Two weeks ago on Thursday I began a game that has still not finished. Five of us embarked on a magical journey of hope and wonder, collecting spells and allies in order to defeat our enemies and defend Hogwarts. We started off so young, but by the stroke of midnight we’d graduated from our third year. The Shrieking Shack had very nearly fallen to the Basilisk, but we managed to muster up the firepower to take it down.

I’m describing Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle. That site tells lies; this game is not winnable in 60 minutes. We’ll have to arrange to meet another time to work through years four to seven. I hear they’re a doozy.

One of our comrades-in-wands required a ride to the event, and I was happy to oblige. I’d heard that he lived on a commune, but hadn’t thought much of it until he offered to show me around when I swung by to grab him. Never one to turn down a cool experience like that, I followed him through the building where he lived, along with others of all sorts. Interesting religious imagery and symbolism everywhere. I was lucky I didn’t see anything in the clothes-optional pool area. While we were off defending Hogwarts we were missing a pagan maypole ritual. Interesting way to live.

Friday at 2pm I got a text from a friend, who’d just picked up a new bike and was looking for a biking buddy for that afternoon. I felt I’d put in enough over-time hours to justify playing hooky, so I shot off early and met her at a park, from which we embarked onto the Cross Kirkland Corridor. Before I moved earlier this year I’d biked the complete path to get myself to work. These days I have to meet up at the trail half-way through, and I miss out on the best parts of it. So it was nice to bike it in its entirety. We hit my office, grabbed some water, then flipped a uie. Had to make it to a dog kennel place to pick up a mutual friend’s husky.

This is what she looked like two months ago:

And here’s her in my car on the way back from the kennel:

My how she’s grown.

Friday night, and most of Saturday, was spent teaching myself Blender. I had some nifty animation ideas for a website we were gonna launch the next week, and thought I’d try my hand at making them. Conceptually pretty simple, but getting Blender to do what I wanted was a Herculean task. It’s basically the Photoshop of 3D graphics. A co-worker remarked to me that Blender is cool and all ’cause they have all these features you can use programmatically, but when it came time to surface them as a UI they were all, whatever, here’s some magic key combos and hidden context menus, have fun.

I ended up with some decent-looking animations, but we didn’t end up going with them, too flashy. Good learning experience regardless.

Nothing much to report from Sunday to Tuesday. On Wednesday I went out to see Rampage, which was a pretty alright film. On the way back from that I stopped by my erstwhile home teachee’s place to give her a blessing for a health issue.

Thursday was the big day. We’d been leading up to this for quite a while, spending many a late night at the office preparing. That morning at 10am we launched our open-source project, Asylo, with its accompanying blog post (that I heavily edited :)). This project is a framework for writing programs that can run with some pretty neat security properties. The basic idea is this: normally, if Alice own the computer, or has an administrative account on the computer, she has all power. Since Alice is better at running computer hardware than Bob, Alice sells access to her computer. Bob writes the program, and gives it to Alice to run on her computer. Since Alice has all power on her computer, Bob has to blindly trust that Alice isn’t messing with his program or stealing his data. This is basically an incontrovertible fact of life for most computer systems.

But there’s this neat concept called a trusted execution environment that essentially changes the game. On certain types of computers, Bob can write his program such that when it runs on Alice’s computer, the program instructs Alice’s computer to set up a “force field”, and thereafter nothing else on the system has access to the program or the data it’s working with. Even with her administrative account, Alice can’t peek at what the program’s doing, or modify it in any way.

So that’s super cool. But the problem is that these magic force fields aren’t very easy to set up or use. They require very specialized programming knowledge. Our project, Asylo, aims to make it dead simple to write high-level programs that take advantage of these ‘force field’ abilities. It’s still pretty early, but we’ll see where the project goes.

So we launched the website Thursday morning. Spent the rest of that day fielding questions from Hacker News and other outlets. My exhaustion had caught up to me by then, so at 4pm I bailed. I’d become a titch irritable, so I headed home to sleep it off.

