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I just wanted to share a little bit of wisdom/advice/suggestion to you, my loyal readers. I admit I cannot take credit for this useful nugget of information as it was told to me by a friend. Nonetheless, I believe it’s worth sharing.

Are you ever late for something? A job? A date? Meeting someone? An interview? This is one way to explain your tardiness or absence without getting into any trouble or having to explain yourself further. If someone challenges you as to why you were missing or late, just say:

Oh sorry, I had diarrhea.

According to my friend, this usually ends the conversation and the person who is questioning you will almost never continue to probe any deeper. I myself have not used this tactic but I’ve sure come close several times. It’s a bold strategy and you want to make sure you’re ready to go through with it. When you say it, you can’t be embarrassed or shy about it. Just state it as plainly as you can, as if you were gone because of a doctor’s appointment.

If you happen do actually try this sometime, let me know how it goes.

In my last post, I wrote how I have about seven weeks left at Radical Entertainment before my contract ends. I’m happy to report that before I leave, you now have the chance to see where I work. G4TV did a little story on us last week and it aired today in the afternoon. The reason why they came to the studio was to chronicle the adventures of some contest winners. A few game retailers worldwide partnered with Radical to hold a contest. The winner would get flown out to Vancouver, come visit Radical, and get their faces photographed. Those photographs would then be turned into art assets so they could be placed as pedestrians in the game. These people would literally be in the game.

So last week the winners, who came from around the world, arrived at the studio for the visit. G4TV came along to document the visit. A camera crew filmed the whole thing, from the airport, the hotel, and of course the studio visit. They must have filmed hours of footage but it got all edited down to less than three minutes. If you look really closely at the video above, I actually make an appearance at about 1:30. For those who don’t have eyes like Legolas, I’ve circled myself in the image below:

Can you see the spinach that was stuck in my teeth that day?

Since leaving grad school in 2005, I’ve kept track of my finances. One of the stats I look at is the amount of money I pull in after taxes vs. the amount of money I spend on a monthly basis. This is an excellent indicator of how much I’m saving and the trend over the year. Before I bought my apartment, on average for every two dollars I made, one dollar was saved and went into a bank account. The ratio was slightly less favourable at the beginning of my career since I made less but it’s a good ballpark figure.

At the end of August, I looked at my numbers in my virtual ledger and realized it was not a good summer for saving money. For the months of June, July, and August, I actually spent more money than I made. This likely meant my net worth actually decreased over the summer which sucks. There were some special circumstances to those months though. I spent more than usual in June because I went to a wedding in Winnipeg, which included airfare and hotels. June was also my sister’s wedding and I’m not ashamed to admit I gave my sister and my brother-in-law a generous gift. I’m an awesome brother, it’s what I do. I almost broke even in July though I was still in the red slightly. August was another expensive month since I paid for my father’s car insurance as his birthday gift.

I saw September as a chance to get back into savings mode, so I challenged myself to save one dollar for every two dollars I brought in. I didn’t have any strict rules for the month, I just was aware that I wanted to save more. I definitely went out less during September. It didn’t mean I stayed at home every single night but it did mean I might have made dinner at home on a night I could have went to a restaurant. I also did not buy any clothes during the month of September. This was mostly because I just didn’t see anything at Banana Republic that I liked more than anything but it stills counts! I also made some effort to eat lunch at the studio more often. Since food is provided at work, this probably saved me at least $10 a day in lunch money. Since the game I’m working on is in full swing, we get OT dinners. That meant if I worked late, I got free dinner. I admit, there were a few nights where I traded my effort in fixing bugs for some din-din.

Somehow, at the end of the month, I was able to reach my goal of saving one dollar for every two dollars I made. I actually didn’t even use a single coupon during the month. Let’s see how much I can save in October!

I looked at the calendar on the weekend and realized it was already October. Not sure about you but September flew by for me. I can’t tell if it’s a good or bad thing when a month of time disappears like it was just minutes. When I realized it was October, I also realized another fact. Unless something changes in the short term, I will be unemployed in about seven weeks. My contract at Radical ends on November 18. The contract was originally supposed to end in October but I received and accepted an extension in August. With the original schedule, I’d be looking at less than four week of employment at this point.

