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!

(In which you get way more detail about the process of obtaining a video game console than you ever, ever wanted to know.)

The scene is the bedroom, early Monday morning. All Target retail stores in the area received fresh shipments of Nintendo Switch units the day prior, on Sunday. The hope is that at least one store will still have units left over.

8am rolls around, and the phone starts dialing. Nope, nope, nada, zilch. Disheartened, I prepare to mosey on down to work. When I notice that Target.com is claiming a store 25 minutes away, in a smaller town, has units in stock. Having been burned last week in a similar manner, I call over and ask pretty please if they might maybe have some units left. “Why yes, as of 20 minutes ago there were nine units left.”

I debate whether or not it’s worth it. Having spent all of 5 seconds on the conundrum, I zoom off in search of the prize. Thankfully I’m heading in the opposite direction as most people on the road at this time of day. Although, the prospect of sitting in all that traffic, empty handed, does not sound nice.

20 minutes later I’m in the Target parking lot. I prepare to exit the vehicle, patting my pocket to ensure I have my wallet. It’s not there. I left it by my bed.

Thankfully I keep my Bank of American Fork debit card in my backpack. It’s gotten me out of pickles like this before. I rush to the Electronics department, hunting for a rare attendant to badger. “Oh, yeah there’s like one unit left, they’re all up front.” <schoom>. (That’s the sound effect for “walk briskly to the front of the store”.) “Yes, certainly, I’ll be right over.” The cashier unlocks a cabinet, where I spy two units left.

She brings one over. And this is where the tale turns somewhat dour. It’s the variant with neon red+blue controllers, not the grey kind that are far more in demand. Makes all sorts of sense why these would be the only kind left in stock, but it will mean a rough clash with the rest of my A/V equipment. All in all not the end of the world, the unit is secured after all, but I know it’ll gnaw at me.

I check out anyways. A man lines up behind me and snags the very last one. I drive off to work semi-triumphantly. I end up not opening it that day, as Target’s return policy is very strict when it comes to electronics. My goal is to somehow obtain the grey variant, and return my neon one. I’m in no particular rush; the fact that I have a unit at all lets me put an upper bound on the amount of time I’ll need to wait to play the thing. If it turns out that supply chain issues mean units are impossible to come by for months, then I’ll break down and open mine up.

Tuesday rolls around, and a fellow Googler posts on an internal mailing list that he’s pre-ordered one too many grey-variant units, and wants to sell his off instead of returning it. Yes please. Grey unit secured, huzzah. The next day I pulled the same stunt to offload my neon-colored unit.

I could finally take a crack at the new Zelda game. And boy howdy, what a game. Its vast open world-ness creates ample opportunity for amazing little adventures. Like that time I engaged in a high-speed horse race deep into unknown territory, past monsters I had neither the desire nor ability to fight, just so I could catch and attempt to tame a beautiful red steed. (I failed on that last bit, I’ll have to try again when I’m leveled up; she was just too crotchety.)

Or that time I silently paraglided, in the dead of night, behind enemy lines so I could attempt to climb and activate a tower, dodging laser blasts from mecha-spiders as I clambered up its sheer face.

I’m sure there’ll be more, and I’ve only explored a tiny portion of the world so far. Let’s just say it’s definitely coming with me on the Europe trip. Though I kind of doubt I’ll be the one playing it..

All in all it’s been a much quieter week than last, which is a definite plus. Work’s picking up in pace a bit, got a tight deadline approaching that I’m fairly confident I’ll meet, but it’ll be interesting nonetheless.

Last night I attended an Ensign Symphony & Choir concert in Seattle with a friend. I’ve mentioned this group before, they’re like a lite version of MCO. Hillary Weeks, an LDS singer-songwriter, performed with them. While everyone sounded amazing, it was a tad too “pop” for me. Like, let the symphony symphonate. But that’s just nit-picking, it was a really nice performance.

Today I mostly Zelda’d, between running laundry and deep-cleaning my room.

I’m gonna have to leave the apartment soon and hunt down some grub, since a) I’ve eaten two bowls of cereal and a clementine today, and b) it’s Sunday tomorrow and I don’t really have any food here.

The title of this post comes from a very witty song a couple of friends have been putting together. I’ll leave you with a badly-angled recording of the current draft.

..but sometimes I wish it would. Since I last wrote I haven’t had a quiet evening to myself. Always something going on.

