Category Archives: Life

Happy birthing day to me…

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…I am twenty three.
(No, actually, that’s a lie.)

The house exists and is a thing and has furniture and stuff inside of it. And on Saturday it had people (25 people, at one point) inside of it. It’s large enough that it never felt full during that time, even with simultaneous games happening in the living room (Nertz), dining room (Betrayal), basement (Agricola), and second-floor office (Bohnanza). We could have had another game going in the library too, probably. (Contrast that to our apartment where we hosted probably a dozen people last Carnival, and it felt so overfull that it was uncomfortable.)

(Not pictured: Dan, Yubin, Matt, Michael, Maja)

But I had a birthday party on Saturday, and a ton of people made it out, and it was awesome. Yubin made a post-birthday-song speech for me thanking everyone for coming out and put really nice words in my mouth. :) I’m super lucky and blessed to have so many friends and an awesome house to host them all in.

Anyway, house!






More photos are here.

I think the only pending thing at the house at this point is getting internet access and cleaning the bathroom (and getting a shower curtain for it). Otherwise it’s move-in ready… we actually spent the night there on both Friday and Saturday and it was fine other than having to come back to the apartment for showers.

Yay house. :D

House, work, Until Dawn, Powerball

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It’s 5 AM and I can’t sleep for some reason, so here’s a general braindump of things from the last few days.

Our house is approaching usable and livable status! Keith needed a trip to Robinson last weekend, so we tagged along and used his car to buy 8 chairs and a TV stand at Ikea. Our living room couch and armchair also arrived, so we actually have furniture now, and it’s awesome. We spent the weekend building furniture and cleaning the place in preparation for my birthday party there this upcoming weekend, did our first load of laundry in the machines (which all work fine, albeit slowly and strangely since I guess they’re all fancy and have tons of modes and settings), and generally started bringing over things from the apartment.

Except that I got a call Sunday night from work that things were exploding. Apparently we managed to break API logins for many customers. It turned out to be a weird edge case that we hadn’t considered, and that had existed for years, but that was revealed now because we stopped doing fallback in a way we had previously. Lesson I guess is to always always always log when stuff is happening that you don’t expect to, and pull logs before deprecating code. (No matter how many times we do this I still get amazed at the weird things our customers sometimes do.)
That was an all-nighter mostly (with an hour or two of sleep between Sunday and Monday), so it was a rather unfortunate start to the week. At least the rest of the week has been quieter.

As previously reported, I acquired a PS4 for Rock Band and Guitar Hero recently. As part of the Black Friday deals, I also picked up a copy of Until Dawn, which plays out kind of like a visual novel but with more exploration and real-time reaction events. It’s actually ridiculously fun, even if my video gaming skills are super rusty from not having really gamed in like a decade. (Then again, I never did play actiony-type games anyway, preferring to stick to RPGs, so maybe I never had them in the first place.) Completed my first playthrough today and somehow managed to get everyone through without dying.

I still need to pick up a second guitar for Rock Band, but the $100 price tag is proving to be a psychological barrier. If I get that, the drum cymbals attachment, and a second mic (and mic stand), I’m going to be down nearly another $200, which seems like it would be better spent on several good board games, or a bunch of good DLC songs. Meh.

Also today, I bought a lottery ticket for the first time. The thrill of having a tiny shot at that ridiculous sum of $1.5 billion proved too alluring, but I was also hoping I’d at least win the cost of admission back by matching the powerball or a couple of numbers. But no such luck — between my manual pick and the QP ticket, I matched exactly zero of the final numbers. It’s just as well anyway… who needs nearly that kind of money?

This is the new year

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It’s 2016! life‘s photojournal and stats pages have both been updated.

Hard to believe that it was an entire year ago that we sat in the living room drinking champagne out of reindeer cups to celebrate the new year. Seems like only a few months ago.

It’s been rather a crazy year. We went to 4 weddings this year, including our own (which we also spent most of the beginning of the year planning) and bought a house, and had various work changes and turmoil. I visited HQ three times (I think a new record for me?), spent an extended period of time with my parents, and bought my first mattress. I was also away from Pittsburgh for nearly all of December, which was its own bit of fun.

I spent the first week of the month in San Francisco for work, followed by a Phoenix trip, which was good. I stayed 2.5 weeks in Phoenix to try and see some high school people before Christmas, and it worked out somewhat? Got to see Pat, Vicki, and David, at least. (Also got to see Jennie and Schmiddy, which was less planned, but still awesome.)








More photos are at photos.

This past week has also been really hectic. We had a car for the week, so we went to all the places we couldn’t normally get to to buy things we couldn’t normally carry. Unfortunately, a lot of stuff didn’t go as expected. Ikea was sold out of the chairs we wanted, and wasn’t going to get more until tomorrow (Saturday), and the car was due back yesterday. Costco also had a couch we wanted, but we’d have no way to get it back other than renting a U-Haul, so we’re looking into other options that include shipping. Also generally we didn’t get as much cleaning done in the house as we would have liked, but that’s the way it goes?

Yesterday evening Akiva hosted a New Year’s party at William’s house (while William was out of town, which was rather amusing). It was nice having people to celebrate with.

The house is nearing move-in condition. We’ve cleaned almost all of the first-floor rooms and will continue trying to find furniture to fill them. We built the Ikea table and Target storage cubes we bought and put them in the appropriate rooms, and it’s nice to start having furniture. I think at this point we just need a bed frame for the mattress, and to clean the kitchen out so it’s usable, and it’s technically ready for us. Woo.

