It was dark on my way back from campus on Saturday, but I was able to spot three or four rabbits hopping off the trail on my way back. Nifty. Speaking of biking, I forgot to mention, but it was weird hopping on my own bike again, after spending the previous week on gBikes, the seats of which were never adjusted to my height. “Woah, are my legs supposed to be almost straight like this? Oh yeah, those other bikes were just weird.”

Also ran into things much more plentiful than rabbits and much less fun – the itty bitty bugs that like to hang out near slow-moving creeks. Gonna have to make sure not to ride through there too late at night.

So while my modem arrived on Monday, I couldn’t actually get it since it was being held in my apartment’s leasing office, which closes at 6pm. I’d have to find some day to grab it before work, or just be sure to be back by then. This turned out not to be the limiting factor, however, since Comcast had to send me some materials / info to get me activated, which was arriving by mail. (Seriously?) I could have gone in to the Xfinity store to get all that done, but I wanted to limit my contact with them as much as possible, and with my modem held captive anyways, it wouldn’t have made a difference.

In the meantime, I discovered that now that I was a paying Comcast customer, I had access to all these ‘xfinitywifi’ networks you see at random places. These networks are broadcast by Comcast-owned routers, and logged-in Comcast customers can leech off other customers’ networks, although the bandwidth is limited. Regardless, I now had wifi in my apartment and could stop using 4G data!

Let me rewind a bit. Last time I wrote, it was Saturday evening. The next day was my first day at my new ward. Church starts at 1pm. Other family wards meet at the building, and I guess they get first dibs on good meeting times. Overall it was like a miniature version of a Provo YSA ward. During the announcements, the first counselor lamented that the “exodus” was coming up. You know how BYU ward attendance balloons during the school year, then drops off during summer? Well their membership influx comes from wards like this.

EQ/RS meets during second hour instead of third. We all fit in the chapel, in the choir seats. For the third hour, the ward did their monthly ‘mix-n-mingle’, which partially supplanted Sunday School. They’d set out a number of round tables with chairs, and everyone just congregated around different tables. At each table there was a teacher, who gave a short 8-10 minute lesson, after which we all lined up for food and then chatted at our tables during lunch/dinner.

Afterwards, I’d heard of a few others planning on going to a nearby fireside. I figured I’d tag along, and I ended up arranging to meet them part-way there and driving them the rest of the way. One was a non-member, and I’d actually arranged with her to have her check out my place and Skype me in back when I was looking for housing. The other was a recent (~10 month) convert. She’s planning on getting her endowments soon, and then thinking about going on a mission. The fireside turned out to be a missionary activity. Most/all of the mission was gathered there, and they constituted the choir and provided a few speakers, along with some other recent converts. There seemed to be a group of missionaries using ASL, and one of them “spoke” with the help of his interpreter-companion. Neat experience.

That night, like every night this week, I returned to an empty apartment. I thought, while gearing up for this transition, that I’d go mad living by myself. I guess that stemmed from my experience in my prior apartments, where my “bubble of self-ownership” was constrained to take up a quarter of the living space, and it was hard to imagine myself living alone in those apartments. But in this place, which is smaller than those past apartments, I find it’s not as weird being all by myself. I could go on like this and probably not suffer any permanent mental instability. However, this solitude is costing me dearly every month in rent, so I’ll continue to search for a roommate.

On Monday I started work at my permanent office. The campus is pretty darn slick, lots of little nooks and crannies to explore. There’s two cafes, with a third opening up early next year. The cafes are closed for dinner on Thursday and Friday, which is nice – it’s like, ‘get outta here, go have a life’.

My new manager is great. He subscribes to the ‘get-yer-hands-dirty’ school of onboarding. I could keep myself busy for months doing code labs and getting up to speed on how development is done at Google, but he feels that my rate of acclimatization will increase if I’m doing actual work. And not just on projects that are well underway, he wants me on nascent initiatives, so I can really be part of the project’s progress.

Regardless, my first week was mainly reading. There were a ton of resources thrown at us during orientation week, and I’m slowly working my way through the list, along with other documents related to my current team’s work. That work, by the way, involves securing us against compromise by lone agents within Google. The goal is that, without collusion, no one rogue employee could mess with the goings-on of Google’s infrastructure. This helps us secure our own stuff, as well as that of customers of our Cloud products.

Oh, and speaking of reading, man I’m getting a ton of emails. I’m used to getting maybe six a day, with over half of those automated. Now it’s six every half hour or so, lots of stuff going on that trigger lots of emails to lots of people. Still working out a system for managing the volume.

On my first day, there was a tour of the facilities, and the one conducting the tour remarked off-hand that Google tries it’s darndest to get employees to work really hard, but it doesn’t do so through underhanded tactics; it just gives incentives. Come to work early / stay late? Have breakfast / dinner. That sort of thing. It also tries to keep employees healthy; all the desks here are the motorized kind, that can raise and lower. So I’ve taken to converting to a standing desk now and then. I might try and continue to raise the percentage of time I’m standing, to ease into it. The first few days it was certainly straining.

