Okay, so it’s a little early… but for those of us working office day jobs, many workplaces are celebrating Halloween today… so, I dressed up today instead of tomorrow. I don’t have any particular Halloween plans this year. I think I’m going to enjoy taking a little break at home, as it’s been a mad rush the past few weeks. With starting the new job, apartment makeovers, party planning, and events with friends, my life has been crazy hectic.

Anyway, back to Halloween

This year at work I recycled an old costume and dressed up as Minnie Mouse. I don’t have a photo of me in costume today, but it looks kinda like this, except with bright red pumps. I know, lame right? I have to admit I was feeling a little uninspired.

Here are some of my costumes in previous years, which were a little more creative.

My absolute favourite costume, Cortana from Halo. It’s a little nerdy, but it’s works well at a video game company

Some sort of fairy with wings. Okay, so maybe these aren’t creative at all. I believe this is now called the “duck face”.

Trevor Linden! My all-time favourite Canucks and hockey player.

I hope everyone has a fantastic day today and of course, night out tomorrow for Halloween… hope you all stay safe and have a lot of fun!

Well, I’m back from Apex Mountain and we all had a great time there snowboarding for New Years!

I can’t believe it is 2009 already. 2008 was a year full of ups and downs, surprises, excitement, and many happy moments.

In 2008 I…

… rang in the New Year’s at Disneyland, finishing up an amazing one-month-long surfing, snowboarding, and scuba diving road trip throughout the States to Portland, San Francisco, Tahoe, Death Valley, Mammoth Mountain, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, Catalina Island, the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Snowbird Mountain, Idaho, Mission Ridge Mountain, and Washington…

… went snowboarding at Big White, Whistler, Cypress, Mt. Washington and Apex…

… parted ways with the first video game company I worked for… and moved to a new, dynamic video game company…

… took a three week trip to Costa Rica for some warm water surfing and travelling…

… went camping, partying, and surfing in Tofino dozens of times…

… caught some seriously large Halibut going deep ocean fishing…

… enjoyed grocery shopping at Granville Island every week…

… traveled to Korea for business…

… and Japan…

… started to learn to skate and play hockey…

… sold my Nikon D80 and got my grubby little hands on a new camera set up with the Nikon D90…

… started working on an HD snowboarding movie project…

… went to Trevor Linden’s retirement night…

… completed my AST-1 Avalanche Training course…

… went to Apex to finish 2008 and welcome 2009!

I couldn’t be happier with how this past year has gone. I feel like I’ve learned a lot, tried new activities, grown as a person, realized how wonderful my friends are, made some new friends, and saw lots of new places.

Plans for 2009:

• Take more photographs of people, improving my fashion and portrait photography
• Grab better, more steady footage for HD snowboarding movie project
• Travel somewhere warm
• Travel somewhere cold
• Keep apartment clean and tidy
• Cook even more
• Do something active at least once a day
• Not worry about what anyone thinks of me!
• Finally finish Gears of War 2 because I’ve been a complete slacker

Thank you to my friends, family, loved ones, and coworkers who have filled the past year with so many laughs, hugs, discussions, activities, and happy moments! I hope you all have an amazing 2009.

Last night was the single greatest, most meaningful moment to me in Canucks history. My favourite player, my hero, my captain, and my role model had his #16 lifted to the skies and retired forever. So many people have had so many amazing things to say about Trevor Linden over the past week, so I’ll try not to be too repetitive here.

You can read this post about how Trevor Linden and the Canucks have been a huge part of my life for as long as I can remember. I got the chance to meet Trevor a couple years ago, and I can honestly say that he is just as kind and handsome in person as everyone’s made him out to be. Thanks for taking the time to sign my jersey, Trevor. You always had time for the fans.

Despite my best efforts to get tickets on Ticketmaster for this game, there weren’t any available even when they were advertised to go on sale. So I ended up having to buy them from scalpers back in September. It was worth every penny. I could only afford to go to one game this year, and this was THE game. I thought the #16 pins they were handing out at the gates at GM Place were a nice touch. I’m going to treasure mine forever.

GM Place really lit up nicely with the old Canucks colours. I still miss the old jerseys and the old colours. We were sitting 3 rows from the ice to the right of the goalies and it was a great view.

Linden imagery was everywhere, including the sides of the stadium.

Gino Odjick and other teammates showed up to pay tribute to Linden, but I cheered the loudest for Gino.

All the current Canucks players were wearing #16 jerseys for the ceremony and the warm up. What a cool sight to see.

Linden was given a Mike Wiegele Helicopter Skiing gift from his teammates. All I can say is… JEALOUS!!!!!!!!

Linden’s speech was incredible. What a stand up, classy guy. He somehow managed to make a night all about him, to a night all about his friends, family and fans. Somehow he turned around the spotlight on him, to a thank you to everyone around him. I was misty-eyed the whole night, but the tears started forming near the end of his speech. I have to admit I was really bawling by the time his number was being raised to the rafters.

There ceremony ended, and I’m sure many others like myself found it hard to switch over to the fast-paced rough hockey game that ensued. It was great to see the Canucks beat the Oilers, but my heart and mind was somewhere else.

I decided to go festive and wore Canucks Christmas stockings (with the feet cut out of them) as leggings.

