I got a lot accomplished today at work. I really am almost done deploying new teacher computers, and I should be down to just a few trivial cable runs. I worked through lunch just because I was on a roll.

After work, I went by my parents’ house, but they were gone to pick up Dad’s car. While I was there, Bác Vân called to let me know she was cooking egg rolls, so I went home and had those for dinner instead of digging out more leftovers. I spent most of the rest of the evening completing the setup of my new phone, but ran into a snag when I tried to activate it on Sprint’s network. The new phone didn’t come with a SIM card, and Sprint links their devices to their SIM cards, so when I plugged the MEID of the new phone into the website, it spat back out the SIM number it was expecting to have come with the phone. Mom and Dad came by right about then just to say they didn’t even get the car, and I was already frustrated with phone stuff, so I super didn’t care.

After they left, I started a chat session with HTC, who has always proven to have excellent customer service when I’ve reached out to them for anything. He assured me I wouldn’t be charged for not sending my old phone back in time, and escalated my ticket to someone for additional help. Maybe they’ll swap out my replacement for a new device!

I wound down with a few rounds of Rocket League with Josh, and then encountered the weirdest spam messages I have ever seen in my life while composing this entry. I remember the good old days when I got spam about Britney Spears shooting down spy satellites with her vagina. Now it’s all flat earth conspiracy WordPress spam, and all I can think is that someone needs to reset the simulation. We went terribly wrong somewhere, and we need to analyze the data and start over fresh.

U.S. Attorney General Seeks Custody of Paris Hilton, Intends to Confine Her at Gitmo

Not much notable about work today. I spent all morning extracting headphone plugs that had broken off inside of iPads. I never got to several of the things I wanted to do because I didn’t have certain parts on me, and I got pulled to hang a TV after lunch. Lunch was fair though. Quiznos with Ben, Gary, Zach, and Sara. After work, I went to my parents’ house to finish the bowl of food I left yesterday, then stayed to show Mom how to use her Google Home to cast media to a Chromecast I left them. It’s upsetting to be the only one with any drive to be on the cutting edge sometimes.

Once I got back home for the evening, I tried wrapping up the migration from my old HTC 10 to my new one. It seems silly to do this all now just to have to do it again in a month, but I’ll probably mostly start fresh on the Pixel when it comes in. The UI may actually be different enough that the layout I’ve been using for years won’t work as well there, but time will tell.

Heartburn tonight. Get it together.

I made myself wake up at a semi-regular hour this morning after staying up until almost 5 the night before. It was more or less a lazy day. Around lunch time, I got an email from Domino’s telling me that my reward points would expire if I didn’t earn any more today, so I decided to pick up some wings and finally try their philly cheese steak sandwich. My old coworker Neal met me at the drive-through window, and we chatted for a while until my food was ready. The sandwich was good, though it seemed a bit light on the toppings. I also tried their mango habanero wings, and I found them to be a bit sweeter than I was craving. Probably best to stick with buffalo wings there.

After lunch, I played a bit of Rocket League with Josh and a very frustrated Johnny. That really can tend to suck the fun out of a game. Eventually I got around to showering. I felt a bit tired, so I ran a bath about halfway through and just laid there for a while.

When dinner time rolled around, I went to my parents’ for some leftovers, but when Mom said leftovers, she really meant she was going to cook more food. I don’t understand. I started to feel a bit sick to the stomach after eating some, so I came home and sat around while I started setting up my replacement HTC 10. I also found a (conspiracy?) site by Max Landis where he dissects Carly Rae Jepsen’s pop music to discover the true meaning behind it all.

And all that we could do with this emotion.

I slept quite a bit better last night, and felt comfortable enough to sleep in until nearly noon. Dad made pancakes, so I went there for breakfast for lunch and made a short animated Jif. Afterward, I came home to rewatch the Final Cut of Blade Runner. I’m really glad I watched it again after so long, because I basically didn’t really remember any important details from watching it years ago. It looked great in 1080p even after all these years.

