Category Archives: The desk of the King

Dude. That ain’t right.

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Holy crap.

I’m realizing that I haven’t updated the Official NJLE™ website in over SIX MONTHS. Wow, that’s my epic failure. It’s kind of bizarre how much things can change in such a relatively short (or relatively long, depending on your perspective) period of time.

The NJLE has always been kind of sliding by; on the brink of both wild success and brutal failure. However, in the past couple of months… it’s become glaringly obvious that belts are going to have to be tightened and things are going to have to change up in this bitch. See, everything in this place… surrounding us, in Canada? So much of it is affected by the price of oil. The whole world is affected. But here’s the trend:

In the past year, the price of oil has dropped off to a staggeringly low price that affects the entire world.

In the past year, the price of oil has dropped off to a staggeringly low price that affects the entire world.

Anyway, the main source of income for the NJLE is related to the price of oil. “On the outside” your highness is an engineering desk jockey for a company servicing the oil and gas sector. With this downturn, the NJLE GDP is taking a forced 10% hack-and-slash and a deep, deep round of layoffs that’s going on at my place of employ as a reaction to the global economy.

So, I have to look at my options. I think I’m relatively ok for the next month or two from a layoff perspective…. maybe. After that? All bets are off. I’m looking at possible opportunities elsewhere however, given that layoffs are rampant in my industry right now, I think it’s unlikely that I’ll find something after I get punted. So… I’ll have my five figure layoff payout. Low five figures, let’s be clear. Very low.

And then? If I don’t find another job? It’s EI for yours truly… and that’s something that I know very little about at this point. It’s terrifying to me to not have a job. To not be able to provide.

Terrifying.

Anyway, the future is not known to me. Maybe shit will turn itself out just fine. Maybe not. I am not Nostradamus of some wizened prognosticator. I’m clinging on to this moment, taking life day to day. Because that’s all I can do right now.

Off Hiatus

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It’s been over a year since the NJLE site has been updated… I know. Bad me.

The whole thing started with a major debacle involving my ownership of the domain newjefflandempire.com and finding the correct DNS servers to redirect to. In the end, both WordPress and 1and1.com were unable to resolve the issue for me so I said, “fuck it” and defaulted to the wordpress.com address that is free with the startup. That whole process took me months to get to and my interest in writing declined in this period. So whatevs.

The good news is that we’re back and the NJLE is as strong as it ever was.

And there’s so much that’s gone on in the past year that it’s hard to know where to start! I don’t want to overwhelm myself right now by trying to write everything out that has gone on but I’ll catch the site up gradually. 

Right now, though, the 2014 Winter Olympics are going on in Sochi, Russia and the round robin portion of the men’s hockey tournament has just completed. Canada is the 4th seed and will face the winner of Switzerland vs Latvia game that goes on tomorrow. Or… potentially in a few hours. The time difference between here and Sochi is killing me. LOL Really, I hope Latvia wins because the Swiss are a complete sleeper team capable of upsetting any team they play. We’ve seen it in the past and I don’t want to see Canada succumb to an upset at this point. Or ever.

Anyway, I really barfed when I originally saw the Team Canada jerseys designed by someone over at Nike however I admit that I really like them now. 

Team Canada Jerseys

For the Sochi 2014 Olympics.

 

In fact, I went and bought myself a red replica version of the jersey. Because if you are going to buy a Team Canada jersey and be patriotic, it’s gotta be a red one. In my opinion, anyway. The black ones are pretty sweet though too.

I’ll be watching the game tomorrow between the Swiss and Latvia with vested interest for sure. Go Canada!!

 

Halo vs Black Ops II

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There are a few big name video games that have been released within the past few weeks on the XBox 360 and the buzz around the NJLE is surrounding Halo 4 and Call Of Duty: Black Ops II. The buzz hasn’t involved me, the King, but rather the princes. Two of the three of them are pretty stoked about these games… and if Meatloaf has taught us anything, it’s that two out of three ain’t bad.

I can appreciate the epic nature of the Halo series. It’s got a pretty solid storyline with just enough mystery to suck you in and then the beautiful and fun gameplay? It’s a recipe for success. It’s really too bad that my video game palate has been wrecked by Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3… the crack cocaine of FPS games. I did play through the entire Halo 3 campaign and was completely enamoured with it. 

While my feelings regarding the Call of Duty abominations that Treyarch keeps producing are no secret, I’m not sure that I’ve put them to words here. So here goes:

Call of Duty: Black Ops was the biggest piece of crap that I’ve played in a long time. Well, since World At War anyway. Treyarch somehow keeps getting the nod from Activision to keep doing work for them when the Modern Warfare side of the franchise is infinitely better. Granted, Activision has pretty much run off all of the talent from Infinity Ward that was responsible for the incredible start to the Modern Warfare series but… that’s no excuse to give money to these bums who are responsible for Black Ops etc.

The only thing work saving in the Treyarch games are the zombie horde facet. Other than that, fuck it.

I’m pretty open to the boys playing Halo 4 however I know that they really want COD: BO2 but I’m hoping that continually disappoint them. Classic.