Rough Draft

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.