Well, it’s 9am local time on Sunday morning, far earlier than my alarm clock is usually set to. I’m up so early because this morning I had plans to attempt to make musubi for a ward chat-n-chow, mix-n-mingle, munch-n….dunch, etc. Yesterday I scoured the local Asian markets for the ingredients. Found everything I needed except the mold. I did find though, online, instructions for making spam musubi roll-style, like sushi. So that was what I was gonna try. Until I was getting all prepped this morning and found that what I’d thought was soy sauce in my cupboard was in fact a very dark bottle of vinegar oil. Shucky darn. Well, now I have time to practice making it for next time. And I have time to get this written early, instead of Tuesday night.

I often feel these days that it would be so easy to let things pile up, like dishes and laundry. The Joker said it best:

Already my laundry cycle is a multi-day affair.

• Day 0: Run load in washer.
• Day 1-3: Get back to the apartment too late, or forget late enough, that I don’t have time to dry and fold, so leave it in the washer. (I’ve learned that I can’t run my whole supply of clothes at once, so I have more to wear during this standby period.)
• Day 4: Finally move load to dryer. Lay dried clothes flat on living room table so they don’t wrinkle.
• Day 5: Company expected, better move clothes to my bed.
• Day 5, evening: Too tired to fold, move clothes to top of dresser.
• Day 6-7: Pull clothes out of stack on dresser for daily use.
• Day 8: Get fed up with the state of things, finally fold clothes, as well as the whites I’ve been keeping in a laundry basket hidden behind my bed.

In other news.

Amazon always recommends the Echo to me when I visit, since I regularly check their Echo Dot page to see whether it’s back in stock yet. I have a speaker already, and the smaller form factor is really appealing. Plus, the thing goes for over 2x its retail price on eBay, so there’s definitely demand. I really wondered what Amazon was thinking, not producing more.

Then this week they released their 2nd generation unit – smaller and cheaper than before. Turns out their original unit relied on a component that ceased production, messing with their supply chain. All’s well, I can finally get that Alexa goodness back at my place. Not till the latter end of October though, when they ship.

On Wednesday night I attended the first of eight sessions of the local police department’s Citizen Academy. A notification went out over our company mailing list, and I thought I’d check it out. Maybe get to fire a few guns at the range, etc. The first night we toured their office, and were going to get a tour of the jail, but at the time we arrived for that portion of the tour we learned they were dealing with rowdy drunks back there, really not a good time for us. The officers conducting the tour were apologetic and said they’d try and arrange a time in the future for us to visit.

Anecdote: during the around-the-table meet-and-greet, several people said they were “a Cougar through-and-through, bleeding crimson.” Threw me off for a sec – I guess they have different mascots around here.

I was very sad when I did the math and realized I’d be in Japan on a conference trip at the same time as the Academy’s shooter-sim night. Everyone gets to gear up in a hyper-realistic laser-tag-esque scenario drill. Apparently it’s usually the crowd favorite. Dag nabbit. I’ll just have to be sure to enjoy Tokyo.

Which, I’ll just put here in case anyone wasn’t aware, but yeah! Going to Tokyo next month. My lab at BYU published a paper at a conference happening next month. I booked a flight out, mainly intending to support whoever from my lab would actually be presenting, either my advisor or my PhD colleague, the lead author on the paper. Well, neither of them could end up going, so I’ll be the one presenting, and the only one from my lab to go. Luckily there are other professors and students attending, so I’ll have people to hang with. And, Google has a cool office just 15 minutes from the conference venue, so that’ll be a fun place to visit.

On Thursday I had to get home early for a Comcast technician visit. When I signed up I got a speed of X, and I was measuring 0.5 * X from my modem. Comcast figured it was a signal issue, so they sent out someone to investigate. The guy couldn’t find any signal issues. He called in to home base and verified what speed I was signed up for. “Yeah, so I’m reading [0.5 * X] for your speed.” Uhh, no, that’s not what the guy said when I signed up. There was nothing the tech could do, so he left me to figure it out with the accounts department.

