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

In my travels on this planet I’ve heard the term “clingstone” peach used a few times. I never knew that meant until a few weeks ago. It turns out that the terms “clingstone” and “freestone” are related and can refer to other fruits than just peaches.

A fruit that is classified as a clingstone means the flesh of that fruit tends to stick or “cling” to the pit in the middle. Now that I think about it, that’s pretty much common sense. I guess I never put two and two together. Man, being dumb sucks.

Anyways, a fruit that is classified as a freestone means the flesh of that fruit is relatively free of the pit in the middle. Again, that makes a lot of sense as well. I admit, this isn’t one of the best “Did You Know?” editions I’ve written. If I were to ever release a small collection of “Did You Know?”s in print, I’d leave this one out. Oh wait, I just thought of something. “When it gets hot in the summer, my underwear tends to cling to my stones.” Get it? Ok, come back tomorrow.

Many of you, my loyal readers, don’t know this but I am terrible with money. I don’t mean I can’t budget or don’t know how to save money, that I think I can do. The problem arises when I have money saved up. If there’s the least effective way to use that saved money, I’ll probably find it. As an example, I’ve had my bank call me up at least three times in the last two years or so because they saw I had a large chunk of change sitting in an account that made no interest. Of course, I ignored their request to help me.

They called me again about three weeks ago and this time I listened. Even I was getting tired of my stupidity. I actually took time on Saturday to visit my home bank branch and sat down with a financial representative to go over my options. It was more than just discussing what to do with that money in that account. We discussed all aspects of where my money goes and how to use it more wisely. The lady I talked to got me thinking about how I can do a lot better with the money I have right now.

For starters, she wanted me to switch my mortgage to the bank. They were offering a lower rate. I also called my mortgage broker to see what he thought. In response, he found an even better option for me, at a much lower rate. I’ll have to pay a penalty but the new mortgage should pay off the penalty in 11 or 12 months. My payments will be lower and more will go towards the principal.

Next, I’ve opened up a new tax free savings account for the express purpose of buying mutual funds of a safe nature. Rather than have money just sitting in an account, making no interest, I’m going to put that money in funds that provide steady income. I’m hoping that the returns will be better than what a normal savings account offers.

This evening, I analyzed the last ten months of my cell phone bills. I am paying way too much for the amount of calling I do. On average, I talk for 105 minutes a month and send out 65 text messages. By switching to a different plan, I can save about $10 a month and actually have more minutes available to me.

Tomorrow, I’m going to remove some channels from my TV lineup that I pay for but rarely watch, if ever.

I should have done some of these things a long time ago but for whatever reason just didn’t do. Let’s clip coupons together!

As most of you know I don’t own a car (I don’t count the Monte Carlo as a car). Because of that, I’m not in my apartment’s parking garage very often.  About two weeks ago, I borrowed my father’s car and drove it back to my place. As I was going up the parking levels, I noticed a few new cars in some of the spots. One of the cars clearly stood out from the rest.

It was a Porsche Cayman and it was the first Porsche I’ve seen in the complex. That alone should garner it attention but it had an awesome paint job that left me staring at the car. The Cayman was pure white but it had a matte finish. This beautiful machine was stunning by itself,  but the clean, white matte finish made it that much more sexy. I haven’t seen many matte paint jobs on cars so far but this was easily the best example as to why one would get one. I don’t know who owns the Porsche but whoever it is sure knew how to pick a car.

I found a less than perfect picture of a matte white Cayman but it should give you an idea of what it looks like. The car actually looks better with less lighting. This video shows off the paint job much better. Oh man, when I get my Toyota Yaris, it’s gonna have a matte finish.

If you’ve been to a mall in North America, you’ve no doubt seen at least a few kids zipping around on roller shoes. Roller shoes are like regular athletic shoes but have a large, wide wheel that extends slightly from the heel of each shoe. It allows the wearer to roll along like a roller skate but then transition to walking immediately (and then back to rolling). Some roller shoes have two wheels in each shoe.

The kids I see with these shoes always seem to be having a lot of fun when they roll along. They also move at a decent speed which, at least to me, adds to the fun. The thing is, I’ve never seen anyone other than kids wear roller shoes. I thought they just didn’t make them in adult sizes. That’s actually not true. I did some research tonight and they do indeed make them in larger sizes. It’s just that adults don’t buy roller shoes in great quantities. I’m guessing that sales for these things are predominantly for kids. Until I saw this video, I’d never seen an actual adult use roller shoes.

