Jeff Stuart - Memoirs of a CPUNERD

I went to bed this morning at 1:00 AM, and despite that, I still woke up at 7:00 AM. I stayed in bed, surfing the net and sleeping until almost 10:00 AM, it was great. Once I finally rolled out of bed, I had work to do so I just got in the shower right away so I could get out of the place.The first thing on my list was to go to a car-wash. Poor Stuie is so freaking filthy. I think it was the three weeks of parking outside in Davis. Even hough there was no sap falling on him, there was still so much crap in the air, and it all clung to him. I noticed while I was getting him ready for his bath how chipped up the front is. I really wish I had gotten the bra for him sooner, a lot of the front paint is chipped, even though you can only tell if you look closely.

Once Stuie got his bath, I headed to the nearest grocery store. Now, I was looking for Albertson’s, but I’m apparently blind, because I missed it completely. I ended up stopping at a Savemart (looks like just like every other grocery store), bought some staples, then headed home.

Once I got home, I updated this journal (mostly rewriting some of the scripts on the backend) for a few hours. No one was online, so I got really bored really fast. Luckily I had plenty to do, otherwise I probably would’ve broken down and gone to San Francisco solo. As it was though, things worked out okay, and you all got a new and improved interface for reading these rather long journal entries. The next thing I’m planning on implementing is summaries, that way I can quickly look at each date, and only get details if something of interest happened that day.

Oh, I also went out to P. F. Changs with Carl, Ilan, and Carl’s roommate Fred (who also happens to go to Davis). I was hesitant because I heard from a reliable source that the one in Sac sucked compared to Reno. As it turned out though, this one was up to snuff, and everyone had a good time. I taught the guys the ancient american secret of reading fortune cookies, and we all got a kick out of it.

I woke up today around 7:00 AM and jumped in the shower. I had to be to a suburb of Scaramento by noon for a family get-together. I ended up dragging though, and didn’t leave Santa Clara until a little after 8:00 AM (though, in my defense, I did have to stop for gas first). On the way to Sac, I realized that I lost my directions, so I now had an excuse to stop in Davis, yay! I dropped by IDAV to print out some directions. I was hoping to see at least someone there, but no, they were all asleep, enjoying their first Saturday sleep-in of the summer (then again it was only 9:45, most of them probably weren’t even up that early during the school year).After I got done at the lab, I headed to the farmer’s market for some breakfast. The peach place wasn’t selling apples, much to my chagrin. I settled for a soft, but not perfectly ripe white peach (still good though). I also grabbed some apple juice and a sticky bun (another first, I’d never had one until today).

Hmmm, well all the excitement, and it was still only 10:45 AM. Well, I had time to kill, so there was only one thing to do… Frye’s. Let me say, I was thoroughly disappointed. I guess I’ve outgrown my huge desire to wander a nerd store, either that or Frye’s is just sub-par. I walked around for a while, looking for things to inspect, seeing if there was any miscellaneous equipment I was missing, and I couldn’t find much. I checked out the new gaming mice (overpriced for what they did it would seem), then I checked out the head phones (way overpriced, must go check out Radio Shack), then I perused laptops and computers. All in all, not too exciting, perhaps I need a fellow nerd to go with me, that way we can keep each other interested in products longer. Oh, I also saw an AC unit at Frye’s, though it was four-hundred and thirty bucks, so I think I am going to have to keep looking.

Despite the apparent failure of my visit, I did accomplish my goal, it was 11:30 AM. So with that, I headed off to the ‘burbs to reacquaint myself with second, third, fourth, and probably some fifth cousins. I had to make one quick stop at a surf and skate shop, and then I arrived. When I got there, I was one of the first ones there. My parents were already there, so they re-introduced me to a few people. I checked out my mom and dads new Spyder, then helped put a bunch of soda and beer on ice (it was so hot outside, I would’ve had any of the three right then and there).

The event was fun. I met some new people, re-met some people, saw some people I remembered but hadn’t seen in a while, and had some good BBQ food. I stuck around for about four hours, then headed back to Davis. I was going to hang out with my friend Tony, but he was really busy trying to finish something up before he left for the summer.

I called up my friend Yuan, and she said she would like to do something. She is staying in Palo Alto over the summer for her internship, so I figured I would just pick her up on the way to my place. Turns out that would have been a good idea, had I decided to take the 880 through Oakland, or if I had taken the 680 a few miles further south than I needed. See, I saw a road sign that said to exit for the Dumbarton bridge. Only problem, it was forty five minutes of surface streets! It’s only ten minutes of freeway if I had gone to the intersection of 680 and 880 and then back up to 84. Oh well, I got to see some beautiful mountain sides and experience first-hand the horror of California state highways.

Once I finally got to Yuan’s, we called up our friend Dan, who happened to be in San Jose, and forced him to go hang out with us. We didn’t know any cool places to go, so he suggested Dave & Buster’s. He gave Yuan directions over the phone, and we were on our way. Just two minor hitches: 1) Yuan didn’t remember the directions, and 2) Those that she did remember were antiquated. The map system told us to get off of the 237 at Pharoah… there is no Pharoah! We drove around for an extra forty-five minutes looking for the place. We called Anna, but she was in the middle of Chicago and thus couldn’t give us any help. Luckily, Jimbo was free, so he guided us to safety and made us laugh with his description of the actions the map system was taking.

