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As you might remember from this post, as an owner of the apartment that I live in, I was given a $6,000 bill as part of the cost to repair the building exterior so it won’t rot from the inside out due to water ingress. This is a tough pill to swallow given that everything costs more lately due to high inflation. I wonder how other owners have found ways to scrape together the money.

If it wasn’t bad enough that we have to pay all this money, I just found out how much of a pain in the ass the actual repairs will be. Work is now beginning and we’ve been told we have to clear all of our balconies of anything. I never use my balcony but I have two wooden chairs, a wooden table, a cheap white card table chair, a telescope, and errand trash can out there. All of that will eventually need to come inside when work begins on my balcony. I have no room for that stuff. What worse is that my balcony gets filthy, somehow dirt is drawn to my building. So there’s dirt and dust all over those items and I’m supposed to bring them in my apartment for who knows how long. I am tempted to junk all of that crap so I don’t have to deal with it since I never use my balcony at all. I might keep the telescope though.

The news gets worse though. Work is supposed to occur between the hours of 7:30am-4pm. We’ve been warned it will be potentially noisy and disruptive as workers do work on my balcony, right near my bed. It has been suggested we close our windows but my place gets immediately stuffy when there’s no ventilation. I can’t believe I paid $6,000 for the privilege of having all this inconvenience.

A couple weeks ago, I decided to let a password manager remember a large majority of the passwords I use online. I made a few exceptions, mostly for sites involving finance and money, those I still manually type in my info.

I must admit, it’s a lot more convenient and totally worth the security risk. For those sites that I visit less than once a month and where I reset my password every single time I go there, it’s a lot less hassle.

I just hope the password manager that I use won’t get hacked someday.

With a looming recession, apparently some tech companies have started to lay off some of their employees. So far, I haven’t heard much of the same happening in the video game industry. The one thing I did read on Twitter was that Microsoft laid off an entire team was working on “games tech” but was not part of their studios organization, so not a conventional game dev team. That’s not to say layoffs won’t be coming for game developers either. With inflation high and people paying more for everything, gamers might have to make some difficult choices with what to do with their money. I have no doubt that some studios will see revenue fall.

What’s interesting is that I am still seeing people leaving their current role for new opportunities elsewhere. Just thinking about the number of goodbye e-mails I’ve read, I think four people at my studio are going to leave this month alone. At least for games, studios are still hiring and people are definitely willing to change jobs. I’m not sure how long this will last though. 2023 might be a lean year but it’s difficult to say how lean.

Today was the hottest October 16th in the greater Vancouver area since records began in 1937. At just above 20 degrees Celsius at the airport, that meant it was likely two or three degrees warmer inland in the suburbs.

The warm temperatures and the lack of rain has meant that wildfires continue to burn in this province, leaving the city covered in a haze that traditionally has long gone by this time of year. Most of the province is now under the most severe drought classification, level 5. The province defines that as, “At Level 5, conditions are exceptionally dry and adverse impacts to socio-economic or ecosystem values are almost certain. All efforts should be made to conserve water and protect critical environmental flows.” That cannot be good for this province.

If there is some good news, the forecast calls for rain next weekend, as early as Friday possibly. It’s crazy to think that the first precipitation for October could come nearly three weeks into the month. That’s just not how weather in Vancouver should be.

For most of the summer, I have been writing code for a big feature for the game I work on. I am essentially the only engineer working on this feature, so by default, I am leading the engineering effort on this. It’s sorta like when you’re the only one cooking in your kitchen, you are head chef by default.

This is a huge feature and probably the biggest thing I’ve worked on since 2017. I will admit that I basically did nothing at work for almost all of 2020, so it’s not difficult to top that year if we’re talking about productivity.

Anyways, it’s not 100% confirmed at this point but this new feature should be released at the end beginning of November. At that point, I will have more to show.

Director and writer Mark Borchardt is one of my favourite show business personalities. He was the subject of the documentary film American Movie, which came out in 1999. The documentary was critically acclaimed and some have said it remains one of the greatest documentaries of all time.

In the above clip, Mark visits Dave to show off his tour of his hometown.

On Thanksgiving Monday I went for a walk in the afternoon. According to the thermometer in my apartment it was around 22 degrees Celsius when I left my apartment. The sun was shining and there were just a few clouds in the sky. It was quite the pleasant day.

I decided to wear a t-shirt and shorts for my walk. In the direct sun, I started to sweat a bit. I actually applied sunscreen to my face and arms before I left and as I felt the heat of the sun on my skin, I was glad I did. It felt like a nice late-spring day.

Now I have worn shorts and a t-shirt in October before but it wasn’t truly shorts and t-shirt weather. There have been times when I tried to play tennis in October and just because the sun was out, it didn’t mean it was actually warm out. Indeed, the air was crisp and cold, and I was better off wearing jogging pants at least. Monday was not like that at all. Shorts were perfectly fine and judging by all the summer gear I saw people wearing, others agreed with me as well.

I heard some families were able to hold their Thanksgiving dinners outside this weekend. Normally this isn’t something that happens in Vancouver unless your balcony or patio is heated. So I guess this is the type of thing people living in Los Angeles or San Diego get to experience every single year, throughout the year.

In the short-term, this is great and all but long-term, this is definitely not normal and a sign that something is wrong.

I have five and a half hours of meetings tomorrow and they start at 7am. What a terrible way to start a new week, especially after a long weekend.

A few years ago, less than four, Best Buy had some sorta door crasher sale to celebrate the opening of a new store. One of the online deals was a 27″ monitor for $97. That was a good deal back then and hell, it’s still a good deal now. The monitor wasn’t top of the line but it wasn’t terrible either.

Not needing another monitor, I didn’t really know where to put it. I eventually set it up in my living room, on top of a lower bookshelf. It was visible from my dining room table where I usually have my laptop set up. It became my second monitor for my laptop and at 27″ it could be a few feet away and still be usable. I mainly used that monitor to play videos while I did reading or other things on the laptop screen.

About a month ago, I had to upgrade my Mom’s computer and I discovered the two monitors that she was using with her old computer only had ancient VGA inputs. Her new computer had only HDMI outputs, so these monitors were useless. As a solution, I decided to bring my 27″ monitor over to my parents’ place and let her use it. She went from crappy 20″ VGA monitors to a single 27″ monitor. The larger size also allowed me to increase the font size in Windows 11 so that she never needs to use glasses while on the computer now.

What I soon realized though is that I miss my second monitor for my laptop. Somewhere in my storage closet is an old 24″ monitor from 2008 with dim brightness and washed out colours. I really don’t want to bring that out. I should just recycle it. So instead, I’ve been looking at online retailers for a new 27″ monitor. The most basic ones are still around $170-200. I am being cheap and haven’t bought one yet. Amazon Prime Days are next week, so I’m hoping I can find a deal there.

I was really tired around 8pm this evening and I knew I had stuff to do later. I could barely keep my eyes closed and going with the flow, I crawled into bed and decided to nap. Now, I knew not to sleep too much as that would ruin my night, so I endeavoured to only nap for 30 minutes or less.

It didn’t take much for me to fall asleep and about 30 minutes later, I woke up feeling refreshed. This allowed me to finish my evening activities like watching TV and eating chocolate with a renewed exuberance. Unfortunately, it is now my traditional bedtime and I am wide awake.

I will now go back to my bed and watch YouTube videos and hopefully I can fall asleep in short order.