Memoirs of a CPUNERD

Or so it seems. This stupid cold that started out easy just hasn’t let up. Something similar to this happened last year. I came down with a cold, it was really weak, and it went away in a few days. However, less than a week after the cold went away, it came back with a vengeance and wouldn’t let up. I think this has something to do with me not stopping my workout while sick. I’m under the belief now that this stupid cold is never going to go away. It might get a little better, but it’s not going to leave.

Monday morning I was still feeling horrible. I worked out, and the cardio was easier. I think the rest helped. Tennis was good, I’m getting the new serve down. It doesn’t have the zip my old serve had, but it has top-spin and control, two things that my old serve found in short supply. I looked for an armband for my new iPod Nano at the MU bookstore but couldn’t find one. I left lunch at the exact moment when everyone else began to arrive. After my first meeting, I went to the lab and watched The Family Guy while my machine was busy compiling code. Right before the MGI meeting, X finished compiling and was working. However, I didn’t have the NVIDIA driver downloaded… I met up with Shakeh after the meeting and then rode home. I finished the split code and began preparations to run it on the Boeing.

I didn’t feel much better on Tuesday than I did on Monday. I even had to sit out for frisbee because I just couldn’t run. Afterwards, I went home and then ran went to lunch, though I didn’t eat. I took Shakeh to health center, then went home for work. I picked shakeh up from her place before we stopped by Chipotle for dinner. We went to the fields and watched our team win the first playoff game. I was very pissed off at the other team though. The guys knew the ref, so the ref called two handballs on our team when the other team had several uncalled ones themselves. We still won 3-2 though. Ken just f***ing crushed their best player though. The guy was being a brute and a general asshole, so Ken waited for the ball to come near him, then just ran right towards the ball, crossed the guys line, lowered his head and shoulder, and just sent the guy flying. And the best part you ask? All perfectly legal. I took Ken to Safeway and then home afterwards, then went home myself.

With Wednesday came my first round of hitting with Andrea. She (of course) worked me over. Two funny things happened though. She lobbed me while I was at the net, and I smashed it right above her head. She screamed and ducked. I didn’t mean to aim at her, she just happened to be standing right in the way. We both laughed after she uncovered her head and looked up. The second funny thing was off of a rally. Andrea was standing at the T as she should have, I hit to her right, and as she was turning to go get it, she just collapsed. I was afraid at first that she twisted her ankle, and thus I actually ran and jumped the net to make sure she was okay, but when I went there she said she was fine. We both laughed at it, then continued hitting. Shakeh and I went to the Great Wall for their lunch buffet. After that, I headed to Reno. Frank and I went to see Hitman, then Bei and I went to the Circus-Circus for a bit. We went to BJ’s for dinner around 2120. We ordered pizza, but about thirty seconds after we ordered, the waitress came over and told us they were all out of pizza dough! So we took the menus back and then decided on Nachos and a Chili-cheese baked-potato. So we order, thirty seconds later, the waitress comes back and says they’re out of both of those as well! We then ask for the menu again. We didnt find anything, so we just said we wanted the check. The manager came over and apologized and offered us salads, but we politely said we understood they were just very busy that day and it was okay, and that we were fine with just paying and taking off. She said okay, but comped my OJ and gave us each $15 gift certificates.

Happy Thanksgiving! Yes, Thursday was turkey day. However, I woke up feeling really crappy. Because of that, I didn’t eat anything in the morning or for lunch. Instead I worked most of the morning. I went over to Dina’s boyfriend’s place around 1400. There was so much snack food, I just couldn’t resist. When dinner came around an hour and a half later, I was so full I barely ate anything (which sucks ’cause there was so much good stuff!). I stuck around and watched football for a bit, then went home around 1800 as I was starting to feel crappy. I fell asleep on the couch watching the USC-ASU game.

I woke up early Friday morning, packed my stuff, said goodbye to the parents, then headed back to Davis. I got in, unloaded, grabbed a blanket and pillow, then headed over to Dani’s. Apparently there was a miscommunication about the time, so I ended up waking him. Martyn showed up shortly after though, and Dani was ready really quickly. We just headed straight out, not stopping until we crossed a Subway in Santa Rosa. We continued on to Guerneville from there, meeting up with the gang at Safeway. We bought a few items, then Ita, Charlotte, Martyn and I headed back to the place to drop stuff off. We got back to Safeway, then decided to try and find a local place to eat. We went down one road and stumbled into a dive that actually allowed smoking! However, they didn’t serve food, and thus we were forced back down to the main street. We ended up going into a pizza place. The food was good, though the service was atrocious and they forced an 18% tip upon us. Afterwards, it was already 1645, so we went back to the cabin and started playing some card games (ERF Sean!). We played until about 2300, mixing ERF with king cup. afterwards, people started getting ready for bed and we eventually settled down around 0130.

