Life

Although I did spend a bunch of money this week, the biggest purchase I need to make soon has yet to come. As I’ve mentioned here and there in the recent past, I need a new laptop, and although it will be charged against the $1500 from my Personal Spending Account from work, there will almost definitely still be an extra amount that I will have to pay, since good laptops are so pricey. I had several requirements for the laptop that I wanted — it needed to have a detachable keyboard, run Windows, have the ability to do 5G connectivity, have an Intel CPU instead of a Snapdragon one (that has the inferior, for now, ARM chipset), and have USB-A and USB-C ports.

The reason for that is that I had the notion that someday I could maybe find the right parts and put together a lightweight rig that would allow me to stream on Twitch as I walked around, using a DJI Pocket 3 connected to the laptop/tablet as a webcam, which is apparently the “best” way to use it as a streaming video camera (as opposed to a static recording video camera).

Anyway, no such laptop existed, so I had to quickly cede some of those requirements. The USB port was first to go, and I was also willing to move on the detachable keyboard if the laptop was a 2-in-1 convertible laptop instead, but it still had to be lightweight and such, and I wasn’t going to drop the Intel requirement because apparently OBS, the Twitch broadcasting software, doesn’t work properly/natively on ARM architecture yet. Same for other commonly-used apps like Discord.

In the end, I “settled” on a Surface Pro 10 (not to be confused with Surface Pro X) for Business, which is weird because that Surface Pro 10 has a Business edition that has Intel chips and a 5G option, but neither the Surface Pro 9 nor 11 have Intel with 5G options. And the Surface Pro 8 has Intel with 4G option instead of 5G. And while you’d think the 8 would be cheaper since it’s been out longer, it’s also much harder to find outside of random 3rd party marketplace stores on Amazon and such, which I don’t want to buy from, and the ones I did find from more “official” sources were upwards of $2,000. Whereas a brand new or nearly new Surface Pro 10 from Microsoft’s website itself goes to about $2,500 instead, depending on the exact model. And accessories inflate both prices too.

Anyway, I spent Monday and Tuesday wrangling over this, looking at alternatives from Dell and Lenovo and such too, but I kept on bouncing back to the Surface Pro X so that’s what I will probably end up with. It’s a tough, expensive purchase to pull the trigger on though, but I don’t really know if goes on sale very often either, and I do need it “soon” so that I can take it along with me when I go travelling.

I might be going travelling around the province or country within the next two weeks, and wouldn’t be able to blog at all without a laptop. The reason I might be travelling soon is that Satinel has a programming game jam coming up soon, from May 16-26, and we won’t be watching anime and playing AMQ during those days anyway, so if I pick those dates to do the travelling that I wanted to do, we can overlap our times away to minimize disruption of our daily schedules. I might not even stream during those days even if I don’t go anywhere since she’s most of my active viewership on any given day. I’m not sure yet though.

But in the end, I didn’t purchase a laptop this week. Instead, my DJI Pocket 3, which I pre-ordered and paid 20% of two weeks ago, came in this week, so I had to pay the remaining 80% and picked up my new camera. It’s still sitting in its box though. But that was the main purchase that happened this week.

Outside of that, I also picked up a couple of scented memory foam pillows from JYSK this week. I had first visited the local JYSK four weeks ago, and had been pondering this purchase for a bit now, as my pillow is very, very old. These new pillows were $50 a pop after a hefty alleged discount, and following Dad‘s advice I got two instead of one so I could keep one for the future (or for a future guest bedroom). They are only medium firmness instead of being super firm, but that’s fine for me, and they’re both slightly scented too — one with eucalyptus and one with lavender — and so far I like this feature. We’ll see if I still feel that way in a month, or in a year, though.

I also picked up a couple articles of clothing and plushies from Hudson’s Bay this week since their deals got lowered again, and a couple of rugs from JYSK to replace the one I got all the way back in My Diary #041. That rug was starting to disintegrate from the bottom and leave “sand” particles all over the floor, in addition to the hairy fibres also being hard to vacuum and being easy for stray hairs to hide in. It had also been stretched very loose over the years. So it was time for that rug to go. This time, I bought two 2 feet by 3 feet polypropylene rugs (because no shop in the world seems to sell a 3 by 3 or 4 by 4 rug alone, so I bought two of those ones and overlapped them), and those should be much easier to clean and maintain and also slip and slide less on hardwood floors.

I also tried out a new recipe this week when I went to T&T and found an interesting looking vegetable called aster indicus leaves. I googled up a recipe for it and found this Chinese Ma Lan Tou one (local), and tried it with slightly different proportions and sauces. It was great!

I wonder if I can find a cheap house for sale right next to a T&T Supermarket. Mmm.

For the second week in a row, a Kickstarter CD that I had pledged for several months ago arrived. This CD is called Opia by aeseaes, and it even came with a handwritten thank you letter. This is my last outstanding CD currently, with the only crowdfunded thing that I have pledged for and not received being a plushie from Makeship.

