So now I’m back in the States, with life just moving right along. My first week back I put in a probably unhealthy amount of time at work. I had been spending some time on a passion project while overseas, so it was nice to get that sent out for review and submitted. Sped up our firmware build process considerably.
After that there was a demo of the project we’d been working on for the last quarter or so. Heard from multiple people that it was an exceptionally good presentation. We had to fit it into half an hour and even then weren’t able to get it all in, so we did a do-over during a more focused regularly-scheduled meeting that gave us more time for questions and discussion.
The other thing going on at work at the moment is some unrest over the reservation system used for our racketball court. The rules say you can only have one reservation active at a time, with no recurring bookings. Unfortunately this isn’t enforced, so now if you take a look at some random week two months from now, all the prime-time slots are fully booked out.
The last time this happened we got Facilities to just purge the entire calendar and send notices that such bookings were against policy. There was talk of calling for another purge, but others were more fatalistic – if it didn’t work last time, nothing to do but join in and book multiple slots defensively.
Since the booking system is basically Google Calendar, and Google Apps Script is a pretty robust and full-featured way of programmatically interacting with Calendar / Gmail etc., I noodled around for half an hour to get a quick proof-of-concept script that could be set up to run automatically daily at midnight, and for each user’s events, allow them to keep one but purge all others.
The script was a hit on the mailing list, so next thing to do was run it by Facilities. That process took about a week, during which I was nervous they’d come back with some big-company red tape response. I spent the time spiffing up the script, since the moment I pointed it at the actual booking calendar in dry-run mode, it barfed; my dummy test calendar was definitely not representative of the various data formats that came back from the real one.
Facilities finally responded saying they’re aware of the problem and are working on clarifying the policy angle, after which they’d love to start using the script. Huzzah.
In the meantime, I celebrated the end of the first year of my third decade on earth.
Oh yeah. I accidentally figured out that putting the projector on my dining room table revolutionizes the living room space.
Went on a hike with some friends. It was rainy.
If any of you remember that one marble game at Alpine House, where you basically play checkers against yourself until you hopefully end up with one marble left, I picked up one of those games in Australia. Played a couple rounds and while I didn’t win, at least I was symmetrical.
On Friday I hosted a showing of the first two episodes of The Mandalorian, a new Star Wars TV show that launched with Disney+. I’d originally only planned on seeing the first episode, which had aired the previous Tuesday, but unbeknownst to me the second episode dropped that Friday, so we got a two-fer.
I’ve been enjoying my new Oculus Quest quite a bit. It’s a VR headset that doesn’t need to be tethered to a phone or PC. Beat Saber, SuperHot, and Vader Immortal are must-plays. Can’t wait to bring it by for Thanksgiving.
Spotted this at Costco. $550, and comes with a cutting board and knife. Full service.
Saw Ford vs. Ferrari yesterday and I’m sure I made people nervous on the road on the way back 🙂
As far as church goes, my calling has had a problem for some time. On the third Sunday of each month, we all gather at round tables in the cultural hall, with one teacher per table, for small group lessons. We then eat a pot-luck meal afterwards. Good in principle, but we’ve been pretty short-staffed with Third Sunday teachers for quite a while, ever since I was called to be the First Counselor last year. We’ve made do with a cadre of backup teachers, who aren’t called to the position but are happy to fill in in an emergency. Emergencies turned into regular occurrences, until it wasn’t out of the ordinary to have, out of nine teachers for a given month, only two be actually-called Third Sunday teachers.
Once my erstwhile president was released and I was made Acting Sunday School President (still haven’t been officially called to the presidency after like three months but whatevs), I decided to institute a New World Order and play a bit more hardball. No more asking people to teach who hadn’t been called. I let leadership know how dire we needed people, and got about three new teachers out of it. But those three never really panned out, and I lost one of my regular teachers in the interim, so this weekend was looking pretty grim, with only two teachers confirmed. I wasn’t gonna go to heroic lengths to get the requisite teachers though. I let the bishop know what the situation was (he attended the Mandalorian premiere) and he said he heard me and he’d get right on it.
So I ended up announcing today that most tables would have to just make do with a more self-directed lesson format. That went off fairly well as far as I could tell. But immediately afterwards I was approached by what seemed like each member of the bishopric in turn, assuring me that more teachers were on the way, and they’d already called three. So there’s hope things can turn around. I might consider reinstating the backup squad, if they truly will be used only as backups.
Anywho. Might step into the lightsaber dojo one more time before bed. See ya in a couple weeks!