I went back to my parents’ house for dinner before meeting with Aaron, his dad, and TJ to go to Conway for the new Blade Runner 2049. As usual with the late shows, there was hardly anyone else there. The movie was awesome, and the story didn’t ever feel like it was dragging on in spite of how long the movie actually ran. As we left, Aaron spotted a red balloon someone had tied to a railing to copy It. I think we’re planning a trip back for Thor: Ragnarok, but we’ll rewatch the first and/or second one here first.

Sometimes to love someone, you’ve got to be a stranger.

I had some trouble sleeping last night on my new pillow top mattress pad because it seemed to trap a lot of heat. It’ll probably take me a few nights to acclimate myself to it. It still doesn’t feel quite as luxurious as I had hoped, but it is noticeably huggier.

I spent literally all day at work pulling cable. First it was for Allen, and then I got the team over to the junior high to finally take care of the ones I needed. I still have some finishing to do when I get back next week, but at least the hard part is done. We were let go early, but the cable run ended up keeping me there even longer than our normal off time, but it was worth it to finally be finished.

After work, I came home for a bit before going to my parents’ house for dinner. Then it was back home to some Rocket League until I was too tired to play. I took a shower to clean the ceiling grime off, and now I’m off to pillowtop land.

Wait, is the week over already???

I spent this morning catching up at the junior high since I only finished a couple things there yesterday after wastefully sitting on my hands all day at Oakland. As lunchtime neared, Zach showed up in my building on official security business and said they were going to Western Sizzlin for lunch. I met them there and made them watch as I shoveled an hour of food into my mouth hole.

After lunch was a lot of back and forth between the office and Oakland just to standardize one teacher’s PC setup because she had something out of the ordinary from a grant that the previous teacher had gotten in that room. I guess grants are cool for getting new tech into places like that, but it makes standardization a real pain.

After work, I came home to open up the pillow top mattress pad I ordered so it could decompress as much as possible before bedtime. While I was here, I watched MKBHD’s first look at the Pixel 2 and followed the link in the video description that surprisingly took me to the store page that suddenly showed my color and size choice in stock. I don’t know how or why it suddenly showed back up there, but it was still showing out of stock on the Fi site, so I went ahead and placed an order while I could. I’ll finally get to try out Fi, and hopefully have a bit better service with the addition of local T-Mobile towers.

Dad summoned us for phở, so I went to their house for dinner. While there, Julie was super tickled that she suddenly knew everything about my life from totally-not-binge-reading-at-all-and-just-skimming the blog. I guess that really sums up relationships in the new millennium. Try and know as much about someone as you possibly can without actually interacting with them in any meaningful way. Whatever’s going on here is a bit of a step beyond a Facebook post or an Instagram selfie, but it’s all still the same. What started out as a personal diary will quickly become some form of entertainment for someone else.

And so it goes.

I had forgotten that today was the first day of testing for one of my schools, and luckily stopped by Oakland first thing this morning. There weren’t really any issues, so I left there to try and get some things done at the junior high. I got caught up at the office for a little while though, and ended up getting a panicked email about testing, so I headed back to Oakland instead. Once there, they had already resolved the issue using the processes we have in place for when something goes wrong. That didn’t stop Ben from getting a call from those in charge of testing. It really aggravates me that I make myself available and we provide all the tools necessary for a successful run, but someone ends up complaining for no reason.

I ended up having to babysit, and killed the entire day’s worth of work sitting in the office. Defining moments were a conversation about life, the universe, and everything with the music teacher, and then the rest of the morning and afternoon hanging out with the girls in the office. I even ended up skipping lunch for some reason. Julie started texting me as she seemingly binge-read through my blog. I don’t know what’s creepier: having someone stalk through that much history in one sitting, or having someone blog about things you’re doing while you’re completely unaware of being the subject of the day. What expectation of privacy do we really have in 2017, anyway?

I laughed about it a bit with Erica, and ended up giving her a card, so we’ll see if she shows up to the digital hoedown. Mollie shared a cupcake and some popcorn with me, which held me through the rest of the school day, and then I was off to the junior high to try and take care of at least a couple things before tomorrow.

