blog.erwintang.com

Even though I received access back to my balcony almost a week ago, I was such a lazy ass that I didn’t move my patio furniture back until today. When I write I moved it back, I really mean I stacked it up into a dirty pile on my balcony. I had some chairs and tables stored on a tarp in my living room because they were so dirty, I just couldn’t have them sitting bare on my floors.

I am considering just junking my patio furniture because it would take so much work to get it clean again. Once clean, I’d have to put some sorta tarp that would enclose the furniture from all sides and angles because my balcony gets so dirty.

Well, in any case, at least a quarter of my living room isn’t taken up by dirty patio furniture anymore.

My car insurance expires tomorrow and in typical fashion, I waited until today to renew it. In the renewal process I discovered that in the last twelve months, I drove my car about 2,700 km which is not a whole lot at all. On average, that’s about 225 km a month. Working from home, living in a walk and transit friendly community, and being somewhat of a homebody means that I don’t have a frequent need to use my car.

This was also the first time I renewed my car insurance online. The process went very smoothly and to my surprise, my insurance was $600 less this year. I’m only paying $1300 for car insurance for the next twelve months, which is very low compared to other people. Renewing my insurance online was convenient but then again, even when I renewed it in-person, it wasn’t that much of a hassle. I can see the insurance office from my living room window. Again, that just highlights how walkable my neighbourhood is. Since I own a laser printer, I was able to print out my own insurance documents and the whole process took about five minutes.

The future is here!

In my time as someone who lives inside buildings, I’ve had to deal with two insect infestations. The first was bedbugs, which had a huge impact on my last year of grad school. Then much later, my current apartment had a moth problem.

I now have an ant problem. For the last two years, residents in my building have complained about ants. How do ants even get into a high-rise apartment building? I knew these ants were steadily making their way up from the ground floor.

Several months ago, I’d see a random ant here and there, maybe a few weeks apart. Since it was one ant, it was really difficult to figure out where they were coming from. I’d see an ant in my bedroom, in my kitchen, or my bathroom. I’d kill the ant and then move on with my day.

Last week, I saw as many as ten ants at a time in my bathroom. I’m not 100% certain but I believe they are using the pipes as conduits to go from floor to floor. I’m also pretty sure they’re not going up the pipes from inside the pipes. I think they are climbing the outside of the pipes. The ten ants I saw were fairly close to my bathroom sink, underneath the cabinetry.

It’s still not a major problem but it could turn into one any day now, so I’m going to spend this weekend doing a thorough investigation. Residents who live on lower floors are reporting much more dire situations, with some saying they’re battling hundreds of ants in their units.

I need to deal with this problem in a serious way. My initial strategy is going to be preventing them from entering my apartment, so somehow sealing off areas of ingress. A friend of mine has recommended a type of trap that doesn’t kill them off right away. In fact, the trap is so attractive to ants that I’ll see even more of them if I hadn’t laid the traps. Apparently this is as designed, with the bait in trap being harmful to the ants and it lets them live long enough to bring the bait back to the nest, thus killing the ants who were foraging in my apartment plus the ants back at the nest. Where are they nesting though? The most logical place would be somewhere near the ground floor. I live twenty-eight floors up though and when I think about how far that is for an ant to travel to get back home, it boggles the mind. I’m human being sized and it takes me almost five minutes to walk down the stairs to get to the ground floor. How long would that take for ant? Would they even be able to get to the nest?

In any case, this is just another pain in the ass that I need to deal with.

I live in a municipality that has been experiencing growth for over a decade now. Lots of high-rise buildings are being constructed in my area as planners to try increase the density of people. Now whether or not these new apartments are worth the money people are paying is another story.

As there is so much construction in my area, it may not be surprising that this leads to a lot of disruption to traffic (both pedestrian and vehicle, area access, and general convenience to existing residents.

If you’ve ever seen a completely new apartment building being constructed, you’ll know that they basically take over that side of the street for an extended period of time. On my street, just about 100m down from where I live, they are building a 40+ storey complex. They dug a giant hole and then they started building up. Somewhere along the timeline, they blocked off the sidewalk on that side of the street. I guess more accurately, the sidewalk basically got obliterated. They tore it up and just fenced off that side of the street.

It feels like it’s been like that for years now and I used Google Street View to find out how long it’s been. The last time I saw that side of the street and it was walkable was back in 2019. It’s been four years now since I was able to walk on that side of the street. The construction isn’t even done yet (though it seems like it is nearing the end), so I don’t anticipate anything changing until well into 2024.

If you stay on my street but walk another block down, you’ll run into another construction project, another new apartment development. Again, the sidewalk has been blocked off and pedestrians haven’t been able to walk down that side of the street for years. I checked Street View again and it was walkable in July of 2019 but the next update in October of 2020 shows it inaccessible. Three years of no access.