I woke up Saturday (from the floor) around 0730. I was working on my laptop quietly, when out of the corner of my eye, I saw David just kinda standing there, looking at me. I was a little freaked out at first, but he was just waiting for me to notice him so he could ask where my laptop was. Over the next two hours, people started getting ready and cleaning up the place. We got out right at noon, then headed back. Bill played us some British pop, and then some JT. Emma and Charlotte enjoyed it, I’ll hold my opinion ; ) We stopped off for lunch at a Carl’s Jr. in Fairfield. Bill made the mistake of wearing jeans before ordering a Double Six-Dollar Burger. He had to change into sweats afterwards because he was so bloated and full. Some of the people decided they wanted to shop a bit in Vacaville, so we met up with Ita and the people carrier at the outlet strip mall. Emma got out and shopped while Dani and David rode back with me. I dropped everyone off, then went home and rested. Ita and the gang got back around 1800, and I went over to Ita’s place to join up with people around 1900. We had dinner, smores, enjoyed some funny youtube clips, and then I left to go home at 2100 as they were about ot watch Children of Men (an excellent movie by the way, I highly recommend it). I got home and was thinking of going to Giovanni’s goodbye party, but I just felt too crappy so I jumped right into bed and went to sleep.

On Sunday, Shakeh got back into town around noon. We watched Fantastic Four Two: Rise of the Silver Surfer, then some South Park. We went to see August Rush at 1600, then met up with my Mom and Vicky after picking up Miles and meeting up with Rawi. Mom and Vicky picked up Chipotle for us (luckily, otherwise I would have surely starved). We all got into the cars and then headed to the TSO concert. It was great as usual, though I realize now how numb one becomes from the lights, loud music, and constant snow fall. ; )

After the night of Izzard, I slept in until almost 10:00 AM. I finally got up because I told Simon I would take him to the UPS store shortly thereafter. I was actually hoping to get up even earlier so I could get my laundry done, but that obviously didn’t happen.

Simon said the UPS store was on Lafayette near Monroe. One thing he didn’t realize though… Monroe doesn’t intersect Lafayette. We drove around for about half an hour (way north of San Tomas/Montague) before we finally turned around and headed back south.

I was getting hungry, so we stopped by the Carl’s Jr. on the corner of Lafayette and Martin. We got there at 10:50 AM, and apparently their breakfast stops being served at 10:30 AM. I was about to just say “okay, nevermind, thanks though” when the person at the drive thru said breakfast would be okay. My guess is that the manager overheard what we wanted, realized that there was still thawed ingredients for what we purchased, then told the employee to just let us order. Regardless though, it worked out well for me and Simon.

After getting our food, we pulled out of the Carl’s Jr. and then immediately into the UPS store. Apparently the store was right across the street. Luckily Simon was paying attention, because it didn’t look like a UPS store. It was in actuality a general packaging store and a U-Haul outlet. They just happened to be a certified UPS pick-up location.

Forty-five minutes later, we were done at the packing store. We headed headed back to Greenpoint to pick people up. I had called Carl earlier to wake up Alden, and he said okay. He called me as we were on the way back to tell me that he had pounded on the front door for five minutes with no response from Alden. That’s when I informed him that the front door was unlocked, and the he could just go into Ben’s room and stir Alden.

Matt, Aaron, Simon, Alden, and I headed to NVIDIA. On the way, we stopped back by Carl’s Jr. to get some food for Alden and Matt. Matt ended up not wanting anything, due to the fact that it was now twelve, and breakfast was indeed over. We got to NVIDIA and started the arduous task of setting up the place. Carl showed up not much later (perhaps 12:30 PM), and that gave us a nice, even, six people with which to start.

We played with us six until 5:00 PM or so. Andrew and his friend Stuart (or Stewart, not sure which) showed up and hopped on to start playing some Q3A deathmatch. We continued playing eight player DM for another hour or so.

Around 6:00 PM, the Waterloo guys showed up and starting getting their machines in order. We were finally all set up with twelve people. However, that posed a problem. DotA only allows ten players. Andrew and Stuart decided to sit out and play Counterstrike for awhile, so we got to play some 5v5 DotA until 8:15 PM.

Being as I was the only one with a car, I took orders for Quiznos. Carl, Alden, and I went to go pick up the food shortly afterwards. We first went to the Quiznos on El Camino near the train station. You can imagine our shock when we got there and both Quiznos and Starbucks were closed! Quiznos actually closed at 7:30 PM on a Saturday, WTF!? We called Sean again, and this time we were glad to hear his response. He was playing drinking Trivial Pursuit with some friends (don’t quite know what that entails), but he was still able to locate a store for us. We got to the Quizno’s on Homestead at 8:52 PM with twelve orders. Of course, the place closes at 9:00 PM, so they weren’t thrilled to take our order. They did submit though, so we just gave them our monstrous order and then took off.

We got back to the party around 9:30 PM, and continued to play DotA until 1:00 AM. At that time, Simon and Fady wanted to bail. I told Simon I would give him a ride home, but he insisted I stay if I wanted to. I felt bad, but if he was offering, I wasn’t going to look a gift-horse in the mouth. The rest of us stayed and played another game of DotA, finally finishing at 2:30 AM. We tore the place down, then got back to Carl’s at 3:15 AM. Alden and I stayed at Carl’s until 4:30 AM talking, then went back to my place to go to sleep. Of course, this means I would have to force myself to get out of bed at 9:00 AM so I would be tired enough to go to sleep tomorrow night at 11:00 PM. Sigh, if only my schedule were a little more flexible.

