Sam's L33t Journal

It's hard to feel like I'm ever going to rest and recover. Julie was pretty busy this week. The weekend was a little better.

Saturday, I got out to play a bit of Ingress in beautiful weather, wrapping up an in-game event celebrating 12 years since the game was released. I still really like the game's ability to give me random reasons to visit places I wouldn't otherwise. This time, I ended up at Bell Rock Memorial Park in Malden.

Today, I went to the art museum in the morning and wandered the galleries with Julie while Erica had her art lesson. In the afternoon I took Erica climbing and cooked dinner.

I just finished reading Erica The Boxcar Children, which was enjoyable, but also one of the most edges-sanded-off things I've ever read.

Erica's wanted to play Splendor a bunch this week, and she's getting quite good at the game, but is frustrated that she can't win consistently. (Played six games this week, and she managed to win one, but most of the others were quite close, including a tied-at-15 game where I won by having one fewer development cards, basically the closest score possible short of an actual tie.)

I've been enjoying the new Magic set, Foundations, a core set of sorts that will be in Standard (the "just recent sets" variant of the game) for an extended time. It seems like the game will be changing quite a bit in the coming year, and not just for that reason. More about that later maybe if I get to writing about it.

We've been under the weather for the past two weeks, and Julie will be away on business travel for the next few days, starting tomorrow. I've been pretty exhausted.

We managed to get in a brief trip to NYC for an Ingress Anomaly last weekend, and that was very fun. The first Ingress event we took Erica to was also in Brooklyn. This game there were four mechanics: The standard territory control mechanic (cluster battle), a game of having team members cover the most ground during the event on average (unique portal hacks), a game of making longest non-overlapping paths with a maximum number of segments (longest path), and a Mystery-Hunt-like code-breaking puzzle game (decoding).

Unique portal hacks was scored winner take all, and since it's about average performance, it's not affected by the number of participants on site. Decoding also allowed a lot of remote participation. So our opponents apparently had a plan, presumably going all in on those and trying to keep the rest close enough to squeeze out a victory. Was enough to make me worry about a repeat of the upset in Chicago.

But it turned out our operators had the right of it and the ones stuck on what worked in the past were our opponents. They lost on every mechanic. Even my subteam, in the "on foot but slower" category, managed to cover quite a bit more ground than our average opponent.

This was the first event run entirely on Ingress Prime, the new version of the Ingress app ported to the same engine as Pokemon Go. Unifying the game engine isn't a bad idea for Niantic, and the Prime app even has some real UI improvements. But it has a few major pervasive problems: It's slower, crashier, and very visually noisy. The game display tries to give a much more live display of what's changing in the game state nearby, which is good in some ways, but contributes to all those problems, especially when a bunch of people are all playing in the same area at once. So we experienced some crashes / freezes / lock-outs during the event. Definitely less smooth than previous events, and even on the old app you generally got a fair amount of lag during the Anomalies, with the general impression that somewhere the servers were on fire.

The Sunday Ingress Mission Day event was pretty fun and relaxing, too. The weather was perfect all weekend, which was really nice. We all enjoyed some good food, and Erica did get some time at various playgrounds. Domino Park was pretty cool, and we took a nice ride on the ferry to get to our hotel when we arrived Friday night.

I'm still recovering from this cold.

On Saturday, made it out to Boston's Ingress First Saturday for the first time, which was pretty fun.

Was pretty down with a cold and related insomnia on Sunday, but had a good evening with Eris. She had a very interesting filibuster while we were getting to pre-bedtime stories. She spun this yarn about how she put together her room by herself: Picked out the furniture, brought up the books and toys, painted the dresser and the paintings, put up the photographs, hung a mirror on the door, tightened the screws on the door hinges, etc. She described this at length as if recounting real events, but interjected "just kidding!" every few sentences. It was a bit odd, definitely a new sort of story-telling for her. (I wonder if it was influenced by a Daniel Tiger episode in which Daniel was helping his dad build a play-house, which by coincidence she's rewatching right now.)

