(no subject)
Wow, I haven't posted in nearly two months, but work e-mail's down and I'm done with bugs for the moment, so I guess I'll write some updates.
San Francisco
For labor day weekend, I went to the bay area to visit a bunch of people. I stayed at Jay's place. A friend from work and I arranged to take the same flights, although we were visiting different friends in the area. We arrived in San Jose about two hours late (damn you Southwest!) Thursday evening.
Friday, I went touring around San Francisco myself - rode on the cable cars twice (some jerk driving a car on a cross street decided to cross right in front of the cable car, and the conductor had to apply the emergency brake, causing a bit of a jolt and some cursing (thankfully there was no collision and no one fell off the car), visited Chinatown and a fortune cookie factory (sadly, they only make the cookies - the fortunes themselves seem to be bought from a vendor, or they don't show the fortune writing factory), the Mission district where I visited the Mission church and went to an ice cream parlor that I heard about (the mango ice cream was great), and then took a boat to Alcatraz where I did all the usual touristy things. Friday evening, I went back into Palo Alto and, after 15 minutes of debating what cuisine to eat, finally had dinner with Jay, Karen, Steve, and Phil at a Mexican place. Afterwards, we went to Patrick's place (a CMUer that I haven't met myself before), and watched a movie, of which, the name escapes me, and had rice krispy treats.
Saturday was a slow day - Jay, Karen, Phil and I ended up going across the mountains to the ocean in the afternoon, although it was a rather cloudy day on the beach, and walked along the beach for a while. For dinner, we met up with the rest of the gang, had dinner at a diner, and then played Ticket to Ride and Apples to Apples at Jay's place. Apples to Apples, as usual, was highly amusing.
Sunday - Jay and I went back into San Francisco, and hit a bunch of other tourist places I missed - Coit Tower, Little Italy, Golden Gate Park, and the Japanese Tea Garden (we were too late for tea though, the place was closing). In the evening, we ended up at a coffee shop with Phil, Chris Smoak and his friend (working on his new project). Afterwards, we went to Steve and Phil's place and played Fusion Frenzy until late.
For Monday, we woke up rather late, but ended up at Rick's Rather Rich ice cream in Palo Alto (which had really good ice cream). We also went to a sculpture garden in Stanford (about 5 minutes from Jay's place). Up to then - every time I was asked what sort of cuisine I wanted to eat, I've half jokingly said Turkish (which is also a bit of a running joke with a co-worker). But this time, Jay decided that we were actually going to have Turkish food (or Mediterranean at least). At that point, Kevin (Oishi), also happened to drop by the area (on his road trip to Seattle), and we had a really late lunch. We also bought a tub of Turkish delight (which actually wasn't particularly delightful). Right afterwards, Jay and Kevin dropped me off at the airport for my flight home. While passing through the security checkpoint, I felt something funny in my mouth, and realized that a tooth filling popped off. Fortunately, it wasn't that painful, and it was also on the cheek side, and also fortunate that it came out at the end of the trip.
PuzzleQuest
The other big thing happening now is PuzzleQuest. This year's PuzzleQuest is going to be on October 28th at CMU, which is about 2 weeks earlier than last years. With last year's experience, things have generally gone smoother, and I think I have a better handle on things. We've rewritten the scoring system completely and thoroughly stress tested the system, and so I'm hopeful (crossing my fingers), that this year might be the first year where we won't have a technical glitch, or have the server go down. However, we're also doing more complicated things, so we definitely will have contingency plans in place again.
The puzzles themselves are finally close to done, although it's been much more teeth pulling this year motivating people to write them up and follow through with them. I've also scheduled a full play test in the coming week, and possibly because we're not conflicting with the college puzzle challenge events, we got a lot more responses. I'm pretty happy with the quality of the puzzles this year, although I think we're probably going to find out from the playtest that we have too many puzzles.
Other Stuff
Otherwise, life has been good. It's a shame Stargate SG-1 is being canceled - I generally now have a group over at my place to watch SG1 and Atlantis, and now that's on break, we'll be watching the new Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica. Amusingly enough, Bomberman has now been firmly entrenched as the game of choice - I bought a multitap for super nintendo on ebay though (waiting for that to arrive now), but hopefully once I get it, we'll be able to play four player Bomberman.
I also bought new computers (a desktop and a laptop) - replacing my 6 year old desktop (with 128MB ram), with a dual core machine (with a full 2GB ram). My laptop is similarly decked out, and I've installed the latest beta of Vista on my laptop. The new computers are definitely awesome (connecting to the work network now only takes about a minute rather than 6-7 on my old machine), and games run fast again :). Definitely looking forward to the release of Flight Simulator X and loading it up on my new machine, although I haven't done anything related to flight simming for a while.
The weather's getting cold and damp again, but last week, we got a clear day and went biking down the trail on the east side of Lake Sammamish, and biked a bit more than 10 miles each way to Issaquah. There, we stopped by the Jamba Juice and Krispy Kreme. We timed things wrong though, so it got dark halfway on the way back. Fortunately, the path is generally clear, so we didn't have too many problems biking in the near dark.
