I love how Jimmy Kimmel replays the rejection over and over again in front of Seth. I think Seth is a good sport for discussing this on North American television. Vancouver represent!
The builders of my apartment sure spared every expense when chose the shower head in my bathroom. This model is literally the one I have right now. It really sucks. The settings are very minimal and the flow patterns you can make with it defy any beneficial use for the act of showering.
To rectify this, I bought a new showerhead from Wal-Mart the other day. I chose this bad boy. Much like the number of cores in my computer, this thing has dual showerheads, one that is fixed and the other for a handheld. You choose to have either on or both! Both!
Of course when I got it home, I realized I didn't have a wrench to help me take off my existing shower head and to install the new one. This is a clear sign that I'm a first time homeowner (or that I'm just not a handyman) as I don't even own a wrench.
A co-worker is going to lend me his tomorrow. I hope the installation goes well.
So just about an hour before I was going to leave work, a co-worker comes up to me. "Shaun" lives in the same building as I do. He has a two-bedroom with his girlfriend a few floors below me.
Shaun wanted to know if I knew anything about the Internet being out of service this evening until the next morning. Apparently, there was a notice in our building. I said no I had not seen anything like that in the morning when I left. The whole thing seem fishy from the beginning. The "Internet" just doesn't become unavailable. He said his girlfriend just called him to inform him of this.
She didn't say if it was a particular provider that had posted. Around my parts, Internet comes from either Shaw or Telus but she didn't say which one it was. Scheduled outages like that are very, very rare. Not liking this one bit, I called the building manager to get some more info. It turns out he didn't know anything about an outage and his Shaw connection was working fine.
Boy, Shaun wasn't too pleased about this deception. His Sundays and Wednesdays are his designated gaming nights, a negotiation he made with his better half. This was an especially big night since he was participating in a little Battlefield: 1943 match tonight.
Ladies, let me give you some advice. If you've said to your dude he can play games that night, don't tell him his connection to the outside gaming world is unavailable.
Despite being at less than the suggested 100 hours of my plasma break-in period, I'm feeling like I'm going to end this preventative step early. I've totally lost track of how many hours I've already put on the TV but I'm guessing it's around 40-50 hours.
I am getting impatient. In the break-in period, the picture settings really are less than optimal. Also, you only calibrate your TV after the break-in. I also can't play video games (because of static HUDs) nor can I watch movies at aspect ratios of 2.35:1. As you can see, that adds up to whole bunch of suck.
I'm going to finish this week off and starting next week, I'm going to turn up the settings and calibrate the TV. Then it'll be time for Blu-rays and Xbox 360.
In posts of the last previous days I mentioned how was participating in a studio-wide EA Sports Grand Slam Tennis tourney. My partner and I made it through the first round which was an elimination round. On Friday, strangely enough, the second round was a round-robin format consisting of the three remaining teams.
The second round started at the lunch hour and we were lucky enough to get some catered sandwiches to fuel us in the competition. My partner and I were up first and we faced a team also from skate. Our opponents were a dude who sits next to me, Alan, and the most senior producer on our team, Jason (not a guy you want to make mad). It wasn't really close as we beat them three games to one.
Our next challenge came from Need for Speed consisting of some pretty senior guys on the corporate ladder. One of them had even worked on a tennis game previously. It was a long and hard fought battle. We won four games to three with the tie-break going 7-5 in our favour.
Since we went 2-0 in the round robin, we were automatically into the finals. Our opponents would be the victory between both the teams we beat. In the end, the other skate team prevailed, making it all an skate final.
While the previous rounds were played in a small room with a TV and Wii, the finals were held in the largest auditorium on our campus, in front of the entire Black Box studio. We went from playing on a 46" TV to a projected screen that about 20 feet high. When we were called down to play, I was only slightly nervous and was pleased that a select few were cheering for me.
The match did not start well. My partner was broken immediately putting us down a game right away. I knew a quick break was crucial since the set was so short. Unfortunately, they held quite easily. Down 2-0, it was a must win game on my serve. I'm not sure how I did it but I held serve at love (or close to it). Down 2-1, it was another must win game where we had to break them. We didn't even come close.
Even though we had beaten them earlier in the day, we faltered at the worst possible time. For second place, we got $50 gift certificates to Future Shop and a medal that had two tennis racquets and a tennis ball on it. The winners got a $100 gift certificate, the same medal, and this is the part that matters, their names engraved on a large trophy.
I still feel the sting of defeat but am glad we at least made it to the finals. I am for sure going to enter into the next studio-wide gaming tournament because hey, who doesn't love free stuff?
My team at work has been producing these videos for the last few months. The most recent one features one of our Amy-ies. Amy is a project manager, also known as a development director within EA circles. I work in one of areas she mentions in the video. Out of the half-dozen or so development directors we have, all except one is female. A strange twist on the usual gender ratio found in the industry.