This is new territory for me. This is only the second contract job I’ve ever had and will be the first one that I’ve been able to take to the intended end date. We all know what happened with my first contract job. I know a lot of people would have started to line up the next gig months ago if they were in my position but I have to admit that other than some cursory exploration, I haven’t done any serious work towards finding new employment. There are several reasons for that. First, many gaming companies don’t do a lot of hiring during the holiday season. I say this even though UFG brought me on last December but that was rare. In any case, I don’t expect too many opportunities to be there before the new year rolls around. Second, I’m actually looking forward to having some time off. Outside of a four day weekend in June, I didn’t take any vacation at all this summer. It’s going to be cold and rainy, possibly even snowy in late December and the thought of being able to sleep in late while everyone trudges off to work makes me all warm. I’m super behind in my video game playing and movie watching, so it’ll be a great time to be entertained and inside, where it’ll be warm. I’m also thinking about taking a vacation somewhere sunny and pleasant. The plan is to go somewhere that has a tennis pro where I can play tennis for a week.

I know when I bought my apartment and took on my mortgage, the prospect of being unemployed and still having to make mortgage payments scared me. I’ve gone through that once already and it wasn’t a big deal at all. I hardly live paycheque to paycheque so a lot of potential worries don’t come into play here. I’m looking forward to having some time off in less than two months!

Several weeks ago I was home on a Saturday night. As the late evening blended into early Sunday morning, 2am fast approached. I had my patio door open as the weather was still pleasant. As I sat in front of my computer doing non-porn tasks, I heard the distinctive sound of a jack hammer. I had to listen intently for a few seconds because it was one of those sounds you just don’t expect to hear at 2am on a Sunday morning. I stepped onto my balcony to investigate.

There was no mistaking the sound for anything else. Unfortunately, I couldn’t place where it was coming from. It was close enough to hear but too far away to properly hear where it was originating from. Now there were previous instances of some overnight construction going on at the retail complex underneath my apartment. These instances, however, were announced well in advance and notices were plastered everywhere in the lobby and elevators. For this weekend, no such notices were present.

Since I couldn’t discern where the noise was coming from, I stepped back inside from my balcony and went about my business. For about half an hour the sound of a jack hammer echoed through the otherwise quiet night. Then it suddenly stopped. Curious, I went back onto my balcony. I looked down to the street level and I saw two police vehicles below me. One of the vehicles was moving very slowly down my block. The other car was pulled over to the side, talking to the security guard for my building. Once their conversation ended, the second vehicle also began a slow roll down my block.

For the next ten minutes, I watched both police cars drive very slowly as they made circles around my building, going a block further out each time. Sometimes they’d come to a complete stop for a few seconds and then continue on. I don’t think they ever found what they were looking for as they just took off after a while.

I never did find out where the jack hammer sound was coming from. It’s times like this where I feel like I should add some embellishment to my blog but I’m not even certain what fictional end to this post would be entertaining enough. It turned out the jack hammer was coming from inside the house! It’s just one of those stories that may never get closure.

Through most of the summer I’ve been buying fresh and whole pineapples from Donald’s Market near where I live. Pineapples are one of my favourite fruits. I can sometimes eat almost half a large pineapple in one sitting. Then the acid stings my mouth but it’s worth it. The market where I buy my pineapples has been selling them during the summer with a 2 for 1 sale for $5, which is a steal for two whole pineapples. They were also Dole brand pineapples which to me, are a sign of quality. I didn’t have a single pineapple that wasn’t tasty and sweet. Man, that was good eating.

A few days ago, the market stopped having their 2 for 1 promo. It was now $4 for a single pineapple. Not only was it more expensive, they weren’t Dole brand anymore. They were Visa pineapples. At first glance, it might seem odd that a credit card company is now dabbling in pineapple distribution but it’s a different company. Biting the bullet, I bought one of these pineapples. What a disappointment that turned out to be. I don’t think I’ve ever had a pineapple where it had absolutely no taste. It wasn’t sweet, it wasn’t bitter, it wasn’t anything really. It had the same texture and juiciness of a good pineapple but it had no taste to it. It was a bland and soulless fruit. After just a few pieces, I threw the rest out. Was that a rash decision? Maybe, but the pineapple wasn’t going to get any better.

