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Weekend in CA
So, I'm in California for Shinteki weekend and... to start working tomorrow at Tagged.
To say that I'm nervous would be an understatement, certainly.
Let's see. I had a weekend.
Friday was a "short" day in terms of being frenetic. I spent the daytime doing laundry and moving more stuff around in the house -- the idea was that I wanted to create space in my room and also have more things organized before going off for a week, sort of like how I cleaned my room in Japan before leaving in January so it'd be in order when I returned in March, which turned out wonderfully given the earthquake circumstances. So when I come back next week I'll still have the same issue of "WHAT DO I DO WITH THESE HUGE BOXES FULL OF T-SHIRTS AND OTHER STUFF FROM MY LIFE?" but at least when I go into "my" room, I won't be tripping all over stuff and clutter on the floor. It's cluttered, but in at least a semi-organized fashion now. I'm still going to feel hopeless when I get back, but whatever.
Was aiming to leave the house by 4pm, so also tried to get my packing done... which wasn't so bad but I couldn't find my camera anywhere, I think it got moved around while I was moving stuff, so that added a few extra minutes, and so I didn't even get out of the house until 4:25pm or so.
Our flight was at 6:20.
I suck.
Got Mike around 4:50, we bolted down the highway towards the airport. Traffic sucked but at least we were a carpool, and only had two terrifying brushes with death (there was one time I'm seriously surprised we didn't hit the car in front of us that pretty much shifted right in front of us out of nowhere). Got to the airport at 5:20... Mike went to park at the other parking garage he likes, and at first I was like "are you NUTS?" but well, he was right, we were in the airport 10 minutes later.
Checkin and security were REMARKABLY fast. WTF. We were at the gate at 5:45pm. Got snacks and went on the plane. For whatever reason, we either managed to miss early checkins (there was no "Seating 1" on my ticket as usual). We were in row 7 and as usual got in and the bins looked full, but I realized that it was mostly people's jackets and shoved my bag in anyway, as did Mike.
Flight was uneventful. I played Drop 7 on my phone and read the first 70 pages of so of Zack Hample's latest baseball book. (I was hoping to meet him when he comes through Seattle later in the year; now I'm not sure I can, ugh.)
Drew and Jason picked us up from the airport and we went to a brewpub near Burlingame station for dinner. We had dinner, and I had some great brewed root beer... and then Andy, Ben, Shane, Jay, and Derek showed up (they were also down here to play Shinteki -- Andy on our team and the other four as Sports Racers), so we got dessert and hung out with them for a while longer. At least I finally got to meet Jay. We were both like "I saw you in videos!" and "I worked with you remotely at MIT Mystery Hunt but have no idea who you are really." Shrug.
We came home and watched Jeopardy rather than going to sleep early. Teehee.
Saturday, I got up at 7:30am, Drew and Mike got up a bit after that. We were out the door by 8:50, and stopped by Starbucks on our way to the meetup place for Shinteki. Finding Andy wasn't too hard. We registered and then schmoozed with other puzzlers for like 20 minutes or so. (Like, a few other groups had come down from Seattle, so we talked to them.)
Here's the one picture I'm posting from the day:
We made these t-shirts on Thursday night at Andy's place. They have LIBONCATIPU letters in various formats and our names on the right sleeves.
Anyway, uh... we've been told not to talk about Shinteki on the internets because they're rerunning it yet again on the 28th.
So, sadly, I'm not going to. We spent 12 hours going all over the areas near Silicon Valley. The theme being Aquarius, you can guess that it involved a lot of water and wet things. Some of the puzzles were fantastic, and some were pretty terrible. There were good parts and bad parts. The worst was wandering around in a park in the dark by myself when I got separated from my group, which was kinda terrifying. Hopefully we learned some things about group dynamics that I can put into play for the Game.
I'll probably try to braindump it all to a private entry and make it public later, really.
We got to the final location about 15 minutes late, so they had stopped serving food. Oops. :( We went to an adjacent place to eat, and then headed home in the rainy night, watched some more Jeopardy, and crashed.