Monday night was the FHE activity I wrote about last week. Tuesday night I went on a double-date with my roommate, to Value Village (think DI). His idea mostly. Thankfully my date was just as reticent as I was about accumulating more random stuff. I had to try very hard to keep my roommate from getting a large canvas print of the aurora borealis to put up in our living room, which is already getting pretty crowded from the other pictures he’s hung up. He eventually did get the print but just hung it up in his poster-covered room.

On Wednesday I was set up on a blind date by a friend, we just went out to eat. Date was done at 9, I was looking forward to a quiet evening, but my roommate had guests over so we just shot the breeze for a few hours.

On Thursday my team at work did an “off-site”, a fun team activity. We’d decided to go to a local shooting range. I was kind of bummed we couldn’t go skeet shooting with shotguns, but boy howdy there were some fun guns to shoot there. My boss even brought his AR-15.

That evening I had a dilemma. The Nintendo Switch was having its midnight release that night. I could’ve gone and stood in line for hours in the cold rain. On the other hand, a friend was having her going-away party, leaving for two years to join the Peace Corps in Albania. I ended up foregoing the Switch, hoping to be able to snag it later on the following week. The party was fun, I was able to run a game of Conspiracy – a cross between Mafia and Bang! that my former roommates have been developing for years. Can’t wait to play it at the next cabin get-together.

Friday night was round two of the Star Wars multi-week marathon. Episode V was up, considered by many to be the best of the original trilogy. The chief chatters of last week weren’t able to make it – pity. There was still some talking, but the major dialogue was understandable, so it was mostly all good.

Saturday morning I was flicking through some news websites on my phone, when on a whim I checked and a nearby Target had the Switch in stock! I hurriedly showered and shot out the door. Unfortunately the site was a lie. They wouldn’t get a new shipment in until Sunday. I’ll just hope they have left-over units by tomorrow.

I had no plans for the rest of the afternoon. I ended up just wandering aimlessly down a road, towards what looked like food. Had to wander a bit further than I thought, but I got to see some pretty cool stuff that I wouldn’t have been able to do had I been driving around.

When I got back I decided to do some prep work for the Switch. When I wired up my TV I didn’t bother with an HDMI cable. All my viewing is done via Ethernet. I had ordered an HDMI cable that was long enough, but the plastic conduit I picked up from Home Depot was not large enough to fit it along with power, an AUX cable, and two Ethernet cables – one for the TV, one for the sound bar. You wouldn’t think a sound bar needs network connectivity, but like the TV it has built-in ChromeCast support, so I could use it to wirelessly stream Pandora or whatever. While the bar does have built-in wifi, I didn’t want to clog up the airwaves. With the arrival of the Echo Dot last year though, I haven’t had a need for any streaming directly to the bar. And I’ve only ever once needed to actually use the AUX cable I ran.

At the time I set all this up I figured (hoped) I wouldn’t ever need a device that delivers HDMI to the TV. The Switch changes this up. And I really didn’t want to have a random cable running off the side of the TV, that’s the whole point of the conduit job. So out came the sound bar’s Ethernet cable and the AUX cable, in went the HDMI cable. At its worst it looked pretty bad.

These conduits really were not made to easily open back up after being clipped shut. (Nor were they made to come off of the wall without taking any of the wallpaper with it… but that’s a problem for later.) Thankfully the adhesives were able to fasten back to the wall without much difficulty. The only indication that anything’s different is an extra pipe running up between the sound bar and TV.

Now just to pounce on the Switch when I can. I hear amazing things about the new Zelda game, and I hear there’s enough content that I’ll probably still be playing it by the time the Europe trip comes around, so that’ll be something to do on the plane.

All in all this afternoon on my own did me good. It reminded me a lot of one of my favorite scenes from Monk.

 

That evening I attended a friend’s pre-birthday party – her actual birthday is today, which she’ll be celebrating with family. Today we’ve got church, then right afterwards a break-the-fast dinner at a friend-of-a-friend’s house. I was planning on making a dish, but my roommate wants me to make myself scarce this afternoon while he serenades a gal in our living room. So I think I’ll just pack up the components and prepare it in the church’s serving area. Fudging the rules a bit, but, ox in the mire. I hope for everyone’s sakes that things go well for my roommate.

Monday night will be FHE again, and we’ll see just how long this busyness goes.

Love ya!