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.