blog.erwintang.com

On Monday night I met with my financial advisor. Now if that seems like I have lots of money to invest and grow, you’re sadly mistaken. My advisor is a friend of mine who I knew before he even was a financial advisor. He basically tells me where I should put the four pennies I have in the bank.

As we were finishing up some paperwork, he told me that engineers that he has as clients that are around my age are worth, on average, a quarter of a million dollars. That is, they have assets that total $250 000. I was amazed… but then I got a little sad. I’m not even worth a tenth of that. I’m like worth… a quarter in total, $0.25. In fact, a year ago, my net worth was in the negative.

I can see how some people could accumulate that wealth though. Say you work hard and graduate with an undergrad degree in engineering by 22 or 23. You immediately get a decent paying job. It doesn’t have to be spectacular pay but decent. You work steadily and receive regular promotions and pay raises. You don’t blow your money on frivolous things but make decent investments with your cash. Ten years down the road, yeah, that could mean a cool quarter million.

I know a few people that might be in that boat, all of them my classmates in engineering. One of them is a dude named Al. Al hailed from Kamloops I believe. He came to UBC to get his mechanical engineering degree. He had a job lined up even before he wrote his last exam. In fact, he wrote his last exam on a Friday and started his new job and career on the following Monday. He took the weekend to recover from five long years of study. Within two years he was married and had a kid. He’s kept on working. Al was balls to the wall and I bet he still is to this day. Quarter mil right there.

I, on the other hand, was balls to wall in getting my degree but had nothing left or didn’t want anything left after I circled my the answer on my last exam. Forty-eight hours after my last exam I wasn’t reading over the new employee handbook, I was on a plane to Hawaii.

I graduated from UBC when I was 23, which should have given me seven good years of income. I only worked full-time three years of out that seven and two of those were at $12.50 an hour or less. Two years were spent travelling and dicking around. The other two were at grad school (which I do not regret).

That is not to say I’m disappointed with my current situation. I have a great job that many people would knock down old ladies to get. I’m lucky to be where I am but it’s hard not to think where I might be if I had figured all this out when I was 23 and not eight years later.

As some of you know, I’ve been trying to renew my domain for at least four weeks now. If you’re ever looking for a deadbeat, piece-of-crap registrar in Delaware, run by a divorced guy that doesn’t return calls or e-mails, and runs a cat breeding business on the side, just let me know.

Anyways, last week I initiated a transfer of my domain from the deadbeat registrar to GoDaddy, the maker of fine Super Bowl commercials. Everything was going smoothly until it required some input from the deadbeat’s end of things. Surprisingly, it worked, which made me think it must have been some sorta automated script that worked since I don’t think that dude actually did a damn thing.

Long story short, we’re good to go for another year. I think we’re due for another “wang-flies” type series of posts. Go 2007!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVT929z4_5o]

This was probably the best part of the episode on Sunday night.

“For Frodo.”

It took some tinkering but I think I have a new commenting system! It required nuking all existing comments from the last seven days of posts but there weren’t that many to begin with. All previous comments besides those have been retained. So fear not, the first time you entered a comment has been saved for eternity… well, at least until Enetation decides to go under (which should be fairly soon).

I see two chances for irony (or close to the definition of irony): no one comments anyway with the new system and I begin to get spammed by comment spammers.

I looked into fixing the commenting system tonight. Thinking it was going to take me about 15 minutes, I soon discovered I was wrong. It’s going to take a bit of work and I don’t have the time tonight.

Actually, the whole thing would have take five minutes if I was willing to switch to a new blog template but the ones Blogger aren’t to my liking. Besides, so many people use the default templates, my blog would wind up looking at like a lot of others.

Alrighty, I got some ironing to do.

I was in the designers area this evening to check out something in the game. I was at someone’s desk, when of the designers said, “I was talking to Cam and he told me you wrote about a Chinese restaurant in a basement on your blog. Let’s hear more about this place!”

The Cam he was referring to is the Cam who frequently comments on this blog. My first thought was, “Hmmm… someone on the team now knows I have a blog.” Before a second thought could enter my brain, a second designer piped up.

“You have a blog? What’s the address?”

I feigned not to know what he was talking about. It’s always interesting when people at my job find out I have a blog. I usually wonder how long it will take. At Backbone, it took about four months. Somehow, someone found out. I think they Googled my name. A few people started reading but now, I think only person reads it regularly.

