December 22, 2024 - bloghan 26
The second last bloghan of the year. The second last connection we will have for 2024. I have recently been having second thoughts about even writing bloghans - why would I do this thing that drains my time, that takes me away from things I want to do, in favour of writing about my week? But I realized: I want to write about my week. I want to share that with you. I have so many feelings, so many words, so many experiences, and in this special season, which should be simple and clear, I'm still able to share the memories I've made through my time here, with you. Thank you, for reading. Thank you, for your encouragement. Thank you, for your continued reporting of spelling errors. I now get to have a record of all I've gone through while over here, as do you, remembering these wonderful stories as they fall like snowflakes from the sky onto my perceivable world. Here's what I've got for you this week:
Tier list of the week
This week's tier list: songs on the album 'Halation Celebration ~ 10th Anniversary Tribute to Snow halation.' I've been listening to this album nonstop in December, putting it on my phone and all that. Each song is a different remix of the original in a different style: low house, rock, folk, and a bunch more. While all are great (except one), I have some favourites. Here's the tier list:
Ordered tiers, unordered within tiers. 'Gelid Dreams' is my favourite track on there by far, since it harkens back to the first appearance of 'Snow halation' on the SiIvagunner channel, in a high-quality rip of the 'Undertale' song 'Hopes and Dreams.' It feels almost like a boss fight track or something, with its own quiet moments that crescendo into hype moments. Others are well composed, but don't get me as excited for them, and I don't really find myself playing those songs when I want to listen to just one song from this album. One specific one is... yeah, no, it may be impressive in its execution, but I can still hate it and want to skip it when it happens to play on shuffle.
Personal updates (achievements, reflections, and antics)
We'll start a little earlier than Monday with late Sunday. I was cooking my butter chicken, or at least attempting to. Last bloghan made it seem like there was nothing to it - that I just did it, no setbacks or hurdles or anything - but that's not really true. From the start, it wasn't going well: the chicken I had moved from the freezer to the fridge in the morning had not yet defrosted fully, and so I had to start prying pieces off the frozen chunk. After nearly giving myself frostbite from cutting it, I started putting spices and all that into the chicken, but I had completely forgotten what the correct results were for the spices I had on hand. My guesses seemed alright, but I felt like I had used too much of all of them. I started cooking, also starting to chop garlic and peel potatoes. My new peeler was actually way better than I thought. I was a bit nervous about the vertical blade mounting style (relative to the handle), but I think it's easier to use than the horizontal style. The vertical style lets you peel by the contour of the potato more, meaning less straining quick stroke moments, and more drawn out "rotate and drag" movements that get more peel. I put the potatoes in and kept cooking, then put about half of my sauce jar into the pot. I made two mistakes: I didn't use enough sauce (should've used the whole jar), and I didn't cook the potatoes nearly enough. Still, I ate it, and after doing so, spent another hour trying to figure out a power source component for my one-bit adder PCB. Why aren't there more surface mount barrel jacks with models??? I followed up with 'Papa's Freezeria' and spent way more time in the game that I intended, then went to bed.
Monday morning was a rough one, but I still made it out of my place on time. Walking into work, I saw some people that I probably should've expected, but was a bit surprised to see. It was three of those old coworkers, the ones who left in August and were also from my home city. I recalled being told that they would be visiting us sometime in December, and the guest badge applications that my work rival was talking about must have been accepted, given the guest badges worn by those three. I gave them a very nonchalant "hi guys" (just another day in the office, you know?). The VP passed by, telling them they had missed a lot (nodding his head towards the crossword grid on the whiteboard), and "welcome back." As I was going to my desk, another coworker told me that there was free breakfast downstairs, provided by the building management. I wasn't feeling particularly like getting it, since thehy would stop offering it in 5 minutes, and I did eat breakfast already, but after putting my things down at my desk, I decided to go. It was a pretty good breakfast, all things considered: eggs, bacon, sausage, croissant, pancakes, and oranges too. I wasn't very hungry, so I didn't eat it right away, but I knew it woudl spoil my lunch appetite for sure. People of all sorts of position came to the corner where my desk was that morning, since my work rival had brought those three to sit in that corner, about our little table. Managers and other full-times were happy to see them, but Steve was working from home today, which disappointed the visitors. Steve actually sent me a message with a picture, starting it with "Yo, what is this. I am a legend!" The message contained an image of some results screen, showing that he had beat his manager in terms of... usage of company resources... well, he was excited for it, so I was happy for him, though that introductory "I am a legend" gave us all a good laugh. I mostly did my work while they were present, as the visitors were pretty occupied with visitng other people or doing their project. I made sure to eat my breakfast while they were not present, and although it was a bit cold from my waiting, it was still really good! Thank you, building management. Around this time, I also got a request from my work rival for today's puzzle to be an easy one that has been done before, so he could gently introduce the guests to the daily cryptic which he had come to enjoy so much. Of course, he had to ask me, so of course, me thinking that he would use it to gas himself up a bit, and also because I was feeling a bit mean that day, I decided to just go ahead with the cryptic that I had already planned to use that day: the hardest one I'd written to date. After a bit more work, we all went down for lunch, but because of that big breakfast, I didn't feel like eating the sandwich I had brought. Instead, I brought down my laptop to work, and di that while conversing. The conversation was actually quite quiet for once, though there was a section where we discussed dinners, and I shared that I made the worst butter chicken known to man, with undercooked potatoes. The group was quick to tell me that I probably should not eat too much more of it, given that undercooked potatoes are actually bad for you and contain actual anti-nutrients. I mulled on that for a bit, and continued to work through lunch, before finally heading up for the hardest cryptic. It was my third 7x7, and the theme words followed the theme "Where I Learned of the Concept of Love." Clearly, they had not heard me talk about last week's song of the week, because they didn't use the theme at all to get those words. They were enjoying the