I was really anxious that they were gonna claim that original offer for X never even existed. Turns out they’d kept good notes on the account, and were able to determine that the agent who’d signed me up had just keyed in the wrong access code or whatever. One modem reset later and I was back up to full speed.

On Friday afternoon I played my usual game of pickup soccer with some other Googlers in the field just east of our buildings. Fun stuff, though one of the lead players could stand to loosen up a bit. Very by-the-book. We always have to play light-shirt vs dark-shirt, there shall be no mixing. A team member has to leave? ‘Hey, I know we’re beating you like crazy, but can we borrow one of your players so we’re even?’ But it’s still fun, been a long time since I’ve been able to play soccer on the regular.

That evening we had Round 2 of movie night at my place. Instead of the rowdy games running late into the evening, we had them before the movie. Which was About Time, one of my favorites. (We watched an edited version, which I am very happy to send to anyone that asks.)

I spec’d out the apartment a while back and figured we could fit ten viewers comfortably. Somehow we managed to get 17 in here. Required a bit of furniture rearranging, but everyone had a grand old time.

I’ve been incessantly mulling over the parts for a new computer, and finally pulled the trigger on ordering them. (In case anyone’s interested parts list is here.) I’m planning on using it as a Plex media server, and as offsite-backup for my folks. Which, if any of you extended family are reading this and would be interested in a similar arrangement, drop me a line.

As many know, naming things is one of the two hardest problems in computer science. Server hostnames are no exception. Fortunately, I’ve already sorted out what I’ll be naming it. It’s gotta be cool. I live in Kirkland, right? So, Kirkland… Kirk… James T. Kirk… James Tiberius Kirk… Tiberius. Done and done.

I hate spending lots of money on things, which made pulling the trigger on these components so difficult. However, I remembered that I’d never done anything fun or interesting with Gram’s little inheritance gift – I’d folded it into my savings and sort of forgotten about it. Now I have something to spend it on. And it’s doubly nice since I remember doing one of those grandchild interviews with her some time before I left on my mission, and she asked me to describe my ideal computer setup. I basically went through and described a maxed-out Mac Pro, incredibly expensive. Now this setup’s cost is a fraction of that, and quite a bit more performant to boot. So I think she’d like that I’m building it.

Till next time!

Well summer is still holding on for dear life. There’ll be drizzles next week, but this week is all sunny.

I may have mentioned before, but the cloud formations are really something out here, much nicer than Utah clouds. I experienced a similar phenomenon in Australia, and I wonder if it’s due to the water content in the air – much drier in Utah than here. Another difference that may be due to the same root cause is that I can’t easily tell by looking outside how cold it is in the morning; it was pretty darn frigid today on my bike ride. I considered just driving in, but with only a week left of nice weather, I can’t be picky.

Speaking of bike rides, and how I ride past tons of blackberry bushes, the blackberries are all shrivelling up for the year. I arrived in town just in time to catch the best part of blackberry season. It’s too late now, but over the last two weeks I would’ve enjoyed being a berrybender, levitating the berries off the bushes into a basket I’d keep on my bike. There’s no other way to get at those high berries since the prickly bushes are so tall.

I keep meaning to write these over the weekend, but then I’m consistently busy. On Friday we had the first of what may become a regular movie night at my place. The movie – The Tourist – lasted until 9:45, and I was happy we’d finished up before the 10pm quiet hours. Then they decided to stay for games. I feel pretty bad for my neighbors. Here I’ve been trying real hard to keep quiet and respect the 10pm quiet-hours rules, and then out of nowhere here’s a group of 12 people shouting at midnight, accusing each other of being government agents out to topple the insurgency. Next time we’ll play the rowdy games before the movie.

On Saturday, the latest chapter of the Holy War unfolded. Unfelded? Unfelled? Feels like there should be a shorter word for that. Anyways. A bitter taste of déjà vu, as I’m pretty sure we lost two games ago in an identical fashion. About 3/8ths of the way through the game, the power went right out. Ended up streaming the game on my phone, which taxed both the battery power and my data usage. It’s just as well that the game ended when it did, since my battery wouldn’t have lasted much longer anyways. Would’ve had to resort to watching it from my car, charging off of the engine.

