A quick overview of the last week-and-a-half:
Princess Diaries: For reasons too mundane to get into I found myself having to “make it up to” a few friends by hosting a chick flick night, ended up being Princess Diaries. I remember liking it a lot more back in the day. And the people for whom I’d put everything together left early, leaving a few friends and I who had to sit through the last third of a movie that I doubt any of us would’ve wanted to finish, but such is life.
A Quiet Place: Two Saturdays ago I met up with some friends to see the latest horror flick, starring Jim from The Office. For half of us it was our first time, while half were going for round two. I’d be more than happy to go for a round two myself some time; awesome movie with an awesome monster design.
After the film I puttered around Bellevue Square, eventually ending up in an Amazon Bookstore. Read a chapter of Ender’s Game, dithered for an egregious amount of time, then plunked down some cash for Way of Kings and Dune. Now that I have a proper bookshelf I’m slowly building up a collection of all my favorite books. One of the worst things about being graduated is not having access to BYU’s library anymore. Floor five, aisle PZ was where it was at; most of my favorite series were housed there.
Battleship on steroids: A month or two prior, a friend’s boyfriend had brought a game called Captain Sonar to a ward game night, and it was a total blast. Two teams of four face off, each commanding a submarine in real-time, trying to find and sink the enemy. By real-time I mean each team’s captain is shouting directions to their crew, firing missiles and deploying mines and sensor packages, all while the enemy team is doing the same; no turn-by-turn business here.
So I had a group over to play it. Afterwards I narrated a game of Forbidden Desert. It’s a collaborative survival game; the entire group is working together to escape a desert that’s rapidly being overtaken by a storm. If anyone on the team dies, the game ends and everyone loses.
Greatest Showman: My first ward-wide event was hosting movie-night for FHE. Had a good crowd, and as I later learned my neighbor didn’t hear a thing.
HOA shenanigans: Thus far I’d been able to count on three fingers the number of neighbors I’d met. That all changed on Tuesday last week when I attended my first-ever HOA meeting. It was an informational meeting, to discuss the impending necessity of hiring a community management firm to take care of some pressing issues. Got to introduce myself to people, and afterwards I was invited along with a group of five out to a local restaurant/bar. Super chill people, though there are some definite characters in the neighborhood.
Drunk with power: Or maybe it was just exhaustion. In any case. On Wednesday I pulled my first all-nighter since I worked on my graduate thesis, and for no good reason. I’d been faced with a problem at work, and had arrived at a plan of action. However, I spent Wednesday learning just how painful it’d be to implement my selected solution. A stroke of inspiration hit me as I arrived home, and I dove into coding. At around 2:30am I’d solved the half of the problem I’d thought I could solve with my new approach, but then I realized that using the same approach I could solve the rest of it in short order! 7am rolled around and I was grateful, since it meant my genius co-worker would’ve arrived at work by then and I could ping him with some lingering questions. At 9am my solution was complete. It was an ugly, abominable union of multiple programming languages, but by Jove it worked, and it was far cleaner than what I’d been anticipating having to do.
By this time I’d been working roughly 24 hours straight. I picked the wrong day to have an obsessive need to stay up all night, having an interview scheduled for 2:30pm that afternoon. So I grabbed a couple hours’ sleep before heading in to work. As I stumbled around corners and tables at lunch I found myself pondering, this must be what being drunk feels like.
All for nought: The next day, Friday, I was getting early feedback on my heinous perversion of a solution, and a co-worker said he’d seen a code-sample that he’d thought did what I was aiming to do. I told him to send it my way, as I’d looked at many code samples, and I’d tell him why what he’d found wouldn’t help my situation.
So of course the sample he gave me was code I’d somehow glossed over, that solved the problem in such an elegant way as to make me want to throw out the mess of code I’d written Wednesday night to Thursday morning. I immediately set to building out a solution that leveraged this new hotness.
A brief intermission: I was interrupted by the need to head out on a date that evening. Went out to Feed Co., a nice little burger joint in Redmond, that served great sweet potato fries and was adept at putting together a lettuce-wrap.
On the way back we decided to stop by the stake center and try and catch the end of a program the youth of the stake were putting on, a play based on the Book of Mormon. They’d been prepping in earnest for a couple months, though I later learned that the entire effort had been in the works for over a year.
We arrived just after the close of the play, but there were still plenty of people milling about. And that set!
I had no idea the ceiling was outfitted to hold up rigging like that. They really went all out, though I wouldn’t find out till the next day just how much out they’d went.
I returned from the date and proceeded to metaphorically bang my head against a wall; the solution I’d been pursuing was presenting frustratingly-vague errors, and I was forced to resort to tedious trial-and-error experimentation to track down the combination of factors that triggered a failure. I was forced to call it quits at 2am; wasn’t gonna give this thing another all-nighter.
Regroup for the counterstrike: As I was heading to bed I formulated a couple plans of attack that I hoped would at least yield better error messages than what I was getting. In the morning I got a chance to try them out, and whooped for joy when I was finally being told precisely what the system thought was going wrong.