challenge, but my work rival was a little mad. The guests were intrigued though, and although the work rival dragged them away before the solution was made, they eventually came back of their own volition, asking about how cryptics are done and how the principles of clue design were used for what I had made. People seemed to like the challenge posed by this one, except my work rival. I did feel a bit bad, since I had assumed he wanted to show off to those old coworkers he missed so dearly, when really it was more about showing them something he was really excited about at work. After this, the rest of my workday was filled with working on that new task from the not-manager, which was an application of the existing stuff I made for him and his subteam, but for some different process or whatever that they were running. I started heading home at my regular departure time, and was a bit disappointed to see the rain. It was gently coming down, but it's the middle of December! Where's the snow?? This should be snow!! It also meant I would have to stow my headphones away, since the Sony XM4s do not really do well in the rain. I went to close my msuic app (Musicolet), but I saw that my app's equivalent of Spotify Wrapped was ready. It was not as "entertaining" as the actual Spotify Wrapped, but it still shared my top songs of 2024 and such. At first, it was a bit of a surprise to see 'Far far away' (song of the week from bloghan 1, my self-proclaimed theme of my 2024) as my number one played, but I guess it makes sense: it is, as I just described, the song I've been relating my 2024 experiences with the most. Right under it was 'GIRLS!!' A song which opens with the line (translated lyrically by me) "It's so much fun being a girl, you know." I guess I just really love its jazzy feel? Getting back to my place, I took a little time to write some bloghan, before jumping into a VC and recording another episode of that let's play/podcast with my friend from home. To be honest, the game that he picked to play is not really that interesting to me, and I'm more here for the conversation, for the discourse. This week's discourse was the best by far, with the main discourse's topic being about potato peelers and how to use them and how each style should be named. There was also some bad French and discussion about the addicting hold that 'Papa's Freezeria' has on me. This was probably the episode of this little series that I've had the most fun with, ever since we started it. The hardest part is really just the starting and ending bits, and what to do in lulls (which my friend has covered), and how to deal with moments where audio or video cuts out. Once that was wrapped up, I went right to the stove, throwing my leftover butter chicken back into a pot, and mixing in the rest of the sauce that I had as well. Cooking the potatoes a little more and actually making it taste more like butter chicken made all the difference. After fulfilling my non-contractual obligation to Papa Louie, I went to bed.
On Tuesday, I woke up a little later than I was expecting to, but decided to stay in bed an extra amount anyways. It was weirdly cold, evn though I was sure the sheets and blankets were wrapped all around me. Once I got up, I saw why: my front door was open again. This time, it was open way wider than the last time, but there wasn't any wind accompanying this occurrence. Rushing around, I made my breakfast and got the recycling and garbage ready, then shaved: I had a feeling that there would be some pictures being taken given the gingerbread house event tonight. I make it to the bus stop 2 minutes before my bus does (so I can afford to leave a little later than usual..!), and as I board, my bus driver asks me where I'm from. This bus driver has been consistently there for me since about September or October. I always get on his bus at the same time, same stop, and always get off at the same stop with the same wave of "goodbye and thank you," wihch he has recently been giving back to me. He then gave his guess where I was from: close, but not quite. When I told him where I was really from, he repeated it back to himself, seemingly like it all made sense now. Maybe it did? Once at work, I was pretty wrapped up in conversation with Steve, where we mostly talked about the work we were doing and about our managers (and the not-manager too), and about other nothingburgers too. Soon, I set into work, and this time, I decided to lock in for the first time in what felt like a while (actually, I probably did that last week, didn't I?), listening to music from many sources (mostly 'Sonic' and 'Love Live!' to be honest), finishing dealing with the error that the not-manager pointed out last week. There was one slight thing about my solution, which was that it made the whole process I was developing probably triple in its time requirement, maybe even more than that. It was quiet in the office today, and consequently easy to focus, because of my work rival's absence. The guests were staying over at his place too, so they weren't around to disturb anyone. I learned later it was because of that interview he got: he was taking it from home, instead of a meeting room in the office. Well, if he's taking a hit to visual credibility, that's on him. Going down to lunch, I continued to work on stuff, but there wasn't really any work I could do except monitor the things that I had set in motion right before going down. There wasn't much to talk about at lunch either. Once we got back up, I put up that French cryptic crossword that my co-DM made. She wanted me to put it up, pretending it was my own, to be just a little more cruel to the solvers, and cruel it was. They were stuck for a very very long time, and they were not feeling very good about this puzzle either. I took a little mercy while my co-DM was out for a meeting, and let them ask one question every 10 minutes, which I would answer truthfully. They only needed two questions, "is it all in French?" (yes) and "is our fill correct so far?" (yes). In the middle of the solve, one of the coworkers of "Celeste's" player (I have not talked about her in a bit, and she's also not going to be playing D&D in January) passed by, and was wondering what we were doing. We explained to him the concept of the cryptic, how the clues worked and all that, and he was completely confused but unknowledgeably impressed. He credited us with how he always passes by this little shared cubicle and is always impressed with how focused everyone in it is, all the time, as we were solving a crossword made in French. He talked at length with "Celeste" about his work experience (when he was in a similar position as us but at a competitor company, he would always clock out 4 hours earlier than he was supposed to because he barely had any work), about his university experience, and some going-on-abouts concerning something about "Tier A" and "Tier B" friend circles or something. I was only thinking about how unfortunate it was that his first exposure to our little daily cryptic thing happened to be the only one that was in French. After quite a lot of effort and Google Translate, they finally solved the cryptic, where I finally revealed the trick: the co-DM wrote this. They were all quite impressed by her feat, and I really hope that she goes ahead and makes more min cryptics in the future (English ones please), if only to take some of the load off of me. I headed back