Jeff Stuart - Memoirs of a CPUNERD

I had my interview with another group at NVIDIA today. My interview was originally scheduled for 9:00 AM, but it apparently got moved to 9:40 AM and I was never told. No bother, I just hung out in the lobby for a little while. I was escorted to the interview room and begun my three hour interview process.

My interview got out promptly at 12:45 PM, after which I went up and got Carl and the Waterloo boys. We had lunch for an hour or so, then I took Carl to Safeway to get some “custard.” Silly South African’s and their obscure “C” foods (inside joke I’m afraid).

I headed back to Davis shortly thereafter and arrived around 4:30 PM. I cleaned up my room a little bit by stacking my boxes of books and beginning the process of throwing things out (which I would’ve done prior to moving *out* had I the chance). I also took the time to set up my computer so I had something to do that night.

I finished what I could, and at 9:30 convinced Jeff and Frances to go to Froggy’s with me. Jeff and Frances both biked to Froggy’s, so they weren’t going to drink. I wasn’t planning on drinking, but Jeff said that it wasn’t right that we were in a bar and none of us were drinking. I decided to try another beer, since you never know when my taste buds will awaken. Apparently it wasn’t that night though. I grudgingly finished the beer right around when Steve showed up (~10:30 PM). Steve ordered a drink. However, he didn’t want to drink alone, so I ordered a Long Island. I turned my head for a little bit to watch TV and when I looked back, the glass I ordered was about half made from the bartender. It looked shockingly empty (I thought Long Island’s had five shots in them), and he topped most of it off with iced tea. We sat down and I finished the drink rather quickly. I went back to get another one, figuring that if they were weak, I could have one more. This time, I saw the bartender actually make it completely… Apparently I was right on the quantities, it had about five shots in it, and just a splash of iced tea.

Jeff, Frances, Steve, and I sat and talked for another half hour, then Jeff and Frances had to go. Steve didn’t want to drive right away since he still had some alchohol in his system. I told him I’d hang out with him for awhile, but that we should go over and check out the G street pub. At that moment, I got up, and suddenly realized I must’ve been sitting absolutely still. All the alchohol I had hit me hard, and I felt incredibly dizzy. I gave myself a moment and then continued outside to see Jeff and Frances off.

Steve and I went to the G street and played/mangled some darts. He took off around 11:30 PM, and I stuck around to play pool. I ended up meeting some rather nice C.S. (Cultural Studies, hah! Tricked ya, didn’t I?) Ph.D. students and played pool with them until 1:00 PM. By that time, I felt comfortable walking home, so I just headed off. I stayed up until 1:30 AM or so, had plenty of water to try and avoid my first hangover the next morning, and then headed off to bed.

It’s apparently very cold in Carl’s apartment without a blanket. I got a decent amount of sleep, but I kept waking up cold. When I got up, I straightened up the apartment for Carl and Fred. Carl got up sometime before 11:00 AM, and we went to Quiznos to get some lunch. We got back and went over to the Waterloo boys’ place to play some DotA. We stayed there until 8:00 PM or so. We headed back to Carl’s place to get the “movie screen” set up. We decided to watch Lucky Number Slevin. It was just us, the Waterloo Boys, and Andrew, Vani, and Roma. All in all a nice, relaxing day. We went to bed around 2:00 AM, just enough time to get some decent sleep before wine tasting in Healdsburg and Sonoma.

It was back to Santa Clara for me. I had to meet Robert in San Mateo around noon, so I got in touch with the NVIDIA gang and had them postpone lunch a little while. I got in around 12:45 PM and ate with them. Everyone had to go back to work, so I went to Carl’s for a little bit.

I was supposed to play tennis with Matt when he got off work at 5:00 PM, but I fell asleep on Carl’s floor until 5:30 PM… woops. By the time I got over to Matt’s, he already had plans (looking at a car to buy).

I went back to Carl’s place for a little bit, then headed to NVIDIA to meet everyone for dinner. Carl and I spent our dinner time convincing more people to show up to his party. We eventually got another four people to commit, so we called it good and headed back to GP.

The first order of business back at Carl’s place was to get refreshments for the night. We went across the street to the corner store, collected our cache of drinks, then got some funny looks from the guys since we were buying more than a hundred and fifty bucks worth of drinks.

When we got back, Mel decided she would play DJ for the night using Carl’s iPod. I ran over to get the Waterloo boys, who weren’t doing anything, but thought they would show up “fashionably late.” Being as they weren’t doing anything, it was easy to convince them to just come over.

Sometime around 11:00 PM, three guys from across the way showed up. They didn’t work at NVIDIA, well, one of them did, but we didn’t find that out until later. They just “heard a party and thought they’d check it out.”

Various others came and went before midnight. Various fun was had, including an appearance by Fado-man, various breakage of frisbees on my knee, and the arrival of “Dr. Andrew and the women.”

