blog.erwintang.com

If you’re like most people, you love blogs and you love being a voyeur. What if there was a way to combine those two things into a single application that could run on a web browser? Well, the smart folks over at Blogger/Google have done just that.

Blogger Play shows you what images bloggers are uploading to their blogs in real-time. If you click on show info, it will show you the blogger’s profile, plus a small snippet from the post to which the image was added. The best part is that while Blogger uses a smart filter to prevent naughty images from appearing, they can’t guarantee something spicy won’t show up while you’re watching! How exciting! Go see what other people are blogging because I couldn’t come up with anything interesting for this post!

Did you know that as early as two weeks ago here in Vancouver, it was still sunny and warm? Since about last week, it’s been cloudy and steadily getting colder and colder. Yes, I am aware that last weekend was the official end of the summer.

So that was summer whimpering away. I had a good three, possibly four weeks of summer where I actually had time to enjoy the weather. Other people had about three months but I had other things to do. From now on, it’s about six months of grey clouds, dreary and never-ending rain, punctuated by the odd flurry of snow.

You know, someone should figure out how to make a huge reflector in space and direct sunlight over Vancouver during the daytime. I’d paid at least a dollar to see that happen.

I hope none of you get too squeamish about this post. Anyways, after I got my tooth extracted, I asked my dentist if I could take the tooth home with me. He said yes but gave me strict instructions to disinfect the tooth first and to not touch the tooth with my barehands before it had been sanitized.

After a half day dip into isopropyl alchol and a thorough cleaning, I was able to take pics of the tooth. My camera’s macro mode isn’t the best so the images didn’t come out too clean except for one which was pretty good.

So in all the pics, the colour is really off. The exposed enamel looks it’s this dark shade of gray. In reality, the enamel is actually quite white in colour. The roots themselves are actually this light manilla colour. The first pic shows two roots that were in pretty good shape, which my dentist said made it a shame since it was only one root that was problematic. What you don’t see is this pulpy, fibrous crap that was stuck in between all three roots. I heard my dentist say it was part of the abscess that had formed because of the infection. It took a bit of work to tear that fibrous stuff out of there. As I was cleaning, I was thinking, man, my body made that stuff in there.

The second pic shows the “root” of the problem. There’s the root that went really bad. It’s as black as the pic shows, there’s no colour problem in that image. I was pretty amazed when I saw it for the first time. That thing had been stuck in my jaw for a few years, getting a shade darker as time marched on. Notice that the tip of black root has been cut off. My dentist wanted to see if his root canal had been as good as he wanted it. Indeed it was, it went as deep as it should have been. Also notice the bits of pulpy tissue that I couldn’t clean off. That stuff is stuck on there tightly. You’d need like a nail file or something to get all that off.

The third pic shows the top of the tooth. The improper colour makes it look like my dentist had filled in my root canal with tar. In fact, the filling is very white in colour.

The last pic, though fuzzy, shows all three roots of the tooth. Again, notice the cut off tip of the black root. You can see the material that my dentist used to fill in that root canal.

Thanks for reading and sharing in my extraction experience!

You know, extracting a tooth, especially a chronically infected one is pretty damn easy. I got in the chair and a topical anaesthetic was applied to the surrounding gums. A minute later, the real local anaesthetic was injected into me via a needle, all painless.

We waited about three minutes and then my dentist pushed my tooth around and asked me if I could feel anything. I said no and so he went for it. He pulled on it for like ten seconds or so, I felt a bit of pressure and the damn thing came out. The time between when I got into the chair to when the tooth came out was probably less than 15 minutes.

He cleaned out the socket a bit and there was a lot of suctioning around my mouth (there’s a joke in there somewhere). Then they rolled up a bit of gauze and stuck it into the now empty socket. I was told to bite down, which I did.