San Francisco
For labor day weekend, I went to the bay area to visit a bunch of people. I stayed at Jay's place. A friend from work and I arranged to take the same flights, although we were visiting different friends in the area. We arrived in San Jose about two hours late (damn you Southwest!) Thursday evening.
Friday, I went touring around San Francisco myself - rode on the cable cars twice (some jerk driving a car on a cross street decided to cross right in front of the cable car, and the conductor had to apply the emergency brake, causing a bit of a jolt and some cursing (thankfully there was no collision and no one fell off the car), visited Chinatown and a fortune cookie factory (sadly, they only make the cookies - the fortunes themselves seem to be bought from a vendor, or they don't show the fortune writing factory), the Mission district where I visited the Mission church and went to an ice cream parlor that I heard about (the mango ice cream was great), and then took a boat to Alcatraz where I did all the usual touristy things. Friday evening, I went back into Palo Alto and, after 15 minutes of debating what cuisine to eat, finally had dinner with Jay, Karen, Steve, and Phil at a Mexican place. Afterwards, we went to Patrick's place (a CMUer that I haven't met myself before), and watched a movie, of which, the name escapes me, and had rice krispy treats.
Saturday was a slow day - Jay, Karen, Phil and I ended up going across the mountains to the ocean in the afternoon, although it was a rather cloudy day on the beach, and walked along the beach for a while. For dinner, we met up with the rest of the gang, had dinner at a diner, and then played Ticket to Ride and Apples to Apples at Jay's place. Apples to Apples, as usual, was highly amusing.
Sunday - Jay and I went back into San Francisco, and hit a bunch of other tourist places I missed - Coit Tower, Little Italy, Golden Gate Park, and the Japanese Tea Garden (we were too late for tea though, the place was closing). In the evening, we ended up at a coffee shop with Phil, Chris Smoak and his friend (working on his new project). Afterwards, we went to Steve and Phil's place and played Fusion Frenzy until late.
For Monday, we woke up rather late, but ended up at Rick's Rather Rich ice cream in Palo Alto (which had really good ice cream). We also went to a sculpture garden in Stanford (about 5 minutes from Jay's place). Up to then - every time I was asked what sort of cuisine I wanted to eat, I've half jokingly said Turkish (which is also a bit of a running joke with a co-worker). But this time, Jay decided that we were actually going to have Turkish food (or Mediterranean at least). At that point, Kevin (Oishi), also happened to drop by the area (on his road trip to Seattle), and we had a really late lunch. We also bought a tub of Turkish delight (which actually wasn't particularly delightful). Right afterwards, Jay and Kevin dropped me off at the airport for my flight home. While passing through the security checkpoint, I felt something funny in my mouth, and realized that a tooth filling popped off. Fortunately, it wasn't that painful, and it was also on the cheek side, and also fortunate that it came out at the end of the trip.
PuzzleQuest
The other big thing happening now is PuzzleQuest. This year's PuzzleQuest is going to be on October 28th at CMU, which is about 2 weeks earlier than last years. With last year's experience, things have generally gone smoother, and I think I have a better handle on things. We've rewritten the scoring system completely and thoroughly stress tested the system, and so I'm hopeful (crossing my fingers), that this year might be the first year where we won't have a technical glitch, or have the server go down. However, we're also doing more complicated things, so we definitely will have contingency plans in place again.
The puzzles themselves are finally close to done, although it's been much more teeth pulling this year motivating people to write them up and follow through with them. I've also scheduled a full play test in the coming week, and possibly because we're not conflicting with the college puzzle challenge events, we got a lot more responses. I'm pretty happy with the quality of the puzzles this year, although I think we're probably going to find out from the playtest that we have too many puzzles.
Other Stuff
Otherwise, life has been good. It's a shame Stargate SG-1 is being canceled - I generally now have a group over at my place to watch SG1 and Atlantis, and now that's on break, we'll be watching the new Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica. Amusingly enough, Bomberman has now been firmly entrenched as the game of choice - I bought a multitap for super nintendo on ebay though (waiting for that to arrive now), but hopefully once I get it, we'll be able to play four player Bomberman.
I also bought new computers (a desktop and a laptop) - replacing my 6 year old desktop (with 128MB ram), with a dual core machine (with a full 2GB ram). My laptop is similarly decked out, and I've installed the latest beta of Vista on my laptop. The new computers are definitely awesome (connecting to the work network now only takes about a minute rather than 6-7 on my old machine), and games run fast again :). Definitely looking forward to the release of Flight Simulator X and loading it up on my new machine, although I haven't done anything related to flight simming for a while.
The weather's getting cold and damp again, but last week, we got a clear day and went biking down the trail on the east side of Lake Sammamish, and biked a bit more than 10 miles each way to Issaquah. There, we stopped by the Jamba Juice and Krispy Kreme. We timed things wrong though, so it got dark halfway on the way back. Fortunately, the path is generally clear, so we didn't have too many problems biking in the near dark.