Sunday, well, everyone slept in. Jason went off to pick up an intern of his from the airport, and then brought said intern back here and then took him into the city. We were supposed to go with them, but then everyone decided not to for whatever reason. Doh. Instead, the rest of us got up and went to lunch at a Philly cheesesteak place near here. On a scale of 0 to 100, for rating places outside Philly (the only 100 I've ever been to was the Philly's Best in south California that flew in Tastykakes and Amoroso's), I'd give this place somewhere in the mid-90's, which is saying a lot. The bread wasn't Amoroso's but the taste was pretty good, they constructed it properly, etc. The only downside was that they make chicken cheesesteaks, which are an abomination, and the cashier misheard me and thought I wanted one rather than a real cheesesteak (but fortuantely I caught it and got it fixed).
Afterwards, Mike and me and Andy and Drew played board games all afternoon -- a few hours of Space Alert and a few games of Seven Wonders. Space Alert, I'd never played before. Drew plays a lot and Andy had played once. We got through 2 training missions and 2 real missions and never died, which apparently is strange. I didn't find it all that different from basically a cooperative Robo Rally, really. I'm not that into cooperative games but would basically play it to humor friends, I think (that is, I'd willingly play it if other people wanted to, as opposed to some games I simply just veto, but I don't think I'd ever suggest playing it myself).
Seven Wonders was brutal, which is sad because I was the one pushing to play it. I think I'd need to actually really LOOK at the cards to really get to understand it, basically, so I guess I'm giving Mike permission to just go drop money on it already :P Several times I built cards hoping for chains where it'd help me build something later, only to find that the something later was something I could build with my resources anyway. It certainly plays different with 4 people than with 7 -- felt like there were less resources around to be sure and you also play a little differently knowing you'll get a card or two from your hand again -- in addition, the military is weird when you have 4. Jason came home and joined us for a game or two and that made the dynamics a little better at least. I think I won the first game we played but sucked it up for the rest.
Then we took Mike and Andy to the airport, since they were flying back to Seattle and I'm staying here this week.
Jason and Drew and I got dinner at a place called... I forget. Straits? It was a Pan-Asian kinda place near Burlingame station. I had some butter chicken stuff that was decent.
Then I dunno, I sat around talking to Jason for a while, Drew worked on some stuff, and I failed to write more about last week, but at least I got the weekend I guess.
This still all feels very surreal. Hopefully soon it'll just be mental overload rather than surreal. The entire process of starting this job has been so weird that I'm just not sure I believe it's going to work out, but we'll see.
To say that I'm nervous would be an understatement, certainly.
Let's see. I had a weekend.
Friday was a "short" day in terms of being frenetic. I spent the daytime doing laundry and moving more stuff around in the house -- the idea was that I wanted to create space in my room and also have more things organized before going off for a week, sort of like how I cleaned my room in Japan before leaving in January so it'd be in order when I returned in March, which turned out wonderfully given the earthquake circumstances. So when I come back next week I'll still have the same issue of "WHAT DO I DO WITH THESE HUGE BOXES FULL OF T-SHIRTS AND OTHER STUFF FROM MY LIFE?" but at least when I go into "my" room, I won't be tripping all over stuff and clutter on the floor. It's cluttered, but in at least a semi-organized fashion now. I'm still going to feel hopeless when I get back, but whatever.
Was aiming to leave the house by 4pm, so also tried to get my packing done... which wasn't so bad but I couldn't find my camera anywhere, I think it got moved around while I was moving stuff, so that added a few extra minutes, and so I didn't even get out of the house until 4:25pm or so.
Our flight was at 6:20.
I suck.
Got Mike around 4:50, we bolted down the highway towards the airport. Traffic sucked but at least we were a carpool, and only had two terrifying brushes with death (there was one time I'm seriously surprised we didn't hit the car in front of us that pretty much shifted right in front of us out of nowhere). Got to the airport at 5:20... Mike went to park at the other parking garage he likes, and at first I was like "are you NUTS?" but well, he was right, we were in the airport 10 minutes later.
Checkin and security were REMARKABLY fast. WTF. We were at the gate at 5:45pm. Got snacks and went on the plane. For whatever reason, we either managed to miss early checkins (there was no "Seating 1" on my ticket as usual). We were in row 7 and as usual got in and the bins looked full, but I realized that it was mostly people's jackets and shoved my bag in anyway, as did Mike.
Flight was uneventful. I played Drop 7 on my phone and read the first 70 pages of so of Zack Hample's latest baseball book. (I was hoping to meet him when he comes through Seattle later in the year; now I'm not sure I can, ugh.)
