People like to rag on new parents for stating their infants’ ages in terms of weeks, even when that number tends towards the high double-digits. I’m beginning to have an appreciation for their mindset, though. “How long’ve you been here?” “Oh, six weeks now.” Wait, six weeks? That’s over a month, I’ve been here a month and a half? No way.

Last week during Elders Quorum someone announced that they’d become engaged. At this news they received a smattering of applause, a far cry from the hooplah we did in my Provo YSA ward’s EQ – standing ovation going on for a good half-minute. And repeated for everyone who got engaged over the prior week, which I believe was three at one point.

For the third hour we had our mix-n-mingle, the thing I didn’t end up bringing musubi to. Sat next to a guy who, it turns out, works as a cook in one of Google’s cafés. I learned from him that the cooks there generally have a bad opinion of most Googlers – a pretentious bunch, I guess. I now try and do my best to be a good example when ordering food. Not that I wasn’t already nice and everything, but now there’s a purpose behind it.

This week at work I was able to move desks, to be closer to the rest of my team. When I started, the nearest open desk was in the next “area” over, with a wall mostly separating us. I’d have to walk over if I wanted to ask a question or get in on a group discussion. My great-grand-manager was doing a walkthrough a couple weeks ago, saw the situation, and committed to fixing it.

So now I have a new desk. Unfortunately it’s a really old one, kinda broken, the motor doesn’t work too well. But hey, none of my old desks even had motors, so I aint complaining. Much.

First world problem: Oh shoot, in the position my head is in I can just make eye contact with that guy through the gap between my monitors. Better shift myself so I don’t make things awkward. Oh great, he shifted position as well, now we can stare at each other again.

Now that I was with the rest of my team, we could have impromptu group conversations. Including the one where I had to remember I wasn’t at church. Topic of discussion was faster-than-light travel, and how it’ll probably never happen, and how sad it is that we’ll never get to go and visit Alpha Centauri. Had to suppress the thought to say, Well, we can just wait till we’re in the Celestial Kingdom, problem solved right? I think it might’ve fallen flat.

During the week I felt my beard was getting a bit frizzly, so I got a quick trim at the in-house hair stylist. She’s a really nice lady who happened to have a spare 15 minutes when I walked by asking for an appointment. Used this really cool setup – a trimmer, attached to a vacuum hose to suck up the cut hair. Didn’t do a perfect job, I was spitting beard hairs out of my mouth for a while afterwards due to an ill-advised attempt to continue conversing during the trim.

The result looked good. Although, I’ve only ever had my beard trimmed as part of a regular haircut, so the result was a bit wonky-looking at first, as though my hair was a bit too big for my face.

Speaking of beards, I have to take the opportunity to post a very relevant meme, that I should have done on week 1. Now that I’m free of BYU’s anti-beard policy…

On Wednesday I attended week 2 of the Police Citizen Academy thing. This week was arguably one of the only reasons I’d signed up in the first place: firearms training. I was reeeallly looking forward to being able to fire a fully automatic weapon. And the class was three hours, so there’d be plenty of time.

Wrong. First two hours were Q&A. And they explicitly stated they were catering to the “lowest common denominator”, those who had no idea what guns were all about. Which, I do appreciate that, I think it’s really important to educate people about guns, so they’re not as strange and threatening. We were finally done and ready to go to the range, but they only had two instructors, so they had one go on ahead with those in the class who’d never fired a gun before, which turned out to be the majority. The eight of us who remained just chilled out in the room, chatting with the lead instructor. Who, by the way, was doing an excellent job channeling his inner Colonel Quaritch.

Eventually the first group was done. One lady, who’d sat next to me during the first part, came out and broke down in tears. Once inside, we took turns firing a standard issue handgun at targets hanging in front of a big pile of shredded up tires, to absorb the bullets. That took a while, long enough in fact that we got kicked off of the range. We did have enough time to see one of the instructors fire off a couple different types of automatic rifles, but couldn’t fire them ourselves. Dag nabbit.

So, the big adventure of the week was building my computer and getting it all set up. For the build process, I’ll let the pictures do the talking.

It was really looking great, all black and clean. So of course, of course I had to go and nick the top of the case with the power cord as I was shifting it around, so now there’s a nice sliver of silver permanently adorning the case, always and forever, a testament to my hubris. I aimed too high and I paid the price.

The next set of hurdles involved installing an operating system. I wanted something with low-overhead, no graphical interface, just something that could drive a file server and Plex. I’ve had great experiences with Ubuntu in the past, so I went with that. I’d done some preliminary research online and it looked like I could be in for a rough time of it though, seeing as how the hardware I’d gotten was more optimized for something like Windows.

Looking back on it now, it feels a lot like a video game. Steady progression towards the goal, periodically interrupted by a seemingly-insurmountable challenge. I prepped by plugging it into an HDMI input on my TV and using a borrowed keyboard from work.

First step was to generate a bootable USB drive from a downloaded ISO image. I hadn’t gotten an optical drive, see, so I couldn’t burn it. After some fiddling with the boot order in the BIOS and picking the specific partition on the drive to boot from, I was in the installer. That was a relief, most of the problems I’d read about would’ve precluded me from getting even that far.

Installation proceeded just fine, until it was time to reboot into the newly-minted OS. On boot I got this lovely screen:

This went on for about 30 seconds, and then the screen would just die. The computer was still on though, I could hear the fans spinning. Google seemed to suggest that the error messages could be fixed by updating the BIOS. I proceeded to do so, and the errors made themselves scarce. Screen still died on boot though.

The fans were on though, and I had a hunch. Had it boot up, then go to black. On the keyboard, I tapped, “j… e… f… f… <enter>… p… a… s… s… w… o… r… d… <enter>… r… e… b… o… o… t… <enter>.

