Category: Uncategorized

I work for a company that employs nearly ten thousand people worldwide. Like many modern companies, we use Slack for a lot of our communications. For the most part, our Slack admins try to prevent people from being able to message the entire company. There is one channel, however, that has over 8300 members in it, a majority of the employees in the company, and there are no restrictions on who can send a message in that channel. This channel is like a general purpose channel used to disseminate things like class announcements or new internal web sites.

Over the last two years, every couple of weeks, a random, meaningless message appears in this channel. If you haven’t muted this channel then thousands of employees get a notification. Here’s an example of a few random posts I’ve seen in this channel. Just today, someone just posted their first name as a message in this Slack channel. So imagine their name was Bob and they just posted, “Bob” in the channel. Why?

Sometimes, I’ve seen people post random characters or just a single random character as a message. Other times, people have posted a message that is clearly meant as a direct message to another employee. Sometimes, it seems their message was intended for another channel.

I don’t understand how people are sending this misguided messages to this one particular channel. Perhaps the distribution of erroneous messages is spread evenly to all Slack channels but since I don’t have visibility to all of them, I only see the ones sent to this general channel. If that is true though, why don’t I see these funny messages in my other channels?

There’s something I’m missing here and I’m not sure what it is.

On this day, fifteen years ago, skate. was released for the Xbox 360. It was the first game to make it to the public that I worked on as a software engineer. It’s very difficult to believe it’s been fifteen years now. I am incredibly proud and lucky that this was my first game as game developer.

skate. was well-received by both gamers and critics alike and much of that was because of the phenomenal people that came together to get this game done. As thankful as I am for the great game we made, I am more thankful that I got to be part of that dev team. There was something magical about the special combination of the people, the game, and working downtown on the 12th floor of 250 Howe Street that made it a career defining time for me. I have worked on plenty of games and been part of many other teams since but none of that has ever come close to what working on skate. has meant to me. As the years go by, I realize now that there probably won’t be another team like that for me even if I work for another thirty years. That’s ok though, because I got to be part of one of the best dev teams ever!

I fell asleep on my couch again this evening while watching TV. It’s just so damn comfortable to lie there. One of these nights, I’m going to just be so tired that I’ll sleep there all night with all the lights on in the rest of my apartment.

After almost an entire summer free from wildfires, several ones across the province blanketed the greater Vancouver with a thick haze of smoke. Smoke from wildfires has unfortunately been a common sight and smell during the summer in many B.C. cities now.

On Saturday morning, I woke up and I didn’t even need to look out the window. I could smell the smoke immediately. I have an air quality meter in my apartment that measures the presence of particulates in the air. From my bed, I could see it was red, indicating the air was not healthy to breathe. I got up and closed my window down to a sliver. The whole city was covered in white hazy smoke. I then turned up my air purifiers to max.

The one silver lining about living in a pandemic where a virus is transmitted mainly through airborne particles is that you’d think most people would already have some system to mitigate against other airborne pollutants, say smoke from wildfires. To be clear, the air was so bad this weekend that B.C. had some of the unhealthiest air in the world. You would think that people would have masks ready to wear and have the willingness to protect their lungs and bodies from this smoke. Yet, I saw very little of that common sense on the weekend. What I did see were lots of people doing outdoor activities in the smoke. I saw people driving around with their windows down. I also saw lots of people indoors with no masks but that’s a topic for another day.

I don’t really get it. The smoke covered the whole greater Vancouver area and left everything in a haze. You could smell it indoors and outdoors, and it was not a pleasant smell. A quick Google search showed the air quality was worse than big cities in China and India. The air was not healthy to breathe. You can’t argue that no one has access to masks, they’re plentiful now. Yet, in the face of all this evidence, people were willing to suck in this dirty and unhealthy air as if it was no big deal. I supposed people have just done this in the past and they will do it again for many summers in the future. I don’t have a lot of hope for society.

Today was my first day back to work after a week off and I gotta say, going back to work when you work from home is a lot easier than going back to work when you have to commute. I remember coming back from vacations and time off and the thought of having to brave a commute so I can bring my sorry ass back to work in the morning just sucked.

Today, I rolled out of bed for meeting in the morning, turned on my computer, and started up Zoom. When it’s easier to get to work, returning from time off is easier too.

In 2016, I attended my first and only (so far) Electronic Entertainment Expo. One of the games being shown was Mafia 3. The “booth” for it was amazing. Publisher 2K essentially recreated a small city block of New Orleans from 1968, with two-story buildings. Inside, there was a bar area, a band, and other stuff that you can see in the above video. The lineup to get into this area was hours long every single day. I made the choice to not spend a significant chunk of my time at E3 just to line up for a single “booth”, even as impressive as that one.

A few years later, I actually bought the game on sale. I tried playing it but soon realized the game was horrendously optimized. It ran very slow, even though I was using a decent video card that was produced a year after the game came out. Six years after I went to E3, I finally bought a video card that was able to run Mafia 3 at decent frame rates.

I finished the main story yesterday and while the game is not flawless, I enjoyed the story and the voice actors were top-notch. The game is set in 1968, in a fictional city in New Orleans. The main character is African-American, and the game is not afraid to show that racism was very much present in the late 60s. I suppose not much has changed unfortunately. On a happier note, the game features an amazing soundtrack, filled with about 100 songs from that era. Some of the tracks are what you might expect, like from Creedence Clearwater Revival but I couldn’t get enough of Sam Cooke songs that were included. YouTube has an almost complete playlist of the soundtrack if you’re interested.

It took six years but I’m glad I closed the loop on this game.

Last week, my team gave everyone Thursday off, which I then took a vacation day for Friday as well. This has made for a very long weekend, which isn’t even over for me. I also took Tuesday and Wednesday off as well. I don’t go back to work until Thursday.

I have been taking it very easy, sleeping in every day, cleaning my apartment, doing errands, visiting my niece and parents, and playing lots of video games. I have no complaints. The weather has been nice too, even that one day that it rained.

Ok, time for bed.

Last week, Canadian actor Simu Liu guest hosted on Jimmy Kimmel Live!. One of his guests was comedian Jimmy O. Yang. I don’t think I’ve seen an Asian host of a late night talk show with an Asian guest before. Sure, the world is in a terrible state right now but that’s pretty cool.

Coincidentally, I have seen both these gentlemen live and in-person during this year. I saw Jimmy’s stand-up show and Simu came to the city for his book tour.