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If you’re able to read this, you’ve been able to access this site in a lucky window where it’s working. There has been a problem with my web hosting and I’m still tracking down the issue. Thanks for your patience.

In my last post, I wrote about going downtown to deposit a cheque. I called Tangerine bank today to confirm that was possible. It turns out it isn’t possible, at least not yet. Tangerine cafes are still closed and my cheque needs to be physically processed by a human and then mailed to the head office in Toronto. It seems archaic but I think it’s because of the no-frills nature of the bank as well as the foreign currency involved.

All this means is that I don’t need to go downtown just to deposit a cheque. I could still go, but it’d be just for the adventure of it.

I have not been in downtown Vancouver since probably the beginning of March or possibly the end of February. Once the pandemic took hold in North America, many people stopped going into the downtown area because we all needed to stay home. Some people started working from home and others, less fortunately, lost their jobs, so they also had no reason to go downtown. Since nothing was open in terms of stores, businesses, and restaurants, that led to more people not needing to go downtown.

In the absence of all those people and activities, the marginalized and the homeless in the downtown region appear to have expanded their reach into other areas of the downtown core. I have a few friends who live downtown and they say the area has become dirtier, the homeless have become more bolder, and it just feels a bit less safe than before. Without seeing it myself, I can’t make a comment about that, I’m just reporting what they have said to me.

Now that some shops have started to open, along with restaurants, in the downtown area, some people have returned to their regular activities, in this “new” normal. I wasn’t planning on returning immediately do buy things or eat out but I may now be compelled to go downtown for a different reason.

As I mentioned in my last post, I had a trip booked to LA for this week. The pandemic cancelled that trip but I had already paid for the hotel. The hotel refunded my money but since I paid for it with a Mastercard, the refunded money went back into the credit card account as a credit. For many reasons, as you might imagine, I am not going back to the United States most likely for quite some time. So a significant amount of money will just sit in that account as a credit. Well, I called my credit card company and asked if they could transfer that money back to me, to say, a a bank account. I was told an electronic transfer would not be possible but they could send me a cheque. I decided to go that route.

The cheque arrived yesterday and the funds are in US dollars as the credit card is in US dollars as well. I have a Tangerine US dollar savings account but since Tangerine is kinda no-frills, the only way I can deposit this cheque into that account is to physically go to one of their “cafes” and drop the cheque off into a box. The Vancouver Tangerine cafe is located downtown.

If I do go deposit this cheque, I’m not sure how to go get downtown. I guess I could take transit as that would be the fastest and cheapest way. It’s really hard to social distance on the train though. More and more people are heading back to work and taking the train. Is this a risk? On the other hand, there were only four test positive cases announced yesterday in the last 24 hours for the entire province. Are we in a good spot now? Maybe I should just drive downtown. That would be safer, even if my car is super old now and might breakdown at any time. Perhaps I could take an Uber. Before all of this happened, I was so excited to take my first Uber trip in Vancouver.

Another option is to not deposit this into my US dollar account. I could take the cheque and convert it back into Canadian dollars. There are currency exchanges nearby that give better rates than banks and I could capitalize on the relatively low dollar and make a buck or two. Then armed with Canadian cash, I could deposit it much easier in my other accounts.

Not sure what to do at this point, but I am curious to see what downtown looks like with my own eyes.

So, it’s June! The months have blurred together. It feels like I’ve been working from home forever now. I think the calendar says it’s been about three months, but it does seem longer. Traditionally, I view June as when summer really gets going. That’s when my expectation of hot and sunny weather increases to a point where I get really disappointed when the inevitable rain and cool temperatures arrive for most of the month. What will summer look like for me in 2020? I’ll probably spend most of it like I did the spring. Mostly inside and perhaps increasingly outside. I’ll probably be bored a bit more. I might force myself to pick up a new skill or read some books that I should really get to.

Did you know that if 2020 had not turned into the disaster that it continues to be, the original plan was for me to be in Los Angeles on Sunday? Yes, on June 7th, I was supposed to go to LA for Electronic Entertainment Expo 2020, North America’s largest video game convention. It would have been my second time going, after my initial trip in 2016. I had a hotel by the beach. It would been good time to visit LA. I might have caught up with some former co-workers who now live in other cities. I would have seen the new PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X up close. I might have come back with a slight tan.

