One fun little anecdote from last week that I’d forgotten to share, and didn’t want it to go without mention. It was Monday night and I had to get to Home Depot for some supplies. I went to start my car and I’d left an internal light on, so that wasn’t happening. I knocked on my neighbors’ doors, looking for someone who could jump my car, to no effect. Evening on a three-day weekend, big surprise. I walked all over my neighborhood till I found someone. Then I darted back to my place to give my car a shove out of the garage, as otherwise there was no way we’d get the jumper cables to reach. Ran to get into the driver’s seat before it rolled too far away, then let it coast out to the street and banked it around so it stopped at the opposite curb. Got jumped and on my way; mission accomplished.

Also last week I excitedly made mention of the spring growth in the back yard. I hadn’t yet noticed the patch in the front yard, which had downright flourished over winter.

I have no idea how the other plants got there, but I couldn’t’ve arranged it better myself.

Our team has gotten too crowded in our current office location, so we’re shifting over to a different building. If we had done this move a couple months earlier I would’ve missed my current location a lot more. But they just kept cramming and cramming. Here’s a before and after pic:

• 

• 

Walking in to my desk had started crushing my soul a little bit.

The new digs aren’t quite as spacious as the first pic, but the desk arrangement precludes any further densification. A couple days previously I’d stopped by the new area to get a feel for it. My desk sat perpendicular to a window, which was nice. What wasn’t nice was that the window I’d be spending most of my time looking out of was split vertically, with a crossbar right at eye level. Makes the window look way smaller. And an awkwardly-placed column would keep me from being able to lean too far back without bumping my head.

I figured out that I had enough space to rotate my desk 90°, so I would be facing the window directly. My monitors would then occlude the crossbar, and I’d be able to lean all the way back.

We each get an assigned drawer set, a compact unit on wheels with a padded top. The move announcement said that these drawer units wouldn’t be getting moved. I noticed that my new unit had an ugly chewing gum stain on it, and it was ~4″ shallower than my current unit. I followed the example of a co-worker and pushed my drawers all the way across campus to the new desk, shuttling the other drawers back as a replacement. Caused quite the ruckus as these are not the quietest things to move around.

The movers wanted all packing done by 4pm, so they could start shuttling stuff over to the new building. Workstation powered off, all cables disconnected, desk cleared off. One benefit of pushing my drawers over was that I didn’t have to empty them out, so most of my stuff didn’t need to be packed away. But I’d had a crazy busy day and hadn’t had a chance to finish some testing I really wanted to get done before the weekend, so having my workstation disconnected till Monday wasn’t an exciting proposition. While I have a laptop, there are some core pieces of work I can’t do without remoting in to my workstation.

I headed out to grab some Subway, then went on a little walk around downtown Kirkland. Headed back to the office and the movers had made short work of migrating everyone’s stuff.

What followed was an hour of bliss: being able to sit in peace with no one around while I did desk rearrangement and cable management to my heart’s desire. I’m quite proud of the end result.

• 

• 

I then decided to try out the rig and finish up the testing I hadn’t been able to earlier. Test succeeded, huzzah.

Rewinding a bit. On Wednesday morning I had a cleaning crew come through and do their thing. I’m still finding cat hairs in the most random places, but one day they shall be no more.

That evening I got invited out to a soccer match. Great seats, not so great game; lost 2-0, but it was still fun to watch.

Thursday night I went out on a date; pizza followed by Alita in IMAX 3D. I dunno if the 3D was that compelling, but it was still fun to watch again.

Friday night was the aforementioned moving day. I also picked up a first-generation Amazon Echo I’d claimed on an internal ‘forsale’ mailing list, for the steep price of $10. The problem with my current setup is that the Echo Dot is plugged directly into the sound bar, which spends most of its time powered off. So if I want to hear anything out of the Dot I need to power on the sound bar and make sure it’s set to the right input. Just fine for light control, not so much for casual Echo queries or music requests.

So I’d been thinking of getting something for my room. A Google Home would be nice, but I can’t address it as “computer”, and that’s a hard line for me. My phone can act as a rudimentary Google Home, but it annoyingly refuses to control my lights without first being unlocked, which kind of defeats the purpose.

So the new Echo is a welcome addition to the family. Now I can just say “Computer, bedroom lights off” and my will is made manifest. One neat trick you can do with multiple Echos is whole-home music playback. Each Echo syncs up and you can play the same music all throughout the house. Once again though, my sound bar throws a wrench in it; it’s doing some sort of audio processing that adds a quarter-second of lag to its output, destroying the effect. From what I can tell the Alexa app does allow you to adjust delays on a per-Echo basis, but only if they’re hooked up to a Bluetooth speaker. The app engineers must’ve assumed that a direct-line connection won’t experience lag. So I guess that’s a feature I won’t be using.

Saturday was a cleaning day. After a year living here I figured it was time to clean out the fridge and wash the shelves. Ran five loads of laundry; the lint filter was full of cat hair on each one. Last Monday I’d taken a hack-saw to the felled tree in my back yard; yesterday I took the branches I’d cut off and trimmed them down so they’d fit in a garbage bin. I think it’ll take two weeks’ worth of garbage runs to clear them out entirely.

• 

• 

It turned out that my dining room lights were so dim because, well, they were dim, but also one of them was burned out. Replacing them with a pair of 100 watt LED bulbs was night and day. Don’t pardon the pun, that was horrible.

That evening I had a couple friends over to watch another Bollywood movie: Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara. It’s another winner; we can watch it next time I’m back in town.

After the movie I darted down to catch the tail-end of a YSA dance. Normally totally not my thing, but I’d spent most of the week on my own, and the movie night didn’t quite do it for me. The dance was ok. It was fun to catch up with people, but I was reminded why I usually avoid them though. Just the whitest dancer ever looking super uncomfortable.

(I’m going to leave the prior sentence as-is because it’s too funny, but on review I realize I should specify that it’s dances I avoid, not the people.)

I asked but unfortunately they didn’t take requests, else I would’ve had them queue up this little number.

During dance clean-up a couple of the balloons got lose and were hanging out on the ceiling. I headed to the custodial closet and found some pipes that could be assembled together to span like 25 feet. After adding some tape and a pair of scissors to the mix, I had a formidable weapon against the Ceiling Clingers.

I got one down, but as I was within a foot of the other, a member came up behind me and authoritatively asked,

“Sir, excuse me. Sir. Um, can I please ask you to put that away. Uhh, sharp objects on the ceiling, could hurt someone. The balloon will come down on its own.”

I’ll have it down in like 3 seconds lady. “Uhh, ok, sure.”

So I came away from that empty-handed. The pole was proving difficult to disassemble, so I enlisted the help of another member to play tug-of-war to get it unstuck. As it was coming apart the woman from earlier again showed up.

“Can you please just put those away and stop playing with them?”

…

(Context)

We reassured her we were just disassembling it for storage. “Thanks, I guess I just act like a mom sometimes.” So she wasn’t in any actual leadership role, just a busybody. Yech.

So, that’s my week. Till next time!