Local residents like myself have had to zig-zag across the street as we dodge these construction projects for years now. Will we ever get our sidewalks back?

Just over two years ago, I got a new electric toothbrush, a Sonicare. A few weeks ago, it started acting really weird. I wrote that it felt like it was perhaps too powerful or at least seemed like it. Then this week, the opposite happened, when I turned it on, it seemed weak, like it wasn’t really cleaning my teeth.

It turns out my Sonicare succumbed to a very common design flaw. The Sonicare I have has replaceable toothbrush heads, which slide onto a metal post on the end of the toothbrush. It’s this metal post that vibrates and thus imparts the cleaning action to the toothbrush head. This post can become loose inside the housing, so you can then move it around several millimeters in all directions. Because the post is loose, the vibrating energy can’t be conducted as effectively to the brush head. I could easily tell it just wasn’t doing a whole lot against my teeth.

The Internet told me this has happened to so many people who also own a Sonicare. It turns out the post is secured to the rest of the toothbrush internals by a screw and that screw can become loose. Why isn’t the screw held in place by a nut?

The bad news is that Sonicare doesn’t design their products to be easily serviceable by consumers. A fix involves prying open the bottom of the toothbrush, trying not to destroy the charging mechanism, and the pulling out the internal assembly to get at that screw. I saw a video of a guy doing it but it seemed super difficult. Another video showed a guy destroying his Sonicare trying to get at the screw.

Now before I started even contemplating this repair, I saw that my Sonicare was out of warranty by at least a month. So knowing that, I had nothing to lose. To tell a long story short, I could not get my Sonicare open and I sorta busted the damn thing.

My new Sonicare arrives tomorrow.

On Thursday, I notice was placed on my front door. It indicated that on Tuesday this week, they’ll unblock my patio doors so I can finally open them as much as I want. I’ll also be able to place my patio furniture back on the balcony. Truth be told, my balcony deck is fine to walk on now. I don’t need to wait until Tuesday. How do I know? Last week, I watched some workers walk on my balcony in normal shoes as they painted on some sorta coating onto the ceiling of my balcony. If the deck wasn’t fully cured and sealed, they wouldn’t have walked on it like that.

Anyways, on Tuesday, this long and expensive saga will finally come to an end. It’s nearly mid-September and they started this work in early July. It might have taken two and half months but I think there was about seven days of actual work done on my balcony. For example, they power washed my balcony and then left it alone for more than two weeks. In that time, my balcony just got dirty again. The actual sealant was applied to my balcony deck about six weeks or more after the power wash. I have no doubt, a whole lot of dirt and dust got sealed into the deck surface.

Now I understand my balcony wasn’t the only was that was being worked on and it wasn’t practical to work on one balcony from start to finish. Instead, they had to make progress on each balcony in step with the others but that meant that rather than inconvenience one resident at a time, they inconvenienced a whole bunch of residents together, and for longer.

In general, I understand why the repairs needed to be made but the whole projected sucked and it was a pain in the ass for a part of my home that I use and enjoy the least. Also, it’s finishing up just as summer is ending and the cold weather approaches, everyone’s favourite time to be out on the balcony.

As the summer draws to a close, a lot of people are doing what I’m doing and that is taking stock of how many times we’ve all almost pooped our pants during these sunny months.

I’ve had IBS for about half my life and I’m lucky in that I have a fairly mild version of it. There are a whole host of bad things that you feel or experience when you suffer from IBS but for me, it surfaces as a sudden urge to poop out of nowhere. The issue is that when the urge strikes, I may not be in an ideal situation to poop.

While sometimes there seems to be no reason why the urge is triggered, over the years I have discovered some of them. One is simply drinking some water. Sometimes it feels like the water just travels through my system way too quickly and then winds up in a place that makes my body want to poop and poop badly. This trigger doesn’t happen if I’m eating or had something substantial to eat before the water. If enough times passes though, the trigger can happen… or it might not.

One sunny Sunday, I decided to take a nice walk out to a local park but I was probably at least fifteen minutes away from my apartment when I was feeling parched. It was super hot that day and I was sweating a lot. I took a sip from my water bottle. A few minutes later, I felt some rumblings and gurglings down below. Things were shifting and moving inside me. Even before the urge was felt, I knew I was in trouble. Sure enough, a few seconds later, I needed to poop bad.

I was at least fifteen minutes away from my apartment and there were no facilities closer that I felt like I wanted to use. I always have this debate in my head about where I want to poop (at home) versus where you logically should just poop (anywhere acceptable). For better or for worse, I decided that I could hold it long enough to get home. I recognize sometimes that just doesn’t make sense. I was probably a ten minute walk to a park washroom but I decided I could make it home instead. So, I began the brisk walk home.

