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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaeS87nJMdg&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

In another sure sign that I’m enjoying my time off, I spent an hour watching Alan Kalter videos on YouTube. Big Red will always be a favourite here.

Every year that the local professional ice hockey team makes the playoffs, I try to make an even and balanced prediction as to how well I think they will fare in each round. The 2010 edition of the Vancouver Canucks have made the playoffs. It’s still too early for me to look into my crystal ball as the season isn’t even over yet and their first round opponent can’t even be calculated.

I do have a few concerns though. I hate to be a party-pooper but the chances of the Canucks winning the Stanley Cup this year are not good. I’ve watched hockey long enough to know what teams look like serious contenders and what teams, while good, don’t have all the necessary pieces.

Let’s just get goaltending right out of the way. A serious contender has a goalie that will steal not one but several games during a playoff run. Canucks goalie, Roberto Luongo has played inconsistent at best since the Olympic break. He’s never strung together more than two somewhat decent performances together since he won the gold medal. There’s a chance he might get his act together in the three remaining regular season games but he’s given no one any indication why that might actually happen.

The other thing that is worrisome for Canucks fans is their defense. One of the top d-men, Willie Mitchell has been in the past relied upon to shut down the best players on the other team. Mitchell has been out of the lineup with concussion problems for months now and isn’t even practicing with the team. It’s almost assured he’ll miss whatever playoffs the Canucks have. Their current number one dude on the blueline, Christian Ehrhoff, has a wonky knee now as of the last game. Canucks staff say he should be fine for the playoffs but who really knows if they’re telling the truth. In the meantime, they have players like Andrew Alberts filling in. No offense to Alberts (he makes more money in one game than I do in a year) but he’s gonna look silly out there against playoff calibre teams.

I don’t want to be all negative as the playoffs are about to begin but fans have to face reality here. I’ll never be one of those guys that every year, without fail, say they’re sure the Canucks are gonna win the Cup this time around.

It’s 4:30am in the morning as I type this and that is a sure indication I am well into my month long vacation. I’ve spent the last few days catching up on some much needed sleep. I also cleaned up my apartment a bit. I had my ironing board sitting in my living room since the Olympics started. I finally put that away.

I really should go to bed. I’m supposed to have lunch with a friend tomorrow and noon isn’t that far off now. It doesn’t take very long for my sleep schedule to get screwed up.

Today was my last official day with Black Box. My employment with them lasted exactly 3 years, 6 months, and 25 days.

Two weeks ago, I was told my services were no longer required. It was a two week heads-up that I would be done at the end of the month. At the time, I wrote a post about it. In that post, I also wrote that they tried present me a “silver lining”, that some other team in the sports label was willing to give me a job. I will be diplomatic and say that the job they offered me did not fit my career interests. At the time, I was told this would be the only option presented to me, which disappointed me greatly. Now, I have to be careful here because there were some sensitive and heated discussions going on, most of which I wasn’t even involved in. Suffice it to say that even before the day was over, I was then told that I could safely decline the original offer and that HR would try to find me a more suitable position.

It would only take two days for another opportunity to come up, mainly due to people who had an unselfish regard for my well-being. I spoke with representatives with this new team just once before they offered me a position. It was certainly a generous and surprising offer but I needed to be convinced this was indeed something right for me. I arranged several more meetings with technical people and managers over the course of a week. I finally said yes late last week.

At the beginning of May, I will be joining the Fight Night team. Until then, I’m taking some time off to rest up from finishing skate 3. I’ll be staying up late, playing many video games, and eating a lot of unhealthy food. I’m looking forward to all of that.

I wonder if it would vex my high school English teachers if they knew that in adulthood, I would mostly read books about vampires and zombies. For every sonnet or play from Shakespeare we analyzed, I would go on to read three books about a world-wide apocalypse brought upon by the undead.

The current book I’m reading is entitled Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. The book is written as a biography of the 16th President of the United States. The biography, however, is fictional (I think) because it includes the fantastical notion that Lincoln was one of the greatest vampire hunters the world has seen. Lincoln’s life is told from the time is he a little boy right on through to his untimely demise. The book purports that he kept journals which recorded his most personal thoughts and his most vicious actions against vampires.

