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It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw
Dave is great! All hail Dave, Sheena's boyfriend who hasn't found a job yet and was nice enough to drive Carl and I to the Austin-Bergstrom airport around 9:30 so we didn't have to go at 7am and be stuck there for five hours. All hail the Austin-Bergstrom airport, for having a Salt Lick BBQ stand right next to an Amy's Ice Creams stand. Oh god. I am still pretty full, and I ate lunch at like 11am. Other than good eatin', the flights were relatively uneventful. Yay.
Hmm, I just realized I don't usually listen to music while writing these things so I feel silly when I consider making up a song to pretend I was listening to at the time, so I decided to go get out some music to listen to. Except I had that sort of weird problem of 500-CDs-in-that-bookcase-and-nothing-I-feel-like-listening-to. So I am currently listening to the Best of Kansas, which is a really really great album, that I had pretty much forgotten about.
For my own benefit, I'll expand yesterday's entry now. Ok, so we started by going to Schlotzsky's Deli ("funny name - serious sandwiches") for a light lunch in preparation for a large dinner. Afterwards we decided to go play minigolf, but the Putt-Putt we went to was really ghetto and cost like $4.50, so we decided to go play mini golf at IBM instead. (Adam, Rehana, Zach, and Sheena all work at IBM Austin, which has a mini golf course on campus. The golf course is cool, it's 9 holes but has rearrangeable obstacles and holes so you can effectively make it an 18-hole course, which we did.) After golf, Brad and I split off from everyone and went to the Le Fun arcade near Zach's place, to play on the DDR 3rd Mix machine. 3rd mix is tough, it grades you really hard, and also the right side had a weak left arrow. However, we had fun since I usually don't get to do a lot of those songs in the arcade. After a while another guy showed up who wanted to play, so we played a last set of songs and left. We went back to Brad's place and played Beatmania for a while - he has the super Beatmania IIDX controller, which I now need to get. It is really cool, ambidextrous, and doesn't stick like my controller does. Also, Beatmania 5th Mix has a lot of neat songs in it. My Bemani wish list is getting sort of high.
After that, we argued over dinner for a while and I whined at everyone until some people agreed to go get BBQ for dinner. Brad, Rehana, Oren, and I went to Rudy's, which is "The Worst BBQ in Texas" - at least, that is how they advertise themselves, what with a gas station and convenience store combined with the BBQ restaurant. However, the food was quite good. They serve it to you in a carton and you bring it back to your table and you and your friends get really messy trying to eat it all. It was also really funny, they had a cattle prod in a glass case hanging over the food line, with a sign that said "If line gets too slow, break glass". Whee.
Ok, so we came home and played video games and board games. I played quite a bit of SSX, and I think I like it. Now I have issues about getting a PSX 2, because I was ideally going to get the Japanese PSX 2 for Para Para Paradise and the newer Beatmania Style games, but I wonder if I can get SSX in Japanese. Hmm. Anyway, we played Settlers and Carl won because we all stomped on Adam. Then we stayed up talking to people way too late. Dave showed us a lot of photo albums - it was weird to see his tons of pictures of bughouse chess gatherings and see pictures of people I know like Steve Morrison, Peter Jansen, Danny Sleator, and all, from various other contexts. I guess I should learn to play chess better one of these years.
Actually, after finishing the book I was reading (the aforementioned "Servant of the Shard") on the trip home today I thought about a lot of random crap. Most was silly, but one sort of pathetic thought was "Hmm, I could get a PSX2, and then what? I don't even have enough time to play with all the toys I currently have." I mean, I assume eventually we will leave Pittsburgh and I will have no friends and have tons of time on my hands to read books, write code, and play video games, but these days I sort of get depressed if I have an evening with just those sort of solitary activities to do. I dunno.
Also, speaking of Servant of the Shard, R.A.Salvatore pulled a major George Lucas at the end of it. The last line of the book basically told a MAJOR life detail about a particular character that had never been revealed before, and which majorly screws with a lot of presumptions about the guy in the past seven or eight books. It was akin to "He built C3P0? What?" but more like "He was in *WHAT* family in Menzoberranzan? You're fucking kidding. And you're ending the book right there and probably never revisiting that point? I hate you, Milkman Bob." Worse, now I want to go back and read the older books to see if I missed some major clue that this guy is of this status. Blah.
