I’m writing this as I rest in my recliner; my knee’s a bit messed up at the moment. More details on that at the end of this post.

Anyways, last week was a shorter one; on Monday I went on a hike to Wallace Falls. This was the same hike I went on just after I moved here. Very interesting contrast between those pics and these ones.

On Wednesday I had some friends over to visit the office, got the grand tour.

On Friday I went to those same friends’ house to watch About Time, one of their favorite movies.

On Saturday I helped a friend move into a house. We had some fun with the boxes.

On Sunday I had dinner with a coworker, fun meeting his kids, all young budding software engineers.

Yesterday I was playing soccer and I positioned myself really badly, and ended up initiating a head-on collision with another player. If you want to visualize the free-body diagram, we have a high-speed, low-mass object colliding with a stationary higher-mass object. I may have imparted a bit more momentum to him as vice-versa; he was out of the game immediately, I just walked with a limp for a while. However, by the end of the day I was sporting a nice marble-sized bump just below my kneecap. Made getting around a bit difficult, hence this late morning.

It’s Sunday night, and we have a couple of friends over just shooting the breeze. Baked some crepes, chicken nuggets, and Cheddar Bay biscuits for dinner. One of Mom’s favorite stories from my mission involves her mailing me instructions for these biscuits, and enough garlic powder to make several batches; I didn’t bother measuring though, and blew the whole thing with one batch. This time I didn’t commit as egregious a mistake, though I did dump all the butter and garlic in the mixing bowl before baking, as opposed to spreading it over the top as I should’ve done. Still turned out great.

A friend pointed this out to me, and it was pretty cool. A recent blog post by Google, Security Through Transparency, links to a paper I helped write in grad school on the abysmal state of PGP usability. (link text is “still can’t”, first paragraph under “Why Key Transparency is Useful”)

I recently got involved with the local office’s art committee, responsible for prettifying the place up. Right now our responsibility is to go out and find appropriate pieces to put on a couple walls in a cafe.

On Friday we went out for a friend’s birthday party:

On the way back I passed a car being towed. Turned out to belong to one of the members in our group, who arrived just three minutes after the tow truck. Rotten luck.

Yesterday we had people over to chill out, play games, watch Knight and Day. Fun times.

Here’s a whole buncha photos from over the Christmas break. I’m counting each as an extra 1k words for this post.

So that was Christmas and New Years. Getting back to Washingon was pretty rough. My first day was made moreso by the revelation that I hadn’t been on the proper mailing lists, and all the discussion and planning for an upcoming recruiting trip back to Utah in February had all taken place back in November and early December, without my knowledge. So I probably won’t be able to be back when I thought I could.

I’ve been living on a prayer as far as getting my car registered. It’s slipped and slipped and now it’s been about four months since it’s been street-legal. And yesterday was a great reminder, when I got pulled over for making an illegal left-hand turn. Got off with a warning on both that and the registration, but I definitely won’t be lax anymore with getting that taken care of.