Category: Uncategorized

Uh, if you haven’t seen the latest Spider-Man movie maybe don’t watch the above video.

I still haven’t rescued my lost items of laundry from the dusty and forgotten side of my washer/dryer. After making dinner and watching the hockey game, I vacuumed my living room and bedroom. I took out my compost and recycling, then stopped off at Safeway for pickles and hot sauce.

I then watched some TV shows over the streams. It is too late now to get the lost laundry. I shall endeavour to rescue them tomorrow.

I need to get to bed but about five minutes ago, I looked into the gap between my washer/dryer set and the wall and realized that I have missing laundry stuck in that gap. My washer/dryer is in a really small and narrow closet. It’s so narrow that they had to install the sliding closet doors after the washer/dryer was put in otherwise it would be too narrow. Unfortunately the gap is on the side where the sliding doors bunch up when they are open. This means I can’t stick my hand easily into the gap to fish out my missing underwear and socks.

It’s too late to fashion a rescue stick or something so I’m gonna leave this for tomorrow.

I’ve been searching for a new sofa for weeks now and I discovered that, like many things, stock is limited, prices have risen dramatically, and you’ll have to wait a long time for some items.

I was looking at one sofa that seemed promising but the store estimates that they won’t have stock until the end of June. The end of June! I can’t wait six months for a sofa , so I kept looking.

This weekend, I bit the bullet and bought a sofa from a local furniture store. I still have to wait around eight weeks for it, but at least it’s not six months. Part of the reason why it won’t take as long to arrive is because it’s made locally, within the province. It’s still subject to the availability of materials, some of which comes from overseas. It will also be custom-made to my liking. I was able to select the fabric, colour, and firmness of the cushions. I have never bought a custom-made piece of furniture before, so I feel pretty baller. It didn’t come cheap though. I think it was almost 4x the cost of my previous sofa , which I bought back in the before times of 2010.

I can’t wait to sit on my new sofa in about two months.

Former Vancouverites Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg were on the “Hot Ones” YouTube series when they mentioned Tsawwassen in one of their anecdotes. It’s not often you hear a random suburb of Vancouver mentioned in a massively popular YouTube video.

It maybe Thursday tomorrow but I am already looking forward to the weekend. Most of my American colleagues got Monday off but I did not. The next long weekend for me won’t be until near the end of February, which is Family Day. That’s almost two months in between New Year’s and Family Day.

With the pandemic, I feel like most people’s “batteries” get depleted much quicker. Long weekends are great but once they are over, you’re yearning for the next one much sooner than before.

Well, I gotta get to bed.

For the first time in my life, I held stock in a company when it was announced that company would be acquired by another company. This has never happened to me before, so I had no idea what was involved or what I should do as an investor.

I discovered that the deal would be a cash-only one and the stock price for said company logically shot up immediately but was still lower than the stated purchase price for each share. As such, I could hold onto the shares as theoretically I would get more if and when the deal completes. The “if and when” is something to think about because not all announced deals get completed because they are subject to government oversight potentially. Even if the deal goes through, I could be waiting for months for it to be done.

Unfortunately, I won’t be retiring because of this. At best, it’ll pay for my new couch but if you’ve seen couch prices recently, you’ll know this isn’t small change either. I ain’t complaining about a free couch.

I used to think it was too bitter but I’ve come to love the coffee they serve at A&W. From what I can tell, the coffee they serve is a special roast from the people over at Van Houtte. My perfect cup from A&W is a regular coffee with two creams and a single sugar. That’s enough to take the edge off but still let the coffee flavours come through.

I’d have a coffee from A&W every day if I could and on some stretches, I do make that happen. I’m looking forward to having one tomorrow.

In what seems like a lifetime ago, my employer made an educated guess many moons ago that we would see employees returning to workplaces starting in February of 2022. This guess was, of course, before the many variants began ravaging the world.

For those following along, February of 2022 is next month, just scant weeks away. It should come as no surprise that my employer is no longer expecting or allowing employees to return to workplaces in great numbers or even any numbers at all. In fact, they’ve gone backwards and sent home the small skeletons crews that were on-site previously.

In addition, they’ve announced they will be no longer giving out global “date of return”. The situation is just too fluid now to make grand predictions and should be we ever return to work, it will be done on a per jurisdiction basis.

It seems like I will be working from home for a long time to come.

After spending several days moving back my furniture and cleaning up my apartment, I was able to place my new robot vacuum and its charger. I’ve had it for weeks but I didn’t want to use it until after my apartment was painted and everything was moved back into place.

It’s not the fanciest robot vacuum out there (not a Roomba) but it does have lidar, which enables the vacuum to “see” the rooms it is working in and also to map out the entire floor space. This allows it to clean in straight lines, rather than earlier robot vacuums which used an algorithm that looked mostly like random movements to cover all the rooms. The image above is a somewhat current map of my apartment, seen through the laser “eye” of the vacuum.

Another great thing about having a lidar robot vacuum is that you can then use an app to partition your living space into rooms. The boundaries are user-defined, you just draw them on the map on the app. In this way, you can tell the vacuum to clean one room. You can also draw virtual boundaries on the app, so the vacuum knows not to try to clean there. In the above map, the dark red areas are closets that the vacuum shouldn’t and doesn’t need to clean, so I don’t want it try to.

If ten year-old me could see this robot vacuum, the integration of it with the app on a smartphone, and what it can do (see with lasers, avoid obstacles, charge itself), my little child brain would hardly be able to believe it wasn’t some sorta science fiction. As terrible as the world might be right now, at least we have robot vacuums now.