Had a couple of get-togethers for the various sessions of General Conference last weekend. Games at my place on Saturday night, and late-breakfast between sessions at a friend’s place on Sunday.
The mega-team trying to pull off a win in The Name Game, which was a huge hit. 
I didn’t mention the last couple weeks but I’ve been having fun with a scheduling system I’ve been putting together for coordinating rides. In the beginning, there was William and Michael, roommates. William doesn’t drive, so Michael was his primary mode of transportation to church events.
Then Michael got hitched, and William started leaning on Mary to take him places. Mary looped in Emma, another wardie who lives somewhat close by. Then they looped me in, since he’s also on my way to church. So the three of us are now in a rotation.
Emma put a spreadsheet together to organize shifts. I thought it’d be a good idea to track it in a shared Google Calendar. Until, that is, I found out how repetitive it was to set up each week’s reminders, and that I’d be notified on days that I wasn’t scheduled. What I really wanted was a spreadsheet to track shifts, and a way to automagically sync the events to three individual calendars, so I’d only be notified for events on my calendar.
Luckily, Google provides Apps Script, a Javascript-based interface for scripting actions across various services. In an afternoon I’d put together a button that, when pressed, would do all the heavy lifting.
I heard more than once from Mary and Emma how funny it was, the lengths we were going to coordinate rides for one person. To paraphrase Ferris Bueller, when the schedules get complicated, the organized survive.
At a ward event another friend of mine overheard about our antics and mentioned how nice it’d be to have a system like that to manage her class assignments. So now I’m a bit of a script dealer. Best not let word spread too far.
Work this week has been pretty chill. Conference weekend was a nice reset. Monday I actually got off work at a reasonable hour to enjoy the sun.
I also have another reason to avoid working late. It’s easy to forget, when jamming out with noise-cancelling headphones, that there’s anyone else working in adjacent areas. And it’s easy to misjudge, when jamming out with noise-cancelling headphones, just how loud you are when you pass gas. The key thing there is to exude no shame, to pretend the next morning like nothing out of the ordinary transpired. Then it’s only awkward if they make it awkward.
So after leaving work at a reasonable hour, I decided to head to FHE at Bishop’s place for Conference discussion followed by games. Before that, though, I thought I’d go and grab some Chipotle. I drive up and park before realizing my wallet was still in my church pants. I was not in a mood to drive all the way back home, as I was already running late for FHE.
Android has a feature analogous to Apple Pay, where you can use the NFC chip to make purchases. Unfortunately, my phone came from an engineering team in Google and it has an “unlocked bootloader”. Makes it easier to put development software on it, but it also makes it inherently less secure. Android Pay detects this and refuses to function. I could lock the bootloader, but that would wipe the entire phone. Really should’ve taken care of it when I first got the phone, and I may just take care of it eventually, but at the moment I can’t use Android Pay.
My old phone, on the other hand, that’d been sitting in my glove compartment for months and had a totally drained battery, has a perfectly safe bootloader and in fact was already set up with Android Pay. So I fished it out and plugged it in to my car charger. It booted fine, though it had no network access, since I’d moved the SIM card over to my new phone. Not to worry, I could broadcast a WiFi network from my new phone.
Things were looking good. I got ready to head on in. This was still a gamble – I was banking on this Chipotle location even accepting Android Pay. If it didn’t, I’d have to go back to the drawing board.
I never got to the point of worrying about that, however. My phone was charging ridiculously slowly off my car. The moment I unplugged it it warned it was within seconds of shutting down. No way I could make it in and through the line before it gave up the ghost. Not to worry, I had a power brick in my backpack.
Whipped it out, only to find that it was dead.
Resigned to searching the place for a port I could charge off of, I went in with both phones – and sure enough, before I made the door, my Android Pay-enabled phone died. But plastered on the door was a poster – “Order Now with the Chipotle App!”
At this moment a large crowd was approaching so I darted in and stood in line, while I downloaded the app on my primary phone and placed an order. While the phone wouldn’t let me use the NFC chip to make Point-of-Sale purchases, it was perfectly happy to use my credit card on file to purchase over the web.
It was a bit ridiculous when I had to essentially tell the employee waiting to take my order at the counter that sorry, my order was sent over the internet to that computer over there in the corner, so I can’t tell you what I want directly. Just had to step out of line and wait for them to get the order from the computer and put it out on the pick-up shelf.
It wasn’t as sweet a victory as it could’ve been, but it’d do. Ate and then headed off to Bishop’s.
This is what I get for parking underneath a cherry blossom tree in the rain. They still haven’t all come off.
The big thing of the week was a team event at my place. Last week I alluded to a need to destroy some sensitive doo-hickeys, and our plan to do so with a co-worker’s plasma cutter. Well on Wednesday we brought everyone together to finish the job.
Behold my totally safe “workbench” – a plasma cutter atop a piece of cardboard atop the old couch.
I ordered pizza for the team and we had a nice lunch in the living room before heading back.
Every time we use these doo-hickeys we write up a very official report of what exactly we did which goes in our permanent archives, so I took the opportunity to write up a straight-faced account of precisely how we destroyed them, with accompanying video evidence. My garage will live forever in our archives.
I thought I’d take a break next week, but I think I’ll push it back a few days, so I can hang with Mattie and Hayden while they’re both in town. I wanna spruce up the back yard while Mattie’s available for a consultation, and I think it’d be fun to finally take the time to head to the Tulip Festival, which I hear is gorgeous.