I admit, I’ve wanted a pair of roller shoes for a long time. The kids seem to dig having these things and I wanna zip along with my shoes as well. The problem is, I’m not sure if it’s socially acceptable for a dude in his 30s to wear roller shoes. I just can’t see myself rolling on my heel to the Orange Julius at the food court. Am I alone in wanting a pair of these things? Where could I roll around in relative seclusion and peace?

The wrap party for skate 3 is being held tomorrow evening. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone who worked on the game with me. In particular, I hope to see the people who were laid off right after the game was done. I used to see them everyday but not anymore.

I know not everyone will go. Sadly, this is the second time this has happened. When skate 2 shipped, they laid off a massive amount of people. When the wrap party came around a few weeks later, a majority of the people who got let go didn’t really want to go. I understood their feelings before but I know it even more now. Nonetheless, I hope that for night, we can all get together and remember what a great team we were.

I came home tonight after having dinner with a friend to find two police cars in front of my building. There were two police officers in the lobby observing a resident moving his stuff out onto the street. Actually, one of the cops was this attractive female with great hair but that’s besides the point. So anyways, the dude who was moving is someone who I’ve seen before. He’s always got a fake tan no matter what time of year it is. He also has one of those tattoos around one of his arms, you know the ones that people get to feel unique, just like everyone else? He’s got this borderline douchebag look. In fact, he actually appeared in the Vancouver section of TheDirty.com. One time I saw him buying drugs from some other dude at the Skytrain station.

To be fair, he’s never really done anything negative to me. In fact, he held the elevator door open for me once. As I got to the lobby, he was basically done his move. I went up to the security guy and asked him what was up with the dude. He told me he wasn’t exactly sure but apparently there was an incident on the weekend. Whatever it was, it was enough to get the landlord and the police involved to him kicked out in less than a week. In my opinion, that’s pretty awesome that we can kick troublemakers out of my building quickly.

Last but not least, he seemed to have a pretty nice TV. Toshiba guts.

Over the years I’ve had the pleasure of meeting and seeing some very interesting people as I go about my own business. This post is about one of those people.

I forget exactly when I started seeing this dude around town but it was definitely when I was living in Coquitlam and continued when I moved to Port Moody. He was always in and around the area of Lougheed Mall. He was either walking near the mall, in the mall, or taking a bus to/from the mall. You definitely would not miss him. He looked to be in his late 40s, maybe even early 50s. He was always in some football getup and by that I mean American football. He’d have his football jersey on, sometimes with full shoulder pads, sometimes not. He also had football pants on, along with cleats. He’d be holding a football helmet in one hand. It looked like he’d just stepped off the field from football practice or something, except there wasn’t a field within several kilometers in any direction.

His hair was jet black, as if his hair had captured the blackness of the darkest, moonless night. I’m pretty sure it was dyed black. He kinda grew it sorta long in the back and slicked all his hair back. It wasn’t really a mullet though. He reminded me of someone you might see in the movie Grease. That was the first impression I got from him. He was a living caricature of a 1950s character from a period piece film or TV show.

I never really did hear him speak but I saw him in a lot of places. I saw him walking up North Road one sunny day in full gear with his helmet in one hand. I saw him the checkout line at Wal-Mart. I even sat across from him on the bus a few years ago.

I’ve been curious all these years as to what his story is. I suppose there exists the chance that he really was on his way to or from some real football related activity. Wouldn’t that be something? I feel though, that’s something else behind all of this. Will I ever find out? Probably not but at least I hope you’re wondering now as well.

I think I got one spam comment a year while I was blogging user Blogger. Now with WordPress, I can get half a dozen spam comments in a single day. I have now activated Akismet, the active spam filtering system. I know the system isn’t perfect, so there might be some false positives or some spam that gets through.

Let’s see how this works because I’m getting tired of reading comments about sunglasses and athletic shoes.

Last evening EA paid for airtime on Jimmy Kimmel Live! where Jimmy and Guillermo talked about skate 3. It was slightly awkward and not all that funny but it’s cool to know that something I worked on got mentioned on a late night talk show.

In December of 2009 I bought a DVD set from the Discovery Channel online store. I bought season 5 of Mythbusters, one of the best shows on Discovery. The set is six discs. I thought I watched the entire set over the Christmas holidays.

I was thinking about selling the set at work through the EA classifieds so I looked at the whole set last week to ensure everything was good. It was only then I noticed that instead of disc six, I had another disc five. I had two disc fives. I don’t know how I missed that the first time around. I e-mailed customer support and they are shipping me an entire new set of discs. They don’t even want the old one back. I’ll have two sets now (minus that missing disc six in one of them).

I can’t wait to watch that sixth disc!