 

The flashlights I brought worked wonderfully though. Shining the light straight up at the ceiling made it seem like there was a sunroof installed.

I was using up the last dregs of power on my laptop to watch Interstellar, and then go to sleep, when power came back at 11:30pm. Nice, now I can stay up another two and a half hours reading Dune! I need to finish the book before I head back to Utah at the end of the month, since it’s checked out from the BYU library.

On Sunday there was a dinner at our bishop’s place for the ward council members and all the newbies. Since I fit in both categories, I was contractually obligated to go :p Afterwards we watched a delayed showing of the devotional by Elder Quentin L. Cook. Good stuff, but I was dead tired afterwards.

Anecdote: I’d arrived early for church in order to attend Ward Council. Afterwards I decided I’d drop in and join the choir. Didn’t realize we’d be singing in Sacrament Meeting that very day, but oh well. But the funny bit was before practice. Girls in row ahead of me, complimenting a guy standing next to me on his bowtie: Bowties are cool. Me: Fezzes are cool too. All of us: Yeeeeaahhh.

Monday evening was a regional FHE over at some beach in Seattle. Didn’t have time to grab something to eat beforehand, so I hoped they’d have proper food, but it was just s’mores. Had one, played some volleyball, more volleyball, frisbee, more frisbee, met some Bellevue members, told riddles, climbed on a cool pirate ship playset, went and had burgers on the way back. Much fun.

Sayonara!

We’re flirting with Fall over here. On Monday I biked in under a dense cover of fog, and started humming the Hobbit theme to myself. Later on in the week it started raining, hard. Which is a bummer for me since I so love to bike to work, and the rain will soon be a permanent fixture of the forecast. How does the rhyme go? ‘tember showers are such downers?

There are employees that will bike to work year-round, who just wear rain coats and gloves to keep themselves from freezing. Not quite ready to put my bike through that kind of punishment – the dusty bike trail is doing enough of a number on the gears, without the moisture’s help. We’ll see how good I can be at using the stationary bikes on the regular.

A big project of last week was getting the TV wall-mounted and all the cables concealed using plastic… concealer-thingies. You know, these things. I had picked up an inexpensive stud finder before heading out (thanks Dad!) and it was time to put it to work. That is, until it decided to go all non-deterministic on me. One minute it swears up and down that the stud is here, and then the next it insists it’s over there, three inches over. I was concerned because neither of those locations matched the common 16″-between-studs rule. I chalked it up to being above a fire-place in an older building, but in any case I needed an accurate reading before I could drill.

I ended up relying on advanced statistical analysis to determine the stud’s true position (read: moving the stud finder repeatedly over the area until it’d gone off enough for me to just do a majority vote). And… well my TV hasn’t fallen off the wall yet, so I guess I got it!

(Oh, funny anecdote – you’ve really gotta be careful when you say you’re “wasted”, I guess it can be taken the wrong way when you’re not in Utah. Long story, details not important, but a less-active member who called me up part-way through my installation job thought I’d just claimed I was incredibly drunk.)

Work is just more of the same really, consuming technical documentation ad infinitum. It’s like getting lost on TV Tropes, every document has links to five more documents I should read. I’m slowly but surely making a dent in my reading list. In the meantime, I’m getting in on technical meetings, and it’s fun, I think to myself, Wow, I actually understand like 80% of what they’re disagreeing over!

Oh, I had an old lab-mate over for lunch last week. He was in the area interviewing for a full-time position. He’d done an internship at Google HQ over the summer, while I’d been working in the lab on finishing up my thesis. I took him on a quick office tour, and became sorta glad I’d not done an internship in Mountain View like he had. See, my week of orientation had been kind of like visiting Disneyland. But imagine if you had lived in Disneyland for three months, then someone took you on a tour of Lagoon. You probably wouldn’t be that impressed. So I’m glad I can appreciate the workplace here – ignorance in this case is bliss.

(Another funny anecdote. This one really makes me respect the men and women in blue [gloves], who protect our airways with such vigilance. On my way to and from orientation week, I’d opted out of the full-body scan, and gotten a pat-down by a TSA agent, who also went over my luggage. On the return flight, my backpack was even flagged by the X-ray machine technician, so it got an even more thorough going-over. The agent opened it up, rifled through it, found a ton of coins I’d left in, and waved it through, stating it must’ve just been a false alarm due to the coins.

Well, after being back in Kirkland for a few days, I decided to clean out my backpack, and found out that had the agent looked just a teensy bit harder, he would’ve found one of Grandpa’s old pocket knives that I’d totally forgot was in there. Oops. Anyways, like I said, this really made me respect the TSA, such hard-working folk.)

Oh, what the heck, this post’s mostly just gonna be anecdotes. At some point in my second week at work, I noticed that the monitor opposite from me still had a sticker on the back, the kind you peel off the moment you get set up. I looked around, and nearly every monitor in the room still had its sticker. Shocking. I peeked around, and mine still had it as well. Not for much longer, of course. Still resisting the urge to walk around and collect everyone’s monitor-stickers. If they couldn’t be bothered to find it, they don’t get the privilege of peeling it off.

On Thursday I went to Institute. It was a pretty small turn-out, by Provo standards anyways. Interesting moment came when, at some point in the lesson, a guy named Hayden asked a question to the teacher, named Shauna. Eyebrow was raised.

I’ve been having troubles due to my addressing mistake I mentioned in my first week, thinking my address was the one for my complex’s leasing office. A few things have failed to arrive, including a package from my folks, which they’ve re-sent using my real one and hopefully it arrives soon. But what did arrive this week was my first real-life credit card. I signed up when I became a Costco member, figured I’d take advantage of some of those cash-back bonuses. It’s weird, using it. I’ve only ever used my bank’s debit card, which works as a credit card and pulls money straight out of my account. Now there’s this huge “buffer” where I’m spending money that’s not really mine. I know it’ll automatically get pulled out of my account at the end of every month, but in the interrim it still feels weird. I hear it does help build good credit, though.

On Saturday I headed down to the DMV to get my Washington state driver’s licence. This wasn’t me acclimating to the move, this was me wanting to stay on the right side of the law. I’m most of the way through a 30-day countdown before I need to have gotten a state license. They’re strict like that, I guess.

What’s neato is, you can get a special license that sorta doubles as a passport, at least when you re-enter the country by land or sea. Such an enhancement costs extra, but definitely makes sense when you just want to head up to Vancouver for the day.

I’ll have to let you all know later how the special license looks, though, since they were closed for the holiday weekend. Ah well, I was out anyways, figured I’d head off to the library to get a card. The libraries in King County (where Kirkland is) are all part of the same “network”, offering one unified service to residents.

Which sounds nice and all, but not if I can’t find the one book I really want to read right now, The Worthing Saga by Orson Scott Card. Not one of their forty-nine locations carries that book. Compare that sorry state of things to back home, where the Orem, Provo, BYU, and UofU libraries all carry a copy of the book. Now, it might have something to do with the fact that the book’s author is a pretty prolific Mormon.

Also, the libray system here does have it, but it’s in one of those new-fangled “electronic book” formats, and I’m kind of old-school with books. Hmm, I’m heading back at the end of this month, if I can finish my current book before then, I might be able to check out The Worthing Saga from BYU (where I’m technically still a current student), then get it back to them over the Christmas break. Hmmmmm.

After I got my library card, I chilled out in the library for a bit, just surfing around, then headed out to check out the nearby pier. I spied a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses witnessing at a table set up just outside the library. Don’t miss running into them in Australia one bit.

On the way to the pier I saw a) a pug puppy that couldn’t have been longer than 10 inches, and 2) a shop that 3D-scans you and then prints and paints a model of you. I saw other things, but those were the two most interesting ones.

On Sunday I met with my counterpart for my calling, who is not long for this world. This week she heads out to go start her final year at BYU-Idaho. I just wanted to get a brain dump of how she’d been running things, so I wouldn’t immediately reveal myself to be incompetent.

In Sacrament meeting I got sustained, along with others, including someone who’d moved in the same time as me, and who has a similar skillset. (He’s working in cybersecurity at Microsoft. I tried to get him as a roommate, but Kirkland was a bit far from his company’s HQ.) Anyways, his calling was Sunday School instructor. Well, let me tell ya, if I could trade callings with him, I definitely would not. Last time someone was inspired to have me teach a lesson in church was in 2012, and I think they learned their lesson. I do like teaching, but Sunday School / Elders Quorum isn’t the best place I guess, it just didn’t go very well at all. Wait, I think I’ve said too much – yes, I’m a very accomplished teacher, I wouldn’t learn a thing from having that calling, no way no how.

After Elders Quorum was over, I noticed that we did not kneel for the closing prayer. Not like that surprised me, it was a very unique tradition we had in my last ward. Which was a fun one, not because kneeling in itself was fun or anything, but because I kind of doubt there’s more than two or three people left in that ward that remember when the tradition was put in place. And I’ll bet they’ll continue to do it for years. Who wants to be the one to say, Hey everyone, I know it’s super spiritual how we all kneel for the closing prayer, but let’s just stop doing that.

After church I prepped for conferencing in for my cousin McCall’s wedding shower. All the cousins were there, it was so fun to say hi to everyone. I hear there’s talk of having Cousin Palooza 2017 up here in May, so stoked.

That night was a game night at a member’s house. She lives with her parents, and has lots of room for activities. There, I met someone who seems to be this ward’s “Cynthia”. A Cynthia, so-named from an old friend in a past ward, is a mover and shaker, someone who knows how to get things done to make an activity happen. One thing led to another, and I’m now a founding member of the Ascent Film Society Facebook group (named after my apartment complex) and our first viewing is this Friday. Woohoo.

After the game night, a group headed over to Seattle to a Catholic cathedral, where monks would sing Gregorian chant every Sunday night. It was open to the public, and inside were people – whoever couldn’t fit in the pews – sprawled out all over the floor, on picnic blankets and makeshift pillows. A very neat experience.

We got back, then had game night part 2. Finally got back to bed by 1:30am. Which wasn’t ideal, since I had been planning my own first activity, a nearby hike to Wallace Falls. Got a couple members to go with, who were childhood best friends, which was fun. (With each other, not me, I didn’t know a soul before heading up.) And, one of them invited their family to come with, which was fun.

After the hike, we decided to continue on for an hour or so and head to Leavenworth, a fun little German town in the middle of the mountains. It’s very touristy, like a larger version of Grand Lake. All I can say is, authentic Bavarian bratwursts are unglaublich lecker.

Got back in time for the tail end of ward FHE, which was a fitness class. Not that we needed it of course. Afterwards was volleyball. Someone was playing music, out of their phone’s tiny speakers. I ended up volunteering my aux-to-RCA adapter cable and got the music playing out of the building’s sound system. And that, kids, is why you should always carry an aux-to-RCA adapter cable. Not even joking, it’s so handy. Closely followed in handiness by an HDMI cable, with whatever adapter’s necessary for plugging in your laptop.

Today I biked in, since the forecast looked pretty clear. Worked, ate dinner, browsed a bit, then realized it was 7:45pm and I still had a long bike ride ahead. You know how, when you’re a kid, you stay out way late playing games, till Mom calls you in, and then you get in and wonder how in the world you were playing in that pitch darkness? It was sort of the reverse for me. Oh man, how am I gonna bike back in this? Totally gonna get mauled by a bear. … Eh, actually it isn’t that bad, plenty of light left. … Actually, nevermind, I’m totally gonna get mauled by a bear. Or a vampire for that matter, Forks is only like four hours away. Aw man, I’m totally the guy that gets taken out in the first five minutes of every horror movie.

Well, I’m back, and the take-away is to go get a dang set of bike lights. And start adhering to the horror movie survival guide.

To sign off, your friendly neighborhood pyro wants to demonstrate why it is never ever a good idea to pour gasoline directly onto a lit fire. Stay safe, everyone. Light responsibly.