I have been quite taken by the book and I’ve had little time to put it down. I’m about half way through it and I wonder how his last days will be interpreted within the vampire theme. I am also been left in a curious mood about Lincoln. Since the author has mixed in authentic details about the President’s life with his own fictional accounts, there are some items that I cannot determine if are historically correct or not (excepting the parts where Lincoln vanquishes the undead). I am almost positive that when I finish this book, I will read up on Lincoln’s life in great detail, as to determine what his life was really like. Before this, I only knew Lincoln as the man who freed the slaves in the US and that he was shot by John Wilkes Booth. You know what’s odd? The Lincoln and vampire connection is never mentioned in National Treasure: Book of Secrets. I guess Nic Cage’s character didn’t dig deep enough.

In any case, if you’re into that type of stuff, I definitely recommend the book. It’s fascinating to discover how Lincoln balanced being a father, husband, lawyer, and ultimately President, with staking vampires in the chest.

Well, with Wednesday officially being my last day as an employee of Black Box, I have started enjoying my time as a lazy bum. I have no where to be tomorrow, which is why I’m writing this at 4am in the morning. I’m just gonna sleep in and see what the day brings. Being laid off sure has its negatives but I think you have to look at where you can scrabble together some positives as well.

By the time I wake up tomorrow, some of you will have already been at work for four hours. I think that’s kinda awesome.

At beginning of March, I sent my Samsung Blu-ray player in for repair as I was encountering frequent stuttering during playback. The repair process took about two weeks and I had the player shipped to my workplace as there was no one at my apartment to receive the package.

The box, with the player in it, has been sitting underneath my desk for almost two weeks now. I didn’t want to take it home on the bus and Skytrain with me. I waited until I had time to borrow a car so I could drive it back home. With the unfortunate circumstances with me being laid off, it took me until this weekend to have enough time to borrow my father’s car to bring the player home. Now if you’re wondering why I’m still even allowed to be at work, it’s because everyone who got booted technically is employed until the end of the month. No one really needs to show up but if you wanna go use your work computer to update your resume, that’s ok.

Anyways, so this afternoon I’m leaving my apartment building and driving up 8th Street in New West which essentially takes me straight to the studio. I get a few blocks from my apartment when the car ahead of me stops at a pedestrian crossing. At the crossing is an old lady. Instead of crossing though, she runs up to the car ahead of me. I now suspect this old lady maybe a bit crazy. Instead of stopping at the car ahead of me though, she now runs over to my car. Oh great. Why does this stuff always happen to me?

The old lady had a concerned look on her face so now I’m thinking she might need some genuine help. She’s now at my passenger window, so I open it a bit.

“I need some help, I need a ride down the block! I forgot my stuff on the bus. Please?”

My brain is trying to process what’s going on. So there’s no emergency and no one is dying. She’s all excited because she got off the bus without some of her stuff. A very, very tiny part of me thinks she’s totally blowing this out of proportion as she shouldn’t be running into traffic over some material goods. Then I see it’s raining and she’s just an old lady, in her late 50s, standing in the road. I instantly regret saying these words as soon as they leave my mouth:

“Fine. Get in.”

The old lady gets in the passenger seat. I now realize that I have a strange old lady in my car and she wants me to catch up to a bus that I can’t even see in the distance. This could go so bad in so many ways.

I tell the old lady I can’t even see the bus. She says it’s just ahead of us. I drive another block and I can now see the bus just a block ahead of us. Lucky for her, there are a quite a few stops along this route. The car ahead of us unfortunately decides to turn left though and there’s a lot of traffic coming the other way. There isn’t another lane for me to go around him though, so we wait.

The old lady tells me she forgot a bag of groceries. What the hell lady?!?!? I’m racing a bus because you forgot a single bag of groceries? I almost told her right then and there that I’d go to Safeway with her and I’d buy her new groceries. Instead, the car in front of us makes its turn and we’re off again.

Without speeding too fast, I get within three or four car lengths to the bus. Unfortunately, the light turns yellow, the bus makes it through the intersection but two cars in front me don’t, so I’m forced to stop. As we wait, the old lady mentions how it totally sucks getting old as her memory ain’t what it used to be. I also find out she just retired recently.

The light turns green again and now I’m wondering how it easy it would have been for the old lady to have a gun or something in that green purse of hers. The thought of being car-jacked by some grandma runs through my mind. Because of traffic and the head-start it had, it takes me a good five blocks before I catch up to the bus again. It’s a good thing I was going this way anyways.

I managed to get in front of the bus but now I need to figure out how to the bus to stop so that the old lady can get back on it. The plot of Speed runs quickly through my mind but nothing practical comes up. Great movie by the way. I figure I have two options: get ahead of the bus far enough so that I can I drop off the old lady at a bus stop before the bus can pass us or find any stop with someone waiting so that person forces the bus to stop (thus buying the old lady enough time to get out).

