Category: Uncategorized

On Sunday, I received an invitation from the provincial government to get my second booster vaccination shot. I was lucky enough to get an appointment the next day at a local and independent pharmacy. I received my first booster in January, so it’s been quite a while since my last shot.

When I arrived at the pharmacy, I was given the choice of two types of boosters. The first was the Pfizer booster, which is exactly the same one I received about nine months ago. This one does not target any variants and is not the same bivalent booster that is currently available in the United States. The second option is Moderna’s bivalent booster which targets the Omnicron (BA.1) variant, plus the original strain. For Canada, this is the only available bivalent vaccine at the time of this writing.

I’m not sure who would willingly choose the Pfizer booster if they understood what each booster does. The Moderna booster offers better protection against the variants that are the ones who are making the majority of the people ill who do wind up catching COVID-19. Without hesitation, I chose the Moderna booster.

I encountered very little side effects to the shot, which was administered around noon. For the rest of the day, my arm was slightly sore. During the evening, I felt more tired than usual, which made me go to bed a bit early. I woke up this morning with a very faint headache which went away as the morning progressed.

I’m happy I got the booster now but I am aware that some people are playing a waiting game. Health Canada is currently reviewing bivalent boosters that target the BA.4 and BA.5 strains, which are the ones causing the most chaos right now. It’s possible that in two months those updated boosters will be available instead. Could I have waited for the latest and greatest? Yes, I could have but there’s nothing to stop me from getting those boosters six months from now.

In the meantime, I remain diligent in trying to prevent myself from being sick.

I’ve been watching Shawn Woods’ videos for a while now and he usually posts videos of him catching mice or rats using traps. In the video above, however, he acquires a wasp or hornets nest and proceeds to cook and eat the larva he finds inside the nest. Fascinating.

At one point on this Sunday afternoon, the first weekend of October, the temperature reached 23 degrees Celsius in my bedroom. I did not have the heat on and all my windows were open. I can’t remember the last time it was this balmy in October.

Next weekend is Thanksgiving and if you look above at the forecast, you’ll see what kind of weather we’ll be having during the week as we approach the long weekend. The highs will be around 20 but that’s only by the water, if you live inland, the highs could reach the mid-20s. So most of the great Vancouver area will experiencing shorts and t-shirts weather with sunny skies as people are prepping for their turkey dinners. Also, if you notice, the lows will still be in the double-digits during the evenings.

This is not normal weather for October if you live in Vancouver. I do remember a few Octobers where there were sunny days but temperatures were much lower, in the single digits, and the air would feel crisp and cool. The traditional Vancouver October weather is usually rain and showers with gray skies. This September was unusually dry this year, with very little rain.

In the moment, this type of weather is great. The ability to wear shorts in October is such a novelty. The clear and sunny skies have made for wonderful, orange sunsets almost daily. In the long term though, this type of weather is concerning. Weather records keep breaking. Vancouver keeps experiencing dryer and hotter weather each year. This cannot be good long term.

My intention tonight was to watch the new episode of She-Hulk when it released at midnight. I got to my couch around 11:30pm and decided to watch YouTube videos on my TV until the new episode came out. I fell asleep while watching said YouTube videos and woke up well past midnight. Now I’m too tired and sleepy to watch any kind of TV and will be going to bed.

So I received an interesting bit of spam e-mail earlier this week. Someone from China, who identified themselves as working for a “consulting” company, inquired if I was willing to partake in a paid interview session where I am supposed to share my thoughts on the video game industry. They even quoted a rate of $250 an hour, unclear in what currency that is.

Shockingly though, the e-mail goes onto state the specifics of what they want me to share in the interview. Without going into too much detail, they were essentially asking me to divulge the business strategies and future plans for one of the games that my employer has recently released. Such information would be considered confidential and not for public consumption, yet this “consulting” company is clearly asking me to share this information in exchange for money. I am not exactly sure but this might also be illegal in some jurisdictions, for both the party offering the money and the party agreeing to divulge such information.

Part of me also thinks this just might be phishing scam. Between the e-mail address domain, the e-mail signature, and the contents of the e-mail body, three separate company names are used to identify the “consulting” company. Also, there appears to be little to no online presence for this company. So maybe they’re just trying to socially engineer some information from me.

In any case, I told my manager about this and they are trying to figure out who should look at this e-mail, perhaps someone in the legal department.

I went out for a walk around noon today and it was quite warm. The official weather forecast said the high today was 22 degrees Celsius but it felt much warmer than that when I was in the direct sun. In fact, while on my walk, I sought the shadier parts of the sidewalk because I was starting to sweat in the direct sunlight. I was dressed in a thin t-shirt and jeans, and it made me wish I had worn shorts instead.

October is just five days away and we’re still getting summer weather. I am not complaining however, as I know that Vancouver retains its amazing ability to turn into six months of torrential rains and cloudy skies in a span of a day. The forecast says we should have sunny skies until the weekend but who knows what it’ll be like beyond that.

In a recent post, I wrote about how people at the company I work for sometimes post mysterious, nonsensical messages in a Slack channel that is visible to almost all employees. Well, it happened again on Sunday evening.

An employee who is already on their Monday workday, posted two six-digit numbers as their message. That’s it. No context or other information was included in their message.

I broke my blog tonight for some period of time as I tried to update some software and it did not go well. I managed to fix, which is why you’re able to read this now. I probably still need to clean up a few more things but I think things are back to normal now.

I was at the dollar store this weekend to buy some kitchen supplies and when I was at the checkout, the cashier said they were giving away hand sanitizer and she was wondering if I wanted some. Hell yeah, I want free stuff. So she gave me a large bottle of hand sanitizer. It was 500ml of the stuff! Safe to say, that was a pretty good day.

I have a co-worker who works from home and sometimes goes into the office in the Los Angeles area. He’s now been infected with COVID-19 twice in the last six months. Both times he’s been very ill. He’s currently unable to work because he’s dealing with his latest bout with the virus.

I’ve also heard of some of co-workers in the LA that have gotten COVID-19 multiple times. Being infected multiple times can’t be good. I think it’s like rolling the dice every single time you get it. The odds just get worse.

Are we just going to accept that multiple infections are just a way of life going forward? It seems like that’s a sub-optimal way of going about things. Unfortunately, I don’t have all the answers either. All I know is people are continually getting ill and that’s worrisome.