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I was at the supermarket last week to buy something to snack on. I was headed towards the potato chips aisle but I wanted something healthier. In the past, I’ve snacked on cereal instead of chips because it’s somewhat better from a nutritional standpoint. As long as you avoid sugary cereals, it’s a great alternative. When I got to the cereal aisle, I noticed that Alpen was on sale and that it was one of the healthier cereals. I’d never had Alpen before so I was also curious about it.

When I got the box home, I thought I’d be able to eat it straight from the box, without any milk. I’d done this with every other cereal type before so I wasn’t expecting any different. As I opened the box, I noticed that Alpen was different. First, the cereal consists of ingredients, that while healthy, are much smaller than say a Cheerio or a Mini Wheat. These smaller pieces are difficult to grab with a hand and they can slip between your fingers, making a mess. Second, Alpen contains a lot of “dust”. It’s this cereal dust that you can kick up if you shake the box. Again, getting this dust on your hands can be messy and it makes it too dry to eat without any added milk.

Unfortunately, I’m trying to stay away from too much dairy now. As I’ve grown older, I’ve found myself more and more lactose intolerant. It’s really hit or miss. Sometimes I can eat ice cream and be ok but other times, the same amount of ice cream will send me running to the bathroom. Now I know I’ve written that I’ve used lactose enzyme pills in the recent months but I wanted to see if there was another alternative. I’d heard of so many different milk substitutes like soy, rice, and almond but I’d never once tried any of them. After doing some really quick Internet research, I decided to try the almond milk. I like the taste of almonds and I was happy with the nutritional content of almond milk. When choosing a type of almond milk to buy, I selected a slightly sweet, vanilla flavoured version.

When I tried it on the Alpen, I was quite impressed with it. It wasn’t overly sweet, nor was the vanilla flavour overwhelming. The colour, texture, and taste didn’t make me notice at all that what was on my cereal wasn’t dairy milk. Of course, without any lactose there was no need for the enzyme pills. I’m also now discovering you can make ice cream with almond milk which is a nice revelation. I’m wondering if this should be something I slot into my series of culinary adventures.

Anyways, almond milk gets a thumbs up from me.

It was Canada Day here so I gave the whole staff at et.com the day off to enjoy their maple syrup poutine at home with their families. We’ll return tomorrow with a milk themed post.

About two years ago, I signed up for Netflix because its on-demand streaming service had just arrived in Canada. There was a free trial which lasted a month, which was what got me to sign up. When I looked at the initial selection of movies and TV shows, I was very disappointed. It sucked, plain and simple. There weren’t any recent movies being offered and most of the older movies which were good I’d already seen. Probably due to laziness and some hope that the selection would get better, I began paying $8 a month for the service. Unfortunately, it did not get better. I would spend 10 minutes looking for something to watch and then deciding video games was a better choice. Eventually, I went two straight months without watching a single thing on Netflix. That was the sign that I needed to cancel my subscription.

This week, I received an e-mail from Netflix asking me to come back to their service. To entice me, they offered another free one month trial. I figured why not, since it was free and I have lots of time now. It took a minute to re-establish the service. Perusing the available the titles, it didn’t take long for me to realize Netflix in Canada has gotten a lot better since I had left. A large majority of the titles are no older than 2 years, which was hardly the case when I last used Netflix. In the thirty seconds of browsing, I already saw two movies I wanted to see and were less than a year old. There were even a few TV shows that piqued my interest.

I’m not sure if I’ll continue my subscription beyond the free month but I’m very surprised at how much better the selection is. If you’ve been away from Netflix as long as I have, it might be worth your time to take a look again.

In a recent post, I detailed my new affinity for meat loaf as a food. It didn’t take long for me to get sick of eating it. I bought it once more after writing that post and it just became a chore eating it. Usually, if I like something, I can’t wait to eat the leftovers. With the meat loaf, I stared at it in the fridge and then began to think of reasons why I should go eat something else instead. This was obviously a sign.

Was it too much meat loaf in a short amount of time? Perhaps but I wasn’t buying it every week or anything like that. I think the takeaway point from this story is that meat loaf is something to be enjoyed only once in a while. I could eat sushi every week (and I think I do actually) and not get tired of it. I don’t think you could do that with meat loaf. Now I need to find something else to get tired of eating.

This week I saw the film World War Z, which is about a world-wide zombie apocalypse. I’ve previously stated that all these apocalyptic scenarios in movies and TV makes you think how you yourself would fare in those situations. Most people would be probably ill-equipped to survive such events, myself included. This summer, with all this extra time on my hands, I’ve started to get serious about emergency preparedness.

I don’t even have to look towards works of fiction to be inspired. Just this month, the flooding in Alberta put people in extraordinary situations where normal access to food, water, shelter, and electricity was interrupted. On a personal level, several weeks ago, a contractor in my neighbourhood damaged a water main. The damage caused the water in my building to run extremely muddy and dirty. While the problem was being fixed, I didn’t feel comfortable using the water to drink or wash with. I realized I didn’t have any other sources of water I could use in my apartment. Now I could have just gone downstairs and bought as much water as I wanted but what if the store was closed or didn’t have any water left?

