“Alright sir, your car is right this way. I see you selected a full-size?”

“That’s right. Heh, it’s funny, last time I was through here they didn’t have any full-size cars left and put me in a Mustang.”

“Hmm… d’you want this SS?”

“Uhh, sure.”

• 

• 

So it’s now a tradition that I get to try a sports car when I travel for work.

That last pic is a straight-on shot from the front. You can see just how ridiculously tiny the view-port is. And the fat pillars in the back mean there’s even less visibility in that direction too. Don’t get me wrong, it’s wicked fun to drive, but I’d never own one.

The most over-the-top feature, though, had to be the Heads-Up Display.

Anyways. The trip was a great success. Had a junior employee along and we had tons of meetings, got to show her the ropes of how to get around down there, met some faces, etcetera.

• 

• 

• 

My flight out, like my flight in, got quite delayed. It was a nice day out and I’d already returned my rental car, so I walked around the airport and found a walking trail next to a river. Had to beat my way through some brush to get to the river bank.

You can see some trash stuck in the foliage. That’s not littering, that’s a sign that this river is filthy and gets a lot higher. So it wasn’t quite the idyllic respite I’d imagined from the trail.

To prep for Hayden’s arrival, I had to finally get rid of the couch that had been taking up space in my garage for the better part of a year. I’d never put much effort into getting rid of it, always figured someone would come along for it. Then it turned out my good friend’s roommate was moving out and taking all their furniture with her, so the couch would be a welcome addition to their place. To paraphrase the elementary school song:

“BROWN couch, it never gets dirty, the longer it stays here the browner it gets.

“SOME day, I think I will sell it off. Something keeps telling me, don’t do it yet. Not yet. Not yet.”

• 

• 

Then Hayden and Mattie arrived!

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

At the park where these pics were taken, we took a stroll through a forest trail. I was intent on retracing my steps from a long ways back. But the undergrowth was too much for me to navigate. I tried my best, but got a finger-ful of thorns for my trouble. Which are still working their way out, a week later.

On our way out Hayden requested a GIF shot of him throwing the frisbee. I wasn’t able to capture it, but I did get something a little less flattering.

Before Hayden shot off for work on Monday we had fun with the plasma cutter.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Tuesday was a nice day and I decided to take a half-day off to shoot the breeze with Mattie. We headed up north to the Tulip Festival, then decided to swing west and head down south through the middle of Whidbey Island.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Wednesday night we headed out for some ice cream after work.

• 

• 

Hayden was gracious enough to take Mattie to the airport early the next morning. I needed the sleep as I was giving a presentation at a large summit the next day, which went quite well.

Highlights from having Mattie and Hayden over:

• Driving over the Deception Pass bridge with Mattie in total amazement. Definitely gonna have to hit that place up next time y’all make it up here.
• Geeking out over protocol buffers and serialization formats while wandering through a tulip field.
• Rocking out with Hayden on the way back from his first local FHE.
• Applause at the end of Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, my latest favorite Bollywood film.

Currently passing the time on a bench in SeaTac airport, till my flight leaves. On accident I arrived here four hours before my flight. Flight left at 6:50, so I got it in my head, 6pm, that’s my flight time [to arrive at the airport]. Somehow I forgot the “to arrive at the airport” bit, so when my ride asked me what time she should pick me up, I did the math backwards from 6pm and figured I should arrive around 5pm. As we were pulling up to departures I realized my mistake just in time to learn that my flight had been delayed to 7:50pm. Didn’t want to inconvenience my ride so figured I’d just tough it out for an extra hour. Got all settled into my bench, when another update said the flight had been delayed again to 8:50pm. Blegh. Actually I really should check to see if it didn’t get delayed again… Nope, still 8:50.

Sunday evening last week I attended a Lamb of God concert down in Tacoma. It’s an annual thing and I haven’t bothered to go in the past. Good thing I went, since apparently this is the last year they’ll be putting it on. The music was good, but the performance was plagued with mic issues. One of the lead singers’ wireless mics suffered from very loud static whenever it was enabled. You could hear it as the tech specialist tried to narrow down which mic needed silencing, as random mics got disabled throughout the performance, until they found the culprit and gave them a hand-held mic. Felt sorry for the performers. But apparently they have issues like this every single year, so, I guess you get what you pay for?

This is a view underneath the deck out back. The water feature leak is back. It was a slow one, but who knows how long it flowed for before I caught it. Entire area back there was soaked. I’m sure it wasn’t any worse than what a few days of Washington winter will do to it, but I didn’t want to pay for it out of season. In the past my strategy has been to shut off the water, wait a few weeks, turn it back on irrationally hoping it went away in the meantime, and be vindicated when the leak actually does go away.

This time I just reduced the flow rate, went to church, came back, and the leak was gone. Weeeird. Not complaining though. Except now that weird humming noise is more audible. Gonna have to do something about that.

The week was pretty ho hum. After YouTube randomly recommended this DS9 clip I’ve fallen in love with the show. The seven-episode arc that follows the clip is fabulous television. Gul Dukat and Weyoun (and Keevan, though he’s only a one-episode character) are excellent villains.

Yesterday I put my back through another round of stress tests, with a 3-hour hike.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

After we got back I headed straight to a Bellevue ward event, dinner and a showing of Infinity War Part 1. I was wondering about the legality of showing a commercial film in a church building, when the opening credits fizzled out and it turned out we weren’t actually watching a movie, but solving a murder mystery.

Had to split off into teams to explore six classrooms-turned-bedrooms and hunt for clues to determine the murderer, the motive, and the weapon. Turns out the victim was dating two people at once; they found out, combined their respective specialties of chemistry and botany, and concocted a poisoned smoothie. Goodbye, Earl.

Today after Sacrament Meeting it turned out that my ride to the airport was attending an early-afternoon Easter dinner, and invited me along. I’d assumed I’d miss out on any of those, due to my forgetting that this was Easter Sunday when I booked my flights. So that was a nice little get-together. As mentioned earlier I ended up leaving it far sooner than I truly needed to, but it was nice to have been able to go at all.

And my back must be getting better, since I completely forgot to bring my arch support and I seem to be doing just fine.

Looking forward to spending next week with the sibs! Good luck on your finals, and good luck Steve on the new job!

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.

• 

• 

• 

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.

• 

• 

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.