I’m showing my age. About two and a half weeks ago I passed out on my couch (been doing that a few times lately), and in the morning it was evident that I’d slept on my wrist wrong, bent all the way back. A younger version of me would shrug it off and go about his business, but these old joints don’t take kindly to such punishment, and even now the wrist smarts whenever I use it to support myself too much when getting up.

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Conference was a thing that was fun. Had the sister missionaries, a recent convert, and an investigator over to watch both sessions. Aside from the great talks, one thing stood out to me: they still used the “all opposed, please indicate by the same sign” mechanism for indicating opportunity to voice dissent. I think it’s been clear for some time that, with the global nature of the Church, this gesture has been a relatively perfunctory cultural hold-over. But there’s ostensibly been an opportunity to actually get there in-person to raise your hand if you really care (or do more than that if you really really care).

Now though, with an in-person audience of approximately zero, the gesture is conclusively pro forma. I kinda wonder what sort of conversations have been had on the topic. On the one hand, if they stop even verbalizing an offer to dissent, it could be construed as “we don’t care.” On the other hand, it seems like they’d need to invest quite a few resources in building up robust online infrastructure for collecting, collating, dispatching, tracking, triaging, and resolving registered “opposition” votes, for something that has really been a formality for some time anyways. Shrug.

The evening of conference I went to what I learned to be a regular Sunday-night get-together at Bishop’s place, to watch Book of Mormon videos. We watched the one where Ammon meets and converts King Lamoni. I couldn’t help but compare the video to the Living Scriptures rendition, and the comparison was not that favorable to the modern take. If I had to make an analogy, it would be the modern-day Lion King to the animated original. I won’t wax poetic or anything, just not my cup of tea.

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My team, like most others at Google, works remotely. However, unlike most other teams, we periodically need to come in to the office to perform certain regular maintenance tasks in a secure room. I went in to help out this last week, and got to see what was going on next door.

This used to be a bit of a strip mall, but has been demolished and will soon become the eighth Google office building in Kirkland. Hope we’ll be able to use it…

While I was in the office, I spent some time swapping desks. Ever since we first moved into the building my team now occupied, I’d admired my teammate Carl’s desk location – perfect view out the window, plenty of room to lean back and swivel. He’s since moved to a new team, and I asked him and my manager if I could swap desks. Mainly for fun given that I would spend very little time there, but it was enjoyable rearranging things anyways.

Speaking of work. I got cc’d on an email chain initiated by a neighbor to our HOA board. They were having complaints about a neighbor who was not keeping their walkway and gutters clear of vegetation, with concerns about liability (delivery people were stepping on their walkway to get to their neighbor’s) and property value. Technically a violation of the CCRs, and apparently there’d been some prior effort on their part to refer the homeowner to outfits who could help out, to no avail. I volunteered to stop in and chat with the neighbor before escalating to any written warnings or anything. Things became more interesting though, when I realized that this person I had to drop by and chat with happened to be a coworker. Not one I knew in any sense, Google is a big place. But it’s put me in a bit of a weird position. I’d like to say “hey actually I work with this guy so could someone else from the board take this on,” but I also don’t want to highlight the association and besmirch the Google name :). I’ll just suck it up and head on over one of these evenings this week.

In sadder news, my trusty 2015 Macbook Pro has reached end-of-life and is no longer supported by Google. I was issued one of these when I first joined, and had it stolen out of a rental car while on a business trip in 2017. At that time Apple had refreshed their MBP line with the shnazzy new touchbar and the “butterfly” keyboard, which cost them quite a bit of public goodwill for being incredibly flaky and prone to breakage. I told them please, I’ll wait weeks if I have to, but could you possibly scrounge up a 2015 model to replace the stolen unit. They helpfully obliged, and the replacement unit has been serving me well ever since.

But I recently noticed my regular backups had been failing, and tech support basically refused to dig into it because the machine was so old. So, replacement time. Luckily at this time Apple has gotten their act together a bit with the keyboard, and upgraded back to one that has much more key travel and reliability than the butterfly model. However, I do have some greivances:

