blog.erwintang.com

I have been passing gas through my bowels all evening. If I had to guess, it was because of the yogourt I had tonight. My Mom gave me some this weekend and it wasn’t the lactose-free kind. I had what I thought was a small amount but I guess it wasn’t small enough.

In other news, I have a two-day work week this week. Today was a public holiday and I only have to work this Tuesday and Wednesday. My team gets a four-day long week every three months and this is the week we’re getting that. Some of my co-workers have taken vacation for those two workdays, so they get a whole week off. I could have done the same but since it should be a quiet week, I have some work things to get done before everyone comes back next Monday.

If you own a smartphone or know how to use the Internet, you’re probably aware there are a plethora of ways one can order food now. Any number of apps now vie for your business. One of the downsides of these apps is the gouging they inflict on the restaurants, taking a cut of your money, which in the old days, all went to the restaurant itself.

I’ve come to expect now that restaurants will make a patron pay more per item if you order via one of the apps, just to make up for the money that lose to the app maker. The most common markup I’ve seen is about a dollar more per item. For example, if you go to the restaurant and see an item costs $10 on the menu, it’ll show up as $11 on the app.

For the most part, I’m ok with this markup, especially if I’m just ordering one or two items. In exchange, it means I don’t have to talk to anyone on the phone, there’s less chance my order gets screwed up since it’s printed out for everyone, and I can chill in my home until it’s time for me to go pick up my food.

This weekend though, I noticed the most wild markup I’ve seen with these apps. There’s a pizza place downstairs called Pizza Garden. Their pizza is fantastic and the quality of their pies makes them a step above some of the other pizza joints in the area. The “Primo” pizza, which I ordered via their own website (so no need to markup) is about $21 for a medium size. If you use “Skip the Dishes”, there’s a two-dollar markup for the same pizza and size. If you order via “Uber Eats”, the same pizza is marked up four dollars. Should you unfortunately use “DoorDash” to order this pizza, it’s marked up a staggering $7. That’s almost $30 for a medium pizza that contains no seafood or solid gold.

I’ve never seen such wildly different prices for the same item at a restaurant. I don’t know if “Door Dash” takes a massive cut compared to the others or if Pizza Garden just hates “Door Dash” more than the others.

This is just a warning that if you can’t use a restaurant’s own website or app to order, it can’t hurt to see how much you’ll be paying depending on which of those other apps you use. You could wind up paying more than you should.

Shortly before bedtime last evening, I felt a muscle or muscles near my right shoulder blade tighten up, causing me sharp pains if I moved my arm or head in a certain direction.

I had been doing light exercise with my right arm that evening so I’m almost certain it was related to that. Maybe it was because I didn’t warm up or that muscle was cold. When you get older, any number of things can cause your body to go wrong.

I was getting tired though, so I was able to gingerly put myself to bed. I’m a side sleeper, so certain angles would cause intense pain in my back. Trying to push up to get myself upright was a particular hell. I’m not sure how I did it but I fell asleep. I did wake up about two hours before my alarm and I was dismayed to feel the pain was still there.

I fell back asleep again but only for a bit. I decided to get up, get hydrated before my morning Zoom meetings started. Sitting at my desk and drinking water seemed to help things. As about an hour later, the pain was going away slightly.

At lunch time, it got worse and I was feeling a lot of discomfort. It got to the point where I even got a slight headache. I took an Advil at that point. Lucky for me, I was able to move my mouse and type without too much pain, so I actually got a good amount of work done.

It’s evening now and the pain has now mostly gone away. The area just feels a bit sore, as if a muscle had been worked too much. I took a hot shower to both clean my genitals and also to use the hot water to loosen the muscles a bit.

I’m hoping that I’ll be good to go tomorrow because my apartment is a mess and I was planning to use a large chunk of Saturday to do the manual labour of vacuuming, dusting, and general cleaning.

This sporting event production would be considered slick and impressive even today.

I bought a new VR headset and it arrived in the mail last week. I’ve had another VR headset for a few years now, that being the PSVR, which is paired with my PlayStation 4 Pro. The PSVR was my first real foray into VR and I played a whole bunch of really fun and entertaining games with it. VR technology has advanced quite a bit since the PSVR was released. Coincidentally, the PSVR2 came out this month as well but I don’t have a PS5, so wasn’t an option for me.

The original PSVR required a camera to track your head and the controllers. That meant that if you moved outside the camera’s view or something got in the way of the camera, it would lose track of you. The controllers that PSVR used were also simple in that it could only track if you were gripping something with your whole hand or not. The concept of knowing what individual fingers were doing wasn’t possible.

The Meta Quest 2 headset improves in all these areas and more. First, the headset has onboard cameras, so it tracks your position from the “inside out”. It doesn’t rely on a camera or set of external sensors to know where you are in your space. Also, since it can work without wires, you’re free to move around in a massive space if you wanted to. Meta warns you not to use the headset outside though, probably for legal reasons (walking into traffic). The controllers are also more advanced. To varying degrees of accuracy, it can track the usage of your thumb, index finger, and middle finger of each hand.

