Category: Uncategorized

In a previous post, I mentioned I had decided to sponsor a child somewhere in the world that could use my assistance. When I applied I was given a choice of the gender, age, and country of origin for my sponsor child. I decided to leave it up to the people at the aid agency. It was my hope that they would pick for me someone who was most deserving of assistance.

I received in the mail yesterday a package which detailed who my sponsor child is. The agency had chosen a young girl from Niger as my sponsor child. I was given a few details about her, including the makeup of her family, where she lives, and a few pictures of her. To protect her privacy, I will not be using her name nor posting photos of her here. I can tell you she is four years old and that she has a nine year old sister. Her father is a farmer and her mother runs the household. They live in the northwest part of Niger, in a village with less than 20,000 inhabitants.

The agency encourages all sponsors to write to their sponsor child. They suggest sending along photos or postcards from the sponsor’s home country and/or city. I will write her a short note and give her some postcards from Vancouver. I’ve been told that I will receive updates on her every 12 to 18 months. She doesn’t go to school because she is still too young. Like so many developing countries, educating children in Niger is difficult. She won’t start school until she is seven years old. Unfortunately, the majority of children in Niger who finish their primary education are boys. I know the issues are complex but it is my hope that my sponsor child gets the education she deserves and needs. Often, children cannot continue their education because they are required to work to help their family survive. Given a choice between either simply surviving or going to school, it is a choice they make out of necessity. That’s where I’m hoping my dollars will go to work, to give enough stability to the family so that they can allow their children to go to school without worry.

I am looking forward to the day where my sponsor child will be able to read my letters and write her own replies to me, all by herself.

Say what you want about the Vancouver Canucks on the ice but off the ice, there is no doubt they are a classy organization. A few years ago the club invited the fathers of the players to join their boys on the road so they could share the experience of being a professional hockey player. It was a great bonding experience for both fathers and sons. This was followed up with a road trip where the players’ mothers got to accompany their beloved sons. Again, you can imagine how special it was for the players to have their Moms along.

Not to be outdone this year, the Canucks invited their players to bring along a sister or a brother on a short two-game road trip to the US. This is another great idea from the team and I know I certainly would be excited if my NHL playing brother invited me along. The Canucks allowed the siblings to travel on the team plane, bus with their brothers to practice, eat with them during team meals, and of course attend the games. What an awesome way to show them what NHL life is like on the road (which mainly is fantastic).

Though most of the players invited their brothers, I was glad to see five sisters on the trip. Some of the players had no choice as their only sibling was a sister. Some players had to choose a sibling since they had more than one. I wonder how that went over with the sibling that didn’t go.

The Canucks have posted several galleries that highlight various moments through the siblings road trip. There is gallery one, gallery two, and gallery three. Last but not least, the sister of defenseman Dan Hamhuis, Erin Hamhuis was picked to be a guest blogger during the trip. She has written a couple of posts detailing when she was told of the trip, how nervous she was that she might be the only girl on the trip, and what a thoughtful big brother Dan is. She even sneaks in a bit of juicy gossip. Apparently, one of the siblings, whom she will not name, overslept in the Dallas hotel and missed the bus to the game. Wow, how embarrassing! Have a read at the day one and day two posts.

The siblings were good luck as the Canucks were dominant on the road trip, beating Dallas and Phoenix handily!

I was way too busy playing with Mint.com tonight so I don’t have time for a lengthy post so I’ll just send out some random thoughts.

I am currently eating some yogurt that is one day past it’s “best before” date. As many of you know, I’m a thrill-seek and risk-taker type of guy so this behaviour is pretty much inline with my crazy lifestyle. Ladies, I’m the guy your mom warned you about… mostly because your mom dislikes nerds.

Even though I don’t work for EA any more, I still intently read every quarterly earnings report that they send out. Today they released their latest earnings report. It was no surprise they posted yet another loss but somehow beat out analyst expectations. In a surprise move, they also mentioned they’ll be buying back approx. $600M worth of stock in the next 18 months. Since I still hold several hundred shares of EA stock, they can buy it back from me, at $50 a share, so I can break even on most of shares that are under water.

