Rough Draft

Tour de Weekend

My friend Jeff is in Cupertino this week for some work stuff and fortunately he was able to fly out here on Friday so we got to hang out over the weekend. I picked him up at the San Francisco airport Friday night and then drove to the Daly City BART station. On Andy's recommendation we went to a Chinese restaurant called Firecracker in The Mission. We ordered two plates to share between us, 5 spice duck and "Phoenix and Dragon" (chicken and shrimp). The food was really good and well priced. It was one of those small restaurants that you might walk pass and never think to go in, so thanks to Andy for the recommendation. After that we came back to the apartment and scanned through the HD channels. We saw a show in the channel guide called Tour de Gorge which we decided to check out, expecting it to be a bike race of some kind. However upon changing the channel we were greeted by an announcer saying "The following will be a 12 minute meatball eating competition". Yes that's right, a meatball eating competition...in High Definition. The winner ended up being this tiny Asian woman, and second place was a fairly old white guy. I think the winner ate around 80+ meatballs. Now that's entertainment...or something.

On Saturday, I took Jeff over to the "Dogbone" and showed him my office as well as a video Mike and I made the previous week. We ate lunch ate B.J's and then played some Katamari at the apartment for a bit. After Andrew got back from his race, the three of us headed up to the Computer History Museum , which I've been wanting to visit for some time. We got there just as the last tour of the day was starting. There was a lot of interesting stuff there. There was an Apple laptop donated by John Scully that was red, white, blue and yellow...we guess he had his own custom laptop made for him. Having fairly recently read Cryptonomicon, it was interesting to an Enigma machine and the largest surviving piece of a Colossus machine. I also enjoyed learning how the original "core memory" worked by inducing a magnetic field on a horizontal row and vertical column to intersect a particular core then using a zig zag pattern that went through all of the cores to determine whether the value of the core was changed. And something that I had sort of always vaguely known, but not really thought much about was the fact that all of the advancement in early computers were driven by government/military needs.

Saturday night Jeff and I went to Santana Row and saw Howl's Moving Castle which was another great Miyazaki film (My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away). The movie was quite enjoyable and had several really fun characters. There were some parts of the plot that didn't quite make sense to me, but the animation and characters were so well done that it didn't matter. Miyazaki has to be one of the very best at creating fun, fantastical worlds. As Jeff pointed out after the movie, it's been a long time since either of us has seen a film that had people laughing and giggling throughout it. I highly recommend you go see this movie.

After the movie it was time to get some food, and Jeff suggested Mexican. I haven't been to many Mexican restaurants around here, but I did remember going to one in the Pruneyard in Campbell a month or so ago. That's where the GPS came in. I just searched locations for Pruneyard and then hit "go to" and it got us there flawlessly. The restaurant I was thinking of was El Burro. After being seated and getting our huge menus (which should have been a sign) we indulged in the tasty chips and salsa and placed our orders. Then after our salads, our food came out. Now as I said, I had been to this place before, but I didn't remember getting such an immense amount of food. The plates themselves were huge and just piled up with food. I only managed to eat the rice, some of the beans, and one of the three items from my combo. I took the rest home for lunch the next day. The best part was the total bill for both of us was just under $20. I definitely plan to visit El Burro more often as I can enough food for two good meals for under $10.

Sunday started off with "El Burro round 2" before Ricci picked Andrew, Jeff, and I up for a geocaching expedition. The first cache we went to was in a residential area in front of this older couple's house. After finding the cache, we talked to the couple for a good while before heading off to our second cache. The second cache was one we had attempted and failed to find the week before. This week Andrew decided to go down the hill and search around by the creek. We looked for quite a while and still couldn't find it. Then I went down by the creek too look, and then Andrew came down for a second pass. Then we hear Ricci say "This cache has a ball in it" and look up to see him hold the cache. It was in the nook of a tree on the hill Andrew and I had walked down to get to the creek. I'm pretty sure Ricci only found it because he accidently stepped in the nook as he was trying to come down the hill. We found the next cache on our list and then stopped for some delicious Jamba Juice. Refreshed, we found our 4th cache of the day which involved some failed attempts at pullups and chin ups by everyone but Andrew and then going on a trail in a park that was "closed to the public".