After work, I went to my parents’ house for some leftovers. Mom started asking me questions about her phone again, and I didn’t have any good answers for why it acts the way it does. It makes sense to run into these kinds of questions with Android because of the options and additional features, but the iPhone doesn’t have an abundance of either. It’s the same frustration I had with randoms that would come in to a retail store and not understand how to use their phones. There’s a break in my perception of everything in life where I simply don’t understand how someone can’t be curious enough to figure out these kinds of things on their own. It’s not technical knowledge. It’s not even basic understanding of anything in particular. It’s the lack of a fundamental desire to tinker with something to get it working the way you want. When I buy a phone, install a piece of software, get in a new car, or do anything new at all, the first thing I do is lay my hands on every single option I can find, and I don’t stop until I’ve covered the same thing two or three times. I just want to know everything about it.

When I got home, I called my old friend Clint to get a referral code for Google Fi so I could order the newly announced Pixel 2 XL. Unfortunately, after several attempts and probably too much time on the fence, I got an out-of-stock message for my color option. I’m not paying $950 for a phone that doesn’t have an orange power button. I’m just not gonna do it.

The intersection of AI, software, and hardware. Machine learning. Machine learning. Machine learning. AI, software, and hardware.

It was another rough start this morning. I don’t even remember how long the alarm played before I rolled over out of bed. I made up for my slow start by plowing right through lunch. It had been raining for a while by quitting time, so I stayed a while and wrapped up a couple things, then went to my parents’ house for dinner.

When I got there, Julie was there showing Mom how to use her phone. It was nice not having to deal with it for once. Julie called me out for blogging about her. It made me curious to know whereabouts she stumbled back upon it, but I don’t put this stuff on the internet to hide it. Welcome one and all, I reckon. Everyone’s got a story.

A little Rocket League wrapped up the night. It was nice to have enough people on to have a proper round of custom games.

Eh, woah, I’ll never let you go.

I got a few more computers set up today, drawing ever closer to completion. I’m getting to the point where I’m filling in gaps now, but I still feel like I’m missing quite a bit somehow.

Ronda invited me to lunch again. This time it was nachos and taco stuff. I crammed a shameful amount of food into my container, with no real healthy vegetables to speak of. I should have done better. I guess hearing that I’m 10 pounds lighter made me cut loose a little. I missed my Soylent this morning.

After work, Julie wanted to meet at Fat Daddy’s downtown to see Andy away. He’s flying south for the winter, or at least for the next few months. While we were waiting for him to show up, my mom and sister argued about Mom’s new iPhone 8. She was frustrated with it, and said she felt like she took a big step backwards from her HTC One M7, which made me laugh. I sat with my face in my hands in an attempt to not be smug about it, but my sister still got upset at me for “having a look.” She kept insisting to her that the iPhone would be easier to use once she learns how to use it.

I was still full from my ridiculous nachos, so I just had a bowl of chili. I don’t know if it was because I was still so stuffed, or maybe that I just felt a little sour overall, but I didn’t care much for it. I tried a piece of Andy’s onion rings though, and they were pretty good. Andy ended up paying for everyone somehow, which was nice of him.

After dinner, I rode back home in some cooler weather, loaded up some Rocket League, and claimed my position at Platinum II. I’m still mad about Gold last season.

I miss the sea.

I woke up this morning around 8 and thought about staying up, but was worried about hunger and entertainment, so I went back to sleep. I only meant to sleep for a little while longer, but ended up sleeping until about noon. I got up and called SuddenLink to switch to my new modem, which caused issues for me all afternoon. After a couple more calls in, I determined it was either their provisioning or a loose termination coming out of my wall. In either case, I ended up getting my new modem to work at close to the speeds for which I am paying.

From then on, I completely wasted the rest of my Sunday. I didn’t even do anything as recreational as play video games, aside from a few rounds of Rocket League to test my internet connection. I did manage to make it out for dinner at my parents’ house, and then returned home to do a couple loads of laundry, but that didn’t make me feel any better about my day.

Knowing I wasted the day, I’m having trouble getting to sleep. I settled down to a couple ASMR videos, which I still have mixed feelings about. I thought I’d try Rainy Mood, but even that’s getting me side tracked into configuring my stereo receiver. I may have to see if I can find some sleep in a bottle somewhere.

You fooled me once with your eyes, now, honey.