Thank you to the person who let me eat their three hot dogs last night at the BBQ. Actually, thanks to Caroline who offered me food left and right like she was my Mom. Happy birthday as well.

I hope this post fixes the fonts on my blog.

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UPDATE: Something about this new Blogger image upload has screwed up the fonts for my blog. I'm too tired to fix it. For now, endure the Times New Roman ugliness.

So I'm determined not to work any more OT for this milestone we're on at work. I think I've worked hard enough to go home at the regular appointed time on Friday. That is, if none of the designers come up with last minute changes to the portion of the game I'm working on. I've been there less than two weeks and already my biggest complaint is people who think of something at the last moment to add. "Oh Erwin, can you make this change for me?" Yeah, I can, but what took you five seconds to think of will take me like an hour or more to code and I won't even know if it'll work.

Well, enough of the work rant. In other news, Canadians still have an unfavourable view of Americans. Big surprise. Next report: sky is blue.

In more obscure news, George Lucas will be the keynote speaker at this year's SIGGRAPH conference. For all those going, I envy you... extra envy if your paper got accepted.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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