Lee, Matt, Carl, and Brian all went rock climbing. I was waiting for Carl to get done, since we were going to go out for a small amount of time afterwards. Around 8:30 PM, I was online, just doing some surfing/writing. I was feeling a little sleepy, so I called Carl and told him I was just going to take a quick nap, but I’d still be up for going out. I don’t remember anything clearly, except waking up the next day at 6:45 AM when my alarm went off…

Apparently I fell asleep, Carl came in two hours later. I got ready, but he said we should just call it an early night. Apparently I didn’t argue because we didn’t go out. Oh, and apparently I also called Sam around 10:50 PM, but I have absolutely no recollection of the conversation. Maybe I just left a message saying we weren’t going out that night.

Yes, yes, yes, we had a LAN party today (anyone guess where the name of this post come’s from?). The LAN party was scheduled for noon. Before that, I did some laundry. I realized that I’m almost out of detergent… sigh. I don’t want to take anything back with me to Davis except my electronics and my clothes, so buying crap like that isn’t something I wanted to do… Oh well.
After I finished my laundry, I grabbed Ben and Carl, then headed off to Quiznos for lunch. We picked up our food, then headed to NVIDIA to set up our machines. Lee was already there, and others were getting in. We were all set up by 1:30 PM.
We started with Quake III: Capture Strike. Carl had me hook my computer up to the projector so others could watch me and “learn” (He means screen-peak = ) ). After Q3A, we switched to DotA. We took a break around 8:30 PM for food, then continued playing until 11:30 PM. Ah man, I have to be up in seven hours for the gym tomorrow…

Today I actually moved in to my apartment. I packed up my stuff, said goodbye to those in Davis, and headed out. I of course had to stop and get something to eat first, so I met my friends Brian and Bei at Posh Bagel in Davis on F street. They were going to San Francisco to pick up Bei’s mom from the airport as she was visiting from China.We left Davis at 8:30. I decided to take I-80 to the 101 since I wanted to caravan with Brian and Bei. It was funny, Brian usually never goes more than a few miles over the speed limit, but Bei, being the bad influence she always is, made him go faster than that to keep up with me. They actually passed me at one point, it was like something out of the twilight zone.

BB wanted to stop in Chinatown and pick up some Ginseng or Ginger or something, so I left them at the 101 and continued on to Santa Clara. I arrived around 10:00 and unloaded my stuff. The bed I bought came with a mechanical air pump, which was really nice. The last time I pumped up a queen size inflatable bed was in Reno, and I had to use a foot pump, it sucked. The bed was probably the only thing that took a significant amount of time, everything else went really fast, so I got back in my car and headed to San Francisco to meet up with BB.

I got ahold of BB, and we were originally trying to find a spot to eat. It turns out they were still at the airport, so I swerved across a few lanes of traffic (well, not really, but let me pretend to bold and daring, or should that be bold and daring, hmmm….) and went into SFO for the first time that I can remember. The place was fairly monstrous in comparison to RTO, but luckily the international wing is right near the parking structure, so I didn’t have a chance to get lost. We waited about five minutes, and Bei’s mom finally made it through customs. You can definitely see the resemblance between Bei and her mom, just a side note I thought I’d throw in.

After we picked up Bei’s mom, the four of us used Brian’s GPS to find a nearby place to eat. I felt like Indian or Meditteranean, but the only stuff not completely out of the way was in San Bruno. The town was kinda depressing, big-little city looking, dirty, I think you know what I mean. We parked our cars and walked down one of the main roads. Most of the places we saw were closed, so we decided to eat at a Korean place. Funny thing though, we walk in (keep in mind it’s a Sunday around 1:00), and the place is packed with Koreans. Turns out that we forgot Korea was playing France in the World Cup. We had a really good time there. Most of us got BiBimBap’s (I like the Stone Pot BiBimBap from Manna More), and then we all kicked back and watched the Korean’s go nuts. We all had a really good time, a few of the older Korean guys gave me high fives as they were walking out, it was cool.

After lunch, I headed back to Santa Clara to meet Ben and his dad. We went to IKEA to pick up some furniture, but we ended up just getting a dining room set. After IKEA, we went back to the place and began setting up the dining room set. I set up the table, then had to head to meet someone who was selling a laptop. I ended up buying the laptop, and so far it works alright. I am having a problem with Linux though, there is a native Broadcom WiFi driver now, and it doesn’t completely work. However, because there is a driver, Ubuntu (yes, I installed Ubuntu instead of Gentoo, I didn’t have an internet connection) didn’t install the NDISWrapper driver, it installed the native driver, which doesn’t work.

After that though, we went to Walmart to pick up a few miscellaneous items. I was going to pick up a bike, but I didn’t really want another Walmart bike, so I just said screw it. However, in the process, I forgot that I needed pillows, and thus will be sleeping tonight without a pillow (poor me, shed a tear if you want).

Oh, it also turns out that our apartment does not have cooling, only heating, so it has been getting excessively hot, and we haven’t even been in the place a day. We must, certainly must, do something about this.