to my desk, where Steve and my Japanese coworker were hard at work. In fairness, during cryptic time, I bring my laptop to that group cubicle, where I do some work with great distraction. Before I go back to working hard, I end up in discussion with them about holidays, as in which ones are paid time off by the company. Surprisingly, Christmas Eve is not, so I'll have to work that day, since it's too late to take it off. I'll just work from home that day. We also discussed about my lost charger cable, and if there was a way for me to work from home on both the 23rd and the 24th: my work laptop could only last on battery for one full workday. My Japanese coworker and I found one of those laptop docking stations in teh pile of electronics next to my work rival's desk, but it seemed to be non-functional, and wouldn't have been compatible with my laptop anyways. He began to muse about his own charger, and the one he used at home, but realized that since he was going to Japan soon, he wouldn't be able to hand the charger to me before leaving. I told him it was all good: I'd come into the office on the 23rd anyways. I proceeded to re-lock in, and got some things done pretty quick. The others were starting to move towards prepping for the gingerbread house event, but I saw someone approaching my desk, using the reflection of the window that I faced: the director. I saw him coming, so I turned and took off my headphones, but he was already sitting in a chair. He asked me about my progress in double checking my version against his version for the specific task he wanted me to do. I happily reported that they matched! What his work found all that time ago is what my update to his work found. He was very pleased to hear this, and told me to start sending out results emails to relevant people on my team, and to CC him on those emails too. After he gave me that directive and left, people came by to tell me that they were starting the gingerbread house event soon, but I had to tell them I would be late. Sending those emails was going to take more time than expected, since I would have to re-run all the work I had done on newer versions of the project, then send out those emails. I did that as the volume on my floor slowly started to disappear. This night, I was the last one left working, just watching the results to see if everything was going smoothly, then puttin gin a lot of effort to make sure the emails were clear and also clearing me of any responsibility for incorrect results, to the greatest extent possible. Once that was done and over with, and the emais sent, I packed up my things and headed down. I had half a mind to just straight up leave, and not attend - I wasn't all that interested in the event - but I still bit, I was a bit curious. I got in, and there was a surprising amount of people here. It was mostly temporary people from many different floors here, and apparently the coworker who shares the same name as my landlord had looped in some of the administration to help get space and prizes for the event. She's so good at planning events like this, so when January arrives, I already know that we probably won't have well-made plans like this again. I didn't really feel like making a gingerbread house, but that one girl, the one that my work rival was always trying to be around and disappearing into long car trips with, basically forced me into a team with my Japanese coworker and two of the old coworkers. I asked them where my work rival was, and they said he was here, just waiting outside. His interview did not go well at all - he was preparing for stuff to do with microarchitecture, with power, but he got a whole bunch of Leetcode and programming questions - tough luck. There was a table filled with two things only: various sweets and various chips. Classic, really. Throughout the night, I would engorge myself on only the mini cupcakes. They were irresistible, though I knew I would come to regret it eventually. Soft Christmas music was being played, and there was quite loud discussion happening everywhere. My work rival also came back in at this point, and I told him I had a question for him. I started it with "you have an array," and he immediately just walked away. The guests were shocked that I had the gall to ask him that, and asked how I knew that was the question that completely messed him up on that interview. I actually didn't know it was an array quesiton, I just assumed that every Leetcode question started with some sort of array. Once all the teams were formed, we started making the houses... except the two guests on my team had different plans. They wanted to make a race car, so they grabbed some scissors, and started grinding it down the middle of the front face plate of the house, breaking off one of the corners in the process of splitting it in half. Already, we were off to an absolutely wonderful start. Over the course of the next hour, we just went wild with the icing (how did we burst two extra holes in it???), the other face plate to replace the broken panel (we broke that too), a little creation by my Japanese coworker that used the broken pieces that was... abstract at best (we reskinned it as a bank that was rammed into by a vehicle), and using the tree and the gigner bread man in the car as well (tree as the back end of the car, man as Ryan Gosling in 'Drive'). Every other team was looking at us like we were crazy or like we were geniuses, and I don't really know which one we were. I swear at some point someone played 10 seconds of 'Snow halation,' but I wasn't really sure, so I glared at my chosen suspect and continued with the "house." We also grabbed some of the donut holes from the snack table, and but them in the "car" as a "seat," and what we were claiming our "car" as was changing everytime. At one point it was a traincar, then it was sled, then a bobsled, then back to a car. It was a very ugly thing, with things constantly falling apart, very thick layers of fondat just in random places, and even the floor's secretary asking us if we were really fit to work at a place like this, considering the design we were currently producing. Eventually, we settled on a final design, and stopped participating to start snacking. The story behind our creation was as follows: a bank heist, taking place on Christmas Eve, where Ryan Gosling himself would ram into a bank and steal the bag of cash in the vault, but there was no predicting the teller still being present. Now there was blood on the front of the car, and the Driver was making his getaway, making a rolling stop at the stop sign we made out of some scrap cut gingerbread and a red gummy. The other teams were making a single story house, a two story house, and a church, but I think we won the creativity game. We watched as the other teams started finishing up, eating snacks, talking about the home city, and all that. Once every team was done (except the two story house), there was a short phase of "now what?" No one was really sure what to do, so it mostly devolved into conversation and more sweets eating. It was at that moment that I heard a certain set of piano notes, and like a sleeper agent's activation phrase, I whirled around and started looking around to see if people noticed. Some people did, but not many, so I guess it was alright, but people did ask me if I had put it on. I don't even use Spotify, so I couldn't use the blend feature to force everyone around