Having onboard cameras is a huge bonus with this headset. As I mentioned, this allows the headset to track itself but it also allows something called “passthrough”. This is when the headset shows the user its actual surroundings, as if you were using the cameras as your eyes. I can’t tell you how many times I had the PSVR headset on and I was fumbling around, feeling for a controller I had set down for a moment. The Quest 2 allows you to see the “real world” at will, if you need to check your surroundings for a second. The view you see isn’t full colour, high resolution though. The real world appears as if you’re looking through black and white night vision googles. It almost feels like you’re seeing the real world in a VR setting. Since it’s wireless, there’s nothing to stop you from putting this thing on and walking out of your home and into the world.

My primary motivation for getting this new headset is to experience VR games at a high-fidelity than before. The game I am looking forward to playing above all others is Half-Life: Alyx, widely regarded as one of the best VR games ever made. I haven’t bought it yet, because at $80, it’s stupidly expensive but Steam allows you to walk around in some of the settings for free and it looks amazing. Once it goes on sale, I’ll grab it then.

I recently realized I needed new PJ bottoms and given how few people see in my PJs, I didn’t need to spend a ton of money on them. I’ve often joked how I should start shopping at Walmart exclusively for all my clothing but for PJs, this made sense.

I sauntered into my local Walmart and found a pair of PJ bottoms like you see above. They were $12, which is relatively cheap these days. I bought a pair that was dark blue and had hockey motifs and symbols on it, things like sticks, pucks, and nets. I brought it home and they fit great. For a guy that has short legs, they didn’t require any alteration and they weren’t long at all. With the elastic waistband, it was super comfy.

If only Walmart sold tuxedos.

Bobby Lee is one of my favourite comedians and I’ve had the pleasure of seeing him in Vancouver and Los Angeles. While we’re both Asia, Bobby and I have something else in common. We both randomly sometimes have to poo very urgently.

In the video above, Bobby tells everyone the time he ate some dodgy meat while shooting a movie. When he was done his scenes, gastrointestinal distress hit while he was driving home. I won’t ruin it for you, just let Bobby finish the story.

This isn’t an isolated case for Bobby, in the same video above, we are told a story where almost the exact same thing happens to him again.

I personally think he has undiagnosed irritable bowel syndrome, which is what I have. Based on the stories I’ve heard, I think I have a milder version compared to him. Which is not to say, my life hasn’t been affected by this. I think the only difference really is I’m able to hold onto my poops long enough to get to a washroom whereas Bobby just can’t.

So it turns out that my employer did have to lay off some people in the current economic climate. In a recent post, I was remarking that it was odd seeing thousands of people being laid off from these giant tech companies while my own employer seemed to be unaffected.

While I wasn’t affected, they did decide to cancel the mobile version of the game I work on. Some of the people on that team will find new homes within the same studio or within the same company at least. We were warned though, that there probably won’t be room for everyone and some might choose to leave entirely and take a severance package.

Worse yet, they decided to shutdown the whole studio responsible for the unreleased Battlefield mobile game. That’s a whole location full just gone. I’m not sure if any of those developers are going to find places internally within the company to continue employment.

In my opinion, these layoffs happened for a different reason than what happened at Google, Meta, or Amazon. Yeah sure, money is at the root of all it but those giant companies all stated they got too big when they bet on the pandemic bump in sales or revenue was going to continue without pause. When that didn’t happen they were too heavy to continue like that. For these games, I don’t think it was a bad idea to make these games in the first place. Fundamentally, these were great IPs to be making games from. For one of these games, it was hamstrung by a business deal that benefited one of the parties but not the other. It wasn’t really that people stopped playing games.

In the end, it’s very unfortunate that some people will lose their jobs or have already lost them. Also, it’s another case of just having some bad luck. Some incredibly smart and talented people were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. A lot of them are way smarter and talented than I am but it’s just luck that I’m still standing. Layoffs rarely have to do with individual performance.

I hope everyone gets everything they deserve and need in the next few weeks.

After weeks of humid and rainy weather, a blast of cold air on the weekend dipped the temperatures below freezing. Sure, the rain isn’t great but being freezing cold and having your skin dry up like an ice cube in the desert sucks even worse.

I had naively put away my humidifier weeks ago but I had to bring it out because the moisture in the air dropped to almost 20% in my apartment. On Sunday afternoon alone, I dumped close to four litres of water into the air of my bedroom and it still was less than 50% humidity in there. Meanwhile, I’ve been applying moisturizer all over my body to ward off the itchiness.

Thankfully, tonight is supposed to be the last night of freezing weather for at least this week as the lows return to above zero.