blog.erwintang.com

I worked my third day of OT today. Dinner tonight was Swiss Chalet. I showed my newbie status with my order. At EA, we were limited to meals totalling to $10 or less. I guess I still had that in mind, since I only ordered a quarter chicken dinner with fries. When the food arrived, I saw everyone had ordered at least half a chicken and some people even got an extra side on top of that. People were looking at me and wondering if I was on a diet or something. I gotta remember I’m not at EA now and I’ve been given a little more leeway on things.

For lunch, even though I just planned on grabbing some Quiznos to go, I went out with some of the boys to Connie’s Cook House on W. 4th Ave. It’s a great place to get some cheap, but good Chinese food. They have this awesome $5.95 lunch special where you get soup and an entree. I chose wonton soup and a huge plate of chicken chow mein. I’m looking forward to returning to try out some of their other items.

Geez, this post is all about food. Well, at least if I have to stay late at work, I get dinner paid for.

In other news, my favourite reality TV show, Beauty and the Geek was renewed for a second season. There will be even more episodes next season. For those who can’t be bothered to download the episodes from the Internet, the show is now on CTV on your local cable dial. They showed the premiere last week, but you can catch the second episode this Friday.

Ok, I’m exhausted, more tomorrow.

Doesn’t the kid above look like the real life Eric Cartman? Anyways…

I worked my second day of OT at work today. It feels a lot like my days at EA. Around 6:30pm someone came around to ask me what I wanted for dinner. Yesterday it was pizza. Today it was Indian food, butter chicken specifically. It’s nice of the company to spring for dinner if you have to work late. I can tell OT is somewhat a common occurence, they have a binder which is full of menus from local restaurants.

I’m not expecting to work OT next week. Things should be back to normal by then. Everyone is trying to meet a milestone next Monday. Because of all the extra time I’ve been putting in, I’m pretty confident I’ll be able to finish what I’m responsible for by Monday. The only question now is how polished it’ll be.

I’ve noticed that the office is divided into two distinctive areas. My team is on one side and the other teams are on the other. Sometimes, people cross the great divide to visit, but it rarely happens. I never visit because I don’t know anyone over there. It’ll be a while before I meet everyone in the company.

Though I’m trying to be frugal, I’m slowly exploring the lunch options around the office. So far, I’ve been to two Thai places, a cafe that serves lunch all day (I had the bacon hash today), Sushi Aoki, and Quiznos. There’s still lots of places left to try out. I’m mustering the courage to go eat at the Church’s Fried Chicken near the office.

A combination of an 11 hour workday and my server being down prevented me from posting late night. All is well now and I have just returned from lunch where I had breakfast.

More later if I don’t work late tonight, which I might.

I had the longest day on Friday. After working a full day, I rushed home to UBC around 7pm. The boys wanted to have some din-din and then go see Batman Begins. I went straight to SJC where we all piled into T-Bone’s car and made our way to Sushi Aoki for dinner. Had I known we were going there, I would have just stayed at work. Oh well.

After dinner, we had time to kill, so we headed over to Future Shop. Who did we run into? It was Bryan and Sarah. We invited them to join us for the movie. While Bryan was totally for it, it took Sarah some convincing, but she eventually agreed. At this point, we had to split the group up temporarily. S&B had to drop some stuff off at their place, so T-Bone, S&B, and myself went in the car. Joel and Adam graciously took the bus downtown ahead of us.

It all worked out in the end, as everyone re-assembled at the Paramount downtown. It was my first visit to the supposedly flagship Famous Players theatre for Vancouver. While it was nice, it did not overwhelm. The movie itself was much better. I would say it’s the best Batman movie of the bunch. Christian Bale did a fine job portraying the pointy-eared crusader.

On Saturday evening, I attended Kirsten and Tim’s birthday party. They are two friends of mine that I met in undergrad. Their marriage remains a model of what I can only hope for if and when I get married myself. Anyways, they rented out the back room of a Greek restaurant along W. Broadway. The food was really good. Kirsten and Tim know how to throw a party and were the consumate hosts. There were a lot of people from my undergrad days there. Some of these people I hadn’t seen in many years. Maybe it’s because I’ve changed since those times, but a few people really got on my nerves. Actually, maybe it was only one guy, but I tend to think my asshole detector is pretty spot on. Bub, if you’re reading this, I don’t see you as the chairman of the board of any Fortune 500 companies right now, so you can go choke on a pretzel and get brain damage.

Well, on that happy note, it’s getting late so I’m off to bed.

After surviving my first week of work, I decided it was time to decorate my work area. If you’ve ever had the chance to look inside the offices of a game development company, it’s likely you’ll see all manner of toys and playthings around people’s desks. It’s very much a different office environment compared to the suit and tie days of old. There’s no formal dress code and people are encouraged to be creative.

Today, I found myself near Toys ‘R Us and decided to pop in to take a look. For a long time now, I’ve had my eye on the Star Wars Unleashed series of figures. In particular, check out the Darth Maul one.

They didn’t have many of the figures, but they did have one that I liked, the Obi-Wan Kenobi figure from the 2003 set. I think he’ll look great on my desk.

At 4:35pm today, I was on a #17 bus heading west. As the bus crossed the intersection at W. Broadway at Fir, I saw Greg Williams. He was in the process of either locking or unlocking his Dodge Charger. I wonder if he was getting a late lunch?

Despite all my research on-line, I’ve come to realization that I have no idea how to bus a monthly bus pass. Yeah, I know I can go to like London Drugs or Safeway to get one, but beyond that the details are a mystery to me.

