Category: Uncategorized

If you’re like me, you probably use the Internet, sometimes for amusement. If porn isn’t doing it for you anymore and you’re chafing for more entertainment, I suggest having a look at Yahoo! Answers. It’s essentially an online community where Yahoo! members ask each other questions. Other members can respond and people can pick the “best” answers. The questions come from a wide range of topics. Of course, since this is the Internet, there can be much hilarity to be found in the Q&A. First, some of the answers are quite funny. There are also a lot of very wrong answers. The worst is when there’s a really genuine question being asked and everyone’s best answer is clearly so wrong. Then there are the really stupid questions. They’re so stupid, you really hope the askee is just having some fun.

In less than five minutes, I found the following three questions that I thought were entertaining. Can you find more?

So I’ve been given preliminary authorization to start a small side business at work. Here’s the situation. A can of any soft drink costs $1.05 at work which I think is a bit of a rip-off. They must be buying the cans in bulk quantities so you know it costs them way less than $1.05 a can. Even your average consumer can go into any supermarket and buy a 12-pack and pay less than $1.05 a can. Here’s another thing, Coke products are being phased out of all the food service facilities, which includes the main cafeteria in Phase I and the Think Tank cafe in Phase II. All the vending machines are already just Pepsi products.

Seeing this opportunity, I devised a plan to initially sell cans of Coke products for $0.75. We’re already doing a similar thing for snacks. Our production coordinator bought some snack-sized food items from Costco and set it all up in this general purpose room we have. It has a fridge and a water cooler in it. Snacks are $0.50 each and we rely on the honour system for payment. I think its worked out well so far.

I’m going to offer the soft drinks in the same manner. Co-located with the snacks, the drinks will be in the previously unused fridge. I’ll also have to rely on the honour system. I’m hoping it will be a success for several reasons. First, the main draw will be price. Seventy-five cents is way more reasonable than $1.05. A soft drink was $1 back at Black Box downtown, so it’s now even cheaper. Second, it’s all about location. Previously, skate team members had to either go to the main cafeteria located all the way in Phase I or go three floors down to the Think Tank to get a drink. Now it’s right where most of the team sits. Third, it’s all about 24-7. The main cafeteria closes at 7pm and the Think Tank finishes at 4pm. If you’re looking for a drink outside of their operating hours, you have to look for a vending machine, a Pepsi vending machine. With my setup, you can get a Coke any time of the day or night.

I’m saying this is a preliminary run because of a few things that might get in the way. The head development director (like a project manager), wants to assess how much profit I’ll be making off the team after the first little while. I’ll make just over $6 for every 24 cans, so I doubt I’ll be getting rich off this. I’m also hoping I won’t get ripped off. If I get two dollars collected for 24 cans, I’ll be mad. I’m not sure of the selection I chose either. I currently am going with an initial mix of 12 Diet Coke and 12 Coke Zero. Is this what the team wants? Maybe not.

I’ll keep everyone posted on how this turns out.

If it existed, my favourite soft drink would be caffeine-free Coke Zero. I do realize there’s a caffeine-free diet Coke but that product doesn’t taste like Coke at all. Did you know they sell a vanilla Coke Zero in Canada? Has anyone seen it in a store?

Though I don’t know exactly when it will be delivered, I finally picked a TV on Tuesday. I eventually decided on a 50″ plasma from Samsung, specifically the PN50B550. For the longest time I thought I was going to get a plasma from Panasonic. Now that Pioneer is out of the plasma making business, it’s commonly thought that Panasonic makes the best plasmas. In fact, reviews do state that most of the time Panasonics plasmas perform better than Samsungs. After doing all my research though, the two questions eventually came up: how much better were the Panasonics and how much more would I be paying for it?

It turns out that how good a TV looks can be a very subjective and personal thing. I looked at the PN50B550 and the Panasonic TC-P50G10 side by side in the store and it was very hard to tell the difference. I do realize though that comparing TVs at a store is not very useful. Going into the store, I knew the professional reviewers said the G10 had deeper blacks which provided a better contrast ratio. To my untrained eye though, I could not see a difference. The B550 looked great too.

Of course, I could have just relied on the reviews and their hard facts and decided yeah, the G10 is the one for me. The problem was I’d have to pay an extra $700 or so to get the G10 for a difference I knew existed but for which my eyes couldn’t really see. Then I discovered some odd design choices that Panasonic made. For example, the G10 has three HDMI inputs compared to the four on the B550. Also, the G10 had some resolution limitations on its VGA and component inputs. Another thing and I know this isn’t a big deal but the G10 has a really bland style to it. Aesthetically, the Samsung looks much better from the bezel to the “floating” glass stand.

The final thing that really sold me on the 550B was that with my EA employee discount, the price I got for it was less than the MSRP in the US. That’s a really good deal. In Canada, we usually get screwed on pricing for anything that is also sold in the US. So the fact I got it for the lower price and in Canadian dollars was a big positive.

I’ll be getting an update today when delivery is available. I am quite excited to get this new toy in my living room.

http://www.metacafe.com/fplayer/1682221/sabra_price_is_right.swf

This SNL skit from 1992 starring Tom Hanks featured the classic line “Toshiba guts”.