It’s already February and one month of 2011 has gone by. About a year ago in Vancouver, we had a small sporting event. Does anyone remember that?

I picked up my tax preparation software while I was on my lunch break today. By the way, I would not have been able to do that if I was still working out in Burnaby. Yay for downtown! Anyways, I usually don’t buy my tax prep application until March. I bought it early this year because I believe I am in a tax situation that I’ve never been in before. Specifically, I received several months worth of severance pay in November which skews my earnings for tax year 2010. Unfortunately, my T4 is not ready yet so I only have a rough estimate of what my earnings were for 2010. What I do know is that I artificially made more money this year than in previous years due to being laid off. I personally think severance payments should be tax exempt. Anyways, I have all my other receipts now which mostly came from RRSPs. I bought a significant amount of RRSPs in hopes that I would be able to somewhat offset the lump sum severance payment. Because I still have another month to buy more RRSPs should I need it, doing my taxes now is a good thing. I haven’t had time to enter in all the data so we’ll see if I owe money to the government still.

In other money news, popular personal finance web site Mint.com now caters to Canadian users. I’ve heard for years how great Mint is for US users and Canadians finally have the chance to try it out. I signed up for an account this evening. I was surprised (perhaps in a naive way) that Mint asks for your online banking info. They do this so they can automatically sync your bank account info to your Mint account. In this way, they can gather all your financial info in one place and it’s always up to date. I understand this makes it easier for Mint to do its thing but I was immediately hesitant to enter in my online bank credentials. Mint swears that it’s tech is secure and that everything is “read only” so that money can’t be moved. That’s nice and all but still not a 100% guarantee. In fact, in their terms of service, which you need to agree to join Mint, they absolve themselves of any responsibility should something go wrong hacker-wise.

On the other hand, in the two years or so that Mint has been running in the US, I have yet to hear about any online breaches of security. This does gives me some confidence that Mint is somewhat secure because I cannot imagine that someone has not tried to hack their system. It would seem like a really logical and sensible place to go looking for financial data. I would really like to try out all Mint’s functionality but for now, I will do a bit more research before taking the plunge. For anyone who is using Mint in its full capacity, how do you like it?

Up until Saturday night, I had not watched a movie that came from the prolific Indian film industry. I was invited to a BBQ at a friend’s place and he suggested to the assembled crowd that we watch the highest grossing Indian film of all time. The movie, Enthiran, which translates to “robot”, was one of the most expensive Indian films to make and it took a better part of two years to produce. It’s also a sci-fi film, so how could we turn down my friend’s suggestion?

Enthiran is about a robotics scientist who creates a robot which is the most advanced version of his kind. It is basically a walking supercomputer. Because it is a robot, it can also perform amazing physical feats. It has the strength of several men and knows how to perform martial arts and dance (which comes in handy for an Indian movie). They name the robot Chitti and his only fault appears to be that he does not have feelings nor emotions. He also appears to have no distinction between good and bad.

The movie is typically Indian in that there are several dance numbers sprinkled liberally through the movie. Though the cast doesn’t just spontaneously break out into song and dance, the film does cut away abruptly to some weird set or location where the dancing and singing begin without pause. I found that a bit odd and jarring, perhaps it might have been better had they just stuck to the current location and just did the dance number there. For example, in one scene, two major characters were in a scene in what was clearly an Indian beach. Without warning or explanation, the movie cut to an outdoor location in Peru where they sang and danced. It was clearly Peru but the actual plot had nothing to do with Peru as the entire movie was set in India. I found that very strange.

For the most part, there were very few cultural references or sensibilities that I did not understand in the movie, except for one. In one scene, Chitti the robot rescues people in an apartment building that is engulfed in flames. He reaches the last trapped victim, a young woman who was taking a bath when the fire started. Naked, the young lady pleads with Chitti not to take her as she is without clothes. She says this even as the flames dance around the bathtub. Chitti ignores her and then cradles her in his arms and takes her to safety. She is left with the gathering crowd outside the burning building all the while still naked. The scientist severely scolds Chitti for taking the naked young woman from the building in her clothes-less condition. A jacket is quickly placed around her to provide her some dignity. It is too late though, as the gathering crowd and media makes the girl feel much shame. She then runs, nay flees the scene to escape her indignity. In doing so, she refuses to look both ways and darts into a busy road where she is promptly hit by a truck and killed. The robot’s creator and everyone else blame Chitti for killing her, ignoring the fact that no one else could have saved her from the fire. It was then that myself and everyone in the room discovered that in Indian culture, it would have been better had the young girl died in the fire than be brought out alive but naked. I did not know that they put such a high premium on decency and honour, to the point that if one had to choose between dying in a fire or public nudity, dying in the fire is socially the right thing to do.

