Sofa King Good!

We finally did it - we found a sofa. And a loveseat. And an ottoman. It was at a modern furniture store called EQ3, and because we got to pick our own fabrics, the items won’t actually be ready for us for about six weeks. However, we managed to buy it all during a promotion where we saved 15%, plus another 10% off for signing up for a store credit card. Woo hoo! I’m not going to actually tell you how much it all came to, but I’m excited to have our own choice of furniture coming soon. Plus it’ll mean actual seating availability for guests, if we ever have some. Here’s a photo culled from EQ3’s website of our sofa, though not in the colour we chose.

On Friday night we recruited some friends to join us for the opening night of the Vancouver International Burlesque Festival. We promised our friends some good entertainment and naturally, that wasn’t the case. The VIBF’s calendar of events failed to mention they’d stock the show with three-quarters painfully unfunny comedians, embarrassingly untalented singers, and just generally bad acts. It wasn’t until the last hour of the show that we got to see the good burlesque performers, which only marginally made up for the previous three hours of checking our watches and sighing. To be fair, there were two funny comedians, but that just accentuated how bad the others were. Now we have to deal with the shame of promising to our friends that burlesque is something fun, because Friday night was a big letdown. Here is a video of one of the good performers, Go-Go Amy. There’s also a video of Miss Kitty Baby on my Flickr page, if you care to see more!

Meetings, Meetings, and more Meetings

One of the common parts of working on a large team, in an office, is meetings. We’re in the preproduction phase of game development right now, which is essentially the time when the clay balls of concepts and ideas get massaged and formed into rough likenesses of a game. Most of this is facilitated through meetings and documentation, and when you have roughly sixty or seventy people on a team, everyone is involved in multiple meetings. It just happens that, since Wednesday, I’ve done approximately four hours of creative work.

I know the importance of meetings - people need to discuss ideas with each other, otherwise development becomes autocratic and poorly thought out and it devolves into a substantial mess. I’ve worked on projects where that happens and it’s something to be avoided. But I can’t lie, spending five to six hours a day in meetings is grueling. Long meetings bring with it symptoms of numb bum, restless legs, fidgeting with pens, staring into space, and fighting the urge to nap. The fact is, my job really depends on the outcome of other peoples’ fully formed ideas; I need constraints and specifications in order to create compositions. Since these meetings help rein in other peoples’ ideas, my main purpose of being in these meetings is to listen and give feedback or comments. The downside is that at work I get anxious and impatient, and meetings just drag things out and make me even more impatient.

Another good aspect to meetings that I’m in: we have project coordinators that are extremely effective at taking notes, summarizing results of the meetings, and following up on “action items”. It means there’s less things wasted when the meeting is over, and that’s something that I haven’t seen much in the companies I’ve worked for. Without them the workplace would probably be inefficient and have “loose threads” that never get completed. Hopefully this is avoided throughout the project.

To sum up: meetings are a necessary evil, I am impatient, and I like naps.

I’m too old to be in this store.

Those were the words I said to my ladyfriend on Saturday, not a few minutes after entering the American Apparel store on Granville Street. It was during a sofa shopping trip that we ended up on trendy South Granville, and for a reason that escapes me, we ducked into American Apparel. For anyone who has never been in one of their stores, I’ll explain: the company is built on hawking domestically made t-shirts and sweatpants and unitards in a rainbow of colours at prices that are beyond ridiculous. Case in point, a plain t-shirt can run you between 15 and 24 dollars. The salespeople are not just ignorant to the concept of customer service, but I believe are trained in how to be ignorant assholes; they run the gamut from emo douchebag to cynical bitch, and can usually be found behind the front counter chatting with each other or with their friends who decided to play hooky and hang out. The customers themselves are almost exclusively teenage girls who use the word “like” in their vocabulary at least twice in every breath of air they pollute. Factor in the company’s attempt to market gold lamme unitards as fashion and their trashy ads that are trashy just for the sake of advertising and you get the idea.

So needless to say, after about two minutes I had to tell my wife that I couldn’t be in the store and parked my ass on the sidewalk bench outside. I may have been the only non-vagrant to use the bench that day.

The sofa hunt, meanwhile, is hopefully drawing to a close. After stopping at Urban Barn and EQ3, my wife made the astute observation that we were overanalyzing our sofa choices. Basically we were finding small faults with most sofas that were at least acceptable, and if we keep hunting for the absolute perfect sofa we may never actually get one. So with some luck and some determination we may actually buy one next weekend.