Like many young boys who grew up in the 1980s, I watched professional wrestling, mainly of the WWF variety. Yes, it was the “World Wrestling Federation” back then before the other WWF, the “World Wildlife Fund” forced the entertainment company to change it’s name to WWE.

I wasn’t a fan of wrestling at first. A lot of my elementary school chums were quite into it before I was, throwing their support behind their favourite wrestlers. Nearly every day there was some sort of debate at recess and/or lunch hour about who had the better finger-four move or who had the better manager.

Eventually, the talk and my curiousity led to me to watch one of the syndicated WWF shows. It took a while but I was entertained by the theatrics of the sport. Much later on, I realized that it was essentially a soap opera drama packaged in a format that was palatable for boys of school age. I was never an over the top fan of wrestling. For example, several of my classmates would go to WWF shows that would come into town. I never bothered with that but that didn’t stop me from eagerly awaiting several episodes of Saturday Night’s Main Event.

For wrestling fans of that era, the most highly anticipated event each year was of course the Wrestlemania. It was the Stanley Cup finals of wrestling. Wrestlemania had the most outrageous storylines and it was there you could count on shocking title matches. The weekly shows were nothing compared to the big event. It was also a Wrestlemania that caused me to stop watching wrestling altogether.

Sometime in 1988, Wrestlemania IV came out on home video on VHS videotape. Since I did not watch it on pay-per-view, I decided to rent it, not knowing the card or the schedule of events. Little did I know that the running time for the tape was about four hours. I like to think I had a lot of patience as a kid but I was no match for Wrestlemania IV .

About two hours into the tape, I was getting mentally fatigued. How long was this thing? How could they possibly drag this on any further? At one point, I stopped the tape and took out of the VCR to look at the running time on the sticker. It was then I realized I had just under two more hours to go. It was also then that I realized this was the heaviest VHS tape I had ever handled. By this time, my parents had made dinner and I had to go eat it.

After returning from my meal, I played the tape again. I got through another twenty minutes before I finally had enough. I stopped the tape, rewound it, and put it back in its case. It was returned without any more subsequent viewings. I never watched wrestling on TV again from that day forward. I essentially outgrew it and got tired of it in a single, fateful day. It was like when someone forces you to smoke a billion cigarettes in a sitting to get them to quit.

I wonder sometimes if and when I would have stopped watching wrestling. Perhaps I’d still be watching today. Would that even be possible? Who knows? Maybe I’d still be a passionate fan today, just like this guy.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFqvLPN1e8o&hl=en&fs=1&]

Departing from my regular usage of the Internet, that is looking for porn researching rare Brazilian tree frogs, I decided for some reason to look for videos of Vietnamese pho on Youtube.

I found the above video which features a decent looking bowl of pho tai. The beef is too well done for my own tastes but it’s a matter of personal preference. If I had it my way, the beef would be still tinged with a bit of red in the bowl. Otherwise, it looks to be a pretty good bowl with all the extras available. Is it just me or can you almost smell the broth through the video? Great, now I’m craving pho. The second part is here.

I was walking on my way to work on Wednesday when I came upon an intersection I had to cross, like I do every day. As I was about 20m from the intersection I saw an SUV waiting for the light to change so he could make a left. Then just to my right a clearly marked police car (of the Crown Victoria Interceptor kind) passed me and stopped behind the waiting SUV.

As I took two more steps the SUV took off and turned left into the busy street. It took about a second for my brain to process what I had seen. I don’t remember the light turning green for him. Sure enough the light was still very distinctly red. I looked at the police car to see if s/he had noticed it too. The SUV’s actions must have surprised the police officer as well since it was good two seconds before the cruiser’s lights lit up. Even though the light was still red, the traffic was clear so the officer roared off to catch up to the SUV.

I was hoping the officer would catch the SUV just down the block so I could see the traffic stop myself but the cruiser was well out of sight by the time I was able to cross the street. I wonder how that conservation went between the officer and the driver.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbbPYfW2s-E&hl=en&fs=1&]

As a service to my female readers, I’m featuring the commercial above for the Kush Support product. As per its web site, “Kush is uniquely designed to fit between the breasts to maintain a more natural shape while resting on your side.” I am not making this up. If you’re interested, there’s a slightly sexier commercial here. Both ads, however, feature a kick-ass Nintendo 8-bit era soundtrack.

http://g4tv.com/lv3/39292

Traditionally, video game development teams have consisted of mainly male developers. Even today, I have never heard of a team being half female. My own team consists of a significantly higher proportion of females (compared to other EA teams) but we don’t even break the 25% mark unfortunately.

While nearly all my team’s project mangers are female and we have several female artists, the one job function that remains decidedly male is the role of programmer or software engineer. We’re lucky to have one female software engineer on our team and she just happens to be one of the best Playstation 3 programmers on the planet.

As further proof that female video game programmers exist, take a look at the video above. It features Anna Kipnis of Double Fine. She’s a gameplay programmer (just like me) who’s working on Brutal Legend, which is going to be published by EA. From what I’ve read, Anna and I for the most part share the same day-to-day tasks and responsibilities albeit on totally different games.

I wish the programmer / software engineer role was much more gender balanced in our industry. Perhaps we should have career days at EA specifically targeted for females. It’s a pretty fun and interesting job. Oh well, back to my dude-bicle.