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Many times before I’ve written how the video game industry is a male dominated one. Yet all this time that I’ve been working at EA as a software engineer, I’ve been lucky enough to work with a female software engineer. “Lisa” as I shall call her, has been sole female SE on our team since before 2006. She just happens to have the only PhD in computer science on our team as well.

Back when I knew nothing about the PS3 (yes, I actually do know something about it now), it was Lisa who sat down with me and gave me the tour through the PS3 dev tools. Believe me, the Sony dev tools back then for PS3 weren’t the best but Lisa was able to cut through all the crap to show me how to at least get the debugger running.

Over the last few years, Lisa has been patient while I asked my questions, answering so that I could go back and get unstuck from my problems. It’s not a big surprise to me and other people that many would consider her one of the best PS3 programmers on the planet.

A few months ago, Lisa and her husband got the great news that a baby was on the way. It’s been interesting as the pregnancy developed. In our programmers meetings, it was great to see half a dozen guys jump from their seats to offer them to Lisa as she arrived for the discussions. Two weeks ago, I had a problem and Lisa volunteered to take a look over at my computer. I felt bad that I was forcing her to walk all the way to my desk in her very developed state.

Lisa started her one year maternity today. On her last Friday, we got her cards and a small gift. We’ll all miss Lisa and hope her time off will be well-spent. Don’t tell anyone but I hope the little boy/girl grows up to be like their Mom, a pretty good programmer.

As Lisa said herself on Friday, our band of software engineers is now all boys. I hope our code doesn’t get all stinky now.

For some reason, I’ve been listening to a lot of Kelly Clarkson lately and I am quite enjoying it.

I’ve been eating at the EA cafeteria now for about six weeks. In that time, I’ve learned a few important lessons. First, their strongest and most impressive meal by far is breakfast. They do breakfast right just about every single day. Every day they have a la carte options like hash browns, sausages, and bacon. It’s quick easy and you can choose whatever you want. It’s also reasonably priced. There’s also bagels and breakfast wraps. Those can be filled with scrambled eggs, cheese, hash browns, and bacon. Yummy. Each day also has a special breakfast item. Waffle Wednesday is a good one. A freshly griddled waffle is made before your eyes with a choice of two of your favourite fruits. Toppings include fresh whip cream, maple syrup, and an additional blueberry fruit topping. Sure it ain’t healthy but when I had one with strawberries and pineapple, I was pretty pleased.

Lunch unfortunately can be very hit or miss. My biggest complaint is that even when they offer a delicious lunch item, the portions are way too small. The most common offender here are their lunch “entrees”. There are usually three options here but each one will offer just a tiny portion of whatever it is. Roast beef? A tiny thinly sliced piece of beef. Roast turkey? Barely enough to even make you think about getting sleepy after the meal. As a sign of how little faith I have in their portions, one of the entrees they had today was a salmon fillet and I didn’t get it. Many of you know I’ll pretty much have salmon anything, raw or cooked. I passed on it in favour of a burger and fries. If you want a consistent lunch item that is both delicious and filling, go to the burger bar. It’s sad that a burger is the best thing about lunch there but that’s my opinion at least.

I can’t comment about the dinner options because I’ve yet to try them. Though OT looms on the horizon… I think.

UPDATE: I was wrong. After completely counting the change, it appears I did break even. I actually made a small profit. There was over $2 missing so there were a few people who didn’t pay the full $0.75. My faith in humanity is slightly restored. I will see what happens with the next 24 cans.

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In a previous post a few days ago I detailed my decision to offer soft drinks for sale at work in the team fridge at prices lower than what the cafeteria was selling them. I checked the fridge before leaving work today and all the cans of Coke Zero and Diet Coke were gone. That would be good news except for the fact there was way less than the $11 and change that should have been in the mug I set aside for payment.

Just two days ago I was already behind in payment when half the cans were gone. I was short about $4. Now with all the cans gone, I’m very behind. I didn’t even break even. I’m not sure why I would continue to buy Coke for team if I just wind up losing money.

Oh well, I guess I can just chalk this up as another test in my faith in humanity.

So I’ve been trying to snack more healthy at work. In the last several weeks, I’ve bought one 8-pack of Twinkies to work just about every week. I usually don’t eat the whole pack myself since people come by my desk, see them, and then ask to have one. I do, however, consume at least half of every box. I didn’t start out consciously wanting to buy Twinkies. I bought a box sorta as a joke when I went over to a friend’s place for dinner. Unfortunately, I when opened the first package, I remembered how damn tasty they were. So here we are.

In an effort snack smarter and healthier, I brought some rice cakes of the buttered popcorn variety to work yesterday. These things have way less fat and sugar. There is a downside however. While the Twinkies last me about the whole week, I ate half the package in about one day. That’s seven rice cakes. As you might imagine, the rice cakes aren’t very substantial. You eat one and you kinda wonder if half the cake was just air. I know I shouldn’t factor money into this but it’s cheaper to eat Twinkies instead of rice cakes. It’s always cheaper to eat unhealthy things.