R&R: Once again I had to leave my efforts by the wayside and head out with a friend to a matinee showing of that very same youth production, dubbed Built on the Rock.
It was incredible. On the order of a couple-hundred youth, all in impeccable costume. Some fantastic talents on display, including some kata, gymnastics, even an aerial silk routine. Great musical numbers. Pneumatic special effects. High-school-theater-caliber lighting design.
Once more into the fray: After the show I headed back home and put the final nail in the coffin of this work problem. Huzzah. Watching those error-free activity log messages tick past just made everything else worth it. Spent a while organizing my work into several smaller well-contained changes, all prepped for being sent out for review on Monday. I stacked them so I’d be able to send all of them out at once, just for theatrics’ sake.
Plants have feelings too: Spent the rest of the afternoon out in the back, weeding. I’d really let it go, partly out of laziness but partly out of fear that I’d be unable to determine what should stay and what should go, and cause inadvertent damage. Enough growth had happened, though, that I could confidently identify the worst offenders. Hacked-n-slashed my way around, building up a nice pile of greens.
Stepped back to take stock of my efforts. I’ve never been very good at weeding. Can’t seem to focus on one section of ground at once, instead flitting between attention zones until things look more-or-less reasonable. I was just about to finish rationalizing to myself that what remained wasn’t worth attacking, when I noticed something odd going on with a bush up near the fence corner. As I approached I realized it wasn’t one plant, but two. Vines growing out of a stump had somehow taken hold of a nearby tree thing and encrusted it in tendrils, bending it much too far over. In fact one rather large branch had been sheared clean off from the pull of the vines.
Weeding had been a chore before, but now it became a mission, to save this tree. As I worked to free it, cutting the vines at various points, I began to empathize with those that decide to be talkative with their plants. So sorry, I thought to the tree, that I let this go on too long without noticing. Shan’t let it happen again.
Chapel rave: Sacrament Meeting on Sunday was a special event, where the (several-more-than-usual) speakers were invited to share their favorite hymn, followed by the speaker, the choir, or the congregation singing it, depending on how good the speaker was or how familiar the hymn. Half-way through the program one of the tall chandeliers’ fluorescent bulb began faintly strobing. Not enough to notice if it wasn’t in your field of view, but too noticeable to focus on anything else with it in your field of view. So I spent the rest of the meeting with my head bowed in reverence.
Changing the rules: It was my turn to teach Gospel Doctrine that day. My lesson was to begin with Joseph’s interpretation of the baker’s and butler’s dreams in prison, and proceed through to his reunification with his family.
Of late, the crowd that attends Gospel Doctrine has been of the less-talkative bunch. Really hard to get good discussion out of the class. After spending so much mental energy on work this week, I didn’t feel like dealing with that, so I pulled a Kobayashi Maru. Wheeled a TV in from the library, gave a brief overview of the dreams and interpretations, then let Living Scriptures do the teaching for the rest of the lesson. And boy was it a hit. Had some fun humor sprinkled throughout an effective explanation of what I would’ve struggled to get across.
That evening I went to a friend’s birthday pajama-pancake game-night. Ran another game of Forbidden Desert, but this time the group lost twice in a row. Gee dang.
And that catches us up to today, which I started by sending off my plethora of changes, and spent the rest of the day ferrying them through code reviews. Haven’t felt this productive in a long time. A shame I won’t have this problem to deal with anymore now that it’s been tackled; grown kinda attached to working on it, in a weird way.
It’s warm enough now that I’m back on my bike. My old route to work, before I moved, had very little elevation change. My new one, however, is, like, not that. The central feature of my route is the part where I hop off my bike and push it up like a hundred stair steps. Thankfully there’s raw earth along the side that I can wheel it up, while I push on up the staircase. Then it’s more-or-less smooth sailing into work.
This evening I read the final pages of Oathbringer, the latest Sanderson novel. I think I picked up the book in January, but held off on starting it until the end of March, for precisely the reason I’m feeling a tad out of sorts now: it’s gonna be so long until I can read more.
I used to be a strong opponent to Netflix’s content distribution strategy, where they just dump a whole series’ worth of content out at once. I’ve always thought it kind of ruined the shared experience of discovery; unless you carefully coordinate your viewing patterns with someone and avoid Internet spoilers, you won’t be able to spend time theorizing and anticipating what happens next, like you can with traditionally serialized shows.
However, reading Oathbringer made me sympathetic to those who prefer that distribution model. I couldn’t imagine how frustrating it’d be to only be able to read one chapter a week.
I bought Way of Kings in case I felt like re-reading it after Oathbringer, which I’ve never done since finishing it the first time. I may do that yet, but I just lent it to a friend yesterday, so I think my next book–if I don’t branch out to something I haven’t read yet–is gonna be a re-read of Dune. I highly recommend it y’all, it’s like the Lord of the Rings of sci-fi.
(Don’t worry Hayden, I’ll retrieve Way of Kings before I made my way down to the Cabin this summer 🙂 )