As I speed ahead of the bus, we encounter stop after stop with no one waiting. I’m still not far enough ahead of the bus to drop her off without the bus passing us. I briefly wonder what would happen if I just stopped randomly in front of the bus but that seemed dangerous. Instead, I drive on, increasing my distance from the bus. As we approach a major intersection, the old lady assures me there’s always someone waiting at the next stop. As we cross the intersection, the old lady turns out to be right. There’s a single person waiting at the next stop. There’s even a small lane that I can turn into right before the stop. This might actually work as the bus is now over a block behind me still.

I pull into the lane and stop. As the old lady hops out of the car, she thanks me profusely. I wish her good luck and say bye to her. She runs off to the bus stop next to the car. I’m forced to drive off as now there’s another car behind me. I have to circle around to get back on track and because of traffic it takes me a while to do so. When I finally get to the major intersection again, I can see the old lady crossing the road to get to the other bus stop so she can go back home the other way now. In her hand now is a single white grocery bag that she did not have before. I guess she was able to get her stuff back.

I was able to drive the rest of the way to the studio without any further incidents. By the way, my Blu-ray player works great now.

Today marks the last beer and cake I’ll be attending as a member of Black Box. For over three and a half years I’ve had the honour of drinking beer and eating cake to my heart’s content each and every Friday.

Shortly before I left my previous job to go to Black Box, I was told about the long and proud tradition of beer and cake on Friday. People said it would be one of the many perks of joining the studio. I didn’t really understand how beer and cake went together but I kept an open mind.

I remember the very first beer and cake that I went to. I had met a user interface artist named Tony who was new to the skate team as well. He’d started working at Black Box downtown just a few weeks earlier than me. He knew a few more people than I did, so he invited me up to the 19th floor patio to have some beers with everyone else.

I remember stepping onto the patio with a beer in hand. It was a beautiful summer day with bright blue skies and barely any clouds in the sky. The patio was crowded with people drinking beer and enjoying the sun. Music was playing over some outdoor speakers. Tony and I made our way to a table and sat down. As I looked over the patio railing I could see the Lions Gate Bridge, Stanley Park, Canada Place, and the surrounding waters of Burrard Inlet. It was a view that I would enjoy for countless more times after that. That first beer and cake sure was a sign I’d made the right decision as to where I wanted to work.

Since then I’ve had a chance to go to over 150 beer and cakes. Sometimes, I brought my friends to let them see where I work. Other times, I just chilled out with my co-workers after a long week at work. I even skipped out a few times, when I was just too busy or had to be elsewhere downtown on a Friday. No matter what though, a late Friday afternoon meant always meant I had somewhere to go and take it easy with the rest of the studio.

Beer and cake changed quite a bit when we moved to Burnaby. We no longer had many guests who wanted to drink free beer all the way out in Burnaby. Even the people working at Black Box seemed to have less enthusiasm for the whole event. Back in the downtown location, we’d invariably run out of beer before the end of the evening. Now in Burnaby, there’s lot of beer left over.

Tomorrow, I’ll have my last drink at Black Box and think about all the people I’ve shared a beer with over the years. Thanks everyone for having a cold one with me.

In a previous post, I wrote about my desire to run my rarely used to dishwasher, just to ensure that it remains in good working order. Since then, I’ve used it twice and I gotta admit, it’s pretty damn convenient.

The second time was less than efficient since the dishwasher only had 4 or so dirty plates, one bowl, and a few utensils to clean. I didn’t feel like cleaning them by hand however, so I went the automated route.

I wonder if this is start of something lazy.

On March 24, 2000, just months after the global Y2K disasters had ravaged the world, I registered the domain erwintang.com under my name. Every year since then I have renewed my domain for one additional year, always finding a reason to keep it.

Today marks the first decade of existence for erwintang.com. I admit I haven’t really done a whole lot with this site. I certainly value my blog and it’s really cool to have my own personal e-mail address but I’ve seen some pretty cool personal web sites out there. In hindsight, I should have really pursued that idea I had in 2002 where I would allow people to upload their videos to my web site for free so that others could watch them.

As we close the chapter on the first ten years here online, I say thanks to everyone for their support and loyalty over the last decade. I feel like I should have run some sorta contest to celebrate the occasion. I’ll see what I can do. Perhaps I’ll give away another set of promotional clothing again. I’ve been threatening to make a bunch of panties with the et.com address on it, maybe I’ll finally go through with it this time.

Thanks for being with me for the first ten years and I look forward to another ten more.