I’ve been told in the past by both my manager and the senior engineer I work with that I’m staying too late at work, and I really need to just disconnect and go have a life. The point’s been raised often enough that I’m really committed to following through this time. However, as I alluded to last week, a new project just landed in my lap that has an extremely strict deadline, and I’ve been staying up quite late getting things sorted on that end. Luckily I’m at the point where all the hard effort is done, and the rest of the project will require minimal work going forward.
It’s funny, I just said how my manager wants me to go have a life and such, and I think I would be having a much rougher time of it here, but the Church really does fill up the remainder of my time. It’s lucky I finished up the hard work on this project on Tuesday, ’cause after that there was always something.
Tuesday night I had a synchronized viewing party with my old roommates from Provo. One of them, and I, had seen Battlestar Galactica all the way through, and we’d been watching on and off with the other roommate. They’re notoriously slow at these sorts of things, and it’s literally taken them over a year to work through the show. But they were finally ready to watch the finale. We hit play at the same time and enjoyed the show, then webcam’d it up for a bit afterwards, to rave and to catch up. Their cousin, my actual roommate from back then, just recently got engaged, so that’s exciting.
Wednesday night we watched Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. We’ll wrap up the marathon next week with Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. I’m not actually totally sold on the idea of skipping Episode I. Intellectually it makes all sorts of sense, and there are a lot of persuasive arguments about how the story unfolds without it. However, from my limited observation, watching Episode II without having seen its predecessor leads to confusion. The various locations aren’t adequately introduced; ‘they already know what Coruscant is and what the Senate looks like, no need for establishing shots or exposition.’ It also requires some explicit explanation of backstory for Anakin, when he starts seeing visions of his mother, and goes to visit his old planet Tatooine, and his old master Watto.
In addition, Episode II features a mystery investigation by Obi Wan. Someone who’s seen Episode I knows what they should and should not be surprised by. I had to explain to the person watching for the first time, “We don’t know anything about these clones, this wasn’t explained in Episode I, it’s all a mystery.” Kind of draws you out of the experience, I think.
Anyways. Thursday night was the third Thursday of the month, and our Service & Activities committee put on a video game night at the chapel, a Mario Kart March Madness tournament. Good times. Someone brought an N64 and the reminder of what kind of graphics prior generations worked with was eye-opening.
Last night was “Shamrocks and Murder”, a murder mystery dinner. I think I’m getting the hang of these – there’s always some character that everyone can’t stand, and they end up dead. Then anyone who had a real beef with them is the suspect, and one of this group ends up being the murderer; though I haven’t been able to use the clues to effectively narrow down the suspect list.
Today I’ll be heading in to work to use our “maker space” workshop to try and fix one of the wireless controllers for the new Nintendo console. Due to a manufacturing defect, the antenna on the left controller is not powerful enough to get a decent signal back to the console. Its etched directly into the board, right next to a large metal something-or-other, and located directly where the hand usually covers the unit. There’s a soldering point on the trace, and the plan is to attach a wire and run it down to the bottom of the unit, where it’ll hopefully get better signal out. Why the antenna wasn’t attached in the first place is beyond me. The right controller is set up in this way, just not the left. There’s an instructive YouTube video that illustrates how to run the wire, I’ll just need to refresh myself on proper soldering technique.
I disassembled the controller last night just to familiarize myself with the internals. Didn’t remove any wires, just unscrewed some cover plates. Unfortunately, when I put it back together it had far worse coverage than before, so I hope this venture is successful; it’ll make playing it quite frustrating going forward if not.
Later on tonight I’ll attend my roommate’s first ever birthday party. This time last year he was still a Jehovah’s Witness, and didn’t believe in celebrating holidays of any sort. So that’ll be fun.
Click to open these in a new tab, they look better enlarged.
Love ya!