[About Me]
19 July 2007
The Latest Happenings in the Life of Mike
Danielle flew out on Monday morning. We ended up getting things more or less patched up by Friday night, so things have returned to normalcy on that front, and in some ways better because it shows we can overcome these little life hurdles and such. The first weekend she visited we ended up going on a dinner/dance cruise around the San Francisco Bay and that was pretty fun, but it was a little bit chilly that day so we weren't really able to be outside all that much and the fog was pretty bad that day so some of the sites we weren't able to see as well as we would have liked. The next day we drove down to Big Sur State Park and drove along the coastal highway a bit (taking plenty of pictures along the way), we then hiked for a total of maybe 5 or 6 miles (fairly light hike) around Big Sur to take in the sights. On the way back from Big Sur, we stopped in Carmel-by-the-Sea and walked around a little bit there (bought some truffles) and then went to dinner at a little Italian place (great ambiance--like everything in Carmel, but rather disappointing food as the dish Danielle got had sauce that wasn't spiced correctly, it tasted almost flavorless). On Sunday we didn't really do much, although I did give her a tour of the Google campus and we did some grocery shopping so she'd have food for the week--oh, and we went to Gordon Biersch so she could try the garlic fries (which are phenomenal).
On Wed. during the week we went with some other Google interns and saw the premiere of Harry Potter 5 at the IMAX in San Jose (I REALLY wanted to see the Ministry of Magic battle on the IMAX--it was as good as I expected on the IMAX, but far too short for my tastes... especially since that was THE scene I had been thinking about for over a year when it came to Harry Potter since it just screams big screen scene...) Then on Friday we went to some Ethiopian restaurant in San Jose, that was the first time either of us had tried Ethiopian but it was pretty interesting. Saturday was spent in San Francisco where we went to Lombard Street (I tried going up the steep part of it, but because the traffic was stop and go--meaning when I stopped my gas engine would shut off and switch to the electric--and the street was steep, I wasn't able to make it all the way to the top as a little over half way up I had drained my battery and the electrical assist was therefore no longer available and without that I had a measly four cylinder engine to work with and that wasn't cutting it). I ended up having to wait for the battery to recharge to at least one or two bars and then I simply did a u-turn and navigated around the steep portion of the hill and to the bottom of Lombard Street so we could walk around and view the curvy portion of the road/take pictures. After that we headed over to Fisherman's Wharf and walked around a little bit over there--it was pretty nice, I expected a lame excuse for a tourist location (like Navy Pier in Chicago), but even though it's equally commercialized it was pretty nice and there were some decent photo locations. We ended Saturday with dinner in Chinatown where we made the mistake of having dinner at Chinatown Restaurant (they were the first place to hand us a flier--with