The night before Christmas-travel and all through the house, packing and cleaning that’d starve out a mouse.
Anyways, this last week has been pretty fun. On Friday the company rented out a few movie theaters and we got to go watch Rogue One. Lemme tell ya, it was probably my favorite film of the franchise so far. But it seems to be polarizing, some really do hate it. Sadly most of my co-workers were just ‘meh’ on it all.
Buses lined up to ferry us off to the theater. I never really appreciated just how many movie theaters there were in Utah County, but there sure aren’t that many here. Also, loads up here don’t even do assigned seating. Dark ages, I’m tellin’ ya.
On Saturday night a group of friends got together and went caroling around a neighborhood. Fun stuff, reminds me of Priests Quorum outings on the Petersens’ trailer.
On Sunday the missionaries came over and we watched some good ol’ Living Scriptures episodes.
On Monday an old friend from BYU was home for the holidays, so we got together and caught up. Turns out her dad and my dad served together in France. Small world!
On Tuesday I went to an Ensign Symphony & Chorus performance. Very well-put-together performance. They made excellent use of multi-color LED strips along the walls to set the various moods, very good color direction. Didn’t sound half bad, neither.
Also it seems like every concert hall I go to these days has one of these Chihuly glass sculpture thingies.
Today I’d signed up to feed the missionaries, but I didn’t feel like making dinner, so I had them over to eat at Google. Got to show them around, much fun was had.
Anyways, thought I’d post this before nodding off, got an early flight to catch tomorrow. Chow now.
It’s taken me a while to get to this, as I’ve been under the weather with a cold and some back pain. Something they didn’t mention when handing out beard cards after graduation was, it isn’t a real pretty sight blowing your nose with a mustache. Probably more than anyone really wanted to think about.
Last week it actually snowed!
Felt really weird driving in to work on snowy roads, with rain pouring down.
On Friday I went to our company’s Christmas party, at a hotel in Seattle.
Spotted this on the way in. It’s Amazon’s new bubble campus thing.
I got back from this party Friday night, and didn’t really leave my apartment again until Tuesday morning. Got a real bad cold, intermingled with some bad back pain. I took some cyclobenzaprine to relax the muscles, and boy did that throw me through a loop. Definitely not safe to drive while on that stuff. I had to triple-check all my work emails to make sure I wasn’t typing nonsense.
I’ve been watching a few old classics. And I’ve learned a couple things. First, the Parent Trap remake is a hoot to rewatch, after all these years. Smile on my face the entire time. Second, Dr. David Drumlin from Contact is a weaseling back-stabbing hypocritical nincompoop.
Story time. A couple days ago I was tinkering around on my home server, and I was about to delete a directory containing some files I didn’t need anymore. I typed the command out, but didn’t hit enter yet, since I wanted to confirm elsewhere that the files were indeed unneeded. So my terminal looked like this:
$ rm -rf folder/to/delete/▋
I left it like that, ready to execute when I finished up confirming things. In the process of doing that, though, I got distracted and forgot what I’d been doing. I came back to the terminal and typed cd ~, to get back to my home directory, then pressed enter.
Those of you familiar with Unix will know I just made a horrible error. The command I ended up running was:
$ rm -rf folder/to/delete/cd ~
Now, folder/to/delete/cd is a path to a file that doesn’t exist, so that didn’t do anything. But rm was happy to clean out ~, my home directory. Whooooops. Luckily my home directory is on an SSD with limited space, and all my large data directories are merely symlinked from there. But there were some handy utility scripts I’ve had to recreate from scratch.
One other kinda important file that got wiped was ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. Without that file I couldn’t log in via SSH. And I’d done a bang-up job in hardening the server, so there wasn’t any way to get in except to plug in a keyboard and log in as root. Well, except for the fact that neither I nor my roommate have a USB keyboard lying around, so I’d effectively locked myself out of my own server for the day, until yesterday when I borrowed a keyboard from work to get myself out of this mess by temporarily editing /etc/ssh/sshd_config to allow password-based remote login.
Lesson learned, don’t leave an rm command sitting around on the terminal. Also, I sprang for an offsite backup service, so if it does happen again it’ll be easy to restore what I nuked. This also has the added benefit of increasing the protection of backup data, for any of you using my server as a backup location.
It was a bit rough trying to get back in the swing of things at work after having a blast in Utah over Thanksgiving break. Here’s some pics of that weekend:
This is the PC that was driving the HTC Vive I was able to try at the Microsoft store. So much fun, and what a case.
Here at Google some employees have been spending months prepping for the annual ‘Light-the-Trail’ show they put on.
The lights on those trees and bushes are multi-colored LEDs, and are individually controllable. This leads to some really awesome patterns. When I was taking this picture, they were doing something that resembled Conway’s Game of Life.Here’s what Christmastime precipitation looks like in Washington.Families could go inside the snowglobe and get their picture taken. Doesn’t sound like a huge blast for the kids, but I’m sure the parents loved it.There were four of these fake ‘snow’ generators, really just soap bubble dispensers. Still fun.Someone dressed themselves up as the Android character, like the phone.
Then over the weekend we watched White Christmas. Nice little film I’d never even heard of.
We also had a Christmas Devotional viewing party at our bishop’s place, where my roommate played some Christmas music. He’s been practicing like crazy, ’cause he’s never learned any of it till now.
And that about wraps it up. Three weeks from yesterday it’ll be Christmas!