The pandemic saw to the end of that trip. Adding to that, just very recently, there is now social unrest in Los Angeles and many parts of the United States. While I think all of us could have done without the pandemic, the protests are something that needed to happen in response to some terrible and systemic injustices. In light of that, the fact that I can’t go to LA this Sunday is an infinitesimal inconvenience compared to what is at stake in the country south to me. It goes without saying there needs to be countless changes to how their society perceives people of colour. It will not be quick fixes. It may take several decades. I just hope it happens.

So, I’m ok with having to stay home for the summer of 2020. There’s a lot more important issues in the world right now.

The annual general meeting of the strata council for my apartment is usually held every year in May. Going to these meetings is a necessary evil of being a homeowner in a multi-dwelling building. It’s a boring time, you sometimes come to lose respect for some of your fellow homeowners, and in the end, you just find out how much more you’ll be paying in strata fees.

Normally, a package containing info about the meeting and what resolutions we’re gonna vote on in the meeting arrives in the mail several weeks beforehand. On the day of the meeting, everyone goes to the meeting in the common room on our ninth floor. Now, if you’ve been paying attention, you can probably guess why this year we won’t be able to attend this meeting in person.

It’s June now and we haven’t had the meeting yet. In fact, I just found out yesterday what they are doing instead. Sometime later this month, we vote on the resolutions via proxy voting, which is essentially mail-in voting. The AGM materials will still be mailed to us and it might take them several weeks before that happens. To facilitate discussion of strata business and to ask questions, a Zoom meeting will be held sometime this month. I find this to be very interesting as this will be the first time all the owners will have met using online meeting software. Some of the owners are older and I wonder if they’ll be able to setup Zoom and join the meeting successfully. There could be anywhere from 20 to 60 people in this Zoom meeting, so this will need a strong moderator who can wrangle the participants and maintain order.

2020 continues to be a year of many firsts. I will report back on how the meeting goes.

On nearly the same day that my quarantine started and I began working from home, my desktop computer started acting up and would refuse to boot up into Windows after any restart or shutdown. It would start up perhaps once out of 50 to 100 attempts. My only recourse to either leave it running or put it to sleep.

While all of us dealt with the pandemic, I was also trying to figure out why my computer wouldn’t recognize that it had Windows installed. Over the course of the last three months, I tried to diagnose what was wrong. I tried different hard drives, different cables, different slots where the cables would, different BIOS settings, and pretty much anything that made sense to change and sometimes things that didn’t make sense. Nothing seemed to work or give me any indication of what was wrong.

I was very close to buying a new motherboard, CPU, and perhaps even a new power supply, to start nearly fresh several times. I stopped though because I didn’t want to give up entirely and computer component prices are a bit high right now due to supply issues for some parts. In the end, I thought I could try two last things: take the computer to a repair shop (this is now possible with recent public health changes) or buy a new hard drive that use a different interface compared to all the other hard drives that I’ve been trying.

I oped for the latter solution. So, previous to this, I’ve been trying to use hard drives that connect with a cable to the motherboard. This is known as a SATA connection. Newer solid-state hard drives use a completely different interface known as M.2, which is basically a slot on your motherboard which you plug in your hard drive directly, with no cable required. Such drives internally use a different “pathway” to talk to the rest of your computer’s components compared to the SATA connection. My hope was that whatever was wrong with my system would get bypassed with a M.2 drive.

I ordered a 250 Gb M.2 drive on Amazon for about $50. It took almost half a month to get here due to the current shipping environment. It was easy to install and it took less than ten minutes to clone my existing SSD to this new one. I made what I thought was all the necessary changes, turned off my computer, took out my old SSD, and turned it back on… to find myself facing a Windows blue screen which indicated a serious error. It took some Googling but it I had forgot one critical change in the BIOS and after that my Windows booted up fine. I couldn’t believe it. I thought it was a fluke so I just restarted Windows ten times in a row just to be sure.

As I write this, everything appears to be fine. I don’t want to jinx it but I believe my computer is now in a state where it will allow me to shut it down or restart without any problems. I recognize though that I still haven’t diagnosed my original problem. I can’t say what caused it to go wonky in the first place. My solution was to bypass the problem, not fix it directly. I’m ok with that because after dealing with all this frustration over the last three months, I settle for what I have now.

It will be an odd feeling tonight when I’m able to go shut down my computer before I sleep and know it will reliably turn back on the next day.