To drive the point home, all water in my building is being shut off between 9am and 4pm tomorrow for some pipe repairs. For most people, they’ll be at work so this won’t even be noticed by them. I’ll be home tomorrow though, so I have to prepare. Again, I could just go downstairs and buy drinking water but I still need water to wash with tomorrow when I wake up. To that end, I’ll be filling up some large pots with water before I go to bed tonight. The tricky thing will be the toilet. Something something yellow mellow, brown flush down. Technically, I could refill the tank with my saved up water but that seems like a waste. I think I may just use the movie theatre washrooms downstairs tomorrow.

So what’s the plan going forward? Well, I’ve already looked at an emergency preparedness kit. It also seems prudent to perhaps buy a survival kit as well. I already have a hand powered flashlight but getting a manually powered radio is a good idea as well. Lastly, I need enough water to last about 48 hours and some non-perishable food. The food doesn’t need to be fancy, it could be canned goods or energy bars of some sort.

Ideally, no one should ever have to use their emergency or survival gear but it’s always good to be prepared.

So I’m currently living off the severance payment that EA gave me when they shut down the studio I worked at. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, this isn’t news to you. Essentially, EA has given me some money to go away and not work for them anymore. It’s simply business and I don’t take it personally. Did you know the same type of thing happens in professional hockey? Well not exactly the same since players are signed to guaranteed contracts and I was on salary (with no guarantee on how long the job would last). There is, however, a clause that allows teams to pay players to go away. It’s called a buyout and players are paid a portion of their entire contract to not play with their team anymore.

Today, the Philadelphia Flyers exercised their right to use a compliance buyout for goaltender Ilya Bryzgalov. The Flyers had signed him to a nine-year deal just two years ago, almost to the day, for $51 million dollars. They will now pay him $23 million dollars over the next 14 years or about $1.6 million a year to not play for the Flyers. Getting close to $2 million a year to not play hockey is pretty cool. It’s often said that it’s easier to make money when you have money. I’m not sure if that fits exactly here but even getting laid off is way better when you’re a professional athlete. When you play pro sports, you can grow your millions by doing nothing. I wish someone would pay me millions to sit at home.

I was going through the photos on my cell phone when I discovered the above image. It’s a picture I took on the last day of work at PopCap when the studio got shut down. I wanted a record of what my desk looked like. I try to do this for every job I have. You spend so much time at your desk, you might as well remember what it looked like before you leave.

If you’re curious, everything you see on my desk I left. Since we had weeks of notice that the studio was going to be closed, I’d already taken home everything I wanted.

A few months ago I bought a video camera on a whim because it was on sale. Admittedly, it was a bit of an impulse buy because I had no real need for a video camera but at least I didn’t pay a whole lot of money for it. When I read the manual for the camera, I noticed it had a time-lapse feature which seemed really cool. I didn’t actually test the feature out until last week when I attempted to make a time-lapse video by pointing the camera out my balcony towards the skyline.

This was technically not my first time-lapse video since I made one a few years ago with a very low quality web cam. You can see the results here. There were numerous problems with that first video, namely due to the crappy VGA resolution and the long intervals between taking frames (five minutes). With this video, it was shot in high-definition at 720p and with only 30 seconds between frames. Filming started around 3am in the morning which meant it didn’t take very long for the sun to rise. I was initially dismayed to see it was a cloudy day as I believed a sunny day would be more pleasing to see. It turned out that the clouds made for a much more interesting time-lapse as you can see the fascinating cloud movements throughout the day. I was quite happy with how this time-lapse turned out. In this instance, better equipment did make a difference.

If I were to do this again, I think I’d stop filming some of the night-time hours. At least from the angle I was shooting at, when it gets dark, there’s no more movement to be seen so it’s useless to be recording at that time. If I had a better angle on a busy road or highway, I think that might be a good candidate for a time-lapse as well. Anyways, I hope you enjoyed this one!

I don’t like to get caught up with stories about celebrities but an amazing revelation just surfaced at the Michael Jackson wrongful death trial. According to a report by CNN, Jackson went sixty days without getting any REM sleep, which is a phase of sleep that is critical to survival.

Apparently, Dr. Conrad Murray injected Jackson with a sedative that allowed him to be unconscious but was far from a state that could be considered sleep, thus the lack of the REM stage. It’s amazing that Dr. Murray decided this was a good idea. I wonder if he realized exactly what he was doing to Jackson at the time. I’m somewhat interested in this because I have weird sleeping patterns as I love to stay up late.

According to the CNN report, if this was indeed true, Michael Jackson would be the first human in recorded history to go that long without REM sleep. I am sure he holds many world records but that’s one no one wishes he had.

So the window washers are starting to clean the windows in my apartment building this week. This happens once a year in my building and like always, property management tells us to close our blinds if we don’t want dudes looking into our homes. I always keep the blinds closed in my bedroom but I leave them open in my living room. I wonder what kind of stuff window washers see when they’re doing their job.

I’m especially proud of my balcony because I clean the hell out of it a few weeks ago. I’m actually tempted to ask the window dudes how clean my balcony is compared to the rest of the building. I’d like to think I’m in the top five. I bet they don’t get asked that question very often.

Ok, I’m going to bed now.