Sort of a shorter post this week, beginning with a funny tidbit I forgot to mention last week. On the plane, during takeoff procedures, the flight crew added this bit to their safety briefing: “The FAA has instructed us to inform those of you who are in possession of a Samsung Galaxy Note 7, that your phone must remain off for the entire duration of the trip.” These phone models, you see, have a tendency to explode.

This week I got to have breakfast with some Googler BYU alumni and a visiting professor. It was pretty slick. We spoke a bit about what we do, then got into BYU business – what’s changed in the department, who’s retiring, etc. One of the main topics of discussion was a debate over what language should be taught as a first programming language to students. It was Java when I went through, then switched to C/C++ a bit before I graduated. Now they’re thinking they might move to Python. These shifts are made in response to what the college feels is best for graduates to know when seeking jobs. Anyways, fun times. Turns out that someone at that breakfast goes to my singles ward, had no idea.

Aside from that, I’ve mainly just had my nose to the grindstone getting ready for the presentation coming up next week at the conference in Tokyo, and getting on top of a new project I just got assigned, very involved and complex. Which is a good problem to have, all considered.

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And, that’s where my weekly missive would have ended, had I not procrastinated posting this. About three hours ago I got a call from someone who’d gotten baptized yesterday – his family is devout Jehovah’s Witness and he was gonna need a new place to stay once he joined the Church. I’d been arranging with him to have him move in in a couple weeks. But turns out, tonight was a good time to get him all moved out, and would I be at all ok with having him over sooner, please and thank you.

It was quite the contrast to how I moved into the apartment at the beginning of my time here: bright, sunny weather, with family to help carry stuff in. Tonight it was cold, dark rainy, a move necessitated by being removed from his family’s home. There were five or six ward members helping him move things into the apartment, which made everything very fast.

So the long and the short of it is, I now have a roommate, after weeks of being on my own. Gonna be a bit of an adjustment I think, but he’s a really cool guy, happy to have him here, and glad I could help him out during this little transition period.