So, about eight months in, someone on my team knows I blog. The good thing is that I always blog about work in very general terms. It’s a good strategy for you young kids out there. Always keep your stick on the ice!

Oh, the David Banner reference? It’s from the TV version of The Incredible Hulk. Dr. Banner went from town to town, waiting for the inevitable moment when people discovered he was the Hulk. I go from job to job, waiting for the inevitable moment when people discover I have a blog.

I know that my commenting systems sucks. Just look at the last few posts. No one has commented. While yes, the content of the posts might not be comment-eliciting but I’m also guessing people can’t or don’t want to comment because they feel the system won’t take their text.

I am in the process of looking at what I can do to switch over to the native Blogger commenting system. It shouldn’t be too hard but I don’t want to lose the existing comments either. In nearly half a decade of blogging, you, my readers, have written some gems.

I’ll do some experimenting on the weekend.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-is63goeBgc]

Almost three years ago, I featured a video in a post where two amateur filmmakers made their own lightsaber movie. It turned out to be quite a hit. They promised to make a sequel and now, here it is.

They’ve made everything a lot more impressive this time around. There are a ton of environmental effects which look awesome. The sabers make contact with objects numerous times which produce sparks. They even have the sabers cut into metal and the molten mess that results looks as good as if ILM did it for them.

The YouTube version is fine but the high-quality version can be found here. It’s worth a download if you’ve got the bandwidth. It’s this version that really shows off the special effects.

A couple of weeks ago at work, we had a studio meeting. They have these about twice a year. It’s a state of the union for the studio and also a good chance to ask the studio head some questions… like how big the bonuses are gonna be this year.

Anyways, the meeting was held the at IMAX theatre at Canada Place. When we were done, everyone left the theatre at the same time. We blocked traffic trying to leave the cruise ship terminal for several minutes. When we got back to the lobby of the studio, the elevators got crowded quickly.

I stood in front of one near capacity car. I was going to let it go but Christi, one of the project managers on our team, told me there was room for me and that I should squeeze in. At the last second, I jumped in and stood behind her. Someone else next to me was scratching their head or something and then moved his hand down by his side. As he was doing this though, he brushed up against Christi’s back, quite close to her butt. In the nearly silent elevator, she protested this invasion of her personal space.

“Erwin! Don’t put your hand there!”

I swear I didn’t mean this in any other way, but I quickly blurted out something I instantly wanted to take back.

“That wasn’t my hand.”

The elevator erupted in juvenille laughter while Christi only could say, “Ewwwwwwwwwwwww….” The doors opened onto our floor and she sprinted from the elevator. And that’s story of how HR flagged my name in the database for the very first time.

Most of this post will be about work since I was there both days. Don’t feel sorry for me though. The game is getting good buzz. People are excited about what they’ve seen. The positive comments far outweigh the negative ones. That gives me incentive to make my area extra kick-ass. The last two games I worked on got no attention, so this is new to me and really cool.

Well, other than my financial advisor, good old Joel M. remains the only person to have visited me at work. Yes, the lawyer we all know and love graced us with his presence all the way from Manhattan. Since his schedule was very tight, we only had time for a workplace visit. He was nice enough to bring his better half, Julie along. I took them both to the 19th floor lounge and patio where they were duly impressed. I treated them to a lavish feast of pre-packaged snacks and drinks, one fit for an overweight video game developer. Sitting in a breakfast nook, we had some delightful conversation before our time was up. I saw them off and went back to work.

Hey, remember a while back I couldn’t stop raving about the OT meals we got one weekend? It turns out there was a reason why the food was so good. Apparently, there was some sorta misunderstanding and someone thought $30 was the budget for each person for the meals. So the catering company got a massive amount of money from EA and prepared accordingly. Thus, came the Alaskan king crab, roast beef, and other delicacies. The actual budget is something like $12 to $15 per person. On Saturday, reality came crashing back where we were greeted by seafood sandwiches and pasta salad, not bad at all, but it wasn’t Alaskan king crab.

Last but not least, I spent almost the entire day at the office padding around in stocking feet. I even went into the elevators and to the 19th floor in my socks. Moving around in a high-rise office building with no shoes… why does that sound so familiar? Wasn’t it Roy Rogers that did that once? Yippie ki-yay!