Today, Julie is off on a conference trip. But the morning went all right (I was able to get to sleep after Julie's 2:30AM shower and the kid's 5AM wake-up was fortunately brief), and the afternoon had only one 40-minute meltdown. So it's going all right! (Three is a hard age.)

Last weekend, I was in Cleveland for PyCon, so Erica got to spend the weekend with grandparents. The conference was really good this year. I very much enjoyed talking to people at the Google booth in the expo hall. The keynotes were phenomenal. Russel Keith-Magee gave the opening keynote on Python's "black swans", a fascinating look at the future of Python, how strategic research and development might be supported in open-source, and the history of Perth, Australia. And on Saturday (unfortunately not posted, at least not yet) Shadeed Wallace-Stepter shared his life story as a reformed criminal turned Python programmer and entrepreneur, then Python luminary Jessica McKellar gave a talk about the intersection between the tech industry and community and criminal justice reform, describing her work with The Last Mile and urging the audience to "hire people with records".

We had Shabbat dinner with my family that Friday, and Anne and Isaac joined us as well (Dan was unfortunately out of town). Was very nice to catch up. I had a great dinner with my colleagues on Saturday, and went to the conference dinner at the Great Lakes Science Center on Sunday night.

We returned to town Monday. Erica must have had an exciting weekend because she slept on the plane, took another nap at daycare Monday afternoon, then fell asleep on her own at about 8:30. Though after that she was back to her usual schedule of never going to bed.

Not much else going on.

We got in a little Ingress on Wednesday evening in Quincy Center. Been a while since I was down there, the new Quincy Center plaza is gorgeous. We're going to the Ingress Anomaly in Chicago in two weeks, which hopefully will be fun.

And I've been playing a bit of Magic. The prerelease tournament for the new Magic set, War of the Spark, was two weekends ago, and after a slow draw in the first match, I was just barely able to squeak by with a winning record overall. Thinking the office tournament for the set will be fun, too.

Last week was very good! I feel like I'm getting my focus back at work, too.

Mid-week had a team fun offsite in Provincetown, which was great. (The last time my team did that I was somewhat distracted as I was right in the middle of buying a house, so it was nice to just be able to relax this time!) We took a tour of the dunes, which were beautiful, and we had a lovely lunch on the beach!

And this past weekend was very eventful, since the latest Ingress Anomaly was in Boston!

The main competition was Saturday afternoon. The gameplay for those live events keeps getting better and better, so the game was pretty interesting throughout. It was a victory for the green team, too. Though a bit lopsided; I wish more of the blue team could have made it out to Boston! (The teams are pretty evenly matched in the Boston urban area, but the Enlightened seem to be the stronger team in New England currently.)

Still was a great (though hot!) day of downtown wandering and high-level gameplay. Got to spend time with old friends and meet some new teammates. And we're still able to corral Eris into going along, as long as we bring some distractions and snacks. Actually, she seems to be interested in the game now, enough that she wants to play it herself. Even (especially?) when I'm in the middle of some of the trickier mechanics. It's adorable, though. "Ingess!"

The team afterparty was at No Name Restaurant, an old-school seafood restaurant down in the Seaport. I'd wanted to go there for a while, but had not gotten around to it.

On the way back, ended up at Figment, an art and music festival on the lawn at Dewey Square (just across from South Station). Fun times with night owl kid, she was up and dancing until 10, and then still somehow wide awake all the way home.

Played more Ingress on Sunday. Niantic has taken to following the live events with more relaxed "Mission Days", which are more of an individual, at-your-own-pace challenge focusing on the in-game "missions" (which are sort of little structured meanders or tours). I did that with Eris in tow; Julie bowed out to do work. Wandered through downtown, stopped to ride the merry-go-round at the Puerto Rico festival fair at City Hall Plaza, saw some of the festival parade. We had a late lunch with fellow Ingress players at the Bell in Hand, then went to the aquarium (with another merry-go-round ride on the Greenway). After the Aquarium, Eris got in the stroller, fell sound asleep in five seconds, and was out for nearly two hours.