I’ve heard that you have to buy a bus pass at the beginning of a month because you just can’t get a pass that’s valid for only 30 days. They’re valid from the 1st of the month on and if you buy it like 6 days into a month, that’s 6 days of transit you’ve wasted. Am I right people? Then again, I think I’ve also heard that you have a chance to buy a bus pass half way into the month, so you don’t have to wait the whole month before getting in on the deal. Does this make any sense?

Anyways, Jon Stewart is almost on. Please, if you know anything about this bus pass stuff, try to comment here (if it works).

First, I’d like to apologize for the comments being down for the last few days. It’s a situation that’s out of my control. There is nothing I can do to fix it on my end.

I’m pretty sure someone at work will probably stumble upon my web site sooner or later. In fact, it would surprise me if someone hasn’t seen it already. If I were an HR person, I’d Google all potential hires just for the hell of it. Not a lot of people at work know me too well just yet, so perhaps I can fly underneath the radar for a while yet.

Today, I was asked for instant messaging info at work. IM is a legitimate business productivity tool. It can help with the instant flow of information at a busy office. Since I only have one IM account, I gave out the info for that one. Then I realized I had just mixed my personal IM contacts with now my work ones. I hope it won’t be a big problem, but now work contacts will be able to see when I sign on at home. I wonder if they’ll ask me work related questions when I’m away from the office.

Anyways, I need some rest. Have a good one.

So this morning, I leave for the bus loop with plenty of time on my side. I’m so early in fact that I have time to speak to Sarah K when I run into her as she’s making her way to her work. When I arrive at the bus loop, I look at my watch. I have a good five minutes before my bus is scheduled to leave.

Strangely though, I see a #17 bus pull away from the curb and drive away. I’m thinking, that can’t be my bus. I know buses can be known for inaccurate timing, but come on, five minutes is a major chunk of time, especially when this is the originating point of departure.

As it takes off, I take a look at the schedule to see if maybe this was the earlier bus. Hmmm… that bus was supposed to take off seven minutes ago. I see no other #17 in sight. I get the feeling the idiot driver did indeed take off early.

I decide to walk over to the #4 stop to when it leaves. The #4 gets me close to my workplace, but I have walk a little further. As I’m examining the schedule, a #4 pulls up and people start to leave the bus. Among the passengers are these four hot sorority girls with their luggage. How do I know they were sorority girls? Because when they got off the bus, they asked someone if they knew where the sorority houses were. Well ok, they might have been just visiting or staying at the sorority houses, but the cliche makes my story more interesting.

I wound up taking the #4 and was only late by like two minutes.

I survived my first day of work as a software engineer. Other than missing my bus on the way home from work, the day went quite well actually.

I arrived at work at 10am just like I was instructed to. The receptionist introduced herself to me and I was immediately handed off to the head IT person for an “IT overview”. This consisted of sitting down at my computer, logging in, and her showing me the various network drives and what they were for. I was also told about virus scanning procedures. Here’s a little bit of trivia, my computer used to belong to a recently departed employee of the company. She had been on the job for only two weeks and then accepted another job offer.

I was also told that I won’t have access to my company e-mail account for at least several days. Apparently the guy in charge of setting up accounts is away on a family matter and won’t be back anytime soon. Until then, I’ll have to be updated on project details by word of mouth.

After the computer stuff, I was handed back to the receptionist who brought me into the boardroom. I was given a whole stack of papers. There were several forms to fill out having to do with taxes, benefits, and non-disclosure agreements. One of the forms was this “get-to-know-you” type of deal where my answers would be sent out to the company, along with my picture. Of course, without an e-mail address, I never did get that e-mail today.

I was also given a company t-shirt, in my size no less. I think this speaks volumes about a company when they have t-shirts in many sizes and not just XL.

I then was given a tour of the place. I was shown where the printers and scanners were located. I was told that groceries are delivered every Tuesday and that the food is available for anyone in the company, this includes things like pop. Free munchies!

The security and access procedures were also described to me. Arriving early in the morning and leaving late can be problematic because of the various alarms you can set off. Things will be made a little bit easier next week when some of the areas will be transferred over to keycard access.

After the tour, I returned to my desk where I did some customizing of my computer. I checked out what was underneath the hood of my computer. It’s pretty decent, it’s fast and has a ton of RAM. I then started to read the design doc for the game I’m working on. For a game, the design doc is the most definitive source of information. It describes the game in great detail from game play mechanics, to characters, and conceptual artwork. This design doc was a huge Word document, well in excess of 200 pages.

I was only several pages in when the producer for our game came over to invite me to lunch. Two other guys joined us. One of them seemed familiar and it turned out we had both worked at EA before. I had a good lunch with the boys and the producer picked up the tab. What a nice gesture!

After lunch, I continued to read over the design doc, skipping pages whenever I could. As my eyes were just about to glaze over, the lead programmer for our project came over to see how I was doing. He also showed me the game in its current state. He went over various gameplay features and explained the stuff that still had to be done. I was also told that I hadn’t looked at the technical design doc which another huge file. There are a lot of dev tools that still need to be installed on my machine before I can start being productive, but that will happen tomorrow.

For the rest of the day I just read more of the design doc and managed to finish it before quitting time.

From just the first day, I got the impression that it’s a pretty cool place to be working at. The people are really nice and I’m being slowly eased into my job, which I appreciate. My body, however, is still getting used to waking up early. I am tired.

Well, I better finish here and get some rest.