Category: Uncategorized

Oh SNL, how saucy! Here’s the original commercial.

For the last ten work days, I believe I’ve had a salad for lunch for at least six of those days. It’s the exact same salad too: “Pecans, Dried Cranberries, Crumbled Goat Cheese, Chicken Breast and Strawberry Poppy Seed Vinaigrette on a Bed of Mixed Greens”.  I pulled that straight from the cafeteria menu. It’s quite delicious and relatively healthy.

I’m not sure why but I’ve been really craving leafy green vegetables lately. I’m not on any particular health kick right now as I had french fries at least twice in the last week. I just enjoy having a decent and healthy salad for lunch. Though I now remember about two weeks back I had poutine for dinner one night and I felt rather guilty about it afterwards. Maybe that was the catalyst for my salad lunches.

Ok, thanks for reading about me and my salad. Here’s a picture of a kitten.

What you see above is an official two-second preview for a movie called Battle: Los Angeles. The movie has been frequently described as Black Hawk Down meets Independence Day. Let’s just hope it’s not the parts of Independence Day that sucked. B: LA is a war movie, with the combatants being humans and aliens. The film stars, among others, Aaron Eckhart and Michelle Rodriguez.

I’m a sucker for movies where humanity has to deal with aliens on a global scale on Earth. I can’t express how excited I was to see Independence Day. I had very high hopes for that movie. Unfortunately, after seeing ID4, I slowly came to the realization it wasn’t really that great of a film. Though it had many things wrong with it, people universally agree that the biggest blunder was trying to make the audience believe Jeff Goldblum could completely disable advanced alien technology using a virus he wrote on a Mac. To even suggest that he was able to setup a proper protocol to communicate with the alien systems would be a huge stretch but to go one light year further and say that the aliens didn’t have their version of Norton working is a slap to my geek face.

Anyways, enough about the mid-1990s. B: LA is out in 2011 and I expect it to be way better than ID4.

Every year the beginning of September signals another start to the school year. The new school year means the next couple of weeks will make for crap commutes both in the morning and in the evening. The sparsely populated buses and Skytrain cars that were part of the summer will now be replaced with sleepy kids sitting where I’m supposed to be.

We are, however, getting a co-op student at work. Hopefully we take the dude out for lunch and I can get in on the company-sponsored eats.

On Saturday, I went to a Taco Del Mar for lunch. Upon returning from the Mexican food establishment, I realized I was no longer in possession of my debit card. I had used said debit card to pay for my burrito and remembered sticking it (the debit card, not the burrito) back in the pocket of my shorts but not actually in my wallet. In the short trip back to my apartment, my debit card must have tumbled out of my shorts. I’m not sure where that happened exactly.

After searching my apartment and my clothes to ensure the card wasn’t hiding somewhere, I resigned myself to canceling my debit card over the phone. A short five minute conversation later, the card was canceled. I was now left with no way of directly accessing my main bank account. Because it was the long weekend and it was already too late to get to a bank, I’d have to wait until Tuesday morning to get a new debit card.

Not having my debit card is an inconvenience for sure but I wasn’t worried. I still have my Visa card, so I can basically pay for anything that I would have used my debit card for. Getting cash is not a problem as well. Using an ATM to get a cash advance using my Visa is simple. I also have my ING bank account, though there is only one ING ATM in all of British Columbia.

I have to get through one more day without my debit card but I don’t think that will be a problem.

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

Did you know that former world number one tennis great Stefan Edberg indirectly killed a man when he was 17 years old? Edberg at the time was playing as a junior in the 1983 US Open. One of his serves made a direct hit into the groin of one of the linesman, a man named Dick Wertheim. The impact of the serve caused Wertheim to fall and hit his head. He was rendered unconscious by the fall and was rushed to hospital. He never recovered and died due to the head injury.

Edberg went onto an illustrious tennis career and was seen as one of the classiest and most sporting players on the tour.

I’ve just added new functionality that will allow readers using mobile devices to read this blog with greater ease. Essentially, the tubes which carry the words and letters to your screen will now detect which type of browser you are using. If a mobile browser if detected, you’ll be served up the mobile version of this blog. The mobile version loads quicker and is laid out to be easier to read on smaller screens. I’m not entirely happy with the mobile theme but I’m going to take some time to choose a better one. In the meantime, it is functional.

For those on the latest generation of smartphones, you might prefer the desktop version of this blog. At the bottom of each page is a link to switch back to the full site with all the bells and whistles. Let me know if you see anything weird with the new layout.

Though the official end of summer doesn’t occur until near the end of September, today Vancouver got a head start on autumn. Not only did it rain today but it rained more than any day in August in all of recorded history for the city. It was as if the weather deities knew it was the end of the month and they weren’t about to fool us into thinking summer was still around. It rained and rained today. It was so torrential that a leak sprung in the ceiling at work near where I get my hot water for my tea.

Next week, kids will return to school, university students will start to get sleep-deprived, and traffic will get heavier along the roads. Not to mention that the days will get shorter, the temperatures will start to drop, and the rains will come more often. For all the things I enjoy about Vancouver, autumn is not one of them.

I was shopping at one of the local T&T Supermarkets this evening when I noticed something interesting. There was this Asian dude in the produce department and he looked exactly like someone who works in the communications department at EA. They were both tall and skinny, had almost the exact same haircut, and more importantly, nearly identical facial features. The only major difference was the EA guy is Caucasian. So the produce guy was the Asian EA communications guy.

This isn’t the first time I’ve noticed something like this. In fact, just a few weeks ago, some new dude joined my team at work. This dude just happened to be Asian. When I saw him for the first time, I thought, “wow, this dude is the Asian Kevin Smith“. My new co-worker was also short and stocky, had the same haircut, and also wore glasses like Kevin does. Their facial features are also similar enough to make the resemblance quite easy to see. Last but not least, both dudes love wearing shorts.

Over the years, I’ve encountered many instances where I’ve seen the Asian version of other people. The very first instance that sticks out in my memory though occurred in 1997. Just days removed from my last exam of my undergrad degree, I was in Honolulu, Hawaii for a family vacation (the first in many years). My Mom loves going on tours of places she visits so she arranged for the whole family to be shuttled around in a van to see the various tourist sites. It was at one of these tourist hangouts that my sister and I spotted the Asian Burt Reynolds. The Asian Burt was a tour guide but not ours. He had his own group that he was showing around. Asian Burt had slightly wavy hair just like the real Burt did. He was also rocking some sunglasses. He wore a turquoise short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt and brilliant white pants. The kicker was his mustache though. It was as grand and thick as real Burt’s ‘stache. If I were a betting man, I’d wager five whole dollars that even Loni would have a hard time knowing which one belonged to who (no riding allowed). Both my sister and I observed Asian Burt at two different stops of the tour. He seemed to have the right attitude to back up his Bert look. He even chewed gum like the real Bert.

Asian Burt made quite an impression on my sister and I. He was more interesting at times than the actual places we had been driven too. We never saw Burt again after that, though my sister and I would speak about him in fond terms many years later. When I went back to Honolulu two years ago, I briefly wondered about what happened to Asian Burt. I didn’t track him down but I did get to touch some taxi driver’s head though.

Today I was going through the list of spam comments for this blog when I saw one that was written by “blue dolphin vibrator”. I wondered if such a thing existed or if that was just a fake name that someone came up with. One Google search later, I discovered there actually is something called a “blue dolphin vibrator”.

“The textured surface ripples against your erogenous zones with every “dive”, offering shiver-inducing sensations each time the shaft dips in and out.”

And I learned something today.