Search

It's an Exciting World

The life and times of David Geisert

Open Search
Author

dgeisert

Brunch at Adam’s

Steph and I started the morning out well with a bike ride to Palo Alto.  The ride was very pleasant, but we didn’t get to stay very long there.  We went to the Chocolate Garage and I got some of the Momotombo candies.  There was a big barbershop choir there and they sounded pretty good.  It was different to hear the barbershop style of singing as a choir instead of a pure quartet.

A group of us got together at Adam’s today for Brunch.  It was really nice of him to have us over since he had spent the last week at his new job.  From what I can tell he isn’t used to working so much.  It was rather tasty, with Adam providing eggs, bacon, and liquor soaked fruit.  I brought the chocolates I had just picked up.  We went to the movie Pacific Rim, but weren’t joined by Tina and Amit.  Nick, Adam, Steph, and Andrew left from there to go to the movie.  At the theatre we met up with Brian.

0

Korean BBQ

Wit, Riley, Nick, and I went to Jang Su Jang (Yelp Link) last ;night and it was quite tasty.  I haven’t been eating much meat lately, and the last time I did I got sick, so I stayed away from the actual bbq part of it.  I got some of the tasty tofu, dumpling soup.  I really enjoyed the food and the company.  Afterwards we went to Honeyberry (Yelp Link) for desert.  I got the creme cheese roti bun, and it was delicious.

0

Winter’s Heart: Wheel of Time 9

This book certainly had a lot happen right at the end, but I didn’t see much of the build up to it coming.  There seemed to be so much more plotting and scheming going on, without as much build up.  Even the great amount of action at the end left a ton of open questions.  I liked this one and the end sequence was great, but something tells me that the next few books will be mostly wrapping up the loose ends from what just happened.

Audible Link

0

Kitties Doing Well

The kitties were better today.  They were playing more and exploring more.  Lana was able to open the drawer on my bed and get underneath into the empty middle space.  Luckily she was able to get back out again.  I thing they are both getting much more comfortable in the room and are almost ready to get acquainted with Howard.

0

Getting Advice from People Who Know What They Are Doing

Today I spend most of the day meeting with people who knew a lot more about developing and coding than myself.  I in turn gave them advice about product and marketing.  The talks with Fadi were really good.  I learned a lot from him when I was at Chegg, including everything I know about SQL and a lot of what I know about Node.js.  We chatted about where he is going with his products, and about where I am going with my game.  I’d love to work with him should things not pan out with the game.

I also met with the backend developer for a China/USA game team and asked a lot about what he uses for his databases, servers, API handling, etc.  It was really useful information and gives me a great direction to look into.  He recommended going with Node.js.  It is good for me since I have the most experience with JavaScript and some experience with Node.js.

0

Got Kitties!

I went to the Palo Alto Animal Services to get 2 adorable kittens.  One is an orange tabby and the other is a Siamese mix.  They are soooo adorable.  The orange tabby is a boy I’ve named “Archer” and the Siamese is a girl I’ve named “Lana.”  I spend the day cuddling with them and getting them used to me and my room.  We tried to introduce Howard, but Lana did not get along with him.  I’ll ease them into Howard over the next few days.  They are soooooo cute.

000_0019 IMG_0276 000_0017 000_0016 000_0014 000_0013

1

Timelines and Avalon at Box

Last night I went to Box for board games night there.  Nick, Peter, Brian, and myself played Timelines, a game of time travel to exploit markets.  I got a pretty good handle of end game conditions from the get go, but with the way the game was played there was no way to know what you would be able to do next turn.  Anyone could completely throw off your ability to do something, which would then make you waste more turns trying to get back to a state where you could do it, just to be foiled again.  If people were only trying to do what was best for themselves then this wouldn’t be a big issue, but it was so easy to block someone that you couldn’t finish the game.  It was especially true when there was one clear leader, which is the position I got into early on since I chose the specializing strategy, which paid off well in this game.  I still ended up winning by a large margin.

BGG Link Timelines

We also played Avalon last night, which was a good bit of fun.  We had up to 9 players in one game, and we also included many of the special characters.  I got to be a special character most of the time, which was really nice.  I won most of the games I was a part of, but in Avalon it is hard to make sure anything specific happens.  I did lose when I was Merlin, which was disheartening.  The guy playing Percival didn’t know what to do, so he didn’t back me up when I pointed out the bad guys I knew.  A suspicious play by Candice also made me think that she was Mordred when it was actually Adam.  All in all it is a well balanced game with a good bit of manipulation.

BGG Avalon

0

The Lean Startup

This is a book about how to focus on what matters in a Startup.  It also changes the definition of startup to include groups inside of larger companies.  The processes that it describes touch on several of the books I’ve read before, such as the Toyota Way.  I think that the learning that I got at Zynga are very heavily along the lines of this book, with some important differences.  The data driven approach is certainly a halmark of the Zynga approach.  I hope to have tighter feedback loops, and that means getting things exposed to people that can give the feedback.  I will try to keep myself focused on what will matter both long term and short term, and reconcile those as needed.

Audible Link

0

Monday Volleyball … ish

Yesterday after finishing work, I went to Stanford to play volleyball.  Not many of the people that I wanted to play with were there.  Nima was, but the other people playing volleyball were much better than him, and he is much better than me.  I decided to not bother those guys too much, and let Nima play a game without me.  I got a little bit more work done while he was playing and got to watch two pretty good games at the same time.  We then went to Sliders in Palo Alto.  We split a pitcher of Great White, which was a nice orange beer.  The sweet potato fries were really tasty, and I got 2 sliders to complete the dinner.  I went over to Steph’s after that and saw her finish off her Messenger bag for the Faith outfit.  It was really nice.

0

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