At some point this week, can’t remember exactly when, I took care of a couple of pressing car concerns. Finally bothered to get my registration renewed. I thought I’d get something out of my laziness, a couple free months of registration, but no; even though I delayed renewing from February to April, my new sticker still reads as expiring in February. Shucky darn.

I also took my car in for service, where I had to give the sad news to the kindly mechanic that no, I really didn’t want to shell out $400+ to try yet another tack at diagnosing the weird noises that’d been coming out of my engine for several years now. Got some contaminated fluids replaced, but I figure the engine’s lasted this long, if it gives out I might just buy a car that’s less than 15 years old and maybe one that hasn’t been rebuilt.

Saturday morning I went off with the same friend I played hooky with, to go bike to Seattle. A cordoned-off commuter lane on a bridge across Lake Washington meant the ride was a pleasant ~40 minutes or so. We ended up arriving at the other side just in time to watch a rowing competition, followed by a boat parade.

By the time I got back to my place I had about two hours to get some R&R before a leadership session of Stake Conference. So I promptly fell asleep and missed the whole thing. Woke up just in time to make it to our ward’s Cinco de Mayo party, before walking the short distance to the chapel for the adult session. Afterwards I headed to a friend’s house to do some tech support, brain storm for an upcoming ward activity (Gadianton Robbers vs Nephites), and get girl advice. Fun times.

For the main session of Stake Conference, I’d been asked to volunteer as the usher coordinator. So it was my job to get there early, distribute usher pins to the other volunteers, assign areas of responsibility, collect attendance figures, and generally make sure people didn’t get trampled over on their way in. I got to hide behind my badge and be the mean ol’ usher boss-man, getting people to stop saving seats, move to the middle to free up the aisles, etcetera.

Stake Conference adjourned at 12:30, leaving us with a very weird amount of free time left in the day; normally our meetings last until 4pm (though I’m lobbying to change that). So I had a friend over for lunch, then napped and read some more Dune.

Monday was a Monday. On Tuesday I played my usual game of soccer with other employees, but I soccer’d so hard that I sprained my ankle something fierce. It’s been easy to do that ever since I hyper-compressed it in Costa Rica some five years ago. Finished the game though, even delivering the game-winning assist. Got home, kicked up my feet in a recliner to read a bit, then tried standing up and had my feet and knee exclaim oh, no, no that won’t do at all. Limped upstairs, took a bath, took some Advil, then slept the worst of it off. I’ve been limping around ever since, but it gets better each day.

How do you end up with four ladies, one guy with a gimp leg, and a cat, all trying to sneak through a construction fence at 10pm without being spotted? Here’s how.

Due to my valiant tech support efforts, I’d been invited over to dinner on Wednesday. Spaghetti, mmm boy. While watching a movie one of the girls got a text from her future father-in-law–who’d just been by to deliver something for the upcoming wedding–stating that cops were swarming the complex. A couple of us wanted to investigate, and this turned into the entire apartment taking a field trip around the block, along with the resident cat, having been properly harnessed and leashed. Turned out it was just some domestic disturbance thing.

Behind the complex lay a delightful forest area, with meandering trails and a charming creek flowing through. I’d heard that there’d been some construction back there, and inquired as to how it was coming along. Apparently it had turned into an absolute travesty. Thus our brief excursion turned into a bit of a field trip to see the new forest digs. Mind you that night had entirely fallen at this point.

And boy what a travesty it was. They’d put down fence along a narrow walkway through the forest, and spread a deep layer of wood chips along the ground. It was essentially a dog park. There had been an intriguing spiral pattern of rocks laid down on the ground, which had been swept away to make room for a wood-chip-blanketed clearing.

We navigated the neutered paths until we made it back into nature. Then it was up onto a sterile steel walkway which overshadowed the old walking trail that used to run right alongside the creek. We followed that until we ended up in a construction zone, where jungle gym equipment was being installed. We could see the main road from here, but it was fenced off, to keep trespassers out.

Rather than head back through the forest trail, we found a section of the fence-line that was high enough off the ground that we could squeeze through it, all incriminating-like. Then we just followed the road back around the long way. My leg was quite happy to be done with that little adventure, as was the cat who had definitely not signed up for all that.

Aaand that’s it for this one, till next time!