My dentist then show me the extracted tooth. Man, those roots are long! One of the roots was all black. Ewwww! That thing had been festering in my mouth for probably a couple of years. I’ll post a pic when I get home. Oh yeah, I’m still at work.

Anyways, the bleeding stopped fairly quickly and there’s only a tiny bit of swelling. It’s only a bit sore as well so I think I don’t even need any pain medication. Just like last time, I think if I really wanted to, I could play basketball tonight.

I’ve also eaten since the tooth extraction. I had french fries from McD’s which was perfect since they’re so small, they can be easily chewed on one side of my mouth.

Now granted, I’m probably going be in for an ass-kicking tomorrow since that’s when your body makes you pay for a fairly intensive medical procedure.

More later.

UPDATE: This post seems quite popular among the search engines. In that case, let me provide links to a description of my actual procedure and then post-op photos of the extracted tooth.

I’m getting back-most upper right tooth extracted tomorrow. It’s the same tooth that I’ve had first and only root canal on. There are some pretty good reasons to get it removed. First, the tooth is kinda dead and it’s turning more gray than white now. Second and probably most important, there’s a huge periodontal pocket behind it which is very prone to infection. Anytime a bit of food gets stuck in there, it’s not good times.

I’m not worried about the removal itself. I had three wisdom teeth removed when I was just out of high school. There were below the surface of the gums and they had to be cracked while still in the gum to faciliate removal. All of this happened under local freezing. I suffered absolutely no swelling at all and I actually played basketball the same evening. I thought that getting your wisdom teeth out was that easy for everybody. I didn’t realize until later that most people get chipmunk cheeks and can be out of commission for a while.

Anyways, I’m hoping I just react very well to getting my teeth taken out. My only concern is that now that I have a tooth missing, the tooth next to it won’t have structural support when chewing forces are applied to it. If it can’t support the forces, there could be buckling or bending and that’ll lead to a whole new set of problems.

I can get an artificial tooth put in but that costs $3000 and I’ve been warned most dental plans don’t cover any of this. $3K for a tooth that no one sees. I’m still deciding whether or not to get the fake tooth.

I’ll update everyone tomorrow.

So there is currently only one washroom available on the entire floor I work on. Not only is there only one washroom, that washroom is the “executive” one, meaning only a single person can use at a time.

The other washrooms are being renovated right now. The building owners have decided to renovate all the washrooms in the building. They are putting in new floor tiles, toilet paper dispensers, and new lighting.

The work started about two weeks ago and was only supposed to take a few days. I’d be ok with the renos but for days and days, I haven’t seen any work being done. I don’t see any tradespeople on our floor. In fact, building materials are just sitting outside the washrooms. I wonder if we can just go in and use them.

Anyways, what that means is that an entire floor of people have to share a single toilet. Even though more than half the people are on vacation, that single washroom is always occupied. Everyone has to go up at least five floors to 17 or above just relieve themselves.

In the grand scheme of things, it’s not a big deal but I just wanted everyone to know what I go through several times a day when I have to pee.

This will probably be one of my last skate. related posts for a while but it was an exciting day for the team as our own personal copies of the game arrived today. This also coincided with the full retail launch of the game in Canada for the Xbox 360.

The box is sitting here next to me on my desk. It’s quite odd seeing it. I almost can’t believe we managed to get that thing out the door. It’s also the first “real” game I’ve shipped now. I’ll be proud to put this on my resume.

The day, at least for me, was slightly dampened by the fact we got three somewhat lukewarm reviews today. GamePro and GameSpot both gave us 75s while The Onion gave us a C+ which Metacritic translated into a 58. Again, I might be biased but a 58? Come on. This drops our Metacritic rating down to an 84 which is quite respectable but I think the team as a whole thinks we’ve done better than that.

So why is the Metacritic rating so damn important? Well internally, EA takes that rating very seriously. It is something the company uses a metric to see how well a title has performed and
that score is used along with other data to make some pretty important decisions.

Anyways, let’s hope we get some better numbers in the days ahead.