Waited for a few seconds, and then voila, the BIOS splash screen came up on the screen! Since I was able to trigger a reboot from the keyboard like that, it was definitely just a screen issue. And since I’d elected to install OpenSSH server during setup…

 

I was in. I could set it up just fine over SSH, without needing a screen at all. Still, it would be nice to be able to troubleshoot things if a network connection was unavailable. More Googling suggested I could fix this by adding a magic incantation to the bootloader config. Made the change, rebooted, and…

Had to do a different change to make it persistent. Did that, rebooted, kernel panic. Carefully tried to find out exactly what I’d done to make it panic, but it never did panic again, even with nothing having changed. Ghost in the machine I guess.

Alright, so I’m in, external monitor works if I need it. I start installing software and setting things up. Everything seems quite slow. I download a script to use Speedtest.net and measure my bandwidth. Ten mbps down, 2 up. Which is about as good network speed as we get at home in Alpine. Read: crime against humanity. My complex has access to Comcast, and I should be getting 2000 mbps down, 200 up. My router is old enough that it can only do about 600 down, which I plan to address one of these weeks. But still, only 10 megabits? I ran simultaneous tests on both my Raspberry Pi and the new server, both hardwired into the router. Full speed on the former, pitiful speed on the latter. If I couldn’t fix this, the server’s utility would be nearly nonexistent.

One mighty suspicious metric from the speed test was a ping time of over 2 seconds. By contrast, my Pi was pinging at about 20 milliseconds. I tried simultaneously pinging the same site on both machines. The server took about two seconds to start pinging, but once it did it was pinging at the same rate as the Pi. This suggested a DNS problem. Sure enough, when pinging by IP address it was just as fast as the Pi.

I interrupt this tale for some context. Whenever computers talk to each other over the Internet, they use IP addresses, groups of four numbers that together constitute the network address of a machine. You can think of these numbers like phone numbers. You need someone’s number if you’re gonna call them.

Thing is, it’s annoying to have to remember phone numbers, so most of us use address books. The Internet’s address book is called DNS, for Domain Name System. It handles translation from friendly-looking names (like google.com) to IP addresses (like 216.58.193.78). (You can try it, go ahead and copy/paste that IP address into your browser address bar.)

So, I have my Raspberry Pi set up in the corner of the living room, serving a very important function. I’ve instructed my router to hand out the IP address of the Pi to every network-connected device in my apartment, as the DNS server. My devices are basically told that if they want a name translated into an IP address, they’re to consult my Pi first. I also provide a couple backup IP addresses for globally-available services, in case my Pi is unavailable or off.

My Pi is receiving these lookup requests, and forwarding them off to a “real” DNS lookup service. However, for any website that’s associated with serving ads, it does not forward that request on, instead replying with a bogus IP address. The end result is that ads are blocked on every device in my apartment, without any need for device software. It also means that I can keep tabs on where my smart TV is phoning home to, and keep it from doing so if I want, by blacklisting the domains it’s using.

So anyways, back to my tale. The server’s DNS lookup is exceedingly slow. I try pinging the Pi, and get a “Destination host unreachable” error. Wut. I’m SSH’d into the machine, it’s obviously on the local network. And I can SSH into the Pi, so it is as well. I ping around on the server, and it turns out that it can ping out of the network, and it can ping wireless devices, but it cannot ping any wired device, those plugged directly into the back of the router, as the Pi is.

This explains the slow ping startup speed from earlier. The server was trying to reach out to my Pi to have it translate the name of whatever server I was trying to ping. (I learned how to ping from Dad, way back when, and the server he always used was www.toyota.com, so that’s the server I always use – old habits die hard.) After waiting 2 seconds for the Pi to respond, it failed over to the next DNS server on the list, the external one I’d set up in case the Pi was unavailable.

I highly suspected it was now a router issue. I’m running dd-wrt on it, which is open-source router firmware. Not inconceivable that it could have a bug in it. And it’s pretty old, I initially set it up back in 2013.

Back to Google. I found an extremely relevant query from someone else in a nearly identical situation. Following up on this, and I found two commands I can run from the router’s admin page to fix things. I did so, and pinging magically works! Re-running the speed test, I found I’m up to full speed.

Hmm, I wonder. My sound bar has Google Cast built in, so I can send audio to it from my phone. And the bar is wired in, just the same as the Pi and server. And casting has always been super slow to start up. Could it be that I’ve been seeing symptoms of this DNS connectivity issue this entire time? I tried casting music from my phone to the bar, and it was suddenly over twice as fast as before.

After all that, all I can say is, thank heavens for Stackoverflow.com.

On Friday we had our third weekly movie night, The Way Way Back. I’d tried to show both this one and About Time to my prior ward, but never got any interest. Very gratified to be able to show these to this crowd.

On Saturday I headed out with some friends to explore Seattle. I’d been looking for an excuse to head over there.

We met up with some other friends for dinner. We arrived at the mall early, so went walking around. I spied a RadioShack and darted in to get parts for a stereo mixer, to be used with the Echo Dot when it arrives. My friends took the opportunity to dart into a cosmetics store and get some mascara. I think we were both happy with our choices.

I mentioned last week that I was nervous about the place falling into disarray. It has begun: after trying to make my bed and not being able to get the top sheet to sit all the way under the blanket, I realize that it’s because the sheet has somehow rotated a full 90 degrees.

There may not be much of a status update next week, as I’ll be back in Utah for Callie’s wedding. Can not wait to be back. As you can see, I’ve really been outdoing myself in the cooking department. Behold my Fast Sunday dinner:

I leave you with an interesting quote from the book I’m frantically trying to finish before getting home this next weekend: