Well, it’s 9am local time on Sunday morning, far earlier than my alarm clock is usually set to. I’m up so early because this morning I had plans to attempt to make musubi for a ward chat-n-chow, mix-n-mingle, munch-n….dunch, etc. Yesterday I scoured the local Asian markets for the ingredients. Found everything I needed except the mold. I did find though, online, instructions for making spam musubi roll-style, like sushi. So that was what I was gonna try. Until I was getting all prepped this morning and found that what I’d thought was soy sauce in my cupboard was in fact a very dark bottle of vinegar oil. Shucky darn. Well, now I have time to practice making it for next time. And I have time to get this written early, instead of Tuesday night.

I often feel these days that it would be so easy to let things pile up, like dishes and laundry. The Joker said it best:

Already my laundry cycle is a multi-day affair.

• Day 0: Run load in washer.
• Day 1-3: Get back to the apartment too late, or forget late enough, that I don’t have time to dry and fold, so leave it in the washer. (I’ve learned that I can’t run my whole supply of clothes at once, so I have more to wear during this standby period.)
• Day 4: Finally move load to dryer. Lay dried clothes flat on living room table so they don’t wrinkle.
• Day 5: Company expected, better move clothes to my bed.
• Day 5, evening: Too tired to fold, move clothes to top of dresser.
• Day 6-7: Pull clothes out of stack on dresser for daily use.
• Day 8: Get fed up with the state of things, finally fold clothes, as well as the whites I’ve been keeping in a laundry basket hidden behind my bed.

In other news.

Amazon always recommends the Echo to me when I visit, since I regularly check their Echo Dot page to see whether it’s back in stock yet. I have a speaker already, and the smaller form factor is really appealing. Plus, the thing goes for over 2x its retail price on eBay, so there’s definitely demand. I really wondered what Amazon was thinking, not producing more.

Then this week they released their 2nd generation unit – smaller and cheaper than before. Turns out their original unit relied on a component that ceased production, messing with their supply chain. All’s well, I can finally get that Alexa goodness back at my place. Not till the latter end of October though, when they ship.

On Wednesday night I attended the first of eight sessions of the local police department’s Citizen Academy. A notification went out over our company mailing list, and I thought I’d check it out. Maybe get to fire a few guns at the range, etc. The first night we toured their office, and were going to get a tour of the jail, but at the time we arrived for that portion of the tour we learned they were dealing with rowdy drunks back there, really not a good time for us. The officers conducting the tour were apologetic and said they’d try and arrange a time in the future for us to visit.

Anecdote: during the around-the-table meet-and-greet, several people said they were “a Cougar through-and-through, bleeding crimson.” Threw me off for a sec – I guess they have different mascots around here.

I was very sad when I did the math and realized I’d be in Japan on a conference trip at the same time as the Academy’s shooter-sim night. Everyone gets to gear up in a hyper-realistic laser-tag-esque scenario drill. Apparently it’s usually the crowd favorite. Dag nabbit. I’ll just have to be sure to enjoy Tokyo.

Which, I’ll just put here in case anyone wasn’t aware, but yeah! Going to Tokyo next month. My lab at BYU published a paper at a conference happening next month. I booked a flight out, mainly intending to support whoever from my lab would actually be presenting, either my advisor or my PhD colleague, the lead author on the paper. Well, neither of them could end up going, so I’ll be the one presenting, and the only one from my lab to go. Luckily there are other professors and students attending, so I’ll have people to hang with. And, Google has a cool office just 15 minutes from the conference venue, so that’ll be a fun place to visit.

On Thursday I had to get home early for a Comcast technician visit. When I signed up I got a speed of X, and I was measuring 0.5 * X from my modem. Comcast figured it was a signal issue, so they sent out someone to investigate. The guy couldn’t find any signal issues. He called in to home base and verified what speed I was signed up for. “Yeah, so I’m reading [0.5 * X] for your speed.” Uhh, no, that’s not what the guy said when I signed up. There was nothing the tech could do, so he left me to figure it out with the accounts department.

I was really anxious that they were gonna claim that original offer for X never even existed. Turns out they’d kept good notes on the account, and were able to determine that the agent who’d signed me up had just keyed in the wrong access code or whatever. One modem reset later and I was back up to full speed.

On Friday afternoon I played my usual game of pickup soccer with some other Googlers in the field just east of our buildings. Fun stuff, though one of the lead players could stand to loosen up a bit. Very by-the-book. We always have to play light-shirt vs dark-shirt, there shall be no mixing. A team member has to leave? ‘Hey, I know we’re beating you like crazy, but can we borrow one of your players so we’re even?’ But it’s still fun, been a long time since I’ve been able to play soccer on the regular.

That evening we had Round 2 of movie night at my place. Instead of the rowdy games running late into the evening, we had them before the movie. Which was About Time, one of my favorites. (We watched an edited version, which I am very happy to send to anyone that asks.)

I spec’d out the apartment a while back and figured we could fit ten viewers comfortably. Somehow we managed to get 17 in here. Required a bit of furniture rearranging, but everyone had a grand old time.

I’ve been incessantly mulling over the parts for a new computer, and finally pulled the trigger on ordering them. (In case anyone’s interested parts list is here.) I’m planning on using it as a Plex media server, and as offsite-backup for my folks. Which, if any of you extended family are reading this and would be interested in a similar arrangement, drop me a line.

As many know, naming things is one of the two hardest problems in computer science. Server hostnames are no exception. Fortunately, I’ve already sorted out what I’ll be naming it. It’s gotta be cool. I live in Kirkland, right? So, Kirkland… Kirk… James T. Kirk… James Tiberius Kirk… Tiberius. Done and done.

I hate spending lots of money on things, which made pulling the trigger on these components so difficult. However, I remembered that I’d never done anything fun or interesting with Gram’s little inheritance gift – I’d folded it into my savings and sort of forgotten about it. Now I have something to spend it on. And it’s doubly nice since I remember doing one of those grandchild interviews with her some time before I left on my mission, and she asked me to describe my ideal computer setup. I basically went through and described a maxed-out Mac Pro, incredibly expensive. Now this setup’s cost is a fraction of that, and quite a bit more performant to boot. So I think she’d like that I’m building it.

Till next time!