Memoirs of a CPUNERD

Not a terribly exiciting night. With Carl gone to SIGGRAPH, I’m left with the sole responsibility of social planner for two weeks. Palo Alto has been good to us so far, so we decided to give it another shot.

We started out by going to Ruby’s. The last time I went there was with Yuan on a Saturday night, and it was absolutely slammed. This time… not so much. There was some one doing standup in a back room, but the main bar was pretty much empty. We sat down for half an hour or so, and I made fun of a few of the guys for watching “The World Series of Darts” on TV.

After Ruby’s, Chris was starving, and all of us were a little hungry, so we headed down the street to find any place that was still open. We stopped by a local pizza place and got a few slices. I think we made them a little mad though. We got there at 11:45 PM, and they closed at Midnight, but we still ordered anyways. We ended up staying there until 12:10 AM when they shut the lights off on us to tell us to get the hell out.

Well, today was my last day in Reno (sniff sniff). While I’m sad to leave my parents and friends, I’m more sad to have to go back to work after four days off. Oh well, at least I’ll have the NVIDIA gang to hang out with again. I didn’t really do much this morning, just hung out with my parents and my cousin Joe. We started talking about tattoos (since my dad just got one), and that totally reminded me of Red vs. Blue. I found the RvB PSAs online and showed them three, the point/counterpoint on tattoos, the internet vs real life, and the RvBIAA.After RvB, we watched some of Harold and Kumar Go To Whitecastle, but my parents fell asleep immediately (yet they saw fit to wake me up at 7:00 AM this morning….). Joe came to pick me up around 2:30 PM, and away we went. We headed up to UNR to throw some frisbee for an hour, then headed to Nick’s place to meet up with Nick, Jim, Brian, and Bei.

Joe and I hung out at Nick’s place for a few hours, then I was off to the airport. I got to the airport one hour before my flight, went through security (which took an awful long time because ONE person was holding up two lines), then got on the plane. Nice to be back, now that the weather isn’t complete crap.

Today was my Dad’s birthday. He got another tattoo as a present from my mom. We had a small get together at our place, with a few friends of my parents. I took off around 3:30 to pick up Joe, since he was going with us to Lake Tahoe to see a version of The Twelfth Night.

We stopped by the new mall in Reno first. I’m sorry, but I have to ask this… what the hell is an outdoor mall doing in an area that is either one-hundred and five degrees, or has three feet of snow on the ground? It doesn’t really make any sense to me. Okay, thank you for that. Joe and I checked out some of the stores, but in terms of number of stores and goods inside the stores, this mall was sorely lacking.

After we got done at the mall, we headed up Mt. Rose Highway to pick Brian up as he too was going with us to Shakespeare on the Lake. He and Bei are staying with one of Bei’s friends in a really nice place up in the Galena area, which worked well since it was on the way to the performance.

On the way to Lake Tahoe, we pulled over at one of the vista points to get some pictures of the lake. I’ve driven by the point tens of times, and even stopped to check out the view, but I never took any photos before.

Before the performance, there is a two-person comedic act that warms up the crowd. It was basically the same act as last year, but it was still funny.

Unfortunately, we weren’t allowed to take any pictures during the play, so I don’t have anything to show from it. And once the play got out, we just headed back home and went to sleep.

I made the mistake of riding in my mom’s convertible today. I was wearing a shirt with slightly shorter sleeves than usual, so now I have a farmer’s tan and a burn line. Huzzah…

I met up with my brother, Sebastian, and John for lunch at Bully’s. I keep telling Yuan that she needs to try their wings, since she made such a big deal out of the fact that bars use bags of wings. Sebastian tried to argue that UFC and Pride fighting was cool, even though both of them are practically gay porn.

After Bully’s, we Sebastian, John, and I went down to the quad to throw for a little bit. When we got tired, we went back to the lab. Brian and Bei were there, so we talked for a little bit about what we were going to do that night.

While Brian and Bei got their stuff ready, Sebastian and I were trying to hit each other with frisbees, and no, I don’t know why or how it got started. I guess I won though. I was standing up and Sebastian was sitting down and I was trying to hit him in the stomach and he would catch them. He made the mistake of leaning forward to grab one. As he was doing that, I threw the next one, which hit him squarely in the forehead… woops.

Brian, Bei, and I went back to their place where we played board games for a little bit. After we got tired of that, we headed out to pick up Bei’s friend Molli, then we were off to Silver Peak for dinner. We met Jesse and Penick there, where somehow we started talking about CS, go figure with five CS majors and a CS secreatary sitting at the table.

After Silver Peak, we got some ice cream from Cold Stone and walked along the river. On the way back to the car, we saw some (what we could only assume was) drunk guy stumbling around trying to practice martial arts.

When we got back to Molli’s place, we were going to play DDR, but some one was sleeping in the room in which we would play. Instead, Molli decided to clean up after her parents’ party, and she also got out a bottle of vodka. Bei kept talking about how she has such a high tolerance for alchohol, so I poured her four shots, which she took. Apparently her tolerance was a little higher than usual for a person of her stature and background, but not so high as she claimed. We called it a night shortly there after, with Brian and Bei driving me home.

I got three hours of solid sleep this morning, waking up at 9:30 AM, then falling asleep again for another hour until 10:30 AM. I woke up, got in the shower, then headed over to UNR to meet my mom and brother for lunch. It felt good walking around the campus, recognizing sights, bringing back a few memories.

I met the old DRI guys at the Claim Jumper for lunch at 1:00 PM. After that, we headed up to DRI to check out the CAVE. Penick showed me some of his VR work, which made us all kind of nauseous, which Bill explained was most likely due to the lack of sleep that morning.

After DRI, we headed down to UNR to play frisbee for a few hours. Sebastian, Jesse, Penick, and I went up to the quad and threw a few discs around. An hour into it, Josh showed up and threw with us for another our. By that time, we were all thoroughly exhausted and dehydrated, so we went back inside. We cooled down for an hour, then headed to the Farmer’s market in Sparks.

I must say, the market was good, more so than the Davis one, but calling it a Farmer’s market was a joke. It had a handful of fruit and vegatable vendors, and everything else was either political campaigners or tech companies or lemonade/beer/food vendors. It was all good though, especially considering the quantity of people at this market, estimated by the papers at five thousand.

Sebastian, John, Joe, and I walked around the place until 9:00 PM, when we met Joe’s friend Teresa. We hung out with her for about an hour, embarassed Joe (long story), then decided to take off. Teresa wanted to go to Rum Bullion’s, and I wasn’t feeling particularly argumentative, so away we went.

We ended up staying there until 1:30 AM, we were just dancing and hanging out. Joe was getting a rather big headache, so we took off, dropped Teresa off at her place, then went home and crashed.