Drew and Jason picked us up from the airport and we went to a brewpub near Burlingame station for dinner. We had dinner, and I had some great brewed root beer... and then Andy, Ben, Shane, Jay, and Derek showed up (they were also down here to play Shinteki -- Andy on our team and the other four as Sports Racers), so we got dessert and hung out with them for a while longer. At least I finally got to meet Jay. We were both like "I saw you in videos!" and "I worked with you remotely at MIT Mystery Hunt but have no idea who you are really." Shrug.
We came home and watched Jeopardy rather than going to sleep early. Teehee.
Saturday, I got up at 7:30am, Drew and Mike got up a bit after that. We were out the door by 8:50, and stopped by Starbucks on our way to the meetup place for Shinteki. Finding Andy wasn't too hard. We registered and then schmoozed with other puzzlers for like 20 minutes or so. (Like, a few other groups had come down from Seattle, so we talked to them.)
Here's the one picture I'm posting from the day:
We made these t-shirts on Thursday night at Andy's place. They have LIBONCATIPU letters in various formats and our names on the right sleeves.
Anyway, uh... we've been told not to talk about Shinteki on the internets because they're rerunning it yet again on the 28th.
So, sadly, I'm not going to. We spent 12 hours going all over the areas near Silicon Valley. The theme being Aquarius, you can guess that it involved a lot of water and wet things. Some of the puzzles were fantastic, and some were pretty terrible. There were good parts and bad parts. The worst was wandering around in a park in the dark by myself when I got separated from my group, which was kinda terrifying. Hopefully we learned some things about group dynamics that I can put into play for the Game.
I'll probably try to braindump it all to a private entry and make it public later, really.
We got to the final location about 15 minutes late, so they had stopped serving food. Oops. :( We went to an adjacent place to eat, and then headed home in the rainy night, watched some more Jeopardy, and crashed.
Sunday, well, everyone slept in. Jason went off to pick up an intern of his from the airport, and then brought said intern back here and then took him into the city. We were supposed to go with them, but then everyone decided not to for whatever reason. Doh. Instead, the rest of us got up and went to lunch at a Philly cheesesteak place near here. On a scale of 0 to 100, for rating places outside Philly (the only 100 I've ever been to was the Philly's Best in south California that flew in Tastykakes and Amoroso's), I'd give this place somewhere in the mid-90's, which is saying a lot. The bread wasn't Amoroso's but the taste was pretty good, they constructed it properly, etc. The only downside was that they make chicken cheesesteaks, which are an abomination, and the cashier misheard me and thought I wanted one rather than a real cheesesteak (but fortuantely I caught it and got it fixed).
Afterwards, Mike and me and Andy and Drew played board games all afternoon -- a few hours of Space Alert and a few games of Seven Wonders. Space Alert, I'd never played before. Drew plays a lot and Andy had played once. We got through 2 training missions and 2 real missions and never died, which apparently is strange. I didn't find it all that different from basically a cooperative Robo Rally, really. I'm not that into cooperative games but would basically play it to humor friends, I think (that is, I'd willingly play it if other people wanted to, as opposed to some games I simply just veto, but I don't think I'd ever suggest playing it myself).
Seven Wonders was brutal, which is sad because I was the one pushing to play it. I think I'd need to actually really LOOK at the cards to really get to understand it, basically, so I guess I'm giving Mike permission to just go drop money on it already :P Several times I built cards hoping for chains where it'd help me build something later, only to find that the something later was something I could build with my resources anyway. It certainly plays different with 4 people than with 7 -- felt like there were less resources around to be sure and you also play a little differently knowing you'll get a card or two from your hand again -- in addition, the military is weird when you have 4. Jason came home and joined us for a game or two and that made the dynamics a little better at least. I think I won the first game we played but sucked it up for the rest.
Then we took Mike and Andy to the airport, since they were flying back to Seattle and I'm staying here this week.
Jason and Drew and I got dinner at a place called... I forget. Straits? It was a Pan-Asian kinda place near Burlingame station. I had some butter chicken stuff that was decent.
Then I dunno, I sat around talking to Jason for a while, Drew worked on some stuff, and I failed to write more about last week, but at least I got the weekend I guess.
This still all feels very surreal. Hopefully soon it'll just be mental overload rather than surreal. The entire process of starting this job has been so weird that I'm just not sure I believe it's going to work out, but we'll see.
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We also found the only place in the whole south bay that makes a decent hoagie; Giovanni's pizza. They use some vietnamese bakery rolls which I think work even better than Amoroso.