THOUGHTS IN MY HEAD RIGHT NOW

1. If there’s a muscle between your eyebrows, mine is randomly twitching and has been for the last two days. I wonder what that could mean?

2. I really want my Xbox 360.

3. I should probably order that widescreen LCD monitor for my Xbox 360.

4. I wish I had gone to bed earlier.

5. I might open a new bank account with an Indian-based bank.

6. I should probably get new shoelaces pretty soon.

7. I really want my Xbox 360.

8. I was probably the last person on Earth to get call display for their cell phone.

9. I’ll end this list one short of ten.

OH PATIENCE

I consider myself a patient person. I know it’s a virtue and it’s something I strive to maintain. I do exceedingly well in lineups. I realize there’s nothing I can do to make the line go faster, so if I want to pay for something then I’m going to have to wait. The only other choice is leave but without whatever I was waiting for. Realizing this keep me calm while others fume around me.

Traffic is harder to accept but if there isn’t a shortcut to be used, waiting is the only thing you can do. Honking the horn isn’t going to make things better. So you can either sit in traffic and be grumpy about it or you can sit in traffic and be calm about it.

Now in most cases, I’d like to think I’m kinda like Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn in The Phantom Menance. When dueling with the evil Darth Maul, the two got separated and trapped between timed force fields. While the Maul paced impatiently like a caged animal, Jinn dropped down into a meditative pose to calm his nerves and focus his energies. Now forget for a second that moments after the force fields switched off, Maul put a large hole in Jinn’s chest and killed him.

As patient as I think I might be, this damn Xbox thing has gotten to me. My 360 was supposed to ship either last Friday or today, but now sources tell me that they won’t ship until probably next week. As a sign that I’m crumbling under the anticipation, I bought a $45 VGA cable for the Xbox 360 I don’t even own yet. The other end of the cable is going to a widescreen LCD monitor that I haven’t even ordered yet. The next step is probably going to see me buy games for it.

And in other news, I’d like everyone to welcome a new blogger to scene. Hot on the heels of GK.com, gwilli, Bone, and many, many others, comes Joel himself. After a delay of many months, his blog is now live. While you may not agree with some of his opinions, please go say hi to him.

MALLS

As if by some unspoken signal, people decided to flock to the malls this weekend in massive numbers. On Saturday afternoon, I met up with my good friend Garrett at Coquitlam Centre. I had to park my car near the outer edges of the lot because there were so many people there. It really surprised me at how crowded the mall was. I guess there are only four weekends until Christmas (three now).

Anyways, I kinda got annoyed at the amount of people I had to contend with inside the mall. I was still in the mode of shopping for myself, not for presents, so really I should have been exempt from the crowds. We later decided to get a snack at the food court after GK got his item. The area was packed with people and I had to line up for several minutes to get my poutine. It was delicious but I wished I had gotten the large size. By the way, I ate very little in the way of healthy food this weekend. Poutine on Saturday and several pieces of KFC on Sunday.

Then I tried to tempt fate again on Sunday. I busted one of my shoelaces last week, so I’ve been walking around with an unsecured shoe. I unfortunately forgot to buy some when I was at the mall on Saturday so I had this crazy idea Lougheed Mall wouldn’t be packed today. I decided I’d go take a look at how packed the parking lot was.

When I got there, it didn’t take me long to realize things were probably a madhouse inside the mall. People were parked in areas they shouldn’t be in and there were vehicles circling all over the place. I decided to leave immediately and saw there were even lineups to get out of the parking lot. I had to use a little known shortcut to avoid waiting for at least ten minutes for the traffic to clear.

I have decided I will not visit any suburban malls until after Christmas is over. I might duck into Pacific Centre since it’s so close to work and it’s traditionally less busier than other malls. And that’s your weekend forecast.

ESCAPE FROM HOTH

It began to snow again in the late afternoon and it was the kind that began sticking. There were many people in the Lower Mainland who decided to leave work early, hoping either to get home sooner or to give themselves more time to commute home.

Since it’s milestone week for my team, we had some serious work to get done and even if it were blazing sunshine outside, we’d have to stay late tonight. A few of us ventured outside around 6pm on our dinner break. It was a bit of mess outside, wet snow was being blown sideways so it was constantly in your face. Snow had accumulated in earnest on the ground again.