Midweek boredom

This is one of those posts about how dull life has been lately. Just not a whole lot going on in Garrett-land these days. It’s a month away from my birthday and I have no idea what to ask for - the only two things I want are a recliner and a new computer, and there’s really no way for family to give gifts that could go towards the purchase of either. As I’m turning “the big three-oh” I’m not even sure I want to celebrate in any big way.

Yesterday I had to endure a day-long offsite meeting. There were some good points to hear and make during the meeting, but 8 hours in a windowless room with nothing to drink coffee and the food choices consisting of fat or sugar, I was fighting off naptime by about 2pm. Aside from that work is progressing well. I foresee challenges, though, as I’m now in a lead position where I need to have a voice that carries weight. In the past I’ve always been second fiddle at the very most. So that will either go well or I’ll be exposed as a fraud. I’ll keep you posted.

I started watching Battlestar Galactica, the newest nerd sensation on television. It’s at the level of nerd hype previously reached by the X-Files, and from what I’ve seen so far, it’s deserving of the rabid following it attracts. The overarching storyline is solid and it blends good sci-fi cheese with the thinly veiled commentary on humanity that Star Trek pioneered.

That is all.

+4 for Being A Man

If there’s anything I wish I could do better, it is fixing stuff. Specifically, cars. When I owned the Mazda I spent way too much on mechanics because I simply didn’t know how to do anything myself. Now that we’re down to one vehicle - and a much simpler one in terms of mechanical parts - I’m hoping to do more maintenance myself.

Yesterday, after enjoying the sunniest day we’ve had since Mexico, I went about lubricating the speedometer cable on our car. With some advice from my brother (who could probably fix anything with his eyes closed) and some unhelpful googling, I managed to do this job on my own. Okay, it’s far from the a complicated repair, but it’s something that likely would have cost one hundred bucks had we taken it to a mechanic. The lube job was a success - I am now 4% more of a man - and we now have a squeakless vehicle for the first time in about a year.

Aside from the quick car repair, we took full advantage of the sun on Saturday, spending it in Mission with my ladyfriend’s family. We were treated to barbecued meat products, which was a perfect meal for sitting on the stoop and watching the birds and ignoring our mild sunburns. The weather outlook for the next week (and probably next 6 weeks) is right back to rain and highs of ten degrees - a typical Vancouver spring. Today, with the overcast skies, we’re off to a furniture store to check on a sectional sofa that almost has our name on it. The first ever spousal tax return came in last week, above expectations, so we’re going to spend a good chunk of it on a sofa.

TWIG Notes XII

This Week In Garrett:

- Saturday, Erwin took me on a man-date to the Canucks’ final game. They were beaten like the twin redheaded Swedes they are by Calgary, but the real reason to go was seeing Trevor Linden’s last game. The team was trying to feed him passes all night, but he failed to put the biscuit in the basket. Linden got a few standing ovations, and it was also nice to see the crowd appreciate former Kamloops Blazer Jarome Iginla score his 50th goal of the season. For those not “in the know”, Iginla is the best captain and probably best goalscorer in the league that isn’t Russian.

- After the game Erwin also introduced me to Rock Band, the heir apparent to Guitar Hero. I have to say it does ratchet up the fun factor as a social game. I mean, even just the two of us nerds had a good time trading off between drums and guitar.

- Sunday the lady and I went to Bellingham to shop. Unfortunately there really weren’t any deals to be had; the pricing of most stuff in Canada has now dropped to par with American prices (not including “big ticket” items, which we weren’t there for anyway). The final haul was a $10 sweater, some Daiso store crap, and an assortment of junk food that cannot be found north of the 49th parallel: Diet Coke Plus, Squirt, Ruby Red Squirt, some small-company Peach pop, Thomas Kemper Root Beer, a 5th Avenue bar, a Hostess Strawberry Pie, and a back of Orbit gum. The root beer was good. The Diet Coke Plus (the “plus” means they added vitamins - go figure) was nothing special, and the other pop wasn’t so good. The 5th Avenue was delicious, and the Hostess Pie never disappoints. No opinion yet on the gum. Click on the photo to see my first try to make a Greg-style wiggly photo of the Hostess Pie. I’ve got some work to do if I want to make wiggly photos as good as Greg does.