Category: Uncategorized

I currently have airline tickets booked for Florida in November. They are fully refundable and from what I can tell, it seems very likely that I’ll be asking for a refund.

We just had a long weekend this week but I have another one coming up. I get Thursday and Friday off next week because my team has decided to give everyone two days off to relax and get rested. It’s a very kind and generous gesture. It’s also a sign that they don’t want us to be working too hard.

I’ve already determined that I will spend most of those days ripping up carpet in my bedroom now that the task is basically complete in my living room.

After I bought my car last September, I went to Walmart and bought a tire pressure gauge because I knew it was important to maintain proper air pressure in your tires. I took the gauge home, put it in the glove compartment of my car, and promptly forgot about it for almost a year.

Last week, I was out shopping when I noticed my front tires looked a bit underinflated. I got home, fished out the tire pressure gauge, and it was then I realized I had never measured the pressure in a tire before. It was easy to do fortunately and I discovered that all my tires were basically at 28 psi, several hours after waiting for the tires to cool down. The people at Toyota suggest the optimal tire pressure for my car is 32 psi, so all my tires needed some air.

This maybe embarrassing to admit, but I’ve never put air in a car tire before. I’ve been driving on and off since I was a teenager but never had to do tire maintenance before. Now that I own my vehicle, this is the type of stuff that I’m having to deal with. Of course, I know that most gas stations have a spot where they have a compressor when you can add air to your tires. When I was kid and for most of my adult life, this air was free of charge. Recently, in an effort to squeeze as much money out of people as possible, gas stations have begun to charge people for air.

I also live fairly close to two different car tire shops and I know both will check your tire pressure and inflate your tires for free. I didn’t think this was the best idea since you have to rely on them to be not busy and they probably want to do work that makes them money rather than filling up some random person’s tires with air. Most importantly, I wanted to do it myself, rather let someone else do it.

So I decided to bite the bullet and headed off to the nearest gas station for some air. When I got there, I saw it cost $1.50 for about five minutes of compressor time. You don’t want to waste all that time, so I took the caps off all the valve stems on my tires before paying. After I tapped my credit card, the compressor roared to life, noisy and rumbly. I grabbed the hose and proceeded to give the first time a short burst of air. I checked the pressure with my gauge. It was nearly at 30 psi, so I gave it another blast. That was enough to get it right up to 32 psi. I repeated the same thing with the three other tires. It wasn’t that difficult at all.

I finished quickly enough that when I put the hose back, the next person in line for air was able to fill up his tires before the time expired. That guy got a freebie from me.

I am learning lots about car maintenance and I believe at this rate, I will be able to rebuild my engine by September.

In a previous post, I detailed that when I eventually “return” to work, it won’t be to the Burnaby studio as my employer has procured another location in Vancouver proper for several teams. The details of this new location are now public.

Electronic Arts to open massive expansion office in Vancouver’s False Creek Flats | Urbanized

The former MEC headquarters at 1077 Great Northern Way in Vancouver’s False Creek Flats will become a major office of Electronic Arts (EA).

The above article has a lot of info on the building and the location but the highlights are:

• the building used to be the headquarters for MEC
• it’s a short walk to the VCC-Clark Skytrain station
• EA will be leasing the entire building and will house several teams there
• it will probably be spring 2022 before the building will be ready

There are a lot more details to be determined but at least the info is public now.

It was a long weekend here in British Columbia so I didn’t have to work today. I spent most of the long weekend in just my underwear with a respirator, ripping up the carpet in my living room. It was hot all weekend, with temperatures reaching up to 27 degrees Celsius in my apartment. I tried to work mainly in the evening when it was supposed to be cool but getting sweaty was unavoidable.

The good news is that I have essentially removed all the carpet from my living room. I removed all the underpad and put it all in garbage bags. For some of the high traffic areas, I just laid the carpet strips I cut back where they were originally, just because I didn’t want to walk on bare, rough concrete all the time. I can roll up these strips in less than a minute though. In the less travelled areas, I removed everything. For example, places where I have furniture, those pieces now just sit on the concrete.

There is also some bad news. As I suspected, my concrete floor is not very even. My dining room table now sits on concrete. The first thing I noticed when I put the table back was that it now rocks back and forth. There is a possibility that one leg is perhaps shorter than the rest but the odds of that are pretty low. I know the table is from Ikea but even Ikea furniture isn’t that bad. I also had a bookcase in the same spot while I was moving things around and the bookcase also rocked back and forth. There is some strong indication that is part of the concrete is fairly uneven. I can’t see like a local high spot or hill either, so it’s not like I can just grind down a small spot to make things better. This is the type of unevenness that is spread over several feet. It seems like this is the worst-case scenario.

Like I said in my previous post, the best way to solve this is to pour a thin layer of concrete across the entire living room to level it out completely. This afternoon, I played a mental game of Tetris to see if it was possible to move all my furniture out of my living room and into the other parts of my apartment. It wouldn’t be pretty and some areas wouldn’t be accessible anymore but I feel like between my kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, and balcony, I could get everything out of there. The key would be using as much vertical space as possible. I’d also need to utilize the surface of my bed to store things as well.