The other thing I have to mention about this film is that the special effects range from pretty good to downright awful. The burning building I mentioned above was all done in CGI and it was very unrealistic. They had the entire building covered in flames so it was like this rectangular volume of flame. Fires in buildings don’t burn like that. Some of the later CGI scenes were a bit better but still not Hollywood quality. What was good was any SFX that involved cars. Whether or not the SFX made any sense from a logical standpoint is another question.

Overall, I thought it was a good learning experience and I felt my horizons were expanded. If you want to see the best “action” bits of Enthiran, watch the video above.

The above song, “Surrender” is from the band Cheap Trick. I was still a toddler when the single was released. It’s a great song and it has withstood the test of time. Whenever I hear it, I feel like I should be watching the names of some very talented people scrolling by.

It was just last week that I wrote a post about the loss of video gaming jobs in Vancouver with the closing of Propaganda Games and the layoffs affecting the EA Sports Active team in Burnaby. My sources now tell me that Relic Entertainment let go about a dozen people this week in a quiet move. There is some talk that several of those people were quite senior. I don’t have much more information beyond that. What I do know is that parent company THQ has their earnings call on February 2, which is coming up soon. It is a common strategy amongst companies to tidy up their business before facing the shareholders. With yet more developers joining the ranks of the unemployed, I wish everyone luck in the future.

On my way home this evening, I ran into a former co-worker from the Fight Night dev team. As many of you know, that was the last team on worked on before I was granted my wish of getting laid off from EA. There were very few things I enjoyed about being on that team but working with said former co-worker was indeed one of the rare highlights. Anyways, we had a short chat about things. He told me that Fight Night Champion is essentially done. He also divulged some personnel changes that occurred on the team. They were very interesting. I was also told that the Fight Night Champion wrap party would be happening Thursday evening. I have to admit, a part of me is a bit surprised I was not invited to the party. I worked on that game for six months in an area that was deemed fairly important feature-wise. While I wasn’t a trailblazer with my work, I did a fairly decent job. I was also the only person who was laid off on the team during the great EA fall purge of 2010, I wasn’t fired or anything. When I was on the skate team, we extended invitations to the wrap parties for everyone who worked on the game, even if they had been subsequently laid off or had come to the end of their temporary employment contracts. Once you worked on skate, you became part of the skate family, no matter what happened. I have known for a long time, however, that the closeness of the skate family is a rarity in the game development world and I should not expect other dev teams to be the same way.

On the other hand, I can totally understand why I wasn’t invited. By the end of my tenure on Fight Night, every single person who was important on that team, franchise DD, group DD, tech director, line producer, and my manager all knew I hated doing the stuff I was forced to do on the game. While I was still professional about my work, they all understood I was just dying on the inside to get out of this personal hell that I’d fallen into. So I can imagine when they were assembling the guest list, they probably thought I wouldn’t want to be even remotely close to anything that reminded me of that negative experience. Or they simply just didn’t want me there, which is their prerogative of course.

In any case, my ex-coworker believes the party is being held at the Earl’s in Yaletown, which coincidentally is right across the street from where I currently work. How convenient! Well, UFG is having their own celebration tomorrow as well. The company is treating all of us to a catered Chinese New Year buffet lunch. There is even going to be a whole roast pig for everyone to enjoy!

This week, Bodog, a popular online gambling site, revised their odds for all NHL teams on winning the Stanley Cup, hockey’s ultimate championship. What a surprise it was to see that the local professional ice hockey team in my city, the Vancouver Canucks were the odds on favourite to win the Cup. Bodog has the Canucks at 9/2 or having an approximately 18% chance of taking hockey’s greatest prize. I found the revisions to be absurd, at least for the Canucks.