At 9pm, I looked outside the windows from my vantage point on the 12th floor. I was looking east along Pender. I could tell there was a lot of snow on the ground. There were very few pedestrians walking about and even fewer vehicles. It seemed if you were smart, you had long gone inside or home. Then, I turned around and saw all the people still at work.

The whole situation seemed really familiar to me but it took me a few minutes to grasp it. You know the part in The Empire Strikes Back where Imperial troops have landed on Hoth? The part where the last few Rebels are still inside their base even as snowtroopers are breaching the walls? Yeah, well, we were the crazy ass Rebels tonight. Even as the temperature was falling, snow was piling up, and transit was being delayed or cancelled we continued to pound away at our keyboards for some reason.

At 9:30pm, I caught the last transport off of Hoth and returned to the Outer Rim territories. We’d didn’t have to run any Imperial blockades but I did have a kickass bus driver who was passing cars left and right. I think he may have done the Kessel run in record time.

Wow, that was a post heavily steeped in Star Wars terminology.

PLAYTESTING

Thanks to a very generous co-worker, I was able to borrow a PSP and take it home. This allowed me to play Sonic Rivals for the first time since the end of July. I will admit I looked at the credits as the first order of business. Man, what an ego I have!

Next was the actual game play. They did a ton of work on the game after I left. It’s been polished and improved in many places that needed it. One set of tracks got a fantastic makeover. I looked for several in game objects that I was responsible for programming the behaviour. Though the game is a race essentially, I stopped several times to examine those objects in detail. Oh there was spike horizontal log, which exhibited the damped harmonic motion I so happily wrote in. Then there was the catapult which caused me so much consternation but thanks to Rich, it finally worked. Who could forget frozen air geyser, which froze characters just like I remembered it.

I’m still working through the game but I can see they cut a few things. For example, I had this jack-in-the-box that sprung open when you jumped on it. It’s still there but nothing happens when you touch it. Why that is, I’m not sure. I’m still eagerly awaiting the appearance of the black holes which were a pain to get working. They were still kinda wonky when I left so maybe that got cut too. I’m most looking forward to the monkey boss. What a ton of work that was. Imagine a huge mechanical monkey that shoots missiles that embed into the ground that also has a detachable flying head that does a beam attack. I left it in a somewhat shaky state so I feel sorry for who had to clean it up after me. I wonder how it’ll look.

Rivals now has an overall score of 72 over on metacritic. That ain’t bad but it’s slightly under good.

SNOW DAY

It was chaos for some in the Lower Mainland today with all the snow that had been dumped on our fair city. UBC was without power all day and poor SJCers had to sit in the dark and read papers. Transit was behind schedule on a few routes and school was cancelled for most post-secondary students.

I, on the other hand, really enjoyed the day. First, my bus wasn’t even a minute late in the morning. When I boarded, I found it to be refreshingly empty and I got a seat all to myself. All the cranky old people that usually fill my bus were no where to be seen. There were either at home or on the sidewalk somewhere with broken hips.

We flew into downtown Vancouver at a very respectable clip, arriving early enough for me to grab a breakfast sandwich from the A&W in Sinclair Centre. Then when I got to the office, I found out the boil water advisory had been lifted, allowing me to have a cup of fresh hot water right from the magical machine.

Though I had to stay a bit later at work this evening, I found an excellent Japanese restaurant to grab my dinner from. It’s only a block away from work as well. As I was preparing to go home, my Mom phoned me and nearly demanded that I get a hotel room downtown for the night. When I asked her why, she said it was too cold be outside this evening and that I would not survive the walk from the office to the bus stop and from the bus stop to my home. Now that might have been true if I was dressed only in my underwear and shoes but I had a fairly warm coat on and also a beanie on my large, bulbous head.

Given that it was probably only around -1 degrees and it only takes me five minutes to walk on either end of my trip, I decided to ignore my mother’s advice and save myself $100. The bus ride was uneventful as expected, as was my walk home. Oh mommy, you care about me so much.

CHECK IT

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8_MEFJGNiI]

In last night’s episode of The Simpsons, Homer gets fired from his job at the power plant. After he kills an elderly ice cream man, he decides to take over his job.

In the clip above, you can see Homer getting dressed as an ice cream man. The sequence might seem familiar to some of you. The first person with the right answer gets 1000 et.com points which can be redeemed at our online store!