In the next few days, I need to plan on how I’m gonna rip up the carpet in my bedroom. There’s less furniture in there but my bed is the biggest piece in my entire apartment and it’s heavy and difficult to move.

I have begun ripping up the carpet in my apartment in preparation for the eventual installation of some type of flooring. Even a moron like me can remove carpet. I’m using a utility knife to cut into the carpet into manageable strips or pieces. I then remove the carpet padding underneath.

I was warned this might be the case and sadly this is true for me, the concrete underneath my carpet was not poured and finished in a completely level manner. I can tell there are a few high spots but the majority of the inconsistencies are depressions or dips in the concrete. With the padding and then the carpet over top, imperfections in the concrete are hidden away but now with all that gone, you can really see how crappy of a job they did with the concrete.

It’s highly inadvisable to install flooring over an uneven surface. The planks of whatever you’re going to install will just try to follow the contour of uneven concrete. At best, the floor will look warped and uneven, at worst, the unevenness will cause the planks to break out of their grooves and pop out.

The solution is to even out the concrete surface. Now I haven’t removed all my carpet so I don’t know how bad the problem is. One solution involves just using tools to remove the high parts and then using a floor leveling compound to fill in the dips and holes. Depending on how bad the irregularities are, this might work but if the whole floor is just an undulating mess, it will be difficult to get everything level.

The best solution but is the most time consuming and involved, requires you to pour a thin layer of concrete over the existing floor. This new layer covers the entire floor area so you’re guaranteed it will fill it any low spots and if you layer is thick enough, it will cover all the high spots as well. As you might imagine, this is a huge endeavour. The entire floor must be cleaned and prepared for another layer of concrete. Anything on that floor before must be removed and store elsewhere for several days. This process is time consuming, expensive, and a logistical pain in the ass.

I don’t know which option is the best for me. Once I get all the carpet out of my place, I’ll need to get a flooring expert in my home and get their opinion.

It turns out that I wasn’t supposed to divulge that my team will be moving to a new building when we “return” to work. I guess it doesn’t really matter because you can’t put the cat back in the bag. I told people within my company and I told people outside the company as well.

I blabbed to all those people because I was told or at least under the impression that the news of the move was going to be widespread today anyways. Interestingly, it doesn’t seem like there was any wide communication of this externally nor internally today at all.

Oh well, you heard it here first.

My employer organized a Zoom meeting today for members of the team I belong to. The goal of the meeting was to inform us of some of the return to work plans that had been finalized to some degree. As many of you know, I worked out of our Burnaby studio prior to the pandemic. As with many companies, my employer underwent substantial changes during the last year and a half. In our case, we had mostly positive changes as we hired more people than we had desks or room for in Burnaby.

Any return to work plans would not be feasible if we intended everyone to return to Burnaby. As such, for the last several months, the company had been exploring relocating teams to another location in the greater Vancouver area. This has now been finalized. My team, when we return to work, will be moving to a new studio space in Vancouver proper. While the building has been leased and the location determined, many other details are still to be ironed out. I can’t say just yet where the new studio is but I can say it is not located downtown but will be very close to it. The new studio will also be well-served by public transit.

Personally, the commute to the new location using public will be longer distance-wise but surprisingly almost the same amount of time. This is because the old location required the train, waiting for a bus, the actual bus travel time, plus walking about 300m. The new commute is all train only and less walking. While I now have a much more reliable car, we’ve been told parking at the new location is essentially not possible since there are very few parking spots.

I’m still processing all this information and deciding what things are good about this new location and what things probably are less than ideal. I will divulge more info as I am allowed.

In a previous post I mentioned that I was selling my old TV on Facebook Marketplace. I had an interested buyer who wanted to give me $60 for it. I agreed to his price but he didn’t realize my TV was about 12 years old. This annoyed me a bit because in my listing, I linked to a webpage that listed all the specs of my TV where you could easily ascertain that the TV wasn’t exactly a recent model. He asked me how old it was and when I answered, he wasn’t interested anymore.

It turned out alright because I found another buyer who wanted the TV for $90. He was a really nice guy, very motivated to pick up my TV on the weekend. I think he drove all the way from North Vancouver to get it. I had no hesitation in helping him move the TV into his SUV.

I hope he enjoys the TV for a long time. I am glad it continues to entertain other people because it remains one of the best electronics purchases I’ve ever made. My TV served me well for over a decade. It didn’t have any problems at all and I played a ton of games on it from the Xbox 360, PS3 to the PS4. It outlasted my Xbox 360 and a few Blu-Ray players as well. I bet it could last for another five years with good care.

I am in the process of cleaning and de-cluttering my home and I have donated a bunch of items to the Salvation Army thrift store that is about a block away from where I live. This location also doubles as an electronics recycling centre as well, so that has been very convenient.

I’ve been trying to be aggressive in my cleaning, throwing out, and donating. I’ll often part ways with something even if I know there’s gonna be a chance I might need the item later. It’s a risk but at least that’s one less item to take up space in my home. I find it’s such a time-consuming task to de-clutter though. I wonder if it’s almost worth it to get professional service to help me.