me to listen to it. The culprit finally revealed themselves during the first verse, and it turned out to be my equivalent. He had also played it during the gingerbread house making too, so it wasn't the person I though it was. At first, I thought it was some cover version, and not the real thing, but it turned out to just be the bad speakers of the room we were in. One of the full-times who had joined us for some reason heard our discussion about 'Love Live!' and 'Snow halation,' and told me that there was another full-time on some other team that was a really big fan of the series. Turns out it's a guy that my co-DM works with. Outside of one person, I've yet to meet another fan of 'Love Live!' that isn't a guy... The two story house guys finished, and after some picture taking with eveyrone present, and with each house, my work rival tried to get everyone to clean, but they were too busy chatting. He thought for abit, went up to the podium that was playing the music, and put that one nursery rhyme on loop, the clean-up song or whatever. It was the most grating version I've ever heard of it, and each key change irritated me more and more. Everyone got the message and started putting things away, and I went for the scissors first, before realizing I had no idea where to put them. Someone else stopped the music, because everyone now had cleaning momentum and it was no longer needed, but my work rival went right back up to the podium. I threatened him with the scissors first, which stopped him, but once someone took the scissors from me to put them away (not to stop my threatening, but because I genuinely had no idea where they went) he immediately took notice and started playing it again. After a copule more minutes of clean up, I spotted my work rival and the three guests leaving the room. I decided to follow and I saw them all enter the washroom. I went in with them, because my hands were still a little sticky from the icing and all that, and I wanted to wash them. My work rival left first, since he didn't really want to use the washroom, he was just escorting them there or something, while the guests did actually use it. Once they were done, they realized they didn't have a way back in to the main room without the work rival, but I reminded them that I also work here, and that I stayed behind just to let them back in. We came back after the clean up had finisehd (the song was over, thankfully), and my work rival realized how he had abandoned the guests in the washroom, but said that me being there was something he accounted for. Sure pal, sure. People spotted me and the guests, all from the same far far away city, and they wanted to take a picture of us, including the other guy from that same city who I had forgotten was also working here. Right after this, the lights went out (it was late and I guess the building just does that at this hour), and judging began. It was by vote on sticky notes in front of the houses, with eveyrone getting one vote to place on a design that was not their own, much to the chagrin of the 6 people who worked on the two story house. I tired to commit voter fraud multiple times, but I was caught each time by my work rival. It's not as easy as the States makes it appear. From just our votes, our design won, but the voting was going to be opened up to al lthe full time employees tomorrow morning, so we would lose then, but I enjoyed sticking it to my work rival in the moment. Once again, we had reached a state of "what now?" Someone suggested going out for dinner, and a lot of people agreed. Someone suggested some famous Chinese restaruant, and my work rival, having heard of it quite a bit, was down, and announced the restaurant. Jokingly, I asked him to spell its name out, thinking that he knew. To my delight, he didn't, and it was very amusing for all of us to see him stumble on it multiple times, before giving up and letting everyone else tell him. I think that ended up solidfying that we were going to that restaruant right away, but while I wanted to go, I couldn't. There were things I wanted to drop off and takae care of at my place first, and this wasn't part of the plan. My co-DM agreed to drive me back to my place and then to the restaurant once the business was taken care of, so we headed out first. However, other people who didn't know about our plan sent two other people with us, thinking we were going straight to the restaruant too. The car ride was a bit awkward, with me explaining what was going on and what the plan was, but everyone was more than alright with it. I get back ot my place, take some time to drop things off and deal with the thing my landlord told me to deal with, and came back out. I promised them it would be 10 minutes maximum, and I came back in 7 minutes and 40 seconds. I know that so precisely because I set a timer on my phone for 10 minutes, which I beat, but my Japanese coworker (one of the guys sent to this car by the others) guessed that I only took 7 minutes and 40 seconds. I chekced my timer as soon as he said it: 2 minutes, 20 seconds, exactly. He was right, and he didn't have his phone out r anything. He didn't even know what time I had left the car, that was just his pure guess, and he just got it???? Just like that??? He shared that back in Japan, he held a record or something for best estimation of 20 meters, and that he was only off by 7 millimeters or something. He thought I was making up that he got it exact, but no. He didn't, at all. That was what we mostly talked about on the ride back, and we promptly arrived at the restaurant. We walked in, spotting our very large group sitting at two lrage circuler tables pushed together in an infinity shape. We took our seats just as the food came in. It had these rotating discs on the top of the tables, and they were bringing huge platters and bowls to rest on them - fried rice, congee, fried turnip cubes, fried fish, this really decadent egglplant dish. It looked good and I went to grab some food from teh rotating table and put it on my plate, but something stopped me. The chopsticks. The chopsticks. Again. This always happens to me. I don't eat with chopsticks, ever. I either use my hands or a fork, because that's my culture. Everyone was encouraging me to eat, and when the guy on my left finally asked me why I didn't grab any food, just tea, I raised my chopsticks. A wide grin slowly spread across his face, and pretty soon after that, the entire table started trying to teach me how to use chopsticks. It was a whole ordeal, in which I was trying to learn two different styles simultaneously, and I don't think much progress came from it, just a very sore right thumb and associated muscles. People eventually gave up on me, and scooped food onto my plate before I got my hands on a fork. We ate and talked and took a whole ton of pictures, and I jumped at every loud sound in the restaurant. I didn't get to eat much of the food, since my group arrived late (my fault), and because I had to wait a long time to get food on my plate (my fault). It was alright though, because what I did get to eat tasted very amazing (not the fried fish skin though, that was painful). After I paid about a quarter of the group's bill, we all headed out, and I got dropped back at my place. I wrote some bloghan, got trapped on Calypso Island, and ended up staying up later than I ever have while over here. When I realized that, I went to bed right away.
I woke up on Wednesday, then went back to sleep. I woke up again, and it was one hour after my alarm, and I had missed my bus. I started rushing to get ready, skipping making lunch, skipping my morning tea, in hopes to catch the next bus, which I did. The end result was me showing up late to work by half an hour, which everyone noticed. However, I still beat my work rival, so I count this as an overall victory. To make up for it, I just went ahead with work right away, trying to figure out where the errors I was seeing in just about everything I was working on were coming from. I also finally started fielding those questions from my work rival's team - they were asking me about another application to Absconder for their cross checking. When I actually looked at that application though, I realized it was just the same application of Absconder that I've been doing for them all along, just way more specific and narrow in focus. Why?? Why do they need this same task over and over again, so many times? I just got over being tired of being asked to do Absconder stuff, but now I'm just getting tired of doing the same Absconder stuff over again. Soon, it was time for lunch, but given that I didn't have lunch, I decided to check out the restaurantin the building across the parking lot. Once we got there, I was surprised at how small and tucked away in a corner it was, and how limited the menu was: only 3 items? I got the first one, as did everyone else who had joined me since they also did not bring lunch today. It seemed like this place was being run by an older Chinese couple, and some of the kitchen equipment was interesting. There were just rice cookers on the table right behind the counter, and random bowls all about. It looked like just a regular kitchen, actually. After a bit of a wait, where I got concerned over my hands since it looked like they suddenly turned yellow (the lighting above me was the cause), the owner came up to all of us and gave us our food, which I wasn't expecting at all. Honestly, the restaurant in this building was way better than the restaurant in my own building in terms of service quality. Before heading back, we also decided to check out the tech vending machine, which reported that everything was out of stock even though we could see its entire stock in there. Looks like I'm not getting that laptop charger anytime soon. We got back to our own building, and started eating and working, with everyone remarking on how we all bought the same thing. The work rival finally showed up to the office, bringing back those three guests from yesterday, as well as a new one: apparently, it was his best friend of 12 years, who works full-time at another company, one which my own company often works with. The conversation is pretty varied, with most of the others talking ot the four guests, and me focusing on my own work. I don't really participate too much, until it's time to go up once again, for the next crossword. I got it all printed out, got the grid all ready, and planted myself on one guy's filing cabinet, until everyone who wanted to participate in the crossword was in the group cubicle. While I waited for the assemblage, I went to the break room to grab a root beer. I saw that guy from yesterday who saw us doing the French cryptic, and he greeted me by name and asked if I had put up the next cryptic. I told him "almost," and headed back, where I saw the group coming together, ready to tackle the crossword. There were so many bodies in that tiny little cramped space, with three of the four guests, four of the people normally in that cubicle, me, my work rival, and one more guy, for a total of 10. Some were sitting in front of the board on the floor, some were standing, some brought their chairs over, and the rest stood. They began solving, with people trying to teach the guests how to solve these, and with a bit of quick progress that led to them getting stuck, only for the guests to go ahead and solve one or two that allowed them to proceed. At one point, the VP joined in the cubicle, peeking over the shoulders of some of the taller people standing at the back, which spooked the guests a little bit. He stepped back, then took a picture of us all, as we were focused on the crossword. I joked that he was "collecting evidence to fire us for being unproductive," which he categorically denied with a smile. After a little more time, they all solved it, feeling very good about this one. After getting the feedback on my clues, and explaining some of the more obscure ones, I went back to work, with my work rival's usual nonsense only being amplified by the guests he had brought. They all seemed a bit bored though, since all they had to work on while here was their own projects. Over the course of the next couple hours, they started to leave, some going separately from others to catch flights and such going elsewhere. At one point, one of them wanted an update on how sassy Steve was getting with the not-manager, taking over my laptop for a bit to do so. Men with big muscles really think they can just do anything, huh? Once the guests and my work rival had left, I worked for a bit more, but not particularly on any specific thing. I had finished sending those emails that the director wanted, and was waiting for the not-manager to get back to me on my solution to that one error. Then, I got a message from someone, that someone being on Steve's team, but it wasn't the not-manager. It was about a task that my boss put on me a while back, one having to do with updating documentation for some specific part of the project, and that message was a question asking if it was done. This was something that I had not even started, something I had completely forgotten about. I start to speedrun this task, firing questions to my manager and to other relevant people when I notice an inconsistency. There was one inconsistency I found which was actually kind of major: a part of the project seemed to be missing a significant portion of itself, so I alerted the person in charge of that portion. He sends me a question back, asking about where this error is, and how we could have a quick call to sort this out. I start taking some time to prep the relevant files and such on my monitor, so that if I was asked to show him, I could do that right away. However, when I was ready to do the call, I looked back at our messages and saw that he had deleted the message requesting the call, and replaced it with messages acknowledging the error, and inviting me to submit the fix for it. OK. I can understand changing your mind about a call, once you yourself realize the error, and no longer need me to tell you where it is. What I don't understand is why he felt the need to delete the message and pretend like he never wanted to call me, and pretend like he saw the error right away. Like, why couldn't he just edit the message? Or even send something like "nvm I see it now." There's nothing wrong with admitting you missed something at first pass, but just deleting the message could confuse someone into doubting what was sent to them in the first and the second place. I could have just ended up calling anyways to confirm that he meant to do that, so if he was trying to avoid calling me out of social anxiety or something, pretending like he never requested the call