I gotta admit, there were parts of the walk home that I needed to clench some muscles pretty badly to keep things in place. It was an awful feeling and I honestly thought this was gonna be the day where I just explosively poop my shorts out in public. Somehow, I mustered up the intestinal fortitude to keep it all together and made it all the way home. The worst part when you get nearly home is the wait for the elevator and then the elevator ride up. My body knows I’m so close to my own bathroom but it needs to wait like just another sixty seconds or so. I’m surprised I even knew how to use my key in the lock, as I’m fumbling around to get my front door open. Once I get through the door, it was a straight-shot to the bathroom, shoes still on, and right onto the toilet. Words can’t describe the relief once I painted the bowl with all that ugliness.

Believe it or not, this scenario happened to me again this summer. I was walking to a nearby shopping district to get a gift for a friend. Halfway there, the urge surprised me like a tiger coming out of the grass. I knew I could either soldier on and try to find a washroom at the mall or I could turn around and go poop at home. I decided to turn around and go home. Again, I almost didn’t make it and very nearly pooped on the sidewalk for the first time. Somehow I stumbled my way home with clean shorts.

Alright, summer memories are fun!

I am on my second month of minimalist approach to subscribed streaming services. As you might recall, I’m down to being subscribed to only two streaming services at any given time.

About a month ago, I cancelled everything except for Amazon Prime and then, because I wanted to watch Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, I subscribed to Paramount+ (on a monthly basis). Over the course of four weeks, I watched enough SNW to get to the end of season 2. It’s an excellent show by the way, and if you’re curious about it at all, please give it a watch. Anyways, since season 3 isn’t coming anytime soon, I decided to cancel my Paramount+ subscription once the month was over. I did hesitate slightly before cancelling because the service also has Picard which I am not caught up on, the Twisted Metal series based on the PlayStation video game series, and also Top Gun: Maverick which I have yet to see. Another month of that would have been fine with me.

In the end, I decided to cancel because I wanted to watch Ahsoka on Disney+. Now interestingly, when I went through the cancellation flow on Paramount+, they tried to stop me by offering me a discounted price for the next three months. This is interesting because this means that even if you want to continue your subscription, you should try to cancel because there’s a chance you might be offered a discount to prevent you from leaving. If the algorithm decides to not give you a last chance discount, you can just back out of the cancellation flow. So yeah, the next time you’re near the end of month for your subscription, at least for Paramount+, just trying cancelling to see what happens.

I decided to push through and cancelled entirely because I wanted to have access to Disney+ for the next month. Now I’m not sure if this was just random luck but just today, I saw a Disney+ ad on Twitter that was offering $1.99 per month deals for three months to new subscribers and returning subscribers. The normal price is $14.99 a month, so this is a great deal. I signed up immediately, so I’m all set for the next three months. The odds that I’ll continue to be subscribed to Disney+ beyond the three months is very low. I will have most likely consumed all the content I want by then and I don’t want to pay $14.99.

The lesson to be learned from all of this is that if I had been subscribed to Disney+ and Paramount+ this entire time and was just content to be continually subscribed, those services would be happy to take my money and exert no effort in giving me discounts.

The act of cancelling or being a lapsed subscriber forces these services to entice you to continue or come back to them. None of this would have happened if I hadn’t changed my spending habits as a consumer. Cancel the services that you don’t have time for or aren’t giving you the content you want to consume. Make them work to get your money and only jump back in if they can give you a deal. Don’t just blindly give them your money every month or every year (if you go annually).

I have to work tomorrow but I can barely remember what I was doing on Friday. This was just a three-day long weekend but it sure seemed longer than that. I didn’t even do all that much this weekend but it seemed more like a five-day weekend.

This is an important week for work because there is some stuff that I absolutely need to get done this week. Other engineers are waiting for something I need to complete first before they can do their work, so if I screw it all up and delay it, that means they’re delayed as well.

I don’t think I’ll need to put in any extra hours but it does mean that I really need to be focused for most of the week and deflect any distractions that might come my way.

As we’re now into September, I feel a sense of confidence in knowing that I can probably put away my air-conditioner unit until next summer. My patio doors are still blocked off, so by the time they’re unblocked, the weather will most likely be cool enough that AC won’t be required.

I recognize that last year had a very warm end to the summer and beginning of autumn. It was probably warm enough to wear shorts near Thanksgiving. If it that happens again this year, it won’t be warm enough to need the AC.

My apartment is a mess, so I’ll be spending most of my Labour Day Monday cleaning and organizing my apartment. I’ll probably put away my AC then as well.