I wore my Linden jersey (that I custom added a ‘C’ for Captain to). I’ve never seen so many Linden jerseys at GM Place EVER! The coolest ones were the old ones from his Junior years.

Face off…

Canuck players stand up and look out over the bench at an exciting fight taking place.

I took this photo of Burrows for Amy

This shot was taken right before the goal. Shame I wasn’t able to get the actual goal, but it’s a neat action shot.

GOAL!!!!!!!!!!!

It was a good win for the Canucks over the Oilers. What a great night overall. The folks at GM Place did a great job organizing the night… making the fans feel special and putting together something really memorable for Linden.

After the game, I stood and looked at Trevor’s number in the rafters for a while. Hanging beside Stan Smyl’s and the Canadian flag. I’m so proud to be fan of the greatest player to ever wear a Canucks jersey, and I will always cherish the memory of seeing his number raised.

I miss having Trevor to cheer for. I will always be a Canucks fan, but I can’t help but feel like it’s a little different now. I can’t help but feel a little empty without #16 on the ice.

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In other news, the Canucks just signed Mats Sundin. I’m not stoked. I want a good Canadian player to join the Canucks. But if he helps us get the Cup, that’d be great, but I’m still not a Sundin fan. Darn, why couldn’t you have gone with Naslund to the Rangers?! He’s basically retired. He was a Leafs captain. There’s no real educated reason why I don’t want him on the Canucks. It just doesn’t feel right. Isn’t this a step backwards? Doesn’t it feels like we just got rid of a Naslund-like character? *sigh* Didn’t we already go through this with Messier? I know there will be a lot of opposing opinions… Anyway. From Linden to Sundin. Times are definitely a’changing’.

This Halloween for work, I decided to dress up as Trevor Linden, campaigning to be Mayor. Trevor Linden has always been my favourite Canucks player. Check my previous post on the Canucks, for a picture of when I met Trevor I have a great “Linden for Mayor” t-shirt that I was holding up all day at work today but unfortunately I forgot to bring it home with me.

I didn’t have a lot of time to put together a costume this year since I just came back from my trip, so I kinda went for the lazy costume. However, it is my own jersey and all my own hockey gear, so I think that counts for something, right? It wasn’t this revealing for work; I was wearing opaque leggings

In past years, I’ve gone as Cortana from the video game Halo (I painted it on myself, and made the Guilty Spark too!), and some other typical ones like the schoolgirl and angel costumes. Fortunately, those cliché Halloween costume times are past and I’m hoping to do more creative and interesting video game costumes in the future.

Tonight, it’ll be off to a house party and I’ll see if I can’t modify my costume to be a little more “party” friendly. I’ll update this post later with pictures.

Now that I’ve got the Halloween stuff out of the way, let’s talk about the tech/video game industry and the Vancouver/world economy. Things aren’t looking so great these days, it seems the high tech industry is a little spooked (har har) this Halloween too. You can read more in my previous post on the Vancouver video game industry. And to clear up all the rumours… no, I don’t work at EA — and I never have.

It looks like Electronic Arts (EA) is going to layoff 400 to 500 employees over the next little while. Ouch. That’s a LOT of people. It’s not looking so great for the folks over at EA’s Burnaby campus, which makes up about a third of the company. In its last quarter, EA reported a loss of $310 Million. And the EA stock tanked today after that news, down almost 5% last time I checked.

And the makers of Just Cause (Avalanche Studios) are going to layoff about half their studio in Sweden after losing a couple contracts.

Retailers everywhere are projecting lower holiday sales and less shoppers/traffic in general, so it’s not looking good for many “boxed” video game sales. I’m sure we will see this affect other Vancouver video game companies and high tech companies soon, even though video game sales do traditionally quite well in economic slowdowns.

Where’s the opportunity though? Microtransactions and free-to-play games. Web and casual games. Companies who take advantage of this market may be better positioned for today’s and tomorrow’s economy.

Silicon Valley isn’t doing great either. It’s also been suspected that Yahoo! is going to layoff a ton of employees, perhaps as many as 3,000. But that’s not concrete and many expect it not to be that drastic. And Sun Microsystems posted a much bigger loss than expected. They are planning layoffs as well.

And the economy is also finally affecting the ridiculous Vancouver condo boom. Many Vancouver condos and housing developments are being stalled, including Concord Pacific’s West Georgia Cosmo, and Onni’s V6A condo development, that still has its sales office open and is selling to unsuspecting buyers. Oh man. Onni is doing some seriously criminal stuff.

That’s it for today!

Short post tonight since I’m feeling a bit rundown.

Roberto Luongo has been named Captain of the 2008/2009 Vancouver Canucks team. Wow.

Willie Mitchell, Ryan Kesler, and Mattias Ohlund were named alternate captains, wearing the “A”. But here’s the big stitch… Lou can’t wear the “C” on his jersey, according to official NHL rules.

I can’t help but feel a little weird about this. How is he going to inspire the team on he ice in key, time sensitive situations? Will he really go all the way from his net to talk to the referees on disputed calls? Will his presence on the ice be enough to compensate for not being at the bench during the game at times?

Lou’s a big fan favourite and I’m really happy for him. A lot of fans are behind this decision, but I’m still going to feel weird about it.

I wear the “C” on my Trevor Linden jersey proudly, so I can only hope that Luongo can live up to be as inspiring a captain as Linden was in his time.

What do you think?