would not have helped in that case. But I guess if there was social anxiety involved in this whole equation, he would not have asked me for a call in the first place? Whatever, I don't know anymore, it's just such a weird detail. No matter the case, I accept the opportunity to submit the fix myself, and he thanks me for spotting the error in the first place. While all of this was happening, my mentor was asking me for help with something using - you guessed it - Absconder. He approached me at my desk at first, but asked me to come to his to make things smoother. While I'm dealing with this speedrun of a task, I'm getting all these requests to meet in his cubicle, and it's about a task which seems to be equivalent to the one I'm working on to replicate and generalize the director's work. It's more complicated than that one, since it's focusing on a more complicated part of the project. He kept telling me about how he considers me way more skilled and knowledgeable wiith Absconder, also considering that I already have some Absconder stuff to use with this task. I helped him get set up with my Absconder stuff, starting to use it to see if the problem could be solved, and we had a bit of small talk. He asked about my holiday plans, and taught me about how holidays work at this company, talked about my usage of free time (I told him about bloghan but not where to find it), and he offered me some gum too. He also asked when my temporary position would end, and when I told him it would be in August, he said "thank God, I was so afraid you'd say 'next week' and leave me to do this myself." It's nice to know that I'm needed here by someone! He also gave me advice on my fix that I got the go ahead for from the call avoider, telling me to test it extensively before submitting it (good call). Our chats in his cubicle were usually cut off by thing taking a long time to run, or requests form his manager to have calls, which obviously superseded our little collaboration. I'm really liking working directly with someone on my own subteam, not just receiving requests over DMs to do something in some way. Eventually, it was time for us to go home, and he ended up leaving before I did. As I left, I met up again with some of the coworkers in the crossword cubicle. We talked for a bit, like some discussion on 'Valorant' Masters, which might be in a nearby city to me next summer, and more discussion on making PCBs for mechanical keyboards. That conversation nearly made me miss my bus, but I ran out right away and caught it. When I got back, I did some bloghan stuff, but I was so mentally exhausted from the day that I didn't feel like writing out the full bloghan paragraphs, instead doing little jot notes to make it easier to write later. I also kept checking my work laptop to make sure that fix I submitted was going to work and wasn't going to break anything. All the testing my mentor told me to do was successful, but submitting it for everyone to see - that was a different story. I really wanted to make sure that went through succesfully, so that I wouldn't walk into work the next day to a bunch of angry emails and admonishings. Once I saw it was all alright, and my bloghan jot notes were done, I made some crosswords and dinner, played some games, and went to bed, also quite late.
Thursday morning was rough, but I did manage to wake up on time. I do have to stop going to bed so many hours after midnight, but for now, it has only caused me to be late to work once. Actually, maybe it's been twice? Once my morning routine was finished, I headed out to my regular old bus stop, listening to 'Halation Celebration' once again. As I got to the bridge of hte remix I was listening to, I noticed that it started to snow, very lightly against the bright blue sky. It was perfectly timed, matching up with the performance of 'Snow halation' in 'Love Live! School idol project.' After that moment that seemed perfectly scripted, I made it into work and did just that, even completing some work within 2 minutes of getting to my desk. My mentor was feeling sick today, so wasn't in the office, but still was working from home, DMing me to say that whatever we did yesterday had failed, in some ways. It was working fuly, but it was reporting a lot of things that it should not have been. He asked me where we should start with the fixes, with the debugging and all that for the two things we were noticing: one set of errors that were seemingly in reverse, and one larger set of errors that had to with outside interference by other parts of the project. I wanted to handle the outside interference issue, since I had some ideas on how to deal with that, but my mentor told me that it might be better if I did the reversal error, since I'm more familiar with the nitty gritty of how Absconder and the stuff I've made with it. Really, this whole thing where I have to track down where things are going wrong is a one-person thing, but I give him a place where I would start when it comes to the half he assignes himself to fix, while I dread fixing the thing I need to fix, as I realized that the issue might lie in a part of my Absconder work that I don't really want to touch. It took some more calls to relay that sort of information to him, but eventually it came down to lunch, where we played 'Crazy Eights' as a group. We played with the modified rules with the Queen of Spades and Jokers and 2s and Jacks and all that, and I ended up getting third by top-decking an eight three times. Once we were done with that, we had finished our lunches, so we moved back upstairs. I was waiting for everyone who was interested to come back to their cubicles, but someone mentioned to me that the women's club at work was having some sort of cake and cookies event, so of course we all went down like the hyenas we are. It was supposed to be some sort of meet and greet with that women's club, but by the time we got there, the room was empty and the cakes untouched. We lined up to grab our food, and looked around, wondering if we were supposed to, you know, meet and greet some sort of representative of that club? But the person who I assumed was in charge of it told us that the event was already over, and that it was alright if we just headed out. I have a feeling that no one came in the first place though, since there was a bit of a defeated and frustrated tone behind those words, in addition to the untouched cakes. Who knows, it's possible that I'm completely wrong, since I don't technically have evidence to prove that those cakes were the only ones brought for the event. We did the crossword after that, with it being one that I finished late last night, and they were satisfied with that. Not amazing, not mind blowing, but just good, which I think is a good thing. After this I got more calls from my mentor, and took more time to work and lock in, focusing on this Absconder problem. At some point, my equivalent on another team came to visit me, asking what music I was listening to, which sparked this whole discussion about music that we listen to, and different genres and recommendations for each other. I left work that day a bit miffed about the things I was working on, because it was just so strange why these things were not working at all. Back at my place, after some gaming and some writing, I went to bed early.
I woke up on Friday only a couple minutes before my usual login time, making my morning tea and logging in for the day. Before that though, I opened my window, expecting the same dreary rain and overcast sky like we've been having at the start of the week. I actually gasped when I saw that it was sunny, and there was a ton of snow on the ground. It was also actively snowing, which was such a nice touch. Seeing that so close to the anniversary of 'Snow halation' and of course, Christmas, made me so happy, and additionally made me feel better about the rest of my day. I had bloghan open up on my own laptop, and the Absconder stuff from yesterday up on my work laptop. The plan was again to slack at work to work on bloghan, since I had been only being doing jot notes for each day's entry. However, right from the start, I got messages from my mentor asking me about my progress, and the allure of the problem drew me into attempting to solve it. I had found a weird little thing yesterday evening, something I had not been able to act on, where Absconder was not able to find some sort of model related to the parts of the project we were looking at. My mentor requested a call, so I did, but he declined it, since apparently at that moment his manager asked him to take care of something right away, leaving me to do this on my own. Well, it's Absconder, so I've been doing it on my own all this time anyway. I chase down this little lead into what's going on, while simultaneously making a non-checked crossword to appease the others who went into the office today, and listening to a bunch of the same music I've been listening to this week to focus. Maybe I should make a playlist or something, to easily access those. When I'm halfway through the crossword, I look back at my Absconder stuff and realize that it's looking for things that don't exist, and that's because it was being fed the wrong names! In order for this to start working in the first place, I needed something provided by my mentor, which turned out to be the source of those incorrect names. Once I remedied that, I reran it, and went to finish the crossword. After my perogie lunch, I looked and saw that it worked! Because of this name thing, those reversal errors happened, and now they were gone. I wanted to tell my mentor, but I decided to give it one more long form test run, just to be sure. Finishing off the crossword and sending it off to the people in office was next, and then I started to work on that thing for my work rival's team member. During my breaks and my waiting time, I ended up being unable to resist the call of Papa, but I did manage to get the result she wanted, hopefully. There was only one hour left in my shift, so I decided to finally let my mentor know that I solved the problem. He really hit me with the "Wow" in response, then asked for a call, in which we discussed the solution I found, and next steps. He was going to be on vacation all of next week though, so I would be working alone on this, but he did say that since this problem was so interesting to him, he might open his work laptop just to poke at it a little bit. He apologized for what happened in the morning, saying it was because he was gating someone else's work, and my mentor needed to get his work in right away. He was now just watching to make sure the submission was successful, which is always a painful thing to do on a Friday. If it doesn't work, you can't just leave it since someone will have to work on the weekend to fix it if you don't, leading to some aggresive messages and emails on Monday. I joked about these Friday plans of his, and he complained about it, saying how he would never ever do it. He said it with a lot less professionalism than I've ever seen him use, which I really appreciated. I now feel like there's a mutual level of respect between us where we can sort of drop that professional layer. I wished him good holidays, and hopped off my work laptop, and back onto my own laptop for a night of continued online existence. I ate the last of my butter chicken, played even more Freezeria and other stuff, and was about to go to bed when I realized that I should probably shovel the snow outside. In the middle of the day, it had started snowing even harder, and it was still going now, to less of an extent and from a clear night sky. It was a couple hours after midnight by now, but I still went ahead and did it: I really did not want to deal with too much ice out there tomorrow. I shoveled away, listening to music the whole time, not really feeling all that cold, and once it was done, I just stood out there, looking up at the stars and the snow. I thought to myself, "This is peace." I had found it here, living alone, for sure. With that, I retreated back inside, and went to bed.