Finally, we arrived at the location of our 5th cache, a micro, on a bridge along Steven's Creek Blvd by the Blue Pheasant restaurant. The GPS couldn't seem to get a good fix, but we knew it had to be on the bridge. We looked for probably a good 20 minutes and couldn't find it. We started to leave and Ricci asked Andrew if he had given us all the clues. Andrew looked at the paper and then saw that he had written down "4X" as a clue. He had mentioned this after we had found the previous cache but we had no idea what it meant and then forgot about it by the time we reached the cache it was for. So we ran back to the bridge and I said "hey, the beams along the bridge are making X's", so I counted in 4 X's and we started looking on either side of the bridge. We looked for a bit and still didn't see it, then I noticed what looked like a small bolt, but didn't see it on any other parts of the bridge. Sure enough, that was it. I posted a couple pictures on my flickr account of the cache. It was definitely the smallest one we've found to date, and also one of the best hidden ones. Finding that cache meant we went 5/5 on the day, and made it our first 100% find rate in quite a few trips.

After geocaching, we stopped back at the apartment to get cleaned up and then headed to Dave and Buster's at the Great Mall in Milpitas. They currently have a deal where on Sunday - Thursday you can get dinner and a $10 game card for $13.99. I had Jack Daniel's BBQ Chicken which was actually pretty good. Jeff had his Derby Owner's Club card with him, so he did a race with his horse Peabody. I played a good bit of Skee Ball, and thanks to the game where you drop tokens to knock other tokens off got enough tickets to get a nice Dave and Buster's glass, while Ricci and Andrew opted to get 3 shot glasses each. I had wanted to play DDR, but they only had some generic version and the arrows were on the diagonals, rather than up, down, left, and right so that would have just confused me.

So that was my weekend, and it was quite a fun one. I'm glad Jeff was able to fly out here on Friday...now if only Apple would see fit to transfer his team out here.

The Training Is Nothing The Will Is Everything

While I'm talking about movies, I thought I'd mention that I saw Batman Begins as a office outing on Wednesday and I highly enjoyed it. After using the trailer for Soundtrack Pro demos for so long, it was great to finally see the movie. The day before the movie, I had looked it up on IMDB and saw that the running time was 141, which sounded long to me. But the time really flew by while watching the movie. It was good to see a darker Batman movie again. I liked how they spent a good deal of time on Batman's origin. The main villain, Ra's Al Ghul was also interesting in the sense that it wasn't your typical trying to take over the world bad guy. I definitely recommend going to see this movie.

Fast Track

Just found out there's a movie called Fast Track in the works starring Zach Braff (Scrubs, Garden State) and Jason Bateman (Arrested Development). Seeing as Scrubs and Arrested Development are two of the funniest shows on TV, this promises to be good entertainment.

Initially found out about the movie on AP.net of all places. Also found a bit of info here.

BFD 2005

On Friday Nick and I went to Live 105's BFD concert at the Shorline Amphitheater in Mountain View. Unfortunately, due to some stuff I needed to do at work I missed two bands I really wanted to see MxPx and to a lesser extent Senses Fail. I got to the show around 4:30 and made it to the stage just in time to catch Alkaline Trio's set. This was the first time I've seen them live, and they played a good set. A couple older songs, some songs from Good Mourning, and a couple from their album which just came out, Crimson. They ended with Time to Waste which is one of my favorite songs from Crimson.

The next band on that stage was Hot Hot Heat who I had actually heard at BFD two years ago when I was out here as an Intern at Apple. They sounded pretty good, I should check out some of their stuff in the future. After that Nick and I made our way over to the main stage. The first band was The Lovemakers who were introduced as "The greatest local band in the world"....only they weren't. Next up were Kasabian, who were alright but I didn't really get into them.

Then came Jimmy Eat World who was another band I was looking forward to seeing (even though I saw them just a couple weeks ago). They played a lot of songs from Bleed American, as well as a few from Clarity, and a few from Futures (woo "nickel and dimed").

Social Distortion followed them and I actually enjoyed their set. I had heard of them before, but wasn't really familiar with any of their songs. They played some good straight up guitar rock though.

Last up were the headliners, The Foo Fighters. They also headlined when I was at BFD two years ago, but I had ridden my bike and had to leave before they played. We stayed for a little over half of their set and then decided to leave lest we get stuck in the sure to be insane traffic jam. Though we should have waited for two more songs, because as we were walking in the parking lot, we could hear them playing Everlong which is one of my favorite songs by them.

All in all, it wasn't the strongest lineup of bands from my point of view, but for $12 it was definitely worth it. It was nice getting to spend time outside and hear to some good music.

CD Purchases

I stopped at Best Buy to pick up a few CDs (all under $10). I saw in their weekly ad that they had Acceptance's new album Phantoms on sale for $8. I've been wanting to pick this up for a while, but hadn't gotten around to it. Needless to say, knowing it was only $8 was all the motivation I needed. Phantoms is an album pretty much anyone can enjoy. Their single, Different, was the free iTunes download last week.

The next CD I picked up was Motion City Soundtrack's Commit This to Memory which just came out last week. This is a great followup to their last album and is filled with fast beats and catchy lyrics. My favorite tracks include Attractive Today, Feels Like Rain, L.G. FUAD and Time Turned Fragile.

The last CD I picked up was Interventions and Lullabies by The Format. I first heard The Format when they opened for Something Corporate and Yellowcard last spring and really enjoyed their set. The album has a bunch of really catchy songs like The First Single, and Tune Out. My recent favorite song is the excellent (if a bit depressing) On Your Porch.

These albums should give me some good music for the start of the summer. Though I still need to pick up the new Coldplay album and the Punk Goes 80's compilation.

All Good Things Have Endings

The Get Up Kids kicked off their final tour in San Francisco on Thursday and you'd better believe I was there. Mike sent me some of The Get Up Kids' mp3s ("Mass Pike" and "Action and Action" were my immediate favorites) back in high school and I was immediately hooked. Very soon after that I picked up the Red Letter Day EP and Something to Write Home About. They got me started with the whole punk/emo/indie scene and I have discovered so many bands since then. But TGUK remains a personal favorite and they will always be the band that started it all for me. So it is a bit unfortunate that the first time I get to see them will also be the last. But alas, on with the show!

Eric and I made it to San Francisco about 7 and stopped at the Subway right by The Fillmore for a quick bite to eat. By the time we got to the venue we still had a good 20 minutes before the show started, there weren't a ton of people in the theater part yet, so we got in the Merch line since I knew I wanted to get a shirt. I picked up a black shirt with a picture of a grain of wheat that says "The Get Up Kids" underneath. I also picked up their new Live CD since it was only $10. We got into the theater about a minute before Punchline (from Pittsburgh) came on and were only about 10 people away from the front, so that worked out perfectly.

I've seen Punchline once before, they opened for Allister at the Grog Shop last April (my last show in Cleveland). So I was familiar with a few of their songs and looking forward to seeing them. Unfortunately, only a handful of other people were familiar with them. Nonetheless they put on a good show and were able to get the crowd to sing along with a few songs and started a chant "The Get Up Kids are the greatest band in the world!" I definitely enjoyed their set and hope to see them on some more tours.

Next up was Say Anything, who I was also looking forward to seeing. They had opened for Straylight Run at the Bottom of the Hill. Fortunately at this show quite a few people were familiar with them so there was lots of singing along. They played a good number of songs including (in no particular order):

Belt
Woe
Yellow Cat/ Red Cat
Spidersong
Slowly Through the Vector
Alive With The Glory of Love

Next up were The Get Up Kids (after what has to be the longest time between sets EVER: pushing 40 minutes). After an amusing welcome message made by James behind the stage, they came out and jumped right into Coming Clean and everyone went crazy jumping and singing. It was great. By the end of the show I had made my way 2 or 3 people from the front.

Their set was pretty much everything I hoped it would be. Lots of songs, lots from Something to Write Home About, and heck they even played their cover of Close to Me. I was really surprised by the double encore. After the main set was over, it was obvious they'd be coming back for an encore. Then when they ended the encore with I'll Catch You, I figured that was the end of the show. But when the lights didn't come on after they had left the stage, you'd knew they'd be back for at least one more song and even better than that they came back for three more. It was great that they ended with a fast, upbeat song like 10 Minutes. So with that I say so long to The Get Up Kids. You've been an amazingly influential band to all your fans and to lots of other bands. Thanks for 10 years of outstanding music.

Set List
(First three songs, and the encores are in the correct order)

Coming Clean
Holiday
Action and Action

The One You Want
Woodson
Martyr Me
Mass Pike
Campfire Kansas
Red Letter Day
No Love
Don't Hate Me
Never Be Alone
I'm a Loner Dottie, A Rebel
At Least 2 or 3 more

Encore 1
Close to Me
Beer for Breakfast
I'll Catch You

Encore 2
Shorty
Out of Reach
Ten Minutes

Edit: Mike posts his review of The Get Up Kids' show in New Jersey.