can’t even see the booths where I used to sit and slurp my beef broth. It’s my hope that corner gets rebuilt and not rebuilt as a condo tower. There’s already too much of that in this city. I hope a brave and ambitious developer does something different with the area.

If you’re curious, the video above shows the fire well over an hour after it started.

So this is a thing that Jimmy Kimmel does where he gets famous people to read mean tweets about themselves. In previous installments, people have been suspicious about the tweets as some of them can’t be verified as real tweets. Just because I have too much time on my hands, I verified the first two at least and they are valid. I cannot verify the Brad Paisley tweet unfortunately because they blurred out part of the handle for that user. The tweet though is probably the best of the bunch, up there with the Kid Rock one.

So I walk into a public washroom today to do my business. I won’t disclose the location of this bathroom but I will mention that I’ve been to it before. There’s some urinals and a stall at the end. As I’m walking to one of the urinals I face the stall. I can see someone is in it because in North America, we have stupid stall partitions that don’t go all the way to the floor. I then notice I can see a significant portion of the dude on the toilet through a gap between the door and wall. That dreaded gap that makes pooping in public that much more fun. Now I thought my eyes were deceiving me because it seemed to me this gap was a lot larger than normal. I stopped myself from staring because I realized I was about to stare intently at some dude pooping. I get to my urinal and make a 90 degree turn to do my thing.

As I’m relieving myself, my curiosity forces to me look over at the stall again. Now that I’m closer, I realize why the gap looked so big. The dude hadn’t locked the door to the stall. He merely just closed it shut but not all the way. I could see the latch was not engaged. So there he was sitting in an unlocked stall, pooping away. Who does that? Why? Maybe he had to go so bad he had no time to even lock the door? Maybe this guy was actually so badass, he doesn’t even feel the need to lock the stall. No one is gonna interrupt his pooping and some lock don’t mean nothing to him.

I didn’t stick around to find out who this guy was. All I know is if I’m pooping public, I’m locking the stall door.

It has been over a month now since I started working again. One of my biggest fears was that I’d get fat again once I returned to the world of the employed. I did a weigh in about a week or so in but I wanted to wait at least a month before making any judgments. So I’ve had over twenty times to choose a reasonable lunch and just as many dinners where I may have returned home hungry and tired. Being at work at least eight hours a day also means I have less time to be active.

I cautiously got on the scale again this evening. I didn’t look fat in the mirror but then again, I didn’t think I looked fat when I weighed 173 lbs in April. To my surprise, the scale displayed 157 lbs tonight which is great. That’s well within the range I’m satisfied with. I need to continue to watch my diet and try to be active as possible. There are a couple of key highlights. Since starting work, I have not had fast food for lunch once. Even though the McDonald’s is about a block away, I’ve resisted getting a Big Mac meal for lunch. Though I try to avoid carbs as much as possible, it’s just too tough to eliminate them completely. I had a sandwich today for lunch but I’m ok with that. A few days ago, I got a big container of stir-fry noodles with chicken for lunch. It was delicious but I made sure to eat all the chicken and vegetables first. I consumed about half the noodles but left the rest. Too many noodles means too many carbs.

Let’s see where I am after two months!

When you live in an apartment, you have to expect some aspects of communal living. One of these aspects is the need for service people to come check out various parts of your apartment. Every year, the smoke detector guy and dryer vent guy need access to my place to do their thing. For every year that I’ve been living in my home, I was at home to let these guys in. I’ve been lucky because they always do this stuff during the weekday and the jobs I’ve had in the past have allowed me to stay at home until the service call is over. I usually work remotely from home or in some cases, my manager didn’t even care and would let me just sit at home and go to work afterwards.

Tomorrow the dryer vent guy is doing his yearly service call and I won’t be there to let him in. I just started my new job a month ago, so I don’t have the privilege to work remotely just yet. At some places, you need to earn that first. I also didn’t feel like taking a vacation day to wait for some dude to come around. I guess I could have asked one of my parents to come over but man, that sucks. Who really wants to do that? The only option that made sense for me was to leave my spare key with the property manager who’d let the dude in.

I have no problem with this arrangement except that I realized on the weekend my kitchen and living room were a bit of a mess. Not wanting people to think I was a slob, I cleaned it up slightly to an acceptable level. I’m cheating in a few places because I’m gonna dump some stuff in my bedroom and then close the door. After I get home, that mess will then get transferred back out to where it was originally.

The one cool thing is that I’ll be able to watch the dryer vent guy in my apartment because of new security cam!

So I went to Tim Hortons today and purchased the above product. Based on this previous post, I’m not sure if this was a good development. I do know that I’m already looking forward to the weekend. It doesn’t take much to keep me amused these days.