I continued to check my mailbox for anything from Comcast. Every night, no dice. All I found in there was junk mail, which I am mystified by. Do they really make so much profit off junk ads that they can afford to print unseemly amounts of it and pay people to walk around neighborhoods filling mailboxes with the stuff? I guess I’ll just have to continue to toss that stuff as soon as it arrives. Not excited to have that chore for the rest of ever. At least there’s a recycle bin not far from the mailboxes.

On Wednesday, I met with my new ward’s bishop. Just a quick meet-n-greet, what callings did you have, what are your hobbies, where did you come from, where did you go, where did you come from cotton-eye Joe? He spent some time emphasizing the importance of making friends and especially dating. Quite a bit of time in fact. I felt like exclaiming, like Hogarth Hughes…

Kidding, totally kidding. But anyways..

One thing I hadn’t taken care of before heading out was obtaining a TV. I’d decided where on the wall to put one, and picked up a mounting kit, but hadn’t felt like deciding what specs to go for until after the move. I checked out Amazon, and finally settled on a unit. A couple days after purchase, I was experiencing buyer’s remorse, and kept looking for other units. I was mainly looking for one with built-in Chromecast support, so I could just run an Ethernet cord to it and stream whatever I wanted to watch. I found a more recent model that had that feature, and was only $X more expensive than what I’d selected earlier, where $X is exactly equal to what I’d have to spend to get the feature I was after in the first place (standalone Chromecast unit + Ethernet adapter).

The TV I’d selected earlier hadn’t shipped yet, so I reached out to have them cancel it. It was then I noticed the seller was some outfit called “Great Prices Check It Out” – yeah, really filling me with confidence there. They got back to me within the hour and said it had been sent out on the truck that morning. Drat. I could refuse the shipment and just pay shipping costs, if I wanted, shipping costs being roughly $X from earlier. Well that’s a drag.

I decided to check out the local Costco to see the TVs they had on display. (I wonder if that was The Original Costco? Being in Kirkland and all…) I approached the door to head in, and an employee asked whether I had a card. “Nope, just looking around, then I’ll head over to get one.” Which was true, I figured I’d be needing one sooner or later. “Sorry, I can’t allow you to go in, company policy. They [the membership desk] can, but I can’t allow you in.” First time in my life I’ve ever gotten stopped like that, but from subsequent conversation it looks like I had just been getting lucky. Didn’t know that at the time, though, so I sourly stood in the long line to get a Costco card. Got almost done with that, when I noticed they’d spelled my name wrong. Took them another six or seven minutes to call head office to correct the mistake, then I was on my way, with 15 minutes till closing.

And lo and behold, there was a unit that ticked all my boxes, and was half the cost of every unit I’d been dealing with earlier. The other units had some (quite expensive) bells and whistles that I didn’t care about, which drove up the cost. I will pay the shipping costs of the other item and be happy while doing it. Getting this unit in my car was a bit tricky, though. The box made it in after I’d slid the two seats up forward, so I’d be driving home all scrunched up. However, the rear doors would not close all the way; they needed another couple inches, which I wasn’t gonna get. Either one or the other would be hanging open for the ride home. I was tempted to just wing it, (heh heh, wing it, cuz the door would be like a wing…) but I figured I’d check to see if I had any rope-like object in the car.

I came up with a set of jumper cables in the trunk. Rolled the right-rear door’s window down, wrapped one end of the cable around the door’s frame, and held the other tight over my shoulder while I drove home. Worked like a charm. I was driving along, wondering if I’d even needed to set this up, when I made my first sorta-fast left turn, and yep, that door would have flown wide open if I hadn’t had that cabling.

Got it safely home and unloaded. It was 10:30pm, but I wasn’t gonna let that stop me from getting this thing set up. I didn’t have batteries for my stud finder, and I wasn’t gonna drill any holes that late at night anyways, but I figured I could at least get it standing up on the legs it came with. After it was powered on it became apparent what it means to be a smart TV in 2016. The unit did come with a remote, but it was pretty barebones. No setting or menu buttons anywhere. What it did have was a “Link” button, which was meant to initialize pairing with an Android / iOS “SmartCast” app, which acts as the unit’s remote and also as a unified streaming content browser.

So I install the app and go to pair with it, and one of the required steps is to connect the unit to a wifi network. Well, like I said earlier, I have access to the xfinitywifi networks now. But, this doesn’t do me any good, because the TV isn’t going to be able to log in with my credentials. As soon as it connects and sees the login prompt, it’ll just fail over and think it doesn’t actually have Internet access.

Well, maybe it doesn’t need full Internet access to get pairing done. I can bust out my old router, set it to broadcast a wifi network, and that’ll give me something to give the TV to connect to. It’ll let the app and the TV talk to each other on the same local network, but it won’t give either the app or the TV access to the global Internet. Hopefully they don’t need it.

Now to name the network. Let’s use “AnderNet” for old-times’ sake, with the same password so I don’t have to think of a new one. Ok, network connection established. Step 3… firmware upgrade. Well, I’ll let it spin, it’ll eventually time out when it can’t reach the upgrade servers. And, yep, there it goes to step 4, “name this TV.”

