Author Archives: Alan V

Phoenix, San Francisco

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Work wanted me to make a trip out (as seems to be the norm every February), but since we had Phantom tickets for yesterday, and my coworker could only make a trip out the last week of February, I reversed the usual schedule and went to Phoenix to visit my parents for a week before heading out to SF.

I left on Valentine’s day. It had been snowing a bit all morning, but as soon as the 28X bus hit the freeway, it really started to come down. Visibility was terrible, and the bus was crawling along the freeway at around 10 MPH.

But I get to the airport with plenty of time anyway, and we board the plane on time. Visibility still isn’t great.

Most of the way through boarding, the captain comes on the speaker and says they’re temporarily stopping boarding because the flight is going to be delayed. A bit after that he tells us all to deplane because air traffic control had shut down the runways (due to wind, snow, and lack of no-wind/snow so they can plow the runways) and they didn’t know if they would open again before Monday.
So I sit on hold with Southwest’s customer service number for about 90 minutes, when they announce that the wind has stopped long enough that the airport can plow. So we quickly re-board, get de-iced, and take off only about 2.5 hours late. Not too bad, all things considered.

But anyway, because I was flying Pittsburgh to Phoenix, I went from snowy 0Fs to sunny high-70Fs. So that was interesting.

My parents and I made a trip out to the Amazing Arizona Comic Con (interesting, I suppose, but not really worth admission if you’re not particularly into modern superheroes) and Cirque du Soleil Varekai (amazing). We also ate at 4 all-you-can-eat buffets over the week. So hooray for food.

The following week of work was fairly uneventful. Didn’t get to see as many people as I was hoping, since everyone seems to be super busy with work and life now. But it was good seeing my coworkers face-to-face again, and it reminded me how much I miss it.

More photos from the trip can be found at my photos site.

Life, climbing, work, expenses

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My photo journal has been updated to bring it up to today.
After the holidays, life has returned to its usual habit of climbing on Tuesday, board games on Thursday, and climbing (plus food) on Friday. It’s a nice routine, and it means I get out of the house, so that’s good.
Climbing and gaming photos from January have also made it up at photos.

Traverse party!

I made a bad thing at work. During some refactoring for a feature I built for the last release, I apparently failed to notice that the class I was pulling code out of was a singleton, so I added instance variables in the base class. The feature in question was a login feature, so the end result was a concurrency bug where users could get logged in as other users.
Oops.
Lesson learned: Singletons are dangerous. Be careful when using them and probably avoid them for things that don’t want state to be shared (like a global whitelist or something), even if they don’t currently have any state.

I’ve belatedly crunched all my expenses from the past year. As expected, 2014 is the year that breaks my spending trend: I spent $11,664.02 in 2011, $12,356.83 in 2012, $13,698.12 in 2013, and $15,821.38 in 2014 (not including wedding expenses).
The responsibility for this lies almost entirely in food expenditures, up around $1,200 from $3,804.70 to $5,081.34 (or a monthly average of $317.06 to $423.45). I guess I’ve been eating out a lot more or something this past year.
Everything else has remained fairly flat, including my $50/month discretionary budget, which hasn’t changed since 2004. Which is surprising given the four weddings we attended in 2014 (travel expenditures of $1,390.13 in 2013 versus $1,787.94 in 2014).
My share of the wedding expenses so far (save the dates, invitations, deposits, scheduled payments) total $2,953.74, which ultimately puts 2014 expenditures at $18,775.12. Not so bad. That’s still under what I was spending in SF (with an average rent and utilities of $1,200 to $1,600 compared to the current $450 to $500), even though monthly food expenditures have more than doubled since then.

Wedding plans continue. The next big thing, I think, is the honeymoon. We’re currently planning a UK and France trip for that, which should be a lot of fun, but argh long plane flights. Hooray for things?

Invitations Done

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101 invitations created, assembled, and sent. Yayz.
Here they are laid out in roughly the right geographic places. We have a lot of invites in California and Ohio. (Local ones are not pictured because we’re delivering those in person, which is why Pennsylvania is underrepresented.)

Here’s what they look like (with the RSVP and information cards on the right). I think they turned out pretty awesome.

I’m glad we took all of last week off of work to finish these up… it ended up taking pretty much the entire week.

In other unrelated news, there was a new year! We had people over for board games. We had the best champagne glasses.

(More documentation of the festivities is here.)

Also, with a new year comes life updates. Both the photo stats site and photo journal have been updated.

It’s only day 3 back at work and I’m already feeling super overwhelmed and stressed out. I don’t know. Sometimes I feel like I’m really not cut out for software, or any job that requires talent and ability. :\
There’s just been so many different things demanding my attention recently (particularly interviews… so many interviews) that I haven’t had a chance to really finish any one thing. And that’s incredibly frustrating.

The week got even better when I went to ship back my old phone today and managed to leave the apartment without my keys, wallet, or phone. That was a fun walk to Squirrel Hill and back in the snow. It’s supposed to be even colder tomorrow though, so I suppose today was a less-bad day to be stuck outside for a while. Blah.

Credit carrdddsss

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Argh credit cards. Argh theknot.com.

I placed an order earlier this month online (at theknot.com) for some custom playing cards for our wedding. I used the usual online temporary credit card number stuff I use, because it’s more secure. The preauthorization for the cards went through fine.

Yesterday, the order ships. But due to some temp card number stuff, the charge fails. (Of course, they don’t actually notify me of this… I actually have to call theknot and explicitly inquire about it.) So I call them, and apparently they can’t actually change the credit card information used for an invoice. Which is the most bizarre thing for an online merchant. (Can’t update billing information? Really?)

So I call my bank. They said that the charge is indeed not going through, but while looking at my account, they see some fraudulent charges from Brazil. So card cancelled, new card issued… it’s supposed to arrive next week.

So I call theknot back. Explain the situation to them, and they insist that they can’t change the number and they will keep reattempting the charge. (No idea why they expect it to work after it’s already been rejected, especially since it’s now against a cancelled card.) They say it’s up to me to contact the bank to get the charge to go through.

So I contact the bank, who has no idea what theknot is talking about, because of course the charge should be rejected. So we get on a three-way call, and apparently the person who can make things work is out until Monday.

So that’s where we stand now after about an hour of back-and-forth and being on hold. I just want to pay for these stupid playing cards, dammit. Why do you make this so hard for me? :(

I think the lesson here is just to stop using temp credit card numbers. I’m not liable for fraud anyway, so who cares if my real credit card number is flying around the internet? It’d make things less stupid for me, anyway.

Christmas

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I had a Christmas. It was awesome. It was filled with lots of board game playing, as I’d ordered Zooloretto, Love Letter, and Viticulture: Tuscany and they arrived over the break. There was also plenty of Bohnanza, Bananagrams, Carcassonne, 6 Nimmt, Uno, and Ingenious. For Christmas we got 7 Wonders (to replace our old water-damaged set), the 7 Wonders Babel expansion, and Splendor, which was added to the mix of games.






There was, of course, the usual cookie decorating. Channing and I made poop cookies. Here’s my two:

I also did some rather untraditional present wrapping:

So it was a nice, relaxing week. More photos are at photos.

We also made some progress on wedding things. We went with the awesome Chris and found our bridesmaids’ dresses.

We’ll be spending the next week working on our invitations and doing more wedding things. So whee.