Last weekend was pretty refreshing. Though I don't remember what I did last weekend. The weekend before was the weekend I collapsed from exhaustion and made Julie watch the kid while I took a long nap, I think, but that was a long weekend and I watched the kid during the day on Monday.

Anyways, I started out the week refreshed but things went downhill. Monday I was bright and chipper, Friday it was about time to lay me out on the slab and hope for a conveniently-timed bolt of lightning.

Did manage to get in a wonderful outing mid-week, though, meeting some Ingress friends at Mike's Pastry in the North End for a stroll around the neighborhood playing the game. (Ray and Jacob took a turn pushing the stroller for a while, and I was glad for the break.) We got there early enough to have supper at The Daily Catch beforehand, which was lovely.

My mom was in town this weekend, and it was great to see her. Erica really enjoyed the visit. Friday was quite a blustery day, my mom joined me for lunch at Google but dinner was packaged Indian food and rice at home. Saturday, we spent the afternoon at the Children's Museum then had dinner with Cousin Claude and Adam. Sunday, we went out to brunch at Loyal Nine with Cousin Amy, then the playground, and then the library (while the kid had a nap). A marching band was playing when we left the library, and we went to the (giant) Clover at the Harvard Science Center for supper before my mom headed off to the airport. (Clover is taking over!)

Performance review time has rolled around at work again, and while I usually get the tasks related to that done at the first opportunity, this week I was too busy with other work. So I wound up having to do quite a bit of work on that over the weekend. And it's been a bit intense this time. As a result, I was up late working and stressed out, and up early, too. Monday is here again, and I'm still pretty exhausted.

It's not that I'm doing badly at work, not at all. I was fairly productive this year and I'm really proud of the work I did. But I also feel like I was a bit all over the place, I don't know if the big picture is as in-focus for me as I'd like it to be. So this review has been time for introspection for me. Which is good.

Eristic improvements: Repeating longer phrases, counting to ten, forward jumping.

A Death in the Family: Julie's grandfather died two weekends ago, at the age of 99. No matter how much time, it's never enough. It seems this has been a really rough year for Julie's mom. We're going to Lubbock to spend some time with the family this coming weekend.

Some Ingress Travels: Also two weekends ago, we went on a brief New York trip with some Ingress teammates, taking part in a challenge associated with the latest series of game events, challenging players to visit points of interest they haven't visited before. It was a fun trip, and we managed to return home unexploded.

There was an Ingress live event in Toronto last weekend, and while we didn't make it out to that one, we helped out from Boston. There's one defensive mechanic that can be done at a distance in Ingress, and while the mechanic itself is the boringest gameplay ever, it does help those teammates who actually made it to the event win their battles (on the defense, anyways), and it's something that can be done while you hang out with local teammates and spectate.

Extended Family: Uncle Marvin and Aunt Anita were in from the other coast, so I had the chance to introduce them to Erica. Got together with extended family and celebrated my cousin Amy's engagement to her long-time boyfriend Josh. Many congratulations to them!

A Bit of Magic: The prerelease for the latest Magic: The Gathering set, Kaladesh was last weekend, and I played in one of the prerelease tournaments at Pandemonium Books and Games in Cambridge. Fantastic set, with a great setting and very interesting mechanics (a lot of surprises on that front, the mechanic I most confidently expected did in fact appear on one cycle of cards, but that ended up being a small (though really cool) part of the set). The games were very fun, and despite a few blunders I won three of my four matches.

Eris Meets Baby: Another infant has started at Erica's daycare. She seemed to be acting friendly towards the baby when I've seen them together, but I heard reports that the first week or two involved some pangs of jealousy, especially when the new kid was receiving a bottle of milk or was being held by the caretakers. They tell me that Erica has been very vocal By coincidence, the new kid's dad works at the Wyss, so he's one of Julie's colleagues.