Our workplace union’s tentative collective agreement got passed this week, with 88% of members ratifying it. This means that we get a 6% pay raise effective immediately, 3% retroactive to last April and 3% from this April. Also a 3% raise the next two Aprils. This means that a couple of paychecks from now, I need to go try to get pre-approval mortgages again and see what kind of house I can get now though. It probably isn’t much more than before, but it’s probably good to get the exact updated number. And possibly get more than one pre-mortgage this time.

I actually voted against this ratification package though, as I saw a clause that worried me. There are two main unions for us non-executive workers on campus, one for academic staff and one for non-academic staff. I’m in the latter one. They’re in negotiations right now and have not yet been able to come to a settlement with the University and government.

And so, one of the new negotiated clauses for our contract was a “me too” clause that stated that if the academic staff union managed to negotiate a raise higher than 3%, then we would get that too, but if they settled for less then we would not. Without knowing any more context behind it, I thought that sounded really scummy. Like we were hobbling their negotiations and giving the employer reason to say “we cannot give you more than 3% because we’d have to give them the same raise too.” And that the other union could similarly retaliate and write the same clause in for the next bargaining session in about three years too.

So I feel like it was a detrimental clause to have for both our unions in the long term, as neither of us would ever be able to negotiate a raise if the other union was hanging on to the first union’s coattails. But hey, I didn’t take part in any of the negotiations or informational sessions at all and didn’t even read that until the ratification vote, because of general busyness at work, so it’s not like I can say I spoke up about it at any point. It is what it is, and the members of our union voted to ratify it, so that’s that. I’ll just note it in my blog and hope my worries never come to pass!

On Wednesday, I went downtown for a walk and to have lunch. On the way to my chosen lunch place, I saw this interesting store along the way:

This was a cashierless, contactless store called Aisle 24 and the way the store worked, only one person is allowed in the store at a time. The front door was like an airlock — to get into the shop proper, one needs to press a button on their phone app to unlock the door, then go into the airlock area, have the front door close completely behind them, then (assumedly) once the camera detects that only one person is inside the airlock area, the inner door will open and let them in. I’m not sure what happens if more than one person tries to go in at once, or is queued up, but the signs did say that only one person at a time was allowed in the store.

The app itself, which had an abysmally low rating on the Play Store due to what seemed to be technical issues, required one to link a credit card to it, and a $10 hold was placed on my card once I did so. While I was outside downloading the app and setting it up out of sheer curiosity, a woman approached me and asked me to buy her some food because she needed to feed her three kids. I declined apologetically because I’m in no financial situation to do that sort of thing (and there was no supermarket or grocery store nearby except this one-person-at-a-time shop I was trying to get into anyway), and she nodded and wandered away a little bit to wait for her husband to pick her up in a vehicle. I thought the whole interaction was a bit weird.

Anyway, soon enough the app was set up and I swiped my way in.

There were no other humans in the store, though there were two automated checkout scanners in the corner, and I wondered why there were two of them when only one person was allowed in the store at the time. I guess for redundancy or something. Or if someone wanted a second opinion.

I walked around the store a little more and took some photos, but by and large the prices were mostly like a local gas station or the Village Foods convenience store that’s embedded into our apartment complex — many extremely common, extremely overpriced items that were not even Canada-made like the app claimed.

Not everything was like that, I believe I did see a handful of items that are not common supermarket fodder and that were not too overpriced compared to a Google search for those products, but they were few and far between. Overall the store selection and price really sucked. I guess it might be good for people that live nearby late at night or something (but it’s in the middle of a mostly commercial neighbourhood). I left the store without buying anything, requested that my account be closed, and deleted the app. Hopefully I get the $10 hold back soon.

The restaurant I went to was called DOSC, or “Drunken Ox/Sober Cat”, according to their receipt.

Home is where the cat is. I exchanged some jovial banter with the waiter over the course of my lunch hour there, and he said that the store didn’t actually have cats and wasn’t actually a cat cafe. Even though the name of half the restaurant (local) was the Sober Cat Cafe. “Sober Cat” Cafe rather than Sober “Cat Cafe”, I guess! Pffbbbhht.

The ambience in the restaurant was really nice though. Contemporary music over the radio, lots of chairs and tables outside if you like the outdoors, inside near the windows if you like to people-watch like me, and way inside if you just like the cozy interior. There were power sockets next to each table and some people just typing away on laptops next to half-empty cups of coffee.

I ordered the oxtail poutine dish there for $18 ($22 after tax and a tip), and it was amazing. I asked the waiter to send my regards to the chef after I paid and tipped, and before I left.

Altogether, I really enjoyed my visit to this place.

On Thursday, I made my visit to JYSK and T&T, but while at that South Park area where both stores were located, I also visited the Fire Dealz liquidation store there, the one that I had visited twice last month. This was a Thursday again, which was restock day, and on a bit of a whim I took an Uber there and arrived at 10:13 am. The scene looked like this:

Again, lots of people rummaging through the tables, and a lot of people queued up along the side again even though the place had just opened. I rummaged around the tables a little but it was mostly pointless junk in there, even in the first hour after launch.