Thanksgiving and flooring

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I had a Thanksgiving. It was nice to sit around for 5 days with no commitments.



Of course, life made up for it afterward.

On Monday, we had people over to refinish our hardwood floors. This by itself would have been fine, because I live (and work) about 4 minutes from the house. But Monday we also had a P0 production issue that I had to deal with at work, involving lots of calls and coordination of the change with different teams. Which meant that I was just further behind on the thing I actually needed to be doing work-wise, which has a hard deadline and I was already in danger of missing. Monday was probably work until 11 PM or so, as a result, including tons of jumping around between the apartment and the house.





On top of that, all of my Black Friday purchases started arriving. I wanted to make sure everything worked properly, so I could return or exchange broken items this week, so I had to spend some time setting everything up and making sure it worked. On the plus side, Guitar Hero and Rock Band make for some reasonable diversion from the general stress of things right now, at least.

Tuesday wasn’t much better. Floors are still in progress, and work is still crazy, and I’m still generally feeling overwhelmed with things. But at least I’m seeing the light at the end of the tunnel now.



Also my new camera is awesome. Looking forward to using it tonight at games.

400k photos and electrical woes

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This past Friday was a fun milestone: I broke 400,000 photos tagged in Photoshop Album — Album is reporting 400,307 photos tagged through today.

Here are the dates on which I took each 25,000th photo as well as the number of days between each 25,000th photo.

25,000 50,000 75,000 100,000 125,000 150,000
January 12, 2004 October 20, 2004 April 10, 2006 April 20, 2007 December 4, 2007 February 7, 2009
282 days 537 days 375 days 228 days 431 days
150,000 175,000 200,000 225,000 250,000 275,000
February 7, 2009 July 4, 2009 April 14, 2010 September 4, 2010 June 23, 2011 December 23, 2011
147 days 284 days 143 days 292 days 183 days
275,000 300,000 325,000 350,000 375,000 400,000
December 23, 2011 August 24, 2012 June 2, 2013 February 17, 2014 March 21, 2015 November 13, 2015
245 days 282 days 260 days 397 days 237 days

Here’s updated stats for my two cameras. I now also use my work iPhone for photos sporadically, but those numbers are not represented here. Perhaps I should pull those in next time I do a stats post.

Samsung SL30 July 27, 2009 – October 1, 2015 2257 days; 6.18 years 20,772 photos $70 9.2 photos per day 0.34¢ per photo
Nikon D90 February 26, 2010 – November 15, 2015 2088 days; 5.72 years 196,539 photos $780 94.13 photos per day 0.40¢ per photo
252,751 shutter releases 121.05 shutter releases per day 0.31¢ per shutter release

And the usual graphs… Number of photos taken by month, log scale y-axis:

Same thing but with a linear y-axis (second graph only includes time after graduation from CMU):

Total number of photos taken through time (second graph only includes time after graduation from CMU):

And amount of time between 1000 photos (second graph only includes time after graduation from CMU, so it starts at 131,000):

Here’s the 400,000th (tagged) photo. It’s our electrician getting a wire through the ceiling so we can replace the second-floor panel with a better one.

Which (finally) brings me to the fun we’ve been having with our house.

One of the things the inspection for the house (before we bought it) brought up was the lack of grounded outlets, and general knob-and-tube wiring, on the second floor of the house. Obviously, since I work from home with computers, and we have 6 computers between us, it was pretty important to get this remedied. We got quotes from quite a few electricians, and eventually settled on Patco Electric, as Pat was very thorough and also friendly and easy to get along with.

He comes Thursday to start the work, and things proceed reasonably.

Once the knob-and-tube wiring is out and the panel disconnected, we run into a minor snag upon discovering that the first floor’s living room light, foyer light, and porch light are also fed from the second floor. Not too terrible though… easily fixed by running a wire down from the second floor. (We were pulling up the floors anyway to avoid cutting holes in the plaster walls, so pulling up a few more boards wasn’t an issue.)

Friday, the work continues, and I took the day off work to sit in the house and be available in case things go wrong. The first part of the day proceeds awesomely… they successfully fish the new main wire to the second floor through the first floor closet and into the basement, then through the (finished) basement ceiling and around most of the room to get it into the panel.

It took a couple of tries, and eventually required cutting a hole in the ceiling as the fish stick was able to get through but the thicker cable wasn’t — cutting revealed that the stick was passing through a ~1cm gap between beams that the cable couldn’t have. But that was fine, and the rest of the work proceeded mostly as expected.


The problem came up when they turned the power back on to the second floor. The ceiling light fixtures in three of the four rooms didn’t come back on, even though they hadn’t previously turned off when cutting the knob and tube power. Cue lots of searching by the electricians. A few hours later, it turns out the previous electricians had done some mess of wiring — the ceiling lights have a hot wire coming from somewhere else (probably the third floor), but their neutral line was going through the second floor knob-and-tube wiring. This basically meant they were not shut off via the second-floor circuit breaker, but were dependent on it to complete the circuit, so its removal meant they no longer worked.

The electrician is coming back next weekend to rewrire those lights as well, but yeah… yay for horrible previous people doing horrible things. I guess that’s what we get for buying such an old house. :P

Saturday was a nice break from things, and we spent the day at William’s house where David was having an “experimental music birthday party”. For us non-musical people, it was mostly hanging out and talking, which was interesting anyway. Here’s a fun photo of Vincent in Wiliam’s basement stairwell.

I have an urge now to shoot people in bright clothing against a white background (maybe with board game components?), blow out the saturation for effect, and then print and frame these photos for the game room or something. Perhaps a project like that will happen at some point.