We finally made it to D&B, then walked right through because we were hungry, and I was all jittery from too much caffeine because I was getting into a food coma on the way back and needed a quick fix so I stopped at a Shell station I had been to previously on the way to Santa Cruz (wooh! trying say that bad boy without needing an extra breath). Anyways, we walked through the Great Mall in Milpitas, and went all the way to the other side to go eat at Johnny Rocket’s. We just ordered a bunch of appetizers and split them all, then navigated our way through the closed mall back to D&B. It was after nine, so D&B was making everyone over twenty-one check-in up front and wear wristbands.

Once we got back in the place, we bought some cards and headed to the shooter games. Yuan and I beat Time Crisis II while Dan played House of the Dead IV with two guns. After that, Yuan and I went to the bar to get something to drink, then headed over to the Trivia machine. I don’t know how, but we stayed there for two hours. It is apparently more addicting than I would’ve thought. We finally were able to pull ourselves away from the machine. We went over to the redemption counter and counted our tickets, over eleven-hundred.

We didn’t find anything we wanted, so we wandered around and looked for some more games to blow our remaining credits on. I found an old school Space Invaders and Qix! I sucked at both, but it was fun playing them again. That about did it for our time at D&B, we took one last stroll through the redemption center with no luck, then took off.

Getting Yuan home was just as fun as getting to D&B. We weren’t quite sure how we got to D&B, so we just followed some random guy for awhile and luckily the SUV happened to get back to 237. We took the 237 to the 101, then navigated surface streets until we got back to Yuan’s place. Of course, she forgot her keys, so she woke someone up to get back into her house. After that, I took off, headed home, and crashed hard.

Ah, how I love kernel panics. So I was running a test on an NV34, and all of a suddent these monospaced, white letters with a black background show up in the top left corner of my test machines screen: [pre I.P. Address is: something MAC Address is: something Waiting for remote GDB connection pre]Boy howdy do I love kernel panics = ).

Well, once work was out, we scarfed down some free food, then headed to Mountain View. Apparently an intern at NVIDIA roomed with an intern at Google during the school year, so they wanted to play some laser tag. It started out as a small group, maybe six or seven people from each place, but then someone at NVIDIA caught on and spammed the intern mailing list. Anyways, it turned into sixty people in total who played.

Laser tag was a ton of fun. I played in the first two games, I came in seventh and eleventh (a relatively high accuracy helped). We lost the first game, roughly four-thousand to thirty-six-hundred, and we lost the third game roughly forty-eight-hundred to forty-six-hundred. I am very glad I didn’t play in the second game, because our guys did absolutely terrible. The final score was something like five-thousand to three-thousand.

Oh well, so what if we lost all three games, we had some relatively cheap and energetic fun. Everyone seemed to be down for doing something like it again, so perhaps paintball in the near future.

Once we got back from Mountain View, Carl and Ilan took a swim in the pool, and we BSed until roughly midnight. Then it was off to bed for me.

Nothing truly eventful happened during work today. I started playing around with Shark (an Apple performance analysis tool) and a few more things, just trying to get comfortable with the build process and debugging process of the driver. However, I did take off from work around four to make sure that we would get to City Beach on time.Oh, what’s that? You don’t know what City Beach is? NVIDIA wanted to do something fun for all the interns at the beginning of the summer, so they rented out this place that has a bar, a restaurant, a rock-climbing wall, basketball/volleyball courts, and more.

When we first got there, everyone signed in, got their free NVIDIA shirt, then got leid (you know, this just isn’t as cool when you type it instead of say it), then got a ticket for a free drink at the bar. So, me and a few of us interns started playing pool and basketball for a little bit.

After not too long, we went into the rock-climbing area and gave that a shot. Let me say that I have never rock climbed before, but now I have! It was fun, I don’t see why everyone is so excited about it all the time, but I do see how it could be done for recreation a few times a month.

After rock-climbing, we were told to grab a seat and get some food, as the show would be starting soon. We originally had a table with all of our stuff there, but of course, someone decided that they were more entitled than we, and just sat down there anyways, even though all of our shirts and stuff were there. It turned out for the best, we got to sit at the luau during the show. As for the show, it consisted of a few musicians playing music while we watched tiki and hula dances. It was pretty cool, and of course, by far, the best part was when they grabbed people from the crowd and had them dance with the dancers. We now officially have blackmail material on Ilan.

After we got back from City Beach (I keep thinking Party Beach from Sloppy Seconds now), Ben and I complained about how hot our apartment gets and vowed to get an A/C unit. I don’t think they are ultra expensive, but they might be. We didn’t do much else for the rest of the night, just hung in our almost barren apartment.

Alright, woohoo! I got to go to my first Apple meeting (between everyone who works on Apple products at NVIDIA). The boss of the OpenGL Apple group is on vacation, and the boss of the other Apple group was there, and then we had someone who reports only to a VP head the meeting. He was rather direct and seemed to try and say that if people didn’t get something done, Apple would not be happy and NVIDIA would lose money.After work, Carl and Ilan (the two South African guys I met) and I went to go play pool. It was fun, we screwed around for awhile, made fun of the waitress, played some cut-throat, talked about music, etc. All in all a good time was had by many.

Oh, that van still hadn’t moved by the time I got back from the gym, so I went to the front office. They said that they would see if the owner lived there, because they didn’t like towing cars either. They also told me of a spot I could have in case mine gets taken again. Long story short though, when I came back, the van was gone.

On another note about transportation, Ben and I both have bikes here, and we were previously storing them on our balcony. We felt too lazy to carry them upstairs, so we just parked them by my car. I come down in the morning, ride to the gym, then park my bike. I notice as my park my bike that there are several cuts on the lock chain, and that part of it is cut almost halfway through. F***ing lowlifes around here need to get a job and get their moronic practices off the street.