Rough Draft

Henry's Hunan and Syriana

Since Jeff wasn't flying home until this morning, I went up to San Francisco again last night to hang out. We went to Henry's Hunan, which was recommended to me by Buzz. It has an overall rating of 9.0 on citysearch, but the user comments were pretty varied, ranging from "Greatest Hunan Cuisine in the USA" to "most dishes taste like Panda Express". Then there's my personal favorite: "Hot and sour soup lover's unite".

We ordered Hot and Sour soup and dumplings for an appetizer and Hunan Shrimp and Kung Pao Beef for our entrees. All of the food was really tasty, and there was plenty of it. We ordered a small bowl of soup ($4.50), but there was enough for us to each have two cups full. We also each had several helpings of the entree dishes and there was still plenty left over to take home. If you're in the SoMa area of the city and have a hankering for Chinese food, I highly recommend Henry's Hunan.

After eating we went back to the hotel to figure out what we wanted to do the rest of the night. We decided on going to see a movie, so while we downloaded several movie trailers we played several rounds of Mario Kart DS. After watching the trailers (Match Point, Syriana, and Munich), we decided on Syriana. I enjoyed the movie quite a bit, but it was really complex and following all the characters and locations was pretty tough. There also wasn't much, if any, backstory on any of the characters, so as Jeff said, you just had to assume they were behaving logically.

Busy Weekend

Jeff's in town for MacWorld this week, but he flew in last Friday night so we could hang out for a few days. I picked him up at SFO Friday night and then we headed to El Burro at The Pruneyard in Campbell. That place gives you an insane amount of food for a great price. You can easily get two meals out of anything you order.

We didn't really have any plans for Saturday so after searching the web a bit we decided to go to the NASA Ames Exploration Center and the Intel Museum. We hit the NASA museum first, and it turned out there really wasn't a whole lot there. There were a few interesting models and some artifacts (like moon rocks), but the displays were pretty low budget and there wasn't much information about each of the exhibits. The main attraction probably would have been the "Immersive Theater", a joint venture by NASA and SGI, but to quote Jeff: "It looks like the theater is out of business, kind of like SGI will soon be." After chatting with the people working there briefly (and getting free blinking pins), we headed off to the Intel Museum.

The Intel Museum was pretty impressive, especially for being free. There was lots of information about the history of the company as well as the process of chip fabrication, and how CPUs work. A few interesting tidbits I learned about the company include the fact that Intel got its start making DRAM chips and it took the company only 10 years to reach 10,000 employees. Also, I hadn't realized before that Gordon Moore (Moore's Law) was a co-founder of Intel.

As for the technical side of things, I'm just blown away that the first Pentium 4 chip contained about 42 million transistors. That in and of itself is unfathomable, but as I said to Jeff, what makes it even more crazy is the fact that it is almost never the processor that is a failing component in a computer.

The museum had something that I think every computer science school in the country should have, a gigantic LED model of a CPU (control unit, alu, registers, etc). You could press buttons and it would show the flow of communication for fetching and storing data and performing calculations. Each of the units had their own unique and entertaining voice explaining what was going on. It was pretty neat. This page has a similar CPU model and example, but it's nowhere near as cool. And one last note is Jeff pointed out that it liked the everywhere on the Intel campus that we saw had already switched over to the new logo. That seemed impressive, given it was just unveiled last week.

After that we made a stop at the Sunnyvale Fry's since Jeff had never been to one. Fry's isn't really a store you can browse in (at least without spending several hours) because it's so overwhelming. We wandered around for a while, then headed off to get some Jamba Juice, a California tradition for Jeff and I.

Saturday night we went to Thai Delight for dinner with Andrew and Ricci and then went to Homstead Lanes to do some bowling. The crowd at bowling alley was really young (families, and groups of middle school and high school kids). I didn't do as well as I normally do, getting somewhere in the 80's the first game. I probably would have gotten over 100 the second game (I was over 80 in the 7th frame), but our 1 hour time limit ran out before we could finish. After that we went over to Ricci's to play some video games (Mario Party and Worms) and poker.

Continuing the tour of local restaurants, Jeff and I went to Yiasso for lunch on Sunday. Yiasso has excellent gyros. After that we headed down to Monterey to go to the aquarium. The aquarium was really impressive (it took about 3 hours to go through the whole thing). The highlight was getting to see the penguins be fed. The one disappointment was that the sea otter exhibit was closed. I posted some photos on flickr. Oh, and of course Jeff and I were quoting Sealab 2021 throughout the entire visit (mainly the Happy Cake Oven and Feng Shui episodes).

After we were done at the aquarium we drove around the area a bit to see if we could find any restaurants that looked good. We didn't really see anything, and weren't really all that hungry so we told the GPS to take us home. Amusingly at the time we were near the military base in Monterey, and on a one way street that was going in the opposite direction that we wanted to go. So the GPS happily started routing us on the road through the military base, which seemed like a bad idea. I followed it's instructions for a bit, but once it said "go 0.5 miles then turn SHARP right" and at that same time we saw an "authorized vehicles only" sign, I decided it would be best to turn around and the wait for the GPS to figure out a different route.

So that was my fun filled weekend. It was good catching up with Jeff again and he filled me in on the happenings with our Cleveland friends. He's working at the iWork booth all week, so I'll see him at the show when I go up on Wednesday, and we're planning to hang out in the city on Friday night. If anyone knows of anything exciting going on up there Friday night, let me know.

Welcome to the New Year

It's been quiet on here for a while, but don't worry I made it to the New Year just fine. A majority of my spare time the last few days has been spent writing up my Music of 2005 for my music blog.

A bit of what I've been up to the past month. I flew back home to PA for Christmas break. It was nice getting to spend some time with my family again. Here's a picture of our Christmas tree. I was fairly busy while I was home and didn't spend much time at the computer. I didn't see anyone from high school while I was home, but I did see a few family friends. One of the best parts of being home was all the great food. We did the whole turkey dinner thing on Christmas Day and on Thursday that week we had a New Year's Dinner (pork and sauerkraut), since I wouldn't actually be there on New Year's Day.

And now since Mike and Meri did it, I'm going to post what I got for Christmas.

Video Games

• Animal Crossing: Wild World (DS)
• Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time (DS)
• Trauma Center: Under the Knife (DS)
• Kirby's Canvas Curse (DS)
• Resident Evil 4

Books

• Watching Football by Darryl "Moose" Johnston
• The Physics of Football by Timothy Gay, Ph.D.
• A Random Walk Down Wall Street

DVDs

• Scrubs Season 2
• The Simspons Season 6
• The Simpsons Season 7

Clothes

• hi i make macintosh software t-shirt
• new shoes
• 2 pairs of cargo pants
• track jacket

Misc

• Set card game
• Picaresque by The Decemberists
• America: The Calendar

I'll probably do a bit more of a write up the video games when I get a chance to actually play them

As for New Year's Eve, I got up 7:15 AM Eastern to catch my plane in Maryland (I was at my uncle's house). I got back to CA around 3 in the afternoon. Ricci picked me up at the airport and we grabbed some food at IHOP. Then when we got over to Apple to pick up my car, I realized I had left one of my bags on the baggage carousel at the airport. D'oh. What happened was when I flew home, I only had my suitcase, but on the way back I had my suitcase and a duffle bag. But it took forever for our bags to start coming out of the baggage chute, that I totally forgot I had two bags. Oh well. I went back to the airport and it was sitting by the Southwest customer service with about 20 other bags. After coming home and unpacking and relaxing for a while, Andrew, Ricci, and I went to BJs for dinner and then headed up to Dave and Buster's (as is becoming tradition). I was really excited to find out D&B's now has air hockey. They also have a trivia game that's pretty fun. We played various video games until midnight, then we went over to the bar area to watch the ball drop. As we were walking through the bar area, I saw a table with 3 rather cute girls, and I suggested to Andrew and Ricci that we go stand by them, but of course we didn't.

After the ball dropped we went over to check on the air hockey tables, and one freed up just as we got there. I ended up winning all 4 games I played, including one shut out. Go me! As we were playing, we noticed some people watching us, and it turned out to be the three girls from the bar. We let them use the table and talked a little and then another couple came and used the table. In the mean time, some random guy had come up and started hitting on one of the girls (though she didn't seem too interested in him). Eventually he got her to play him in a game of air hockey. While that was going on, I told Andrew I'd got check on where we were in line for pool. Fortunately Andrew took my subtle hint, because when I got back to say we had a table, he and Ricci had asked the girls to join us and they did. So we played pool with them (Jamie, Laura, and Emily) from about 12:30 until 2 am when they closed. They all go to school at Chico state, so I don't think we'll be seeing them again any time soon, but they were fun to hang out with.

So that's a bit of what I've been up to lately. And things stay pretty busy for the next month or so. Jeff flies in tomorrow and will be here all of next week for MacWorld, so it will be good to hang out with him again. Then in a couple weeks I'm taking my first trip to Tahoe with a co-worker and learning to snowboard. Then mid-February my aunt and uncle will be in town for several (my uncle has a training class to go to, but that's only during the weekdays). We're already planning to go to the winery I went to with Candice, because they really liked the wine she brought back for them. Busy, busy me.