It’s been quite a while since I last wrote. My blog is hosted on my home server, and for a good chunk of this week it was either in my car or on my kitchen counter. More on that later.
A quick aside. When I took the GRE for grad school they presented us with this big long paragraph on how we won’t cheat, lie, or cheat on the test, then had us write it out verbatim, in cursive. And of course our elementary teachers told the truth when they said we’d have to know this stuff for the real world, so it was no problem at all. Of course that’s not true; I ended up just faking it as well as I could manage, and I got away with it scot-free.
Well I told you that story to tell you this one. Last Thursday I sat down with a notary and signed documents all official-like, and now I’m in my own place! I was this close to giving up on the search for a while after I’d gotten back from Christmas break, when my agent called with a nice townhouse to look at. Ended up putting an offer in only a few hours after it went on the market, and it was accepted!
That was almost a month ago. Last Thursday I signed papers. The notary was quite strict with my handwriting and signature. Don’t change the way you sign your name, fix up those fives, and for goodness sake don’t scribble out a mistake, only strike it out with one line, now we gotta redo this whole page. Yikes.
Friday I closed, and Saturday I did the move, with the help of my ward and a couple of professional movers who took care of the stuff too big and awkward to foist on the volunteers from my ward. So, so worth it, even if they did show up about five hours late.
The night I moved in a friend stopped by to see the new place and help unpack. She was so helpful in putting my kitchen together, something I really didn’t have strong opinions about. And when I don’t have strong opinions about something, I tend to get stuck in decision paralysis, so it was great having someone else have ideas on what goes where.
Then began dependency management. Couldn’t put my rug down until I found a way to move the coffee table out of the way. Couldn’t put the TV up until I got my hands on a slab of wood to space the back of the TV out from the wall, as it was too wide to fit above the fireplace. Couldn’t put my A/V setup together until that was done and Internet was turned on at my place.
I’d arranged some time before I moved to have Comcast auto-transfer service to the new location. Saturday night rolled around and my modem was still trying to get a signal. Called them that night, they jiggled some knobs, said they could see the modem reaching out, and to wait 24 hours before trying back.
Well 24 hours later was Sunday night, so that was out. Monday night arrives, and now they’re seeing an outage in the area expected to last till 6am Tuesday, so there’s nothing they could do even if they wanted to.
Tuesday morning arrives, and all of a sudden the support agent can see that the property actually hasn’t had service with Comcast since 2015. Gee thanks, coulda told me that like three days earlier. The previous residents had fiber via Frontier. I called and checked out their prices, may move to them if/when Comcast jacks theirs up. In any case, a tech was dispatched, arrived Wednesday afternoon, reattached my line and my modem immediately woke up. Hallelujah.
Rewinding a sec, I was able to get a slab of wood cut from my bishop’s workshop on Monday before FHE, clearing the path for my TV to be mounted.
With the TV mounted and the internet turned on, I was finally ready to resurrect my ‘puters.
Both machines spun up nicely, got assigned their usual static IPs, and inside of half an hour my domain names were resolving to the new location’s IP address, bringing my blog back online.
And Plex was working just fine, which is what everyone back home was itching about :p
The other fun project was getting the rug down into place. The coffee table had been falling apart for a while, and with the move it was barely holding together. It was too heavy for me to move by myself, and quite probably too rickety for any number of people to move. I looked underneath and saw that a bunch of screws were missing from the bottom slab, contributing to the ricketiness. Figured that as long as I couldn’t move it myself I may as well try and put it together better for when I had help to move it.
I recalled packing a baggie of spare screws that had been left when I first moved into my apartment a couple years ago, meant to be used to secure a couple pieces of metal trim that had fallen off. Never got around to doing that, but the screws fit perfectly underneath.
I pulled one last tug on the Allen wrench to finish off the job, and gave the whole thing a shove just to make sure it wasn’t gonna fall apart any second. And the whole thing glode! Glade… glided… made with the gliding… in any case it slid across the floor just as easy as could be. Turns out those wheels attached to that bottom slab, which I’d always though were useless on carpet, were perfect for hard-wood floors. Almost as groovy as linoleum for shooting marbles.
So it was fantastically easy to get the thing moved out of the way for the rug to come down.
After that was all done I found it hard to motivate myself to put the rest of my stuff where it belonged. Wasn’t expecting company, would rather do anything but that, you know the drill. So it was a nice kick in the pants when it turned out I’d be hosting a game night with a lot of old friends in the ward tonight. Now things are looking a little less like a bomb went off. My general mood about the whole thing is…
Had to put the post on hold as guests arrived before I could finish. It worked out great! Played a few rounds of Resistance, and then… Jackbox :/
Back in the eighties, American Airlines offered the AAirpass for $100,000, which grants the holder unlimited free first-class travel for life. Recipients say it changed their life completely, racking up tens of millions of miles in short order. A few years back, with its finances in trouble, American Airlines started investigating these heavy users to see how much they were costing the company, and learned it was on the order of $1 million per year, each. The airline had ratcheted up the pass’s price over time, getting as high as $3 million, before eventually terminating the program.
Once again, I told you that story to tell you this one. I happened across (read: got talked into it by a couple friends) a deal Costco is offering for a year-long subscription to MoviePass. This is an app + credit card that lets you see one movie a day, for free. You “check in” to the film you want to see on the app, then use the supplied credit card to purchase the ticket. I’ve already recouped about a third of the cost.
Mary and the Witch’s Flower: A Studio Ghibli film with absolutely fantastic visuals, though it kind of turns into a regular anime-movie ending.
The Commuter: Liam Neeson can still take a beating at 60. Feels like a mishmash between Source Code and Non-Stop.
Maze Runner: The Death Cure: I hadn’t seen any of the previous films, but a couple friends were going out to this one and the trailer looked fun. My summary of the film is, “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”
At one point there was the cliche scene where the hero sneaks off to save the day by themselves, only to be stopped by their friends, who’re all geared up and ready to head out too. I feel like there’s some potential here for a Studio C skit, from the friends’ point of view.
“Man we’ve been here for over an hour!”
“Just chill, ok, it’s gonna be so epic when he comes out here and finds us.”
“So he is planning the getaway, you made sure?”
“Well… no… but I did overhear him arguing with the Elders. I’m positive he’s planning something. Look, let’s just practice our lines, alright? He’ll walk up from there, and I’ll jump out and say ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ Then you say…”
“…sigh… ‘You weren’t going to leave without us, were you?'”
“Right, this is gonna be so cool. Any second now.”
[Two hours later…]
“Got any threes?”
“Hmm, got nothing, go fish.”
“–Shhh, I hear him coming! Get into places!”
[Hero walks in, and is startled by…]
“Where do I think you’re going? Shoot, I mean, Where do you think you’re going?”
“Umm, to take a leak?”
“Oh, so, you’re not planning to head off on any daring adventures by yourself?”
“Pshh, no way, you kidding? With no support? We’d make it like half way there before getting overrun by zombies or something, we can’t afford to lose the vehicles or ammunition, and even if we made it there it wouldn’t make any logistical sense, we’d need half our arsenal to make a dent in their defenses. You think we’re in some kind of young-adult movie or something?”
“Well, when you put it that way…”
One gotcha with the MoviePass thing is, you are required to be within 100 yards of the theater before purchasing the ticket, so no advance reservations. That’s just fine for me usually, lots of movies I end up wanting to see only after they’ve been in theaters for a while. However, I did find one way around this limitation. Turns out there are special Android apps that will provide a fake location to the device, so all apps running on it are “fooled” into thinking you’re somewhere you’re not. Perfect application for MoviePass. The only thing is, turns out apps can detect when the location’s being mocked, and MoviePass got wise to my operation, refusing to check in to a film unless location mocking was disabled. Shucky darn. Only wait, turns out there’s a race condition; it takes some amount of time after disabling location mocking for apps to start receiving the real GPS location. If you can check in in that window of time, you can successfully get the app to think you’re really at the theater. This’ll come in handy for popular shows.
Before catching The Commuter I headed to the temple to cap off our family Temple Month. I thought I’d just have enough time to do a drive-by, and was lamenting that I couldn’t do anything cooler for the last day. But then I realized I’d left my drone in the car, so up it went!
It was the sort of thing that I realized once it was up there, Hey, maybe this isn’t like the best idea or whatever, buzzing the temple with a quadcopter. But it all turned out ok.
So today I’ll be catching up on work stuff, and possibly doing some prep for a trip to Hawaii! I head out Monday morning for a week, a friend’s having a handful of people over to his sister’s place on the big island. Thinkin’ I’ll bring my drone for one last huzzah.
P.S. Last night I had a restless dream where I got put up to a prank by some friends, including one unnamed former roommate. The plan was to steal some part of a security system from a Google parking garage. We made it across the street before some neighbors called the cops, and I had to come clean. I ended up getting fired. Wondering how the heck that storyline got in there.