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For the first time since the end of March of this year, I will wake up on a Monday as an unemployed bum. Being unemployed can stress people out but I’m feeling quite relaxed about the whole thing. It’s a good time for me to rest up, relax, and have time to do whatever I want. I have the luxury of waiting until the new year to figure out where I’ll be working next.

There will be, of course, changes to my lifestyle that will be quite obvious from day one. Working a game studio, especially near the end of a project, involves a daily whirlwind of bug fixing, design decisions, lots of e-mails, asking questions, answering questions, and generally taking care of business. All of this happening around 100 or so people at the same time. I’ll go from that hectic pace to something much less frenetic. On Monday, it’ll be just me and whatever I choose to do that day. My first free day might consist of me looking up apple pie recipes online. That could be my entire day and that would be ok.

The gaining of all this freedom obviously comes with some tradeoffs. It doesn’t take a Roberto Einstein to figure out I won’t have any money coming in any more but there are also not so obvious effects. The first is the amount of free food I ate at Radical. I probably ate breakfast at Radical five days a week for the last eight months or so. There were also many a lunch that I had free because of Radical as well. Near the end, I also ate dinner there because of OT. If you count up all the free eats I had while working, that was a lot of money I saved. Now I go back to having to buy all my own food.

I expect my electricity bill to go up going forward as well. When I spent eight plus hours at work, my home sat empty that entire time. That meant my lights were off and all my appliances were off or on stand-by. Now I’ll be home most of the day; that means lights and other stuff on for most of that time. My computer will be on more and so will my Xbox 360. It’ll be interesting to see how much more juice I use compared to last month.

The biggest adjustment, which could be viewed as a good or bad thing, is the amount of free time I’ll have to buy things. This isn’t really a surprise to me anymore. Anytime that I’ve transitioned from working hard to having copious amounts of free time, I’ve always started to spend more than usual. Idle hands usually lead to online shopping. I’m also susceptible to buying stuff just because I now have the time to interact with anything I buy, like new gadgets, kitchen appliances, and kittens.

Well, it’s almost 2:30am and there some other chore I need to get to. When its noon on Monday, think of me because I’ll probably be still asleep and warm in my bed.

Tomorrow is my last day of work at Radical Entertainment. After almost eight months, my contract has come to an end. It feels good to have finally taken a contract position to its intended conclusion. As many of you know, my first contract job didn’t work out so well.

Overall, working at Radical and on Prototype 2 was a great experience. The last two games I worked on, I was basically just going through the motions. While those two teams had great people, the work I was doing was boring and left me dissatisfied. I felt like my work made no real difference in the game. Things were completely different once I signed on with Radical. The work was interesting, utilized my strengths, allowed me to learn new skills, and at the end of the day, I felt like my efforts had a real, genuine impact on how the game plays. When Prototype 2 ships in April of 2012 I’ll be able to easily and proudly point out gameplay elements that I worked on.

My employment at Radical was a long time coming. I remember sending in a resume to apply for a testing position at Radical after my first year of university. I never even got a response back from them. I was finally able to close that loop with this job. As good as the work was, I also have to mention some of the great people that I was able to toil alongside with. I had a really good project manager. He is a very pragmatic, logical, and transparent guy when it comes to managing game development; an awesome guy to keep things under control. The lead programmer is my area is another solid individual. He knows our systems in great detail and was able to get me up to speed very quickly and never hesitated to answer any of my questions. It also helped that he has a good sense of humour. In general, I worked with extremely talented and nice people which made it quite easy to go to work every day.

My future might include another stint at Radical someday down the road but we’ll save that discussion for much, much later. For now, I’m just happy that I got the chance to work there for the last several months. Now it is time to relax and rest up.

In the Greater Vancouver area, we are currently experiencing an election campaign as the local municipalities are deciding on mayors, city councilors, school board trustees, and lunch ladies. In the mail, I received several pamphlets and other informational items from local candidates. Because these elections are far from the provincial and federal level, their campaigns tend to be less slick. In this day and age though, everyone has a web site which is encouraging, smart, and cost-effective for any candidate at any level. As I looked through all the election material, I also noticed nearly all the candidates had their own custom domains, another good sign that everyone was catching to the times. Candidates were no longer using Geocities to host their sites.

The one thing that stood out, like me at a lingerie store, was the use of candidate e-mail addresses. Though candidates managed to get their own custom domains, they listed their e-mail addresses from providers like Yahoo, Gmail, Shaw, and Telus. That’s just so disappointing. That’s like running a marathon at a record pace and then stopping 10 metres from the finish line. They got so close to having all their bases covered from an Internet perspective, only to look like someone who discovered the Internet last month. I’ve registered several domains in the past and basically every registrar will throw in a basic e-mail account for your domain for free. It’s essentially a no-brainer. If you registered johnsmithformayor.com, it requires almost no effort to set up john@johnsmithformayor.com. Instead we get candidate e-mail addresses like johnsmith69@gmail.com. Imagine e-mailing your questions about parking meters to a candidate with an address like that.

I know it makes no sense but I’d have a hard time voting for a candidate that setup their Internet presence that way. Again, it’s a stupid way to vote but I never claimed to be a smart individual. If you want to see examples of what I’m writing about, feel free to go to here, here, here, and here. To be fair, many candidates have a good and complete Internet presence. Also, having a web site and e-mail address out there is better than not having anything. I’m just getting old and cranky.

I went to a fundraiser to fight cancer this evening. It was full of people from the local video gaming industry. I think there was about $4000 raised. There was also a silent auction. Someone convinced me to chip in $50 as part of a $700 prize which consisted of a one night stay at a penthouse suite at a local hotel. Apparently that suite goes for $5000 a night. A good deal for sure but I wonder how we’re gonna take turns sharing the bidet for the night.

More than a week into this month, I was on my way to work when I looked down at my transit pass. I was still using my October pass. The beginning of November arrived and passed me by and I had just forgotten to get a new pass. I had ridden on Skytrain at least sixteen times, about half an hour each time and luck saw to it that I was not checked once by any transit employee. Here’s the most interesting thing, I even rode on several buses while having an expired pass. I flashed the pass at the drivers and I usually keep the pass out long enough for them to read it. None of the drivers noticed and they all waved me through as if I had pulled that old Jedi mind trick.

Once I noticed I had an expired pass, I decided to get a November one. It took a few tries to find one, as most places had already sold out. I eventually found one at a corner store near the downtown east side. The lady behind the counter mentioned that it was almost two weeks into the month and here I was buying a monthly pass. I explained to her I’d ridden for free until now anyways so it would just even out.

I was lucky to have not been caught. A day after I bought my new pass, I actually was checked on the Skytrain. On a final note, freeloading and freeballing are not the same thing, trust me on that.

Welcome to another edition of “Did You Know?”!!!

Did you know in the almost three years I’ve lived in my apartment I have never had food delivered to my home? That’s right, no pizza or cupcake deliveries to my home thus far. The reason is I live very close to many different food places and getting things delivered would more expensive and actually take longer than if I just picked it up myself. I am within walking distance of a Boston Pizza, an independent pizza joint, a sushi joint, and a Chinese place. I suppose if the Keg Steakhouse did takeout I could count that too.

There isn’t a KFC within walking distance of my home, perhaps that I’ll be my first home delivery.

On Tuesday evening, I was at a social function where I met a group of people I didn’t know. As I was making small talk with a young lady, she mentioned she used to work for PricewaterhouseCoopers. They were the company that Black Box shared the building with when EA still had a downtown Vancouver presence at 250 Howe Street. I told her that I worked for EA in the same building and that we were probably were there at the same time.

She then mentioned how easy it was for her to figure out who worked for EA when everyone piled into the elevators to go up to the various floors. While her co-workers were in business attire, us EA slobs were in t-shirts and jeans. She then said that some EA dude actually wore slippers around the office building. That was me I said to her. I was the only guy I knew who wore slippers around the studio and I used to wear them in the elevator when I went between the 12th and 19th floors. Here’s a picture of me wearing my slippers.

I miss those days and being that guy.

A couple of months ago, I was waiting for the elevator to go downstairs in my apartment building. When the elevator arrived, it was packed full of people. There was barely enough room for me to slip in and slide into one of the front corners of the car. As the doors closed, my cell phone started ringing in my jacket pocket. Now some of you, my loyal readers, know that one of the biggest pet peeve is when people talk on their cell phones in small, cramped public spaces like in elevators and public transit. Why is that the people who talk the loudest on their cell phones in these places are the ones with the most inane, boring, and aggravating conversations? I don’t like being a hypocrite so I really didn’t want to answer my phone. I did, however, look at the call display to see who it was. It was a friend who was calling though, a dude who I was going meet up for lunch soon but hadn’t worked out the details yet. I know I could have just let it go to voicemail and call him right back but I didn’t want him to think I was ignoring his call. So I came up with a compromise. I answered the call said somewhat discreetly:

“Hey man, I’m in the elevator and I don’t want to be that guy. I’ll call you as soon as I get out.”

I quickly put my phone away and I didn’t think anyone really had heard what I said. I stole a glance to my right and I saw a young lady who was looking down at her feet and trying to hide a smile. I guess she overheard my short conversation. The rest of the ride down to the lobby went in silence. As everyone piled out of the elevator and began walking to the lobby doors, I heard the young lady say to her elevator companion:

“Dad! You’re that guy all the time! Ha!”

Young lady, I hope you and your father learned a lesson that day. Don’t be that guy.

 

This is a reminder that A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas is now out in theatres. If you like funny movies you should go see it. If you enjoyed any of the two previous movies you should go see it. If haven’t seen any of the two previous movies you should go see it. If you want to support movies with lead actors who don’t conform to traditional roles, you should go see it. If you have extra money lying around you should go see it. If you don’t want to go see it you should still go see it. Did I mention it has Neil Patrick Harris in it? That’s right, NPH himself. You should go see A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas.

A few days ago, I saw some of my co-workers coming back from lunch. After they had eaten, they took a small detour to do some shopping. They came back with some Nerf Vortex products. There is something very pleasing when you see grown men buy toys for themselves. It didn’t take long before I got shot in the chest with a disc with one of the weapons.

I wondered if they were going to do anything else with their toys. It didn’t take long for me to find out. After 6pm on Friday, I strolled into the lounge to find that a bunch of them had set up some sort of battlefield complete with cover consisting of portable walls, stacked chairs, and large boxes. I found out they had divided themselves up into two teams for some sort of war game. The goal was to capture three “flags” and bring them back to their respective home bases. These “flags” turned out to be magazines but that was ok. You could also win a round by killing all members of the other team.

I watched about three rounds of this and it was pretty entertaining. Each round didn’t last more than two minutes. In fact, it took longer for them to look for and collect all the shot discs than to actually play the round.