But then, I started wondering about the shelves along the sides, where some pricier items, mostly electronics, were kept, and a table of electronics that was roped off and mostly accessible only to people at the cashiers. And then I heard over the loudspeaker that they were going to restock the electronics at the front at noon, and the tables at the back at 1pm. I went off to do other shopping in the area, then came back at noon to watch the procession. They roped off the front area so that no one could enter, wheeled a big box of stuff out, and unloaded most of it onto the shelves as a long queue of people watched on.

Then they let people in one or two at a time to look through the shelves.

And all through that time, there was one other cashier open on the other side, nearer the door, for people that had stuff from the tables but did not want to go through the long queue:

So after putting two and two together and chatting with that cashier a bit, I finally realized what was happening. That long queue on the side that I had seen last month on Thursday the moment the store opened, and again today in the morning, and again today at noon, was not a line of people with stuff from the bins to check out — it was a line of people waiting for their turn to scour the electronics and shelves for stuff that they wanted to buy. The first people in after the noon restock, for example, picked up a blender, a leaf blower, and a portable cooler for cheap, all of which had just been unloaded from the boxes. I don’t know how expensive they were, they were definitely pricier than the items at the standard tables, but cheaper than retail.

But to actually look through those shelves of premium electronics and more expensive stuff and pick out stuff to buy, you had to line up and wait your turn. And that was what a good chunk of the people there just came to do. The tables were mostly just overstock garbage, though there were many items that were definitely worth $10 to $20 and some even over $25 if you happened to want them.

It was quite interesting to finally see how it worked. I don’t completely remember what the lady at the cashier that I chatted with said, but I believe she said that they restocked the tables over the weekend too, but the electronics only on Thursdays. She also said she posted instructions and pictures and stuff on Instagram, but I dislike the sensationalistic sort of language they use on their posts (and dislike the Instagram platform in general), so no thank you to following them.

Also as an aside, when I was buying stuff at JYSK, I had assumed that this sign, which was plastered all over the store:

meant that if you spent $59 or more, then they would provide shipping of the item to your place. The fine print says to ask a store associate for details, so I even asked an associate about it and she must have misinterpreted what I meant cause she nodded at my interpretation.

But nope. What it actually meant, I found out at the cashier, was that you could spend an additional $59 and they would get their shipping guy to arrange a date and time to ship your bought items to you. There was no free shipping at any price. So since JYSK was my first stop of the day, I told them I would still buy the pillows and rugs but had to leave them there until I had finished my grocery shopping (and levelled up my understanding of Fire Dealz), at which point I could then come back and pick those items up and Uber myself and them home. They thankfully were perfectly OK with that plan. She also confirmed that the “closing down sale” would last for quite a while and that JYSK would likely still remain open till at least the end of the year. All the way from April and May if not before!

I also already briefly noted that I bought a few things from The Bay this week, but here are some associated pictures for my continued catalogue of liquidation pictures. The sale levelled up this week after not moving the previous week, and now we’re at 50% to 70% off.

So the floor for basically every item got pushed up from 40% to 50%. That was pretty huge, and was the reason I picked up a few clothing items that had a sticker sale on top of the general 50% sale. Also, the Hallmark shelf on the third floor, which had been stuck on 15% off every week and never obeyed the sale range, finally went 50% off too.

I might have picked up a couple plushies from there, but not any of the ones on the shelves — these tiny ones cost over $20 at full price and $10 at current price, and that still wasn’t worth it for me. Instead, well, tune in in a couple of weeks!

Talking about the behemoth that is The Bay and the slow death of the one next to my apartment, I noted last week that a billionaire from Vancouver had put in bids to a couple dozen stores in British Columbia, Alberta, and Ontario to save them. A followup article (local) I saw this week suggested that they were stores in Toronto, Vancouver, and Calgary though. Which seems to leave Edmonton’s out in the cold. That’s a bit upsetting. Maybe it’s incomplete information though.

And finally, here are some nice sky balcony pictures for the week. Wednesday May 07 at 9:13 pm, with a wall of clouds along the horizon that remind me of mountain scenery:

Thursday May 08 at 9:23 pm, with a single large raincloud going by in the distance:

Friday, May 09 at 2:09 am, where a large gibbous moon (which the phone camera cannot capture well) shines down upon a very noisy truck going around cleaning the Southgate carpark. Southgate Mall is very irresponsible in general with when they schedule their contractors, their snow plows that run all the way to 2am at times during winter are really noisy instead of clearing the snow earlier in the evening, and even outside of the snowy season they have unnecessary rubbish like this keeping up a bunch of nearby residents instead of doing this kind of thing earlier in the evening.

And later on in the day, Friday May 09 at 9:23 pm, with a single red blemish in the blue, late evening sky: