Cookies, Subway and Sadness

This blog ran a little late in being posted... see the Aug 11th entry as to why. No pictures either, but they ARE on the way. I'll let you know. :-) 300 page-views since I started the counter back in January.. amazing!

Aug 11 - Cookies and Stress

Today was a five-cookie day. Nearly ten hours of continuous stress….yeesh! We rolled out an update of one of our major products today, Victoria being the test-market for the rest of the country. Can you say ‘fiasco’ with me? Repeat ad nauseum… it was horrible. Bugs in the program meant that my first customer, who had the patience of a saint, spent 45 minutes in the lobby while I tried desperately to get the product working. It finally did, after a band-aid solution was found to work around the issues. It was like that all day long, and I finished the ten-hour-long day with my teeth gritted in a solid mass. Doesn’t do much for headaches, that – I try not to grind them, which is foolish.

I’ve noticed that stress hits me differently these days. In years past, I would wind up a bad day by ending with incredibly tense neck and shoulder muscles, to which I quickly applied a fantastic Homedics back massager ( looks like E.T. ) – made a world of difference, and I still have it for the occasional use. Now, stress tends to add up over a few days, where I will have a day where its just a struggle to get some energy and focus on things, even relaxing. Different from the end-of-a-single-day stress, and more difficult to deal with, as I don’t get anything done at the end of one of those days – staying focused at work takes it all.

Aug 12 – Reboot Revival / Zeroes2Heroes

One of my favourite shows from the 90’s is Reboot, the first computer-animated television show. It ran for three seasons, as well as having two two-hour movies, which were actually the fourth season cut down a bit when the series was nipped short. Recently, I have discovered that a ‘ReBoot Revival’ is underway. This makes me happy, as I very much enjoyed the series for its characters and its story; the third season was a non-stop thrill ride with an ending that did not disappoint at all. No ‘kiddy show’ by then, I tell you! Too bad the DVD’s are incredibly difficult to get, which I find odd.

A movie pitch was made for a ReBoot idea, on a website called Zeroes2Heroes where anyone can put up their creative ideas… with the possibility that they will be picked up and produced, in some form or another, by a major entertainment company! What I find fascinating is that anyone at all can submit their ideas or art, and the community of registered users will vote on it… to the point where it may be developed! Sure beats the heck out of trying to find an agent and getting them to add your manuscript to the massive piles of slush that are an editors cross to bear daily. Nobody likes slush piles.

Aug 13 - Subway

Work is going to be interesting in the next month, and not in a good way. With the departure of one of my co-workers earlier in the month, and the news that my other co-worker is leaving, I will be the ONLY staff member at my branch – not good. My DM has already asked me if I was willing to cut short my vacation and start working almost as soon as I return from Niagara – since this is the sort of thing that usually happens when I take vacations, I agreed, as it’s either that or close the branch for the rest of the week… seems it IS hard to get good help in a lot of sectors these days, as it’s a buyer’s market. Too many people are staying only for a few months, then hopping to ‘better’ jobs – which is good, as it indicates a strong economy, but bad for employee retention. Yep.

While having a chai tea with my neighbour over at the Cook St. Starbuck’s, I noticed something new going in just down the road: a Subway. Amazing, as that was the only thing that my neighbourhood did not already have – kind of freaky actually, like wishing for a new toy and finding it some months later by the side of the road. Well, not exactly like that, but you get the idea. Made me wonder how careful I should be about wishing for a movie theater down this end of the city… don’t want to wipe out a block of homes! A library might be nice though, as the nearest one is downtown, where I don't usually go. Too much to ask for with all the other conveniences around here, so I'll stick with my own massive book collection.

Aug 14 - Sadness at a Distance

I found out that a friend’s father passed away today, and that he had been sick for some time… damned hard news to take, especially from this far away. Coming from a large Italian family, I can remember much of my youth was spent going to funerals( or weddings )so my feelings are still quite strong on BEING there for people...

Distance and friends are always hard to juggle. Though the internet makes it easy to communicate, it can’t help when you need to BE there for someone – phone calls just aren’t the same, it’s just a voice on the line and not a shoulder to lean on.

I wonder, in this coming age of rising fuel costs, if travel will become a barrier again. I recently wrote an article for Cyberwalker about webcams and videophones, the latter being something we STILL can’t buy down at the local FutureShop as easily as we would a regular phone. You think that someone would come up with a simple, reasonably-priced unit that uses compatible standards so ANY videophone would work with any other manufacturer’s unit… but no. To date, it’s still webcams and fond wishes, which annoys the heck out of me – I had those back in the 90’s, and they’re only marginally better for the non-techie to set up and use, despite a decade of ‘progress’. At least theyr’e cheaper, and no longer suffer ‘pixel burn’ from bright light sources like sun on snow through a window… I learned THAT one the hard way during a call to Mexico one day.

Aug 15 - Writing practice and Civ

In writing this blog, I have been getting in some good practice with my word-skills, and just recently realized than on average I am writing about ten thousand words a month just for this blog alone – surprised the heck outta me, that did. It is also rather difficult to keep this blog flowing along, in terms of never retreading the same topic as well as not just creating a boring play-by-play daily journal on washing socks. No, I try to put in something different, something amusing, every week – my thoughts on various subjects, my observations about Victoria and even the occasional profound thought as it scampers pell-mell through my mind.

I played Civ:Rev for far too long this evening, trying to win the game in specific ways yet being frustrated as usual by random chance that set my plans askew. I have also noticed that the game is not as polished technically as I would have liked for a console game. Graphical glitches, slowdowns, slow access to some features and odd sound-level variances all make me wince on occasion; I hope that Firaxis Games is hard at work on a patch to smooth things out. While the glitches do not interfere with gameplay, they are annoying.

Aug 16 - Overtime and Bad Gameplay

I worked an overtime shift today at another branch, to help out. It always amuses me to work somewhere else, as the regular customers usually ask “Oh, are you new?” to which I always reply “Why, yes!” just to see what they will do. Some of the slightly sneaky ones will try to convince me that they are ‘allowed’ to do something that tries to get around our work policies… which again amuses me, as I let them go on for a bit before snapping them back to the reality of how things really work. It never fails to amaze me how people will try something with a ‘new’ person that would never do with a ‘regular’ staff member. But I guarantee they’ll never try it again when they see me next.

Surprisingly, I had a bad experience on NWN tonight, though in hindsight the stress of work this week perhaps provided a tipping point for my frustrations. Given the unstructured nature of a NWN-run gameworld, every DM running ‘quests’ is there on their own time, volunteering to run people around and tell their own story in the overall framework of things. As an aside, this usually works, but give the ‘catch-as-can’ nature of unscheduled events, some nights there aren’t a lot of people around, and other nights you can miss out on an amazing experience by but a few hours if you are unlucky – annoying, that is.

Well, in a nutshell( before your eyes glaze over )a few friends and I were out to do what seemed to be a simple rescue… but turned out to be a Mexican Standoff. I grew very frustrated at the seeming lack of options, and when the NPC ‘hostage’ was lost, despite our frantic efforts, I grew very angry – the first time that has happened to me in an online game. I quickly cooled down, but this clarified the problem that a lot of online games have compared to well-crafted single-player games: good gameplay structure with MULTIPLE means of problem resolution, most of which are NOT too difficult to distinguish – it should be hard to MAKE the choice itself, not to just SEE it initially. In any case, I logged off after chatting with both the DM and other players, to ensure this sort of thing did not reoccur and so frustrate people who would be less better able to deal.

Aug 17 - Heard the Thunder

I felt a little better about working the weekend through( again today )as the weather was nowhere near as sunny as promised earlier in the week – go figure. Again, the rain here doesn’t last, similar in some ways to rain in Florida: it rains for a few minutes and moves on, though the sky may be cloudy for most of the day. A week of get skies and rain is unheard of here, just like thunder or lightning; some people here have never SEEN lightning before, if they grew up in Victoria.

Amazing, to think that something so common in Ontario is a rare wonder here. Good thing too, as it’s damned dangerous… and that so many fools take so little note of that. I’ll never forget a violent thunderstorm that hit Niagara some years back, while I was staying at the Prince. The winds blew the rain horizontally so hard that it penetrated into the building( since sealed )and managed to cause my bedroom ceiling to partially collapse – we ended up having to move for three months while the unit was repaired, including new carpets. No, what got me was DURING that storm, a family of crazy fools was IN the pool, with lightning strikes flickering in the sky all around. They huddled for shelter, all of them still IN THE WATER and UNDER an overhanging tree as the wind and rain whipped all around. I remember shouting out the window for them to get out of the water, but the noise of the thunder and rain was too much. Incredibly lucky they were, as lucky as they were stupid! Dumbest thing I’ve seen in a long, long time, I tell you... and I work with the public.

At least I do not have an early morning tomorrow; we’ve scaled back our hours on Mondays and Tuesdays, so( for now )it’s guaranteed that I can sleep in, even to 9am, on a Monday – how many jobs can you say that for? Mind you, there’s a lot of other things that balance that out about the job, but since I rate sleep rather highly( never getting enough of it )then anything that increases sleep time is good in my books. Reminds me of someone I worked with, a long time ago: a figure skater, who told me that due to the incredible demands that that sport puts on a person, she needed to sleep at least eight to TEN hours a night before practice or performances – incredible, since I feel logy if I get more than eight hours… or less than six, which shows there’s a balance needed too.

Another week blogged and logged, and that makes TWO weeks without comments... has Anonymous given up? Or is he plotting some fiendish comment campaign the likes of which this blog has never seen before? Tune in next week for another exciting episode...

UPDATE: we have a NEW commentator... a holy figure, no less! Welcome to Comment Christ. We'll find out if he's just cross, or if he can really nail those comments in coming weeks... and thanks Jen - glad you keep coming back for more! Surprising, but welcome!!!

Singing, Shock and Sweat

I am still working on those pictures. There's literally thousands of them that I am going through, so what I am doing is going through this Blog week by week and picking out images that go with each entry. I wanted to do that in the first place, but it was hellish trying to get images properly attached / hosted when I started this blog. Again, I hope to have it done before my trip to Niagara!

Aug 4 – B.C. Day

After work, I headed home for a quick supper and then cycled down to the Inner Harbour area to catch the festivities. The weather was simply perfect: clear skies and balmy temperatures that did not start to feel the least bit chilly until well after 10pm. Part of BC 150 Years, this article gives a great summary of the event.

When I arrived, the crowds were dense but not heavy, with quite a few people content to sit much further back from the massive stage set up in front of the Parliament Buildings. Hundreds were spread over the vast lawn of the Fairmont Empress Hotel. Famous local son Burton Cummings was playing when I made my way to the corner of Government and Belleville St, which was close enough. The crowds were much heavier just the opposite side of the street, covering the lawn completely. Where I was, I could see the stage as well as the two huge screens on opposite sides. I even had a tall guy to my right, who neatly blocked the blinding rays of the setting sun – perfect, in fact.

Burton Cummings was a blast of energy, singing his heart out along with his band. I was sorry I had not got there sooner, as they left the stage not even a half hour after I arrived.