So there you have it, my last day in a nutshell.
Hmm, I just realized I don't usually listen to music while writing these things so I feel silly when I consider making up a song to pretend I was listening to at the time, so I decided to go get out some music to listen to. Except I had that sort of weird problem of 500-CDs-in-that-bookcase-and-nothing-I-feel-like-listening-to. So I am currently listening to the Best of Kansas, which is a really really great album, that I had pretty much forgotten about.
For my own benefit, I'll expand yesterday's entry now. Ok, so we started by going to Schlotzsky's Deli ("funny name - serious sandwiches") for a light lunch in preparation for a large dinner. Afterwards we decided to go play minigolf, but the Putt-Putt we went to was really ghetto and cost like $4.50, so we decided to go play mini golf at IBM instead. (Adam, Rehana, Zach, and Sheena all work at IBM Austin, which has a mini golf course on campus. The golf course is cool, it's 9 holes but has rearrangeable obstacles and holes so you can effectively make it an 18-hole course, which we did.) After golf, Brad and I split off from everyone and went to the Le Fun arcade near Zach's place, to play on the DDR 3rd Mix machine. 3rd mix is tough, it grades you really hard, and also the right side had a weak left arrow. However, we had fun since I usually don't get to do a lot of those songs in the arcade. After a while another guy showed up who wanted to play, so we played a last set of songs and left. We went back to Brad's place and played Beatmania for a while - he has the super Beatmania IIDX controller, which I now need to get. It is really cool, ambidextrous, and doesn't stick like my controller does. Also, Beatmania 5th Mix has a lot of neat songs in it. My Bemani wish list is getting sort of high.
After that, we argued over dinner for a while and I whined at everyone until some people agreed to go get BBQ for dinner. Brad, Rehana, Oren, and I went to Rudy's, which is "The Worst BBQ in Texas" - at least, that is how they advertise themselves, what with a gas station and convenience store combined with the BBQ restaurant. However, the food was quite good. They serve it to you in a carton and you bring it back to your table and you and your friends get really messy trying to eat it all. It was also really funny, they had a cattle prod in a glass case hanging over the food line, with a sign that said "If line gets too slow, break glass". Whee.
Ok, so we came home and played video games and board games. I played quite a bit of SSX, and I think I like it. Now I have issues about getting a PSX 2, because I was ideally going to get the Japanese PSX 2 for Para Para Paradise and the newer Beatmania Style games, but I wonder if I can get SSX in Japanese. Hmm. Anyway, we played Settlers and Carl won because we all stomped on Adam. Then we stayed up talking to people way too late. Dave showed us a lot of photo albums - it was weird to see his tons of pictures of bughouse chess gatherings and see pictures of people I know like Steve Morrison, Peter Jansen, Danny Sleator, and all, from various other contexts. I guess I should learn to play chess better one of these years.
Actually, after finishing the book I was reading (the aforementioned "Servant of the Shard") on the trip home today I thought about a lot of random crap. Most was silly, but one sort of pathetic thought was "Hmm, I could get a PSX2, and then what? I don't even have enough time to play with all the toys I currently have." I mean, I assume eventually we will leave Pittsburgh and I will have no friends and have tons of time on my hands to read books, write code, and play video games, but these days I sort of get depressed if I have an evening with just those sort of solitary activities to do. I dunno.
Also, speaking of Servant of the Shard, R.A.Salvatore pulled a major George Lucas at the end of it. The last line of the book basically told a MAJOR life detail about a particular character that had never been revealed before, and which majorly screws with a lot of presumptions about the guy in the past seven or eight books. It was akin to "He built C3P0? What?" but more like "He was in *WHAT* family in Menzoberranzan? You're fucking kidding. And you're ending the book right there and probably never revisiting that point? I hate you, Milkman Bob." Worse, now I want to go back and read the older books to see if I missed some major clue that this guy is of this status. Blah.
So there you have it, my last day in a nutshell.
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So, in the Servent of the Shard, can I guess the end now that you gave the hint? Is it that the lineage of the drow gangster leader who ends up with the shard in the previous book is tied to the hero in some way?
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