This morning, as I was about to enter my place of employment, I saw professional goaltender, Roberto Luongo from less than 50m away. He was easy to spot, with his trademark hair slicked back and his tall frame peaking above the assorted umbrellas in the street. He wore a grey suit and a white dress shirt and even from a distance he looked like a million bucks which is not surprising since he’s a millionaire several times over.

As he was crossing the street, I couldn’t tell where he was coming from. In that general area, there’s a restaurant and a hair salon. He was carrying a coffee in his hand, so perhaps he stopped off for some java? Once he crossed the street, he got into a newer model Mercedes SUV. I am guessing he was probably on his way to practice. It’s also possible that he was on his way to the airport since the Canucks are opening their season in San Jose.

I didn’t linger to watch him drive off as I wanted started on work.

A few weeks ago, I changed some of the parameters for some ads I have sprinkled throughout my site. The next day, I immediately I had two visitors click on these ads, which generated a wee bit of money for me. The optimistic in me thought this was the beginning of the gravy train and that I had finally found the right type of ads that would allow me to retire (or at least buy a cheeseburger). After that initial day, no one else has clicked on those ads. I’m still poor.

So despite finding out that my downstairs Tim Hortons is open 24 hours, I usually don’t frequent that place too often. If you look at it objectively, Timmy’s serves up a whole bunch of carbs, sugars, fats, and caffeine. There’s no deny that stuff can be packaged up in a tasty way but in general that stuff isn’t good for you.

I’m not sure how I discovered it but I found out recently that Timmy’s has this promotion where they are offering some of their specialty coffees for $1 for a small size. You get a choice between a mocha, a latte, and a french vanilla cappuccino. For whatever reason, even though I don’t drink coffee, I decided to try the french vanilla. When I worked downtown at EA, the only type of coffee I could stand drinking was the french vanilla. I decided what the hell, it was a Friday and the caffeine wouldn’t cause me any problems because I could stay up late.

I believe this was perhaps the third time in my life that I’d ever ordered a drink at Tim Hortons. I get my small french vanilla cappuccino and I bring it back upstairs to my apartment. I remove the lid and it smells great. It’s still super hot so I leave it for about two minutes to let it cool down some more. I take a sip and there it is, it’s like a little bit of heaven in my mouth. It was delicious. I drank the whole thing in almost a minute. I even briefly though about going right back down to get another. Maybe double fist?

I hesitated and instead looked up the nutritional info for this beverage. Of course, with something that tastes so good, it’s completely awful for you. If you look here, just a small contains almost 30g of sugar and 9g of fat. The caffeine content isn’t so good either. A small contains 60mg of the vroom-vroom, which is more than a can of Coke.

This didn’t stop me from getting a large french vanilla this Saturday but I felt bad about it afterwards though. During the consumption, however, oh man that’s good stuff.

I feel like this will be a pitched battle going forward. Maybe we can keep it to one small on the weekends?

So over the weekend I was doing some non-porn surfing on the Internet when I started to read a discussion thread on how much YouTube content creators make on video views. The original discussion was on something else entirely but it took a tangent to YouTube and the money you can make off it.

In one particular comment, someone estimated that one specific YouTube dude was making several million dollars a year on his videos just through views, not ad clicks. This a guess, as even the comment author pointed out, but it seemed to be backed up with some logical assumptions. The most interesting thing, besides that multi-million dollar figure, was that this YouTube dude primarily makes videos of him playing video games. Yes, that’s correct, he just records himself playing video games.

Ok, let’s just toss aside the millions for a second and assume he makes $1M a year doing this. That’s just stunning. You can be a millionaire by simply playing video games and putting videos of you doing that on the Internet.

For a long time, mothers all over the world would commonly say to their children, “you’ll never amount to anything if you just sit there and play video games”. For many of us, we had twist reality a bit to make that statement false. Sure we loved video games but no one would really pay us to just play. We had to go to school and learn stuff, and then make video games. It was hard work, certainly harder than just sitting at home and playing Xbox 360. Hell, even testing video games is hard work. You’re often playing broken parts of the game over and over again. Let’s not forget those eSports guys that make lots of money playing in tournaments. While they do get rewarded handsomely, they have to be in the top ten in the world in their specific game. It’s a lot of effort and it can be stressful.

This YouTube guy though, he just sits and plays the game normally. He doesn’t even have to be that good at it, certainly not top ten in the world. Someone will now literally pay you lots of money to just play video games.

So you might question the amount of money there is to be made in such gaming related videos. I was a bit skeptical too but then I have seen some anecdotal evidence. I’ve been following two particular YouTube content creators for a few years now. Both recently started a gaming channel, where they simply play games and record the game and their commentary. One of these guys never really struck me as that much of a gamer before but now here he is playing and recording all the new releases.

You know, if I knew there was this much money in these gaming YouTube channels, I would have done this a long time ago. I would have recorded hours of footage of me playing Atari 2600.