Waking up on time on Saturday, I got an early start to writing this week's bloghan from the jot notes I made. I made a regular breakfast (two basted eggs, two pieces of toast, morning tea), and interlaced sections of bloghan writing with chores: dishwashing, shaving, things like that, doing them piece by piece. I decided it was also time to go out for a haircut, but before I could, my coworker who shares a name with my landlord sent me a message, inviting me to a group chat where we could plan that keyboard PCB together. She opened with "welcome to da club," and I made a joke playing on the club thing, asking "what do you wear to a club? I've never been clubbing." Of course, I should've seen this coming, but she followed that with "do u have a cocktail dress." I can never beat these allegations, can I? We proceeded to have two conversations simultaneously, one about the feasibilty of me getting a cocktail dress with her to go clubbing (she better be joking she better be joking) and one about the actual keyboard PCB, and how we want to start approaching it. Once the conversation got a little quieter, I finally headed out to get that haircut. First though, I wanted to grab some cash from the ATM, because the place I was going to preferred cash payments. I start my regular walk to the grocery store, this time going a little past it to get to the ATM. When I try to put my debit card in though, and assumedly guess my PIN correctly, it tells me my card is expired. I look at it, and sure enough, ti expired a year ago. Cashless, I head to the hair place, and walk in to see it's quite busy. Even so, I get waved into one salon chair, and wait for a little bit. I get a real ogod look at my hair, which was last cut in August? I think? It's definetely wavy and curly just about everywhere, and there was a significant part of it that was drooping over my right eye. While I'm sure I'd have found that hairstyle sick as a kid, it was getting a little annoying, so it was time for a cut. Someone came to attend to my hair, asking me about lenght and options and all that. I just kinda said yes and nodded along with things, because I had no idea what any of the terms they were using meant. I was very grateful that she noticed I'm not much of a talker at all wen I'm getting a haircut, so she kept silent the whole time except for when it had to do with my hair. There was this weird cutting board thing hanging from the cupboard in front of me, which was the thing I thought of the most during that haircut. There were some really odd things being asked and done, such as these scissors shaped in the strangest way I've ever seen. It looked like one of those craft scissors that are supposed to cut in some sort of pattern on paper, but those never work. Once it was done, she pulled off the cutting board from the cabinet, which turned out to be a very thick mirror, and showed me the view of my hair from all angles. I don't think she realized that I can barely see without my glasses, which were on that cabinet, so I just nodded and said it was good. While it's nice that living alone means that I don't have to make as many decisions, I still do have to make some decisions. Unfortunate. I walked back to the view of the sunset, at that moment deciding what my personam song of the next year would be. One day, I would like to bear witness to a sunset that can house my pain. When I got back, I was feeling cold and sleepy, but I still had bloghan to write, so I climbed under the sheets of my bed and did that whole wireless keyboard thing to type from a distance. I made dinner after a good deal of writing, making fusili and meatballs with tomato sauce, then stayed up way too long doing - well you know what I do at the end of the day now. I went to bed, greatly regretting that choice. Surprisingly, I woke up on time on Sunday, despite going to bed only 6 hours ago. Today was a big day: the 14th anniversary of 'Snow halation' being released, a song which I joking describe as having "saved" me. I ate a bigger brekfast than usual on this day, and quickly spent most of the morning writing this bloghan. I really wish I hadn't done the jot notes style thing that I did. I should've just written the bloghan sections of each day as they happened. At least I still got time to do some things on Sunday though! While I was writing, I had this weird feeling of hunger coming from my stomach? This was only one hour after eating breakfast, so it couldn't have been actual hunger. Drinking water and eating some of those Indian mixture snacks made it go away, so there's that. Most of the chatting I was doing throughtout the day had to with technology stuff, holiday plans, more keyboard talk, and some concern about the loans I have going into repayment when I would actually very much like those loans to not do that please. I went out for groceries too, just to stock up on stuff for the many days off ahead, treating myself to real bacon, which is something I usually never buy (sausage is better to be honest, but bacon is more iconic). In between rounds of writing, I did my laundry, I played some games, I cooked dinner, and all that conversation from earlier, fueled only by whatever snacks I scrounged around in the back of my cupboards for, and a whole lot of boiling water. It was a relatively quiet day of celebration of 'Snow halation' (some might say that I didn't really celebrate it at all today, based on what I've written here), but watching through the results of the new SiIvagunner ARG and listening to 'Halation Celebration' once more, I think it counts. After finishing off this week's bloghan, I played some more 'Freezeria' and went to bed. What a week. What a great week.
Future plans
Remember when I said that December would free me up slightly? Yeah that was a lie. I'm still running out of time consistently, mostly because of bloghan and cooking food. If only I had a lighter laptop, then I can do both at the same time...
- PCB stuff: for my one-bit adder recreation, I did a little bit of schematic symbol work for the barrel jack, but I might change that to just a regular header. For the keyboard stuff, we've got a keyboard layout, now we actually just have to start working on a PCB.
- Door: no progress
- 'A Court of Thorns and Roses': guys I swear I'll finish this book before 2024. I literally have three days off this week I'll have so much time, trust.
- Cryptic crossword: Here's the ones I made this week, try them with these links:
- Watching something new: does more 'Balatro' gameplay count? I don't think it counts...
This week, the plan is simple, and repeated, slightly, but like again, and again (this bit which is not a bit is still unfunny): finish 'A Court of Thorns and Roses' (this time for sure, for sure), make the PCB schematic and component footprints for the one-bit adder recreation, get ready to start making the keyboard PCB, make clues for the special 12x12 "holiday special" cryptic, make a short playlist for my "lock in" playlist, and watch 'Sonic the Hedgehog 3' in a movie theatre.
Song of the week
'Snow halation' (https://youtu.be/OzGVz1ClxIc) from 'Love Live! School idol project' is the song of the week. This might not have come across very well, but this week was basically all in anticipation for today, the anniversary of its release. I really do love this song, since it's what got me aware and into 'Love Live!' That show has altered my life's course forever, in a generally positive direction. This song has also taught me everything I know about love, specificlally the type of love one has towards the things that they create and the things that they enjoy. As Chad Warden himself said, 'Snow halation' represents everything beautiful about love. It's the feeling of making something high quality, the feeling of being around the ones you love, the feeling of doing what you do not to appease anyone, but because you love doing it. True emotion, pure-hearted devotion. The melody of the heart. The melody of my heart. I would not be who I am today without it, without the specific dominoes in my life that have toppled because of my exposure to it. I would not appreciate what I have, appreciate the things I make, to the same extent as I do now, without it. Until the day we come to feel the same, I'll keep it close: all this love I hold, my new sensation. Thank you, 'Snow halation,' for everything.
Until next time
I said most of what I wanted to say to you, the audience, and to you, the world, in the rest of this bloghan already. It's always around the end of December where I get all mushy and thankful for just about everything, so don't expect to see that kind of sentiment in the new year. See you next week!
- bubbler