Maybe I should start eating fruit instead.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzdhU2_fwdQ&hl=en&fs=1&]

I knew there was something going on at work this morning when I saw the “event parking” sign was out by the entrance to Phase II. A further sign that this wasn’t a normal was when I saw a black Lincoln Town Car pull out of the driveway. That’s usually a sign that talent is on-campus. There was also about a billion press people milling about where I usually go buy a morning doughnut.

I would later find out that Venus Williams of women’s tennis fame, Dwight Howard of the Orland Magic, Milan Lucic of the Boston Bruins, and Sacha Kljestan of the MLS were all out at EA Canada to promote their respective sports for EA Grand Slam Tennis, NBA Live!, NHL, and FIFA.

Around noon everyone including the press headed out to the soccer pitch area. Each athlete was running a training session with the gathered gamer press. Howard was teaching the press the various ways of taking the rock to the rim. Venus was teaching the dudes how to serve. I have to say, even though I was watching her from nearly 100 feet away, you can tell she’s a very fit woman. Lucic was telling people how to fight on the ice. Kljestan, whom I was closest to, was taking penalties and sending crosses over to the journalists to head.

The interview of Venus above happened today in the Think Tank lounge just three floors below where I was working. If you want the Vancouver Sun’s take on the festivities, click here. They include a somewhat humourous video.

Did you know that Wikipedia maintains a list of unusual deaths? The list is ordered chronologically. Some of the oldest entries probably are either outright lies or at the very least stretch the truth considerably. The more recent ones are much more valid. Did you know that throughout the centuries, people have supposedly died from laughing? Some of the more interesting demises are as follows:

“1322: Humphrey de Bohun, 4th Earl of Hereford was fatally speared through the anus by a pikeman hiding under the bridge during the Battle of Boroughbridge.”

“1514: György Dózsa, Székely man-at-arms and peasants’ revolt leader in Hungary, was condemned to sit on a red-hot iron throne with a red-hot iron crown on his head and a red-hot sceptre in his hand (mocking at his ambition to be king), by Hungarian landed nobility in Transylvania. While Dózsa was still alive, he was set upon and his partially roasted body was eaten by six of his fellow rebels, who had been starved for a week beforehand.”

“1862: Jim Creighton, baseball player, died when he swung a bat too hard and ruptured his bladder.”

“1959: In the Dyatlov Pass incident, Nine ski hikers in the Ural Mountains abandoned their camp in the middle of the night in apparent terror, some clad only in their underwear despite sub-zero weather. Six of the hikers died of hypothermia and three by unexplained fatal injuries. Though the corpses showed no signs of struggle, one victim had a fatal skull fracture, two had major chest fractures (comparable in force to a car accident), and one was missing her tongue. The victims’ clothing also contained high levels of radiation. Soviet investigators determined only that “a compelling unknown force” had caused the deaths, barring entry to the area for years thereafter.”

So if you remember correctly, I bought a Dell Mini 9 laptop a few months ago. It came in handy while traveling. It also made the commute to work much more enjoyable.

Now that I don’t work in downtown Vancouver anymore, my commute is shorter. It’s short enough now that I don’t have time to watch any movies or TV on my laptop. I have a billion episodes of The Hills to catch up on.

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/qOe5Lmyyxiw&hl=en&fs=1&

I’ve watched a lot of nature shows in the past. As such, I’ve seen a lot of animals of varying kinds do battle with each other. I’ve seen cats battle mice, dogs versus a rock, and bears against spawning salmon. What I didn’t see until today were ants engaging a crab. It seems like such an unlikely scenario. Ants live in and on the ground. Crabs live in water, usually the ocean. Where the hell would those two meet?

The above video answers that question. It also tells you who won this particular engagement. I won’t spoil it but I will say someone was way too passive and didn’t use their advantage very well.

My TV was delivered just a half hour or so into the five hour waiting period that I thought I might have to sit through. The delivery guy was a nice fellow too. Though it wasn’t part of the basic delivery service, he took the TV out of the box, put it on the stand for me, and helped me put onto the fireplace mantle that I hate with a passion.

I did a real quick setup just to make sure everything was working. The first picture you see above is how everything looked with no regard to where wires should go. Note the real big mess of wires to the left of the TV.

After running through a series of Blu-ray discs, DVDs, HD cable, and some Xbox 360, I shut everything down. I then proceeded to reroute almost all the wiring which included speaker wires, Ethernet, HDMI, digital optical, and power for four different devices. The second picture shows the results of my “clean up”. While wire placement is more logical now, it just appears that I smeared the mess of wires out further and to the left. Oh well, it’s a work in progress.

Overall, I’m quite pleased with the TV so far. My first impression was how small 50″ looks when you have it at home. I can’t believe I was even considering a 46″. Since I have a plasma and not an LCD, I’m being careful and opting to do a break-in procedure. I’m getting real impatient because a hundred hours of low contrast and low brightness viewing really sucks ass. I’m thinking I might do twenty hours and then light that mofo up again.