• While the keyboard is much better than the butterfly one that plagued the lineup since 2016, it really has no redeeming qualities when compared to the old 2015 model’s keyboard. I’m finding myself mis-typing many times an hour because, in Apple’s quest for thin-ness, the keys can’t travel as far when they press.
• The touchbar is completely useless to me. I never want to use the context-sensitive controls, so I customized it to only contain buttons for the actions I use that row for: screen brightness, keyboard brightness, and volume. So now I’ve traded physical buttons for touch-sensitive ones with zero haptic feedback and a propensity to get mis-clicked when I brush my fingers near that top row. Also the driver must be buggy because many times I find the touchbar using a button layout I did not order. Also, I used to be able to turn the keyboard brightness all the way down on-demand when watching a movie, but that’s gone, since the touchbar does whatever it wants brightness-wise.
• The trackpad is enormous. Like the touchbar, the palm rejection software is a bit buggy, and several times I find myself zooming when I really just wanted to scroll. Nowhere to rest my fingers below the keyboard either.
• The USB-C ports have taken over. No USB-A, no HDMI, no SD-card slot.
• No more Magsafe charger. As handy as it is to occasionally plug the charger into the right side (as you can now charge from any port), it is not worth my fumbling with the charger late at night, wishing for the days when I could just dangle the charger near the port and have it catch.

There are a couple pros though:

• Sound quality is intensely good.
• Screen is a bit bigger, 16″ vs 15″, for the same form-factor.
• Battery life, especially when it gets low, is much improved. My old machine was struggling in that area, which is to be expected for such an old boy.

Oh well, zeroth-world problems. On a positive note, I picked up a pretty groovy new toy: an antique toaster (whose design harks back to the 1940’s) with an ingenious mechanism for toasting and actuating the bread elevation. It also looks pretty spiffy.

Also recently acquired a portable A/C unit from a Googler for a song, will come in handy next summer. Tossed in some artwork as well.

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This evening I had a couple of kittens come by for a visit. They’re being taken care of by a friend in the ward, since the shelter can’t have as many volunteers come by as usual. Really seemed to enjoy the change in scenery.

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The little one’s name is Cinnamon, and her big brother is named Nutmeg.

Last night was the finale of Lower Decks – been watching it with Dad each weekend, and it’s been a hoot. Saw an article where the showrunner describes season 2, and I’m looking forward to it. Also Discovery season 3.

I recently decided to do something about a few items that needed doing around the house. Recall that I put a fresh hole in my wall while doing cable routing. I also had a deck that frankly needed cleaning when I first moved in 2.75 years ago. And finally, there was a hole in the roof of my garage that I inherited when I bought the place.

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If you recall from a couple of posts ago, I met a fellow in a Home Depot parking lot looking for handyman work. I had him come by for an estimate. He arrived in a run-down sedan, which off the bat didn’t inspire a huge amount of confidence. He took a look around and scribbled a few notes on some loose-leaf paper, then came up with an estimate. He noted that I’d need to pay half up front, and pay in cash – a check wouldn’t do it, since it takes two weeks to clear. To be polite I said I’d let him know when I got the cash, sent him on his way, and immediately fired up Yelp looking for a more reputable outfit.

Found a group that did everything I was looking for. Let me know though that at this time of year, with the rain so frequent, they’d need to really thread the needle to get the work done. To resurface the back would need one day to pressure-wash everything, two days of clear skies, a day to apply sealant, and a day – ideally two – afterwards to let it cure.

Luckily a stretch of sunlight came up on the scopes, so they headed over to pressure-wash. Looked fantastic afterwards.

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There were a few boards in the back that the handyman mentioned could use replacement, so I headed out to Home Depot to grab some.

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When it came time to stain, there was a bit of drama. He knocked on my window and had me come out and see that the pressure washing had not gotten all of the old stain removed, and the semi-transparent stain I’d picked up would not look the best in those parts of the deck. That’s what you get with aged wood.

The ironic part of all this was that I’d originally picked up some redwood solid color stain+sealant, but had a change of heart the night before because I liked the natural look of the wood. Now though, I was hearing that one really should go with a solid color when working with this sort of wood.

So, I left the handymen at my place and rushed off to Home Depot to return what I could of the semi-transparent (bought two cans, returned the un-opened one), and swapped back to the redwood.

When all was said and done, the stain looked awesome on the front gate, but… not so much out back.

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It’s kinda loud, clashes with the vegetation. In retrospect I really should’ve gone with a brown or dark green. Oh well, that’s a very expensive lesson I’ve learned: always test your colors out before paying people to come by and paint with them. And find someone who knows colors.

The other projects finished up nicely though.

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Now, with all this foot traffic in my place over the last while, I’m growing a bit paranoid. See, I’ve somehow misplaced basically all of my socks.

Pictured here is essentially my entire collection of day-to-day socks. I really do not know what happened to the rest. Could’ve sworn I had a ton piled up down in the laundry room, but I’ve looked everywhere and cannot find anything besides these.

Let’s just say that I’m now one of those old folks who really enjoys receiving socks for Christmas.