Sarah McLaughlin was next. I was interested to see her, as I'd been first introduced to her music back in my days working at The Brock Press. My editor at the time, Nick, was a HUGE fan of hers. So much so, that he was on a first-name basis with the staff at her record label – he would call them up weekly to see if there was anything new happening with her, which I found amusing. I should also mention that the last Sarah McLaughlin concert I attended was back at the Molson Amphitheatre, when she first returned from hiatus after having a child( I believe ). That was a great show, but I ended up not enjoying myself after the halfway point. I had gone up to the 'cheap seats' rail that separated the grassy seating fringe from the 'paying customer' seating to take some pictures, with my lowly 3-megapixel Olympus C3000 digital camera( but DAMN could it take good low light pictures! ). Amazingly, there are still reviews online of the camera. I barely got two pictures before security dove on me, lectured me about not 'filming' ( ?? )and took away my camera for the rest of the concert. Needless to say, I was NOT impressed.

But back to the concert. Sarah put on a lovely performance, her songs as always making the crowd smile. I noticed 'Aida' seemed to be the most popular, with a lot of the crowd singing along. It was a mixed lot too, with a lot of families and older folk present; officials put it at around 45,000 people all told. Suffice to say it was a relaxed, happy and well-behaved group of people out to enjoy a perfect summer evening with a free show.

Fiest was on after Sarah, with an intermission by a local singer named Shawn Hlookoff. He was energetic, but you could tell by the absent-minded chatter of the crowd that they were really waiting for Feist. There was a small group at the front who would occasionally chant her name during the setup after Shawn, and the roar that went up when the lights came on( low of course )was almost as big as for Sarah's low-key entrance.

And an interesting entrance it was. Fiest had set up a 'silhouette screen' and started off the show singing with her backlit silhouette on that very screen, a theme that continued throughout the show. I did not know any of the songs, but BOY could you hear her – they must have amped the bass ten times over the other performers, as very asphalt was vibrating enough to rattle the gravel. Loud, I guess, is another way to put it – glad I wasn't any closer. Too bad I had to leave before she got to the one song I did know, the Apple iPod commercial-famous "One, Two, Three, Four…" I really wanted to stay for that, but I was just too tired at that point, so off I went home in the gathering chill – I'd not brought a jacket( again )and forgotten how quickly things cooled down here at night. MUCH different than Niagara, where the hot summer nights can make sleeping a chore.

Aug 5 - Weather to Sleep

I almost got to sleep in today… until the garbage truck came at 7am. Very similar to how the landscaping guys used to show up around 7:30 am at The Prince every Tuesday to start mowing the lawn – great timing when you're tired from the night before. Not that I managed to get much done before work, mind you, but that's not the point.

The weather has done a total reversal during the weekend – it's back to sunny skies and balmy temperatures. Only a few clouds forecast for later in the week, so it's back to chilly mornings, sweaty lunchtimes and cool evenings again. Again, hard to get used to needing to bring a jacket, or wear 'layers' of clothes as the locals put it. Makes sense, but I'm so used to sandals, shorts and a t-shirt for summer weather, day and night. At least the need to shower more than twice a day is alleviated somewhat here due to the lack of humidity. Heck, the glaciers on Mt. Olympus to the south see to natural A/C for the city! No sightings of Zeus or other gods though; they must be laying low in the heat.

Aug 6 – Surprise Work Problems

Well, a shocker today: my co-worker was let go from the company. While I cannot go into why it happened, the reasons were a surprise to everyone. It is especially hard when working at a small branch like ours, when there ARE only the two of us there. It's stunning when someone you work with every day, who you have great respect for their abilities and like as a person, is suddenly gone for reasons that come as a hammerblow to the now-revealed-as-fragile-glass gestalt image you had created of them. In the business I am in, one learns to read people very well… but that still cannot ferret out well-kept secrets, and will never restore the blow that you take to your sense of trust. Damn, it sucks. So now our trainee is back, who ironically has the SAME name as my newly-departed coworker( yes, it was very confusing when they were both there at the same time ). Fortunately, we get along great, and we'll both move along from this incident as best we can… a little wiser, and a lot more conscious of how fragile a thing our jobs can really be.

Aug 7 – Looking for Group

I stumbled across a GREAT webcomic, called Looking for Group. It's based off WoW, but not overtly so. The art style is colourful, the writing is decent… and it has a GREAT character or two in there as well( see if you can tell which one I like ). Reminds me of another great comic I've not had the time to read in many years: Thieves and Kings, whose creator was a friend of a friend from quite long ago. Though why the site is in Australia beats me - last I heard, the creator was in Toronto. Hmmm.

On a related stress note, I've been cutting back on a lot of foods lately. Not buying cookies, chips and other snacks has made a difference in my food cravings, though the balance has not yet swung the other way to the point where fresh fruit and veggies fill the fridge. Yet. The one indulgence I still permit is something I discovered at the local Thrifty's I pass twice a workday: the Kilo Bag of Chocolate Chip Cookies.

Measuring daily stress levels by the numbers of cookies consumed has proven both amusing and tasty, so it's something I will continue for a while. Inexpensive yet delicious, the fresh-baked K.B.C-3 is something to look forward too, trivial though a cookie may be in the grand scheme of things. In terms of stress measurement though, the average day at work is about a two-cookie day in the end, with perhaps a half-cookie thrown in for good behaviour or a witty retort. A full cookie if they actually get said retort.

Aug 8 - Where the heck AM I?

I may have posted this already some time ago, but I like it and feel like sharing it again, as people keep adding to it – what's not to like about something continually updated? The 117 Things to Do in Victoria List is chock-full of Goodness for the South-Vancouver Island dweller to dig into. Speaking of which, a little geography for you folks, to clear up something that often confuses people who aren't familiar with exactly where Victoria is. The city is located on South Vancouver Island, which can be confusing as it's over 100 km SOUTH of the city of Vancouver… which is on the mainland well to the north-northeast. Most of Vancouver Island is reserved as forest parkland, with communities mainly situated on the south-east shores, radiating from Victoria north to Sidney. This website in particular has some great info, including interactive travel guides.

Aug 9 - Rain at last

Saturday mornings without cable – has it comes to this? The foundations of my world have become shaky and cracked… no Spiderman, no Robotech – what am I to to?

Oh, right. Work. That's it. How could I forget? I mean, when you take away the PC games, Xbox360, PS2, TurboGrafx, the DVD collection( movies, TV shows, recorded TV episodes ), the several thousand books, the TV available on the internet and those old Choose-Your-Own-Adventure stories… there's practically nothing to do here. *grin*

So aside from writing up a few more articles for Cyberwalker.com, finishing up a few story outlines and digging into a few old stories, there's still a lot to do around here. It actually rained for most of the morning and early afternoon here, which was fine by me as I had a lot of laundry to do. Seemed like the perfect time for it too, as everyone else in the building was apparently out doing their Weekend Thing. As I mentioned earlier in this blog, Victoria is FULL of things to do and it seems that especially during the Summer months, there just aren't enough hours even with the longer days.

Aug 10 - Damn, I'm hot!

My apartment gets rather warm with the PC or the Xbox running for any period of time, but as I have mentioned before, the %##@! smokers out the front of the building manage to pollute the air every couple of hours – it seems even more than that, of late. Kudos for not smoking IN their units, but it pisses me off NO END that I have to run to the window to slam it shut when I sniff the foul stench of their killing clouds drifting my way. Even reversing the flow of air does not help; the prevailing wind blows from the southwest, and going against that means I get no cool air – so I either swelter with little airflow, or I have to do a yo-yo act to constantly close the window, wait, then open it again and see if the air is clear so I can get some cool air again. Damn all smokers and their addictions( present friends and family members excluded ).

I played COD4 for a few hours until 5pm, and as usual it was a varied performance. Since my final game of the day was 0 kills / 18 deaths, I took that as a sign to quit before it got worse… as if that were possible? At least I am managing to keep up with my friends, most games - nothing is worse than being the team anklebiter or headshot dummy.

Amazingly, last week's blog was the first one since March that had no comments posted for it. Seems to support my theory that this is the busiest time of summer, when people are packing all they can into the fading daylight hours of warmth.