Roof Repairs: The building across the way had its 30-year roof repairs last fall (shortly after we moved in). The same for our building was planned for this year, a bit of emergency repair (though not in our unit) was required last winter. The work was completed last weekend. Really glad to have that done before the winter! The work wasn't too much of a bother (and was never too loud inside the building), but there was one day when the workers were running a really loud compressor outside and Erica really didn't like that sound. (The only other noises I've seen bother Erica that much were a cheering crowd and those high-powered hand dryers.)

Eristic Improvements: The kid now has an insatiable drive to explore. On the plus side, that means she can spend hours entertaining herself while I get chores done. On the minus side, that means she's finding new ways to get in trouble. She's really energetic, up until the moment when she's suddenly super-tired and super-cranky. Seems to have some renewed difficulty falling asleep: She wants to stay up and play more, plus teething continues. Starting the toothbrushing routine.

I've been very tired lately. Between that and the heat, I've pretty much given up on cooking, and all of my entertainment has tended towards the short-form. Work has been exhausting as well.

Julie's Science paper came out this week, and she was working to get her companion-piece methods paper ready for pre-publication. And post-postdoc job search continues.

Next week, we'll be going to Portland, Maine for another Ingress live event. So have been getting in a little Ingress-playing this week to gather the game-items needed for the battle ahead.

The weekend after that is my sister's wedding, also near Portland.

Today, I thought I might get a quiet day at home, then did nothing of the sort (as usual). Went out for breakfast, then decided to catch a bit of the Red Bull Flugtag (a funny amateur "flying" machine competition), then played some Ingress in/around Boston Public Garden. Did a bit more wandering and relaxing, then got dinner at Happy Lamb Hot Pot (a new place in Central Square which happened to be serving their special menu for this summer's restaurant week). It didn't feel like much time had passed since early afternoon, but by the time we were done with dinner, it was nearly 10PM.

Speaking of which, I'd better get to sleep if I don't want to be dead tomorrow.

Eristic improvements: Crawling for real (though still somewhat limited/slow), new growling noise that she finds incredibly entertaining.

I really enjoyed spending the long weekend with Julie. We had Thanksgiving dinner with my Boston family, worked on more of the long tail of new-house chores, saw a movie (the second part of Mockingjay, which was pretty good), ate a fancy dinner at Clio Restaurant (which is closing at the end of the month).

We also went to some parenting classes and a tour at Brigham and Women's. The imminence of parenthood is becoming manifest.

Work is busy for both of us. Julie is wrapping up a paper in the coming weeks, I'm organizing training sessions (and teaching a session) for my project at work.

Ingress is celebrating it's third year. As a result, I wanted to reach level 13 before Tuesday, which for me required capturing about 130 portals I hadn't captured before. So I was running around downtown after dark in the cold today, while Julie toiled in lab. (I did it, though. Victory!)

Housing acquired! Picking up keys tomorrow, move scheduled for mid-November.

It took an extra week due to circumstances beyond our control (some finicky details about an international deed transfer not done correctly the first time by the seller). But now it's done for real.

Stress is still wearing on me. Still, there are quite a few things I'm really looking forward to: Spending time with cousins this weekend, my mom is visiting town next weekend, there's an Ingress event in Boston next Saturday, and the weekends after that include some last-minute trips home.

I led a tech talk on interviewing at Google at Olin last week, and I'll be at Olin again for the career fair and a tech interviews panel discussion this week. I really enjoy helping out with that aspect of recruiting!

I saw The Martian on a work movie outing on Friday. The book is great, and the movie is a great adaptation. For the most part, it sticks closely to the book's plot with some judicious trimming for time. Though it does manage to make the book's over-the-top ending even more implausible, and there are a few moments where the cuts cause some of the funny bits to make less sense, or where the movie goes a little bit too far with putting viewer-friendly interfaces on everything. If you at all think you might like a story about an astronaut trying to survive being stranded on Mars, I recommend you see the movie and watch the book, in either order.