On Saturday evening I had the pleasure of attending the St. John’s College 10th anniversary gala BBQ / welcome dinner. SJC is of course my beloved former graduate residence.

Before the dinner, I participated in an afternoon panel discussion entitled, “From SJC to the Real World“. The discussion was led by everyone’s favourite weatherman, Ian, who is a good friend of the College. The panel was somewhat poorly attended by the current residents but that’s not really a big departure from when I lived there.

Now having participated in the panel really screwed up my perception of what I was going to wear to the dinner. I certainly wasn’t going to wear a suit to the panel. Keep in mind also that the dinner was going to be advertised as a BBQ. With that in mind, I wore some denim pants, some of you call these “jeans” and a very nice short-sleeve shirt. Just in case, it got cold, I also brought along a classy black hoodie with the skate. logo emblazoned along one sleeve. I did not bring a change of clothes which might have been a poor decision.

After the panel was done, we had lots of time to kill so Dana L. and myself played two games of croquet. It was really great to see Dana again. I miss a lot of people from SJC but he is certainly one of the best. Anyways, Dana kicked my ass twice. Even though I lost both games, I could still feel the magic. Plus, I kept looking over my shoulder because I swore Bryan was there.

For the dinner, they had a huge tent setup in the courtyard. Inside there was a small stage and podium. I believe there were over 20 tables and some nice decorations. It really reminded me of an outdoor wedding reception.

So anyways, from 6pm on people started arriving for the dinner. The guests included current residents, alumni, UBC staff and faculty, and original Johanneans. So everyone is arriving all dressed up and Dana and myself are looking like bums now. Dana is wearing this Hawaiian-like shirt and jeans, so he’s in the same boat as I am. The only saving grace was that Amber brought some sorta squirrel cosplay costume and was running around entertaining people. For the record, she attended the actual dinner in normal clothes.

The dinner itself was quite nice. There were some great speeches by acting SJC Principal Henry Yu, UBC President Stephen Toope, and a graduate from the original SJC in Shanghai. The evening was hosted by Stephen H. which was a bit of a surprise. When I met this kid three years ago he was a pretty shy chemistry student. “Hyberbole” as Joel called him, sure has changed. He did a bang-up job hosting and was actually quite funny. There were also a lot of alumni there, mostly from 2002 and on. Off the top of my head, there was Dana, Ian, Joel H, Donna, Emre, Rubab, Aliye, Carly, Frank, and probably someone I left out. As well, I did meet a few alumni that I did not know beforehand.

The food was awesome of course. Clarence had a wonderful spread of salmon steaks, skewers of every kind of meat, exotic sausages, seafood, several salads, and more food than my brain can recall. For dessert there were selections of fresh fruit (way above fruit plate quality I have to add), small pastries, and pieces of a large and tasty 10th anniversary cake. All during the meal, we were waited on by David and his staff.

As I sat with old friends and had this wonderful meal, I realized how much I missed the formal dinners. There are a lot of good things about SJC and the formal dinners are probably in the top three. I was lucky enough to realize before I left how special those dinners are at SJC.

With the dinner over and dessert eaten, I mingled among the tables. I talked to people that I still know there (a small number) and got introduced to some new residents. Then it was time for the social lounge “dance party” which seems to have taken over as the new post-dinner tradition. No one seems to go to Koerner’s anymore though Shawn and Frank sure wanted to go.

The “dance party” seemed to have some old ghosts because it was nothing but salsa for the short time I was there. Dana invited all of us alumni to his room for a private party. That is where I hung out for most of the evening. Because I was with old people, everyone went home pretty early. I went back to the social lounge for a bit and said goodbye to some people and I went home myself.

I really enjoyed the evening and am glad I got to be part of the festivities. Dana took some pictures which I hope I can put up on this site in a few days.

The above message board post is from a thread where people are recommending their dentists. Good to see someone out there likes me.