And that was my post about buying a disappointing pineapple. Man, it’s a good thing the weekend is coming up.

We’re gonna have to do something different tonight. The time I allocated for blogging is going to be used up to determine why I got charged a service fee in one of my bank accounts. You’ll be following along as I discover the truth. A few days ago, I logged onto Mint.com and discovered the service charge with one of my CIBC accounts. Usually CIBC gives me a service charge but then refunds it almost all back. I wind up paying like a dollar a month. This, however, happens at the end of the month. This service charge was in the middle of the month and I did not get a refund.

Ok, let me log onto my CIBC account to see if the charge is actually there since Mint.com sometimes gets the labels wrong.

Wait, there seems to be something weird here. Hold on…

Yep, Mint.com is totally screwed up. It somehow decided the $20 or so I spent at Boston Pizza was a bank service charge. It has also decided all my Interac purchases have been at a business called “The Point”.

Sorry folks for the anti-climatic ending.

I’m not sure why but it took me this long to hear about the term “Canadian tuxedo” for the first time. That term echoed within my ears just last week. Apparently, it was made popular in the movie Super Troopers. For those who were as lost as I was, a “Canadian tuxedo” is an outfit that consists of denim on the bottom as well as denim on top. Most commonly, this outfit is accomplished by wearing denim jeans and then a denim jacket. If you want to see what this looks like, you can visit this site or just go to your local Wal-Mart.

I’ve known for many, many years this look was a major fashion faux pas, I just didn’t know it had a name. It surprised me that it was attributed to Canadians as I’ve seen this look worn by people of many nationalities. By the way, there’s also an outfit called a “Russian tuxedo”. That consists of a track suit. Back to the Canadian version now. It really amazes me that people don’t understand the denim on denim or as I call it a “blue on blue incident” is not a good look. The first problem is it’s very difficult to get two items of denim that match in colour exactly. One of the items will darker and it just looks off. Even if you were able to get both items exactly the same colour, it leads to our second problem, too much denim. It would be like you just draped your entire body in a continuous swath of denim. I believe such outfits are acceptable if you perform in Vegas but not if you’re going to buy a pack of smokes at the 7-11.

Just today, I was walking past a bus stop where there were people lined up waiting for a bus. In said lineup, were two dudes wearing denim on denim. Maybe this is a Canadian thing after all.

I bet some of you are curious how many visitors this dog and pony show gets. Well, to be honest, not a whole lot. I do have a small number of loyal readers whom I am thankful for every day.

To give you an idea how many people visit this site, here are some stats about the number of visitors this whole site gets, which includes pages beyond just this blog. I can’t even imagine what the stats look like for Google.com for example.

I had a very boring Sunday. As evidence, the following incident was the most exciting thing to happen to me today.

I went to do some housecleaning today as my apartment is a mess. I slid open the glass patio door in my living room to get some fresh air in while I cleaned. After I was done, I went to close the door when I saw a bee had flown into my apartment and was in between one of my living room windows and the blinds. I could tell it was trying to get out because it kept flying against the glass. Since it was trying to leave and it wasn’t antagonizing me, I decided to leave it alone. It kept trying to fly through the glass though and that wasn’t really going to work. I wanted to tell him to just fly over to his left since that was where the patio door was wide open. I unfortunately don’t know how to communicate with bees, so I just had to stay silent and hope he’d figure it out on his own.

To his credit, he did stop flying into the glass. Instead, he flew in the opposite direction, through the blinds and back into my living room. I was about to bolt into the safety of my bedroom when the bee flew back towards the windows. He landed on a part of the patio door, just mere inches away from the edge where the door opening was and freedom awaited. So close, yet so far. He figured it out pretty quickly though as he found the opening and took off into the sky. I was happy for the both of us, he found freedom again and I didn’t have to worry about having him stay over for the night. I briefly worried about him bringing his buddies back to my place but that never happened.

I hope your Sunday was way better than mine.

Last but not least, this blog looks way better in 1996 (might contain music).