Well, now that I know I’ll be working from home until the new year, I’m seriously considering getting a new desk chair. I spend so much time at my desk now that I think it’s worth upgrading. My current desk chair is one that I brought with me when I moved into my apartment about ten years ago. I have no idea how I got it. I don’t remember buying it but I could have bought it and just forgot. It’s also quite possible that I just took it from my parents’ place and moved it into mine.

It’s a simple padded desk chair but the padding on the seat has been smushed into a flat pancake because of my fat ass. You can adjust the height and it allows you to tilt back but that’s about it. It’s not painful to sit in but my ass does get a bit tired sometimes after a few hours because of the lack of padding. The armrests also aren’t adjustable.

If I’m gonna be sitting so much for the foreseeable future, perhaps I should at least sit in better comfort.

This morning, I received, as did everyone in the company, an e-mail from the CEO. It was to give us an update for our work from home status. After some analysis of the situation, we were told that the majority of us will continue to work from home until January 2021.

They were already hinting at this timeline before, so this doesn’t come as a major surprise, but now we have a confirmation as such. We were also told that going forward, some additional work from home resources will be made available to us but details are still being worked out. I think that probably means some additional funding for things like desks, chairs, and other equipment. They’re also trying to arrange some way for us to remove some of our personal belongings from our studios. It’s important to realize that for most employees, the work from home order arrived with great urgency and very little warning. People went home as if it was a normal day and then in the evening, were not told to come back the next day, and here we are. Personal items like pictures, toys, clothing, and the like were all left at desks. Some people had plants at their desks and it’s safe to say most of those are now very dry and very much gone.

At my desk, I have very little in the way of personal items that I need right now. I have an umbrella, two hoodies, some green tea, and interestingly, a Tupperware container of now very stale cookies. I don’t need any of these things, so I probably won’t request to come get my things. I am thankful that I have nothing stuck in the mail room as there is currently no plan in the place to get those items to their rightful owners.

As for the actual work we do, now that I know I’ll be at home until the new year, that means I’ll help complete and ship FIFA 21 from the comfort of my own home. I’ve never made a game while spending most of that development time at home, so this will be a first. I know I won’t be alone as many other game developers in my company and in other studios worldwide are in the same situation. Come fall and beyond, many of the new games will have had their last bits of development done while everyone is at home.

As many of you know, I was in the process of trying to get a new baseboard heater installed in my apartment before the global pandemic occurred. This was going to be phase one of several in my home improvement plan. The next phases would have been dry wall repairs, new paint on at least two walls, and then the big project, new laminate flooring. If all of this was going to be like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the baseboard heater was going to be Iron Man.

To no one’s surprise, the electrician that I wanted to proceed with to do the work, stopped servicing residential homes in mid-March. Now, some three months or so later, I was curious to see if they were starting to provide residential service again. I sent out an e-mail today and they said they were still not going into homes for work. I completely understand why that is. Having their employees going inside, into strangers’ homes, where they don’t know the situation or can’t be sure of the status of everyone who lives in that home is a huge liability. Just for completeness, I e-mailed another electrical contractor and they also said they were not servicing homes just yet.

I guess I shouldn’t be impressed that these businesses are putting the health and safety of their employees first but in this day and age, nothing is a given, so I can’t help but be a bit happy these companies are taking things so seriously.

In the end, I told both contractors that I’m more than happy to wait for the right time to get all this work done.

So here’s an interesting factoid about the quick and immediate transition to working from home, at least for my employer. A significant number of employees, including myself, would frequently get packages delivered to work, instead of our homes, because it would be easier to get the packages that way.

It became quite formal process, where the mail room would accept the packages upon delivery, then lock the packages in a secure room, and then begin processing all the packages that came in. Even if you got a delivery notification, you wouldn’t be able to come down to the mail room to get your package until the mail room employees logged your package as being received and then figured out who it was for and then sent out an e-mail to the recipient. Because of this process and the number of packages arriving on a daily basis, some employees would have to wait up to two or three days before the mail room would send the e-mail out that they could come down and get their package, even as the package was sitting in the secured mail room. This got so frustrating to me that I began routing my packages back home or to a local post office instead since it wound up being faster.

Anyways, after we started working from home, there were packages already in the mail room and packages that continued to arrive at the mail room even after the quarantine started. The company decided that these packages would be held indefinitely until employees could return to work. That probably won’t happen until late 2020 or early 2021 in our case. So, there are many employees who have packages that they have paid for which are just sitting in a secured room at the studio, that they cannot pick up for the foreseeable future.