None of the girls were willing to spank Carl twenty-five times, so instead we had to give Carl twenty-five heaves in the air. It seemed like a good idea, but in practice, Carl almost had his head slammed into the ceiling-light fixture several times. In the end, he was apparently quite disoriented.

The party progressed steadily throughout the night. Various goings on occurred including girls dancing, boys being roudy, and Fadoman making his transformation back into Fady.

Apparently the girls have a habit of trying to get guys to kiss each other. They tried before, and they were trying again. Between Carl and I though, we convinced them that if we gave each other a kiss on the cheek, we could get pictures of all the girls giving us kisses.

The party continued raging for awhile longer. Security was eventually called for noise disturbances, so we had to tone it down a bit. I took some people home and got back around 3:00 AM, and eventually had to kick everyone out around 3:45 AM.

And thus did the adventures of the nine interns start. Their journey began as one of separation, for their party was dispursed across the lands of the Valley of Silicon. The stalwart Ian and foolish Matt traveled back to the dwelling of the interns long before the other interns were freed from the curse of “work.” Six of the nine interns supped together in the area of freely acquirable food. Meanwhile, in the far away town of Sunnyvale, the brave and able Roma was competing in a tournament of bad mintons (whatever the heck a minton is…, but anyways, back to the story).

Thus did the resourceful Jeff, with his two squires (Dan and Fady) and the fair lady Vani make their way to the town of Sunnyvale. Upon coming to the tower where the lady Roma was in contest, one could see but a single entrance to the building. Also noticed by the master Jeff was that no beasts of burden were present. Taking this into account, Jeff dared the dreaded area known as “the back of the building” in search of the Lady Roma. Fortune smiled him, for upon vanquishing the evil monsters in “the back” he found his goal, the fair Lady Roma.

With the maidens fair accompanying them, Jeff and his squires continued onward to their final destination, the hall of billiards. The other knight Lee had already ventured forth to the dwelling of the interns to enlist the services of Ian, Matt, and the Rafel foreign one. There way was not paved with as much peril as that of the noble Jeff’s, hence their early arrival.

Upon entrance to the hall of billiards, Jeff, Lee, and the (now slightly intoxicated) Matt did battle with the dreaded “Clerk.” In the end, they were all forced to temporarily surrender papers of their bloodline in exchange for the services offered therein. Their six companions were asked for nothing, as the galliant trio had bartered the agreement as such.

Yeah, so if you couldn’t tell, I got bored trying to write about the night and went back and changed it to gibberish = p. We finished playing pool after three hours, then went home and crashed.

I woke up and decided that I needed to get some “work” work done. Being as I stayed out kind of late last night, I slept in until 9:00 AM before finally getting up, hence I didn’t get into NVIDIA until noon. I stayed there working until roughly 4:30 PM when Lee came to get me to go out to lunch. We went to a salad buffet place near Lawrence and Walsh, it was really good, and it wasn’t that expensive.

After lunch/dinner, we went to GP to pick up Ian, then fueled up and headed to the show. We got to the arena half an hour before the show started, which was just about right. I was able to get rid of the fourth ticket for a little less than I paid (no big deal though). We then stood in line, talking about various things and laughing at some of the people standing in line (”Don’t be that guy!”).

We finally got into the arena and found a place to stand. Surprisingly, we were only about six rows of people from the front of the stage. We sat through the opening band, Is Is (actually, it’s Isis, but I want to call them Is Is cause they definitely weren’t, make sense?). They were good for what they were, which was an incendiary device to the audience. I seriously think that bands are getting crappy openers so they sound that much better by comparison.

After another hour or so, Tool made their way onto the stage. By this time, the crowd was getting packed in. So much so that I had to keep holding people away from me. When Tool actually started playing (they opened with “H”), as you can imagine, the place went nuts. However, due to the fact that the place was packed, pits didn’t erupt, the entire crowd was just jumping up and down and swaying all over the place.

It didn’t take more than a few songs before the place started heating up (literally) and people started sweating. It got worse as time went on, but I managed to stay a little cooler than most by keeping people away.

Throughout the show, I probably moved almost a mile, even though by the end of the show I ended up no more than five feet from where I started. Combine that with the massive amount of (other people’s) sweat on me, my near eye-gouging incident, and near-dehydration, and it made for a rather eventful (and tiresome) night.

Tool finished playing around 11:00 PM. They actually sat on the stage waiting for the crowd to convince them to play again. Luckily that didn’t take too long, and they finished off a few more songs, ending with their usual closer, AEnema.

We all had to ride without our shirts since they were so covered in other people’s sweat. We were all also really thirsty, so we stopped by a gas station. Of course, that meant putting our shirts back on, which was just completely nasty (I wouldn’t wish putting on a cold-sweat soaked shirt on anyone).
I dropped Lee off, then me and Ian got back to GP around midnight. I finished off my laundry around 2:00 AM, then headed to bed.