Though the local team has done relatively well this season as we enter the half-way mark of the 2010-2011 campaign, there’s is a lot more hockey to played and then there’s the issue that the playoffs haven’t even begun yet. I know that Bodog must have kept in mind numerous stats and crunching many numbers before spitting out the odds, they neglected to keep in mind one thing, the Vancouver Canucks are the Vancouver Canucks. By that I mean, no matter what players play on the team, no matter what year it is, the Canucks always find a way to their own defeat. The huge exception to this is of course the team that went to the Cup finals in 1994. Every single player on that team holds a special place in my heart. To me, they didn’t beat themselves, they gave it their all and it was all that anyone could ask for them.

Enough reminiscing though, the odds are for the current incarnation of the team. I think the bookies have put way too much faith on how well the team has done in the regular season. Keep in mind this current collection of players has never gone back the second round of the playoffs. In the last several seasons, the Canucks exited the second round with a whimper, getting badly beaten in many of the key games. It would be slightly different if they put up a huge effort and lost in seven games but that didn’t happen. Despite some interesting player signing during the off-season, the core of the team remains the same. Now one could argue the same players have gotten more mature and are better players today but I’m not so sure that will make a difference in the playoffs. In the last seven games, the Canucks have cooled off considerably and in two of those games they were outright shutout from scoring. I know every team, even the elite ones, have their rough spots during the season but I’m just not feeling it from Vancouver.

In light of this, I’m trying to find a way to bet some money that the Canucks actually won’t win the Cup. I know that makes me sound like a terrible fan but the despite what the bookies think, they truthfully aren’t the real favourites to win the Cup. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love if they actually did triumph but realistically that’s not going to happen. So why not make some money off of something I know more about than the bookies do? If anyone call tell me how I can place like a reverse bet, you let me know.

So I just signed up to sponsor a child somewhere in the world that needs a bit of help. I know a lot of people do this and I thought it was about time I helped as well. The form I had to fill out was fairly straight-forward. It gave me preferences on which country, age group, and gender but I left it up to them. I am hoping they’ll put my dollars towards someone who needs it the most. Anyways, one of the dropdowns boxes was for my title, as in “Mr.” or “Mrs.”, and so forth. I swear I selected “Mr.” but when the form processed, I became “Mrs. Erwin Tang”, the newest sponsor of a child.

I guess it’s not a big deal in the grand scheme of things but it would be a shame if my sponsor child thought I was a woman. Anyways, I e-mailed the organization to tell them of my silly error. I am hoping they correct it.

When I returned home Friday evening, I discovered a piece of mail on the floor near where my doormat is. The letter was opened so I initially thought it might have fallen off my kitchen counter. The distance was between where it had landed and where my counter is was a bit far, so I began to wonder. I looked at the letter again and I didn’t remember getting that piece of mail.

The letter was from a company that I buy financial products from and when I looked inside, it was an RRSP receipt. It was clear to me now that someone other than Canada Post had slid this letter underneath my door. I understand that in apartment living, people get other people’s mail all the time. I’m ok with that because that’s just the way it is. What I’m not ok with is the fact that someone opened up my letter when it was clearly not addressed to them. I look at the front of every piece of mail that’s addressed to me for two reasons. First, I want to know who sent me the mail so I can have any idea what I’m about to open. Second, I check who the mail is addressed to just in case it’s not actually for me.

I suppose there are people out there who just rip open everything that winds up in the mailbox without looking but I think that’s dumb, especially if you’re living in an apartment building. In this case, who ever looked at my mail now know how much I contributed to my RRSP for this one account. They also know my social insurance number as well which is probably the most troublesome thing in all of this. The odds are, nothing untoward will happen because of this but I just prefer my personal info not being discovered by my neighbours. At the very least, I would have appreciated a small note attached to the letter, “Sorry about opening your letter, it was an accident”. That would have been the right thing to do. I guess I should just be thankful I got the letter back in the first place.

What if my penis pump had been delivered to my neighbour by accident?