We got up to a lot over Christmas! Highlights for me include:

• Finishing up four series and two books over the break.
  • The Expanse season 4
  • The Mandalorian season 1
  • Galavant season 1
  • Battlestar Galactica season 3
  • Use of Weapons
  • Excession (which I left back home for anyone to read if they want)
• Snowmobiling.
• Playing the Harry Potter board game.
• Fireworks on the lake.
• Watching Knives Out.
• Seeing Mattie and Mom make an emotional connection to Quill in VR.
• Watching Mom and Aunt Lisa ‘daww’ over Baby Yoda.

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Christmas Day was lovely, had a ton of fun solving the riddles y’all left all over the place.

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Went shooting with Steve, was a blast (don’t pardon that pun, it was awful). Learned a few real useful tips and tricks for more accurate aim.

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Then it was off to the Cabin. I think it had been a good while since I’d last been.

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Scout sure was happy to be back.

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Puttered around for a bit more, before it was back off to Seattle.

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Arrived back to a lovely surprise waiting for me in the sink.

I had plans to fly out to Sunnyvale for business shortly after arriving back, which would’ve meant I’d miss Mom and Aunt Lisa’s visit. Due to some annoying gamesmanship at work though, I ended up rescheduling that trip to mid-February, meaning I could hang with those two, eating good food and watching good movies.

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They left just in time to avoid a boat-load of snow. Schools closed, roads slick, most of the office working from home, so we had a lot of the place to ourself over most of last week.

Saw a few movies in theaters last week. Spies in Disguise was far more entertaining than I thought it would’ve been. Frozen 2 was meh. And Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior, a Bollywood film with subtitles, and the first Bollywood film I’ve seen in theaters, was possibly the second most entertaining movie I’ve seen in theaters the past year, after Knives Out. It’s fairly violent but not excessively so. I think the fam would really dig it.

Although last week’s trip got deferred, I and another co-worker ended up needing to head out this last week anyways, for other business. I arrived a day before just to get settled in and see other folks, and ended up having four Thursday meetings in four different buildings back-to-back.

I experimented this trip with packing everything into a backpack, and I’m a convert. I’d previously taken it as a given that airports take time to get through, but this was much faster. It was annoying, though, hauling all my luggage between rooms and buildings.

Since returning from break I’ve discovered a means of “hacking” into the Oculus Quest to get custom songs on Beat Saber. It’s awesome fun and has turned into a bit of an evening activity – fire it up, download a couple of new ones, try them out, keep only the best ones. Currently have ~40 songs on hand that are super fun. Just worked with Hayden to set the family unit up similarly, so y’all have a blast with that!

Tonight was a ward temple night, followed by a wedding reception for a couple friends of mine. Funny story, she didn’t want to have anyone around that they knew for their proposal, so he decided to pop the question while they were touring BYU campus (and also so they can claim they got engaged at BYU even though she was never a student there :)). Ironically though, they decided to be on campus the very same day I was on campus recruiting. Only found out after the fact through Facebook. So we had a laugh about that.

It’s looking like I’ll be heading back to campus late February, for another recruiting cycle. See ya then!

Had a wonderful Thanksgiving break back at the ranch. I have still somewhat stubbornly avoided getting on GroupMe, so I rely on the rest of you to tell me what’s the sitch.

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Back in Seattle I stopped by to help set up the Christmas Nativity display thing in the stake center. Families from all over were invited to bring their nativity displays. Turned out very nice.

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My team at work went out for wings and went for this super hot challenge.

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My office had their yearly “light-the-trail” party, where they set up hundreds of LEDs along the trail that runs by our buildings, time them to music, and have a big todo to officially turn them on.

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This year they had problems getting the sound to play when the lights all came on, but that’s life. But even without that, they always make the same mistake, in that they have this grand count-down and build-up to… something like this. Which is nice and all, but for the first song they really should do something like:

Anyways.

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Only for the die-hard fans.

So this week a friend of mine invited me to a Deadmau5 concert. I’ve heard of him, he’s the guy with the signature mouse head helmet he wears at all his concerts. His music genre is EDM, or Electronic Dance Music.

The concert tour he’s on features a neat prop, a giant cube that he performs within, which rotates around him. The atmosphere was great, the music was LOUD, the effects were amazing, and the music videos were cursed.

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If you wonder what I mean by the music videos being cursed, here’s a link – click at peril to your sanity. Or just let it play in the background, it’s kinda catchy.

For something a bit less cursed but still definitely Of the Internet:

Something else lovely from the Internet: Scarfolk Council, a blog about a very strange town. Favorites so far are the Don’t campaign, Under 7’s Fire Service, and Lavaland Holiday Camp.

I’m pretty sure the last time I refilled my contacts prescription was before I graduated BYU. I was running low, and looked up the contact brand to find a clinic that could prescribe them. Called and set up an appointment, and since it was a new place I’d need to undergo the full new-patient rigamarole, with all the costs associated with that. I asked them in a bit of a rant why I couldn’t just read off the prescription I had and order it straight from the manufacturer, since my eyesight hadn’t degraded since I was last fitted.

After the call I came to the conclusion that it’s because if suppliers sold directly to end-users, that’d be less business for eye doctors, and so an eye doctor is probably motivated to only prescribe brands that have policies that prevent selling directly to users. Capitalism.

I had to revise my theory, however, when the doctor informed me that I have about a millimeter of blood vessels growing into my cornea, where they have no business growing. The growth is due to the lack of oxygen in the area, which comes down to my unhealthy contact habits, wearing the same pair too long.

The doctor basically said she could in good conscience only prescribe dailies, which I was specifically trying to avoid by going to her, but oh well. So, dailies are the new world order, unless I get sick of those as I did last time I tried that style, and go for LASIK. So far the brand they got for me doesn’t seem as ill-fitting as last time, so this could be ok.

In about eleven hours I board a plane to Utah for Christmas break. See ya on the flippity flip!

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.

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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.

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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.

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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!