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?

Photo Firsts (Andrew, Ben, Shawn, Todd, Trisha, Harsimran)

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Two posts in one day? What is this madness?

I added a bunch of Bay Area people to stats, so it’s time for more photo firsts. This seemed to make more sense as a separate post given how many new people there are.

First photo of Andrew T.

August 8, 2009 at Sharon and Charles’ housewarming party

First photo of Ben J.

Also August 8, 2009 at Sharon and Charles’ housewarming party

First photo of Shawn

May 9, 2009 at our apartment (along with Ally and other Mozilla people)

First photo of Todd

April 16, 2010 in the cluster

First photo of Trisha

June 27, 2008 at work before leaving for the 154 release party

First photo of Harsimran

June 27, 2008 at the 154 release party

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.

I am a consumer whore (and how)

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It’s 4:30 AM right now, but given the recent positive experiences I’ve had, I would be remiss to not report on it.

Some of you may know that I’ve wanted Rock Band and/or Guitar Hero for a while… basically since I first moved to San Francisco and before I became overly stingy about money. When I was seriously considering this idea again last year, Rock Band 3 had been out of print for so long that it was going for ridiculous amounts of money online, and I couldn’t justify spending nearly $1000 to buy the game, an extra guitar controller, and a PS3 to play it all on.

Rock Band 4 and Guitar Hero Live were released earlier this year, and I figured I should get them now (after basically waiting almost 8 years, and given we now have a house and therefore a place to play it), especially when Black Friday sales were happening. So I got Rock Band at $50 off (online via Target) this past Monday, and ordered Guitar Hero Live on Amazon (at $40 off).
But that evening, I made a physical trip to the Target store in our neighborhood, and happened to walk past the games section, where they were having a one-day sale on Guitar Hero at 40% (or $60) off. So it was entirely by happy coincidence and luck that I saved another $20. (Amazon fortunately made it easy to cancel the order, so I didn’t end up with two copies of Guitar Hero.)

I also figured I should actually spend the work Amazon credit that had been earmarked for a new camera lens for a while, given all the steep discounts happening right now.
I’d been debating for months (since I got the credit in late August, basically) about getting the D610 full-frame camera body, versus just a lens, versus upgrading my existing body to the DX-format D7100. But, in the end, I couldn’t justify spending nearly twice the price on a body just to get FX (sale prices of ~$800 versus ~$1500), and Amazon was having some pretty awesome discounts on a D7100, 18-140mm lens, and Photoshop Lightroom bundle, so I sprang for it yesterday (Wednesday) morning. It will be really nice to have the new camera and lens.

Black Friday deals started up in earnest today (pretty much 4.5 hours ago at this point), so I ordered the PS4 ($50 off pretty much everywhere; I got it from Amazon) and some discounted games (FFX/X-2 Remaster, Until Dawn; $20 and $40 off respectively) and things are awesome.

And it turns out… shipping nowadays is really fast. Rock Band, which was ordered from Target late Monday night, actually shipped from within PA and arrived at the house this past evening (Wednesday). I was glad there were housemates to bring the package indoors so it doesn’t have to sit outside until we return from Thanksgiving.

The camera body, which shipped hours after I placed the order, also shipped from within PA and had a delivery date of Friday, which was clearly not going to work. (And be even more problematic, because while it’s one thing to let a $250 game sit outside and potentially get stolen, it’s entirely another to leave a $1000 camera body outside.) And this is where Amazon is awesome.

I know a lot of people complain about how Amazon treats its workers and how it strangles publishers and other competition… but from a consumer standpoint, Amazon is pretty much perfect. I hopped onto a chat and explained the situation, and the rep was simply like, “Yeah. That makes total sense. Let me contact UPS and tell them to delay delivery until Monday.”
Simple, effective, and it took about 5 minutes of typing into a chat window (with phone options available for those so inclined). This is what all customer service should be like.

(Related note: I kind of feel like websites should not only have delivery windows when ordering, but also allow you to specify restrictions like, “Item cannot arrive before X date”. Seems like it’d be particularly important around holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, where items arriving early can conflict with travel plans. But maybe this isn’t a thing that comes up too often in practice? Maybe I’m just unusual for hitting it twice within a period of 3 days.)

So that was really nice, until I happened to check the D7100 bundle I’d bought again a little bit ago, and found that the price had dropped $90. It was entirely my fault — I should have waited until actual Black Friday deals to get it, I guess — but I figured it didn’t hurt to at least ask…
So I hopped into another Amazon chat, explained the situation, and had a $90 refund against my credit card with no fuss. Magic.

So yeah… it’s been a nice shopping experience this year, between Amazon having awesome customer service and being able to take advantage of all the Black Friday sales online (and, in some cases, as early as this past Monday). I’ve spent more in the last 72 hours than probably all my discretionary spending in the last two years combined, which makes me feel a little weird about things. But I suppose most of it has been stuff I’ve been wanting for years anyway, so it’s more like I’m taking advantage of the specific sale period rather than buying random things?

Yay for basement video game room. :D