blog.erwintang.com

I’ve noticed a particular apartment in a building about a block and half over from me. The reason it caught my attention is that the lights have been on in this apartment for about a month. You can notice the lights as soon as it gets dark enough and the lights stay on. I’ve gone to bed close to 4am and that apartment is usually the only one in the building that is still lit up.

This apartment is so interesting that I’ve trained my binoculars on it a few times. I’ve never seen any people moving about through the windows. The apartment appears to be still furnished because I can see a bar stool. Other than that, I can’t see much.

What is the deal with this apartment? Did someone move out and leave a bar stool and a light on? If so, how does an apartment go untouched for over a month? The rental market here, while crazy expensive, is still competitive. People are desperate for places to live all the time.

Maybe this apartment isn’t being rented out. So it’s just sitting empty? Or did the owner go away for an extended period of time and forgot they left the light on?

What bothers me in all of this is the light that’s been left on. What a waste of electricity. A single light left on 24/7 isn’t gonna break the bank but it just seems unnecessary. I’m gonna keep track of how long it takes before I notice the light is off. How much longer?!?!?

Every night after I crawl into bed, I take my phone, get Google to listen to me, and then I ask it to turn off all my lights. The lights in my bedroom, living room, and kitchen turn off.

As a kid, I used to daydream about the “home of the future”, where I could ask some sorta computerized home assistant to turn on or off my lights. This is now possible and even commonplace. More than half the lights in my place are now controllable over the Internet. Beyond turning some lights just on or off, I can even dim them and control the warmth of the light, and the colour. Ten year-old me would be pretty amazed at how much of my home I control with just my voice or my phone.

Now that I think of it, ten year-old me would also be blown away by my large TV that’s thinner than a sandwich and as bright as the sun (compared to a CRT). I hope I’ll be just as amazed about something like that ten years from now.

I have not seen a single ant in the area of my bathroom in about a week or so. Of course, since I just wrote that, an ant is now in my bathroom, that’s just how my luck goes.

Anyways, this is just an anecdotal observation. I did not have a camera trained on bathroom sink 24/7 so I could definitely say there were no ants for a week. Another reason why I’m not jumping for joy is that the absence of ants did not follow the most advantageous flow of logic. The most ideal situation would have flowed as follows: I see ants, I observe ants coming from a gap/hole, I seal off the gap/hole, and then observe no more ants. This would most likely mean that the ants no longer have any more points of ingress into my bathroom. I have effectively barred them from coming in.

What happened instead was this: I see ants, I observed the ants coming from the latest gap/hole, I sealed off the gap/hole, I continued to see ants wandering around the now sealed gap/hole for about a day, and then the ants disappeared for around seven days now.

The issue was that even after the latest action on my part, I saw ants for about a day afterwards. This leaves the possibility they were coming in from elsewhere, expecting to go into this newly sealed hole, got confused, and then left to go back to where they first made entry.

I kept looking for ants today and I even emptied out the end of the closet closest to my bathroom sink. I looked into the corners and saw nothing. Did I sit there long enough to conclusively say ants weren’t coming in from my closet? Of course not.

It would be premature to declare the bathroom battleground a victory at this point. A number of factors could explain the absence of the ants and some of them might not have anything to do with my efforts. It could be temperature related or it could be they just decided my bathroom wasn’t worth going to anymore. All of which could change and they could be back any time.

I’ll continue to monitor the bathroom but in the meantime, I’m going to start the battle again underneath my kitchen sink, which will be a bigger challenge for sure.

I feel like eating a whole pizza by myself for dinner tomorrow.

Has anyone else been getting ads for gold all over the Internet? I sure have. It’s mainly concentrated on Twitter but when I click on a Tweet, I’ll sometimes get the same ad for gold repeated multiple times in the replies to the Tweet. I’ll scroll in my feed and a gold ad will be there after every fifth Tweet or so. It’s quite pervasive.

To be clear, the ad isn’t to sell my gold to a pawn shop or to buy gold from a 1-800 number, it seems like the ad was created by “big gold”, similar to “big oil” or “big tobacco”. Why they decided to target me is a mystery. Gold is expensive, while I am poor. I don’t even know where I’d go buy gold even if I wanted do. Though I guess if I really wanted to figure that out, I could click on the ad, which I have yet to do.

I really wonder how “big gold” decided they needed a blitz of an ad campaign. Are people buying less gold these days? Are people on social media the best candidates for buying gold?

Well, good luck “big gold”, I am in no position to buy your products.

I am still seeing ants in my bathroom, despite my efforts. I know the changes I’ve made, however, have forced the ants to change their behaviour. I used to see a lot of ants underneath my sink, in the cabinet itself. Now, the ants seem to be almost entirely traversing along the left side of the cabinet, where it meets the wall.