Uh oh, error. Darn, it won’t let me continue with pairing. I’m guessing the app is expecting the TV to be on a current firmware version, and can’t communicate with whatever version it shipped with. Also, it wouldn’t even let me switch inputs to HDMI, so I was gonna have to finish this pairing process before I could even use the TV as a TV. I needed to get Internet access to this device, without a functional modem of my own. Time to channel my inner Mark Watney and science the crap out of this.

The solution turned out to be a hidden little feature of Mac OS X. Under System Preferences → Sharing, you can enable “Internet Sharing”, which lets you bridge your Internet access from Ethernet to wifi, or vice versa. I could use this to pass my xfinitywifi-based Internet connection through my Ethernet jack, into the router, and from there broadcast that signal as a wifi network.

That was all well and good, but my corporate-issued laptop didn’t seem to like the idea of sharing its network. Fair enough, time to bust out my old MacBook that used to be my primary machine. Wow did it look dated. But it was still fully functional, and that’s what counted. Wifi connected.. patched through to Ethernet.. broadcasting from router.. and ta da! A full Internet-enabled wifi signal, no modem necessary. Take that, overly convoluted installation workflow!

With the app and the TV now happily talking with each other over my patched-up network, I was able to connect my laptop to it and start watching a bit of Fast Five, which I’d loaded up for the Cabin trip a couple weeks back but never ended up watching.

Well that was a lot more than any of you ever wanted to know about setting up a TV, but there you have it.

This homemade network worked well for a time, until Friday night, when I started getting a “your account is inactive” error message when authenticating to xfinitywifi. Weird. I called tech support the next day to figure it out. Turns out, since I hadn’t set up my modem in the week since I’d activated my account, they’d just gone ahead and shut it down. Well, I can’t very well activate it unless I get the cables in your package that you said were on their way, now can I? So I sucked it up and drove out to their store in Redmond, psyching myself up on the way. Turns out it was a good call, since the sales agent I’d spoken with at first had not offered me a nice first-time promotion good for 2 years, so at least something good came out of that.

While I was out I headed to a Saturday-night ward activity, movie night at the bishop’s place. His son worked in a movie theater, and snagged an old screen they were about to toss. 24′ x 12′, the thing is a monster. I brought the fixins for the trademarked Andersen popcorn, and it was a hit. The movie was Guardians of the Galaxy, which was fun but might’ve looked better if they hadn’t been driving their 27′ screen with a poor little projector being fed signal over S-Video. However, since the source was a DVD player anyways, and DVD resolution is about the same as S-Video’s maximum, there probably wasn’t a point to using HDMI unless they were gonna stream an HD version or play via Blu-ray.

Headed back, pulled into my parking stall. Which is right next to this motorcycle which I haven’t seen moved once. Even noticed some spider webs on the handlebars. Along with some scrape marks all over it, and a cracked windshield. So maybe it’s just out of commission. Either way, it makes pulling in much easier.

Alright, time to get this modem all hooked up. And…

So, back to the Comcast phone tree. “Please tell us, in your own words, what you’re calling about.” “Account activations.” “Your balance is $0. Press zero if you would like to speak with an agent.” *0* “I’m sorry, our accounts office is currently closed. Please try again later.” *headdesk*

I eventually reached their 24/7 tech support and they sorted it out (it sorta just fixed itself half-way through the call, neither I nor they were sure of what they did to fix it). So now my network is all properly modem-powered and no longer speed-throttled by the xfinitywifi bottleneck.

Now that my network was all set up, I could bring my Raspberry Pi out of storage and get it running again. Among other things, it preloads an hour’s worth of Pandora each night so I can sync it to my phone in the morning and not use any data when I’m listening out and about. Couldn’t get port forwarding to work properly though, so I stayed up puzzling over it until I dropped out at 2:30am.

On my way to Church the next morning I noticed an hour-old text from the first counselor, asking me to meet with the bishop a bit before Sacrament Meeting. Too late for that, I’d have to see them during one or another block. Second block was a combined EQ/RS meeting with an employment specialist. Not much there that was relevant for me.

I finally make it into a meeting with the first counselor. Hi, how’re you doing, some pleasantries, etcetera. “We appreciate the skills you’re bringing to the ward, and we want to extend to you a calling. Many callings are standard throughout the church, but this one’s a bit different.” Now, I’d heard this line in a past ward. What followed then was, “We need you to be a special-assignment ward clerk and help us organize our membership records processes”, and I’d gone on to do requirements gathering, programming a CSV-to-PDF generator, establish a Google Docs filing pipeline, and had a grand old time.

This time, the words were, “We would like you to be the Services & Activities co-chair.”

So this committee is basically responsible for any activity that crosses organizational lines. EQ and RS want to do an activity together? Multi-ward shindig? We’re the guys. It’ll certainly be different than what I’ve been doing in the past. Like, soooooooo different. Stake technology specialist to ward activities co-chair, what a swap. Hope it works out though.

On the way back from church, it was my first taste of fall weather in Washington, with a light drizzle that I hear is just how it is for like all the time until winter, when it gets worse. Hi ho silver.

I passed a sign on the drive back: Higher Leaf, Marijuana Boutique. Very clever.

Congrats for making it to the end! Till next week.