Brian, Brittany, and I took a morning at the Chocolate Garage, and Palo Alto farmers market. They got some good fruit and sourdough. We then went into Stanford, and took the grand tour. They were very impressed by the buildings and the space. We went through the Stanford Museum, and they really liked the art there. It is a surprisingly good eclectic collection. After that they dropped me off at home and they went to Ikea.
Brian and Brittany showed up Friday afternoon, and we decided to bike around SF. We got to the city and headed over to Golden Gate Park. We walked around the Japanese Garden, which was very nice.
We also got to go around the rest of the park and see the lakes, the windmill, the beach, and the bison.
After we were done biking around we went to Bo’s place and decided to grab dinner at a food truck area. The food was very good and we ate at several different places. Most of the others got ice cream tacos for dessert, but I got a Thai ice tea popsicle.
Once we got back to Bo’s place Brian and Brittany’s bikes were gone. They had the wire based locks and those wires had been cut. My bike was there, as I had a U-lock. We met at the train for the way back. This was complicated by the end of a Giants game. We managed to get a decent seat, but on the second train. Steph was nice enough to pick us up at the train station and take us home.
Brittany and Steph ended up making some of the candies that Steph likes and Brittany liked them too!
We got up early and waited for Rose to come by. Rose is one of Stephanie’s teammates, and she is new to the school. She joined us on the ride up, and we grabbed coffee before hitting the road. We got there a little before the Filipino festival started. I was hoping to do some Filipino arts and crafts, but it was conspicuously absent. I sat down and watched the matches once everyone had shown up and gotten started. They were very fast, but there were quite a few of them. Stephanie only did two rounds:
Video of round1 , Video of round2
After the festival we went to a restaurant nearby and had a relaxing lunch. I drove back to Beachhead and we relaxed for a bit.
Stephanie and I decided to do a hike with a meetup group. We went to Castle Rock State Park to do the hike and the group turned out to be a rather large one. There were a little over 50 people there and most of them were either significantly older than us, or transient foreigners. They were all great people, and most were decent hikers, but we didn’t feel like there was the kind of people that we could be friends with. We got a lot of good suggestions of other meetup groups to try. I also think a hike with 50 people was way too many, and the waiting for the slow people to catch up got annoying towards the end.
The hike was a total of about 8 miles, and had some amazing views.
I had a really good time at the convention, learning a good number of new games. There was one card game that was very simple, but very deep in strategy. I really enjoyed playing it. The game Java that was very similar to Tikal was way too complex. I enjoyed listening to James’ lectures, and they had a lot of information I didn’t already know. The one on probabilities I already knew most of, but that was to be expected. I’m really looking forward to his lectures on Kickastarter and randomness.
Stephanie was amazing, and took me to a surprise event on Saturday for my birthday. We went east into the valley and when we started getting close I saw the advertisements for the caves. I was still excited to see if it was going to be the caves. We got there and saw a map of the caverns, It went very deep and on top of that we got to repel through the ceiling! I was scared when I came through the crack in the top, because it was 100 feet from the floor. On the floor there was a “bone pile” that was made of hundreds of people who fell through the crack in the ceiling. We continued down to the adventure tour. The tiny cracks we crawled through in the adventure tour were just big enough to squeeze through. The best part was the final climb up a chimney and then the slide down the cave wall. I really enjoyed the trip and would love to do something like it again.
We took Andrew, Lee, Esther, and Kevin. Steph was the captain most of the time, and she did very well. There were a few parts where she was a little forgetful about some important terminology and how to do some of the more complex maneuvers, but all in all it was a good trip. We had lunch out at sea, and Andrew and Kevin got sick from it. I found that heaving to and sitting there a while is when people tend to get sick. I think we should eat before heading out from now on, and less focus of cheese in the meals. After sailing we went to The Penny and got some amazing ice cream. The strawberry was delicious and the white chocolate wasn’t bad either.
Steph and I went to SF on Sunday to meet with lots of people. The first group we met with was one of Steph’s friends from her robotics team. We had a tasty lunch of east Asian style sandwiches and then went to the Asian art museum to see the exhibit on yoga. The exhibit wasn’t what I was expecting as most of the history of yoga is a mix of Buddhism and Hinduism, without much in the way of taking care of the body. Most of the history of yoga was in fact focused on acetic life, and not having a particularly well maintained body. The body part of yoga came about from a westernization and reaction to scientific thought. This was almost completely separate from the religious part of the practice. The westernized yoga was then taken back to the west and westernized a second time to get what we would think of as yoga. This big change was unexpected, and there was surprisingly little about why it changed. I was a little disappointing at the lack of historical context given to most of the exhibits at the Asian Art Museum. Most of the time there would be a sentence or two on the wall when entering a room, and a description of each item that amounted to “this is a vase from the Han dynasty.” I was hoping for something more along the lines of a read documentary where it would say what things were used for, how they would be seen in daily life, what kind of person would have them, and so on. I still enjoyed the time.
We then went to an ice cream place and met up with Jeremy. This liquid nitrogen ice cream was from a small stand by a park, called Smitten. It was tasty, but there wasn’t as much choice, and a much longer wait.
We then went to Nick’s place to watch some Game of Thrones. It was nice to see Simon again, and I really enjoyed watching more Game of Thrones. The story did a lot of re-introduction, but that is to be expected in a season opener. I brought up the series over time breakdown of ratings, and we had fun pulling up different series, and seeing how they changed over time. Breaking bad had by far the most impressive point, with a 10.0 on an episode with 48,000 votes. Nothing else came close.
Bo is now living close to Japan Town, and we were able to hang out with him Saturday evening. We stopped by and talked for a while. His new place is really nice and he is sharing it with a guy who is doing a food truck startup. I’ll have to go work with him and get his feedback on the work we are doing.
It's an Exciting World 