On top of the cabinet is the granite countertop and in the corner, I found a tiny small hole where it wasn’t completely sealed. I saw an ant go in there, so I sealed it off. This appeared to confuse the ants, because I see the ants climb up there and they just wander around. I feel like this hole was definitely a major thoroughfare and now I’ve removed it.

So you might be wondering if they’re climbing up there, where are they still coming from? Great question. I have seen the ants appear the floor. The sink is located near the threshold between the bathroom and my bedroom. I sometimes see them on the doorjamb and then they make their way along the wall, to where it meets the sink cabinet, and then they climb. I still haven’t figured out where exactly they’re coming from. I feel like I’m close to getting this all buttoned up but I need to do more observation. Then again, I’ve felt like I’ve been close before and it turned out, I was not close at all. Still, I persist.

So I wanna get a new set of two free weights as I think I can handle a heavier set. I think I can go up twelve pounds each. Amazon has several options, most of which are quite economical. What’s stopping me is that I feed bad for the delivery person who has to then deliver a 24 pound package for me. I know they deliver heavy stuff all the time, like a TV, but with a TV, they know it’s big and they’re prepared to deliver it with a cart or dolly. With the weights, it comes in a standard box and it’s just heavier than you’d expect.

Maybe I’m just overthinking things and these Amazon delivery people are prepared to deliver anything, no matter how heavy or how small that heavy package is.

We gotta get rid of this stupid time change in the fall. I looked outside today around 5pm and it was as dark as midnight. I couldn’t tell the difference.

What’s frustrating is that legislative bodies across North America have already voted to get rid of daylight savings time. Some of these resolutions were passed years ago. In the United States, even the Senate has passed a bill which would get rid of the time change. Unfortunately, the bill is stuck in Congress, where no progress has been made. For better or for worse, if the US doesn’t make the change, then other jurisdictions won’t either, in fear of being out of sync with the US.

The crazy thing is, some medical experts think the US bill is bad for people in general because the bill wants to make daylight savings time permanent. That is, the bill wants everyone to do the spring forward time change in March and keep it there. Some medical people say this is not desired because our circadian rhythms are actually better matched with the sun setting super early like it does now. They argue it would be healthier this way for everyone.

I question such statements because how is this good for anyone? Because of the time change over the weekend, most people who commute home in the early evening now have to do the commute with no natural light. Think about how many more accidents happen at night where artificial light is the only light available to see other vehicles and pedestrians. How many people die every year because driving home in the dark makes it that much more dangerous?

Also, how depressing is it for people to get up before sunrise, commute to work in darkness, work all day, and then commute home in darkness as well? That’s supposed to be healthy for you? That’s actually a huge morale hit. Before the time change this weekend, most people would see at least a bit of the last daylight on their commutes home.

Congress needs to get off their asses and get this bill passed and see if we can get everyone organized for next year.

It seems like every weekend I do battle with the ants. This afternoon I opened looked underneath my bathroom sink to find three or four ants just chilling, like they owned my apartment.

I vacuumed them all up because I wanted to see how and where they were getting in. I wasn’t convinced I got it right the last time I made some observations. So I just sat down on my bathroom floor with a flashlight and just waited for new ants to emerge.

After a few minutes, I saw two ants, at the side of the cabinet, and I had no idea how they got there. It looked like they just materialized out of thin air. It took about 30 more minutes and observing four or five more ants to realize they were coming in and out of two separate points of ingress. These were areas I had not noticed before.

One of them was a tiny hole near the ground where the tile meets the wall. The other was a wide gap near the top of the sink cabinet. This gap went behind a panel in the cabinet, which I realized I had to remove if I was gonna get full access to the gap to seal it off.

The panel was held in place with eight screws, all of which were hard to get at. To remove these screws, I had to get on back and laid down inside the cabinet. It’s also one of those situations where something is easier to remove than to put back. When it’s time to attach it again, I won’t have anything to hold it place while I awkwardly put the screws back in. That’s a future me problem however.

Armed with this new knowledge and access, I grabbed some sealant, put on my respirator, and sealed up these points of ingress. Every single time I seal more areas off, I quietly hope this is the last time I need to do this, at least for the bathroom area. So far, every time I check the next day or so, I see more ants.

Let’s not even talk about the kitchen situation.

So Post Malone is doing a collaboration with the game I work on. Now before you think this is some lame corporate deal with a celebrity, Posty is and has been a huge fan of our game for a long time now. If you do a search, it won’t take you long to find footage of him playing our game. I can also tell you this, he has more hours in the game than I do, by a wide margin. He’s also way better at the game than me, though that’s not saying a lot.

Anyways, he partnered with us to help design some of the cosmetics for the event and as you can see, he made a pretty cool trailer with us as well. I’ve been making games for a long time now and it’s always exciting to me to see things like this.