blog.erwintang.com

I changed my cell phone provider this evening because my new one was offering almost the same plan for $12 (plus taxes) cheaper a month. That won’t send me to retirement ahead of schedule or anything but $12 a month is still $12. That’s an extra fast food meal each month or two more apples that I wouldn’t have otherwise.

This is also the first time I’m using a eSIM. Instead of the physical SIM card that you insert into your phone, you just download an eSIM. Because of this, I was able to switch providers immediately, without having to go a store to get an actual card.

I’ve lost track but I think this is the third or fourth time I’ve transferred my phone number to another cell phone provider. Each time it’s been ported over without any issues but I’m not exactly sure if the process has gone smoothly this time. The new provider stated in all their documentation that I should expect to get a text from my old provider, with instructions to confirm that I wanted my number to be ported over. It’s been almost six hours since I started the porting process and I haven’t received any text messages from them. Because I’m not sure where we are in the process, I haven’t removed my old SIM card yet.

It’s quite possible the porting process it’s actually completed though. I received a text message from a friend earlier this evening and my texting app denotes which SIM card the text was received from. It said it came from my new provider. Though a few hours later, I needed to receive a two-factor authentication text, and that message said it was received using my old provider. So who knows.

I don’t want to remove my old SIM card just yet. If it looks like the transfer process is still in limbo tomorrow, I may have to contact customer support.

So sometime in the late summer or early fall my credit score dropped by seventy points. My credit score dropped below 800 for the first time in I don’t know how long, possibly over a decade.

The only thing I could think of that caused this drop is that I forgot to pay one of credit card bills one month. I only use two credit cards and the one I forgot to pay doesn’t have an “auto-pay” feature. So every month, I have a scheduled reminder which tells me to go pay my bill. It’s a bit old school because a lot of bills now have some measure of automation that allows you to draw money of out an account to pay said bill.

Anyways, it’s a bit interesting to see that one missed bill can cause a drop of nearly 100 points. I’m not too concerned because my mortgage doesn’t need renewal anytime soon and I’m not looking to borrow money otherwise either. Also, my credit score is back above 800 now though not to where it was before.

This is a reminder to me to not to screw up my credit score in the time leading up to my mortgage renewal.

The forecast calls for upwards to 20cm of snow to fall between now and tomorrow morning. As I write this, there’s already a healthy layer on snow on the ground already.

Knowing the way the city responds to snow, it’s gonna be a mess out there tomorrow for the morning commute. Some universities and colleges have already preemptively cancelled classes for tomorrow. In the before-times, when I used to have to commute to work, tomorrow undoubtedly would have been a snow-day for sure. Now, tomorrow will be just another normal day of work for me. It might just look a little more like a winter wonderland outside instead.

Of course, not everyone can work from home, and I understand that is a huge privilege to have. For the people who have no other choice to commute, I wish them well. It will be a long day for them.

The air outside hasn’t been above freezing since last Thursday. In fact, it got as low as -13 Centigrade in the last few days. It’s been bitterly cold for this usually mild and balmy city.

As temperatures have dropped, so has the moisture content in the air. The water in the air has dried up and it’s been doing a number on my skin. I had to get my humidifier out and it’s been struggling to get the relative humidity up to just 25%. It just can’t pump enough water into the air before it gets replaced by more dry air or it gets dried out by the heater.

I don’t know how people in the Prairies handle this type of weather. Does everyone just live with dry and itchy skin all winter? Do they have industrial humidifiers in everyone room. It’s just madness. I’ve been applying moisturizer all over my body for the last few days.

The cold snap is supposed to end later this week when temperatures will rise well above freezing again. I can’t wait. Cold air sucks.

Over the holidays, I got deep into one of those YouTube rabbit holes and got lost in the world of what I call “recap YouTube”. There are these channels on YouTube that essentially summarize a movie or TV series in ten to twenty minutes. All these recap videos feature footage from the movie or TV show and there is always narration, which explains the plot and the characters. Some of the channels use text-to-speech, so you’re never sure who really is behind the channel. Other channels use a real human voice and their narration is sprinkled in with commentary, like when a character does something dumb.

I kinda got addicted to watching these, especially for movies or shows I never had the intention of watching. Some of the recaps are from foreign shows and movies that would never even know existed nor would I even know where to get access to them. Instead, I discovered them through these recap channels.

I’ve watched a lot of horror recap vids because I’m not a huge fan of horror but I can easily spend ten minutes and know exactly what happens in a horror movie, without having to devote an hour and a half to two hours of jump scares. It’s great!

There is a potential downside to all these recap videos however. Sometimes I’ll get to the end of the video and think, “that was great, I kinda wish I’d just watched the whole thing”. Now there’s nothing to stop me from doing that but I already know what’s gonna happen, so unless it’s a masterpiece of entertainment, one could view it as a waste of time.

I also have a feeling these types of videos are perhaps an indication of the times we currently live in. Attention spans are shorter now. Social media videos need to be short to get traction and no one has time or the focus to take in information in a long form.

As an experiment, I’ve watched a few recap videos of movies I’ve seen from start to finish, just to see what gets cut out of the plot summary narration and what stays in. Now obviously it’s subjective and boils down to the skill of the person who wrote the narration but for the most part, these videos hit all the necessary major plot points. They also show the most interesting parts of the most important scenes as well. I should also mention that nearly all these videos do not include audio from the show or movie. The narration audio is backed by generic music, so you won’t hear any dialogue or music from the movie. I’m actually surprised these videos don’t get copyright striked on YouTube but they must fall under some fair use policy… or maybe they don’t.

Anyways, the video above is a recap of season one of Outer Range. Don’t watch it unless you want to be spoiled.

This has been an amazingly mild and warm winter, even by Vancouver standards. As the temperatures have been well above freezing, the air is able to hold a lot more moisture and thus the humidity has been relatively high for winter.

Normally, I have to bust out the humidifier sometime in late November or early December. The dry air just wrecks my skin. Because of the lack of a deep freeze, my humidifier has stayed in storage. My skin is doing great, at least for winter.

Of course, things might change later this week, when temperatures are supposed to drop below freezing and we might have the first snow of this winter. I really do not want it to snow.

I received letter mail today which informed me that my personal information was accessed through a security breach in MGM Resorts’ computer systems. This happened in September but I was only made aware of it today. I realize it made the news when it was originally reported but I can’t monitor the news to look for breaches for every single system that my personal information is located on. It’s also quite possible I read the headline and dismissed it because MGM was also hacked as recently as 2019 and just thought it was the same hack. It’s amazing you now have to keep track of which MGM hack you’re talking about now.

Perhaps the only silver lining in any of this is that my personal info that was stolen in 2019 is exactly the same that was taken just a few months ago. My e-mail address, address, and phone number were already out here, so no one learned anything new from this latest hack.

In hindsight, I should have deleted my MGM Resorts account in 2019, after learning about that breach. I have no reason to have such an account anyways. It’s been many years since I last stayed at an MGM property and you don’t need an account with them to book a room anyways.

In any case, I started the process of deleting my account with them today. I understand my info is already out there but I have a strong suspicion that MGM will likely get hacked again and the next time, my info won’t be there. I’m doing the hackers a favour as now there will slightly less data to download off their servers.

When you’re an adult, sometimes you gotta do adult things, which are often not very fun things. One of these things is paying your mortgage. Now, I do that every two weeks like my mortgage company wants me to but sometimes, when you’re lucky enough to have some extra money lying around, you can pay down your mortgage even more.

Now I consider myself quite lucky, because I’m still gainfully employed and given what’s happened to the games industry in the last year or so, I am indeed quite lucky to be where I am. I’m also fortunate to have some extra cash lying around. The interest rates are at the highest they’ve been since I had the privilege of having a mortgage. My current interest rate for my mortgage is 6.5% and that is high for me. It used to be that my savings accounts would accrue interest at a rate higher than what my mortgage would. It just made sense to just park my money in my bank account than pay down my mortgage. That hasn’t been the case for a while now.

I probably should have done this a while ago but I’m gonna put a decent chunk of change into paying down my mortgage in a lump sum payment. I think I’ve done this twice before. It’s been years since I made my last lump sum payment. Anyways, according to the mortgage calculator, once I make this payment, it’ll knock off two years from my payment schedule. I’ll be mortgage-free two years sooner, assuming nothing changes, but of course things will change.

If interest rates remain high like this, it makes more sense to me to make more lump sum payments more frequently. I’m quite close to getting my mortgage down to five-figures now and that’ll be quite the milestone.

Anyways, that money I’m gonna use for the payment could be used for so many other, more fun things but being an adult sometimes means you gotta put away the fun.

I had the last two weeks off since I took an extra week from my vacation days and added that onto the company supplied week off. My plan was to do a combination of productive and lazy days and that’s exactly what I did.

On some days, I did adult things like clean my apartment, put stuff in storage, and fight the ants. On other days, I slept in until noon, ate food, and played video games well into the early morning. I got lots of sleep and there were days I wanted to get up early but my body just told me to keep sleeping until noon.

I also saw my parents and my niece quite a bit over the last two weeks which is so precious and special to me. My niece is three years-old now and I think she is finally understanding the concept of what an uncle is. The last two times I saw my niece, I helped her play with Play-Doh, which is her current focus in terms of play and toys.

I also tried making chicken piccata again. This is my favourite thing to order from Cheesecake Factory. A few years ago, I tried making this at home and I did not come very close to replicating it. It was terrible to be honest. This time around, I used a new recipe and it led to a huge improvement. It’s still not close to how Cheesecake Factory makes it but I got a lot closer. It’s easy to make and compared to some meal kit dinners, it’s much less complicated and takes less time. I’ll continue to refine my technique.

Alas, the break is now over and tomorrow is the first day back at work for the new year. Part of me regrets not taking another week off after the break, as some of my co-workers have done. My hope is that the first week back will be fairly low-key and low-stress as people like me who are returning are trying to shake off the cobwebs and some won’t be back yet. I can’t say I’m expecting myself to be too productive this week and I’m glad it’s a short week anyways.

The war with the ants continues. I had to apply more sealant a few days ago but this time around, I went and purchased “tooling”. It’s essentially just a few pieces of soft plastic that you press and drag along the bead. The plastic is cut into the shape of the bead you want. It can be an angled straight bead or a curved one. Here’s an example of the tooling I’m talking about. The tool scrapes up any extra sealant and pushes sealant into the gap or joint as well. The key is to use just enough material to make a proper sized bead but not too much though, because you just wind up scraping it off and wasting it.

The picture above should show you what a difference having the proper tool makes. The picture on the left is just the bead I did by hand, using no tooling. It just looks messy. The picture on the right almost looks like I didn’t even use any sealant at all. The angle and lighting made it difficult to show but there’s a straight and thin line of sealant along the moulding. It looks much more professional.

The right thing to do is to eventually remove all the badly applied sealant and then redo it with proper tooling. For now though, it’s not the plan, because despite my best efforts, the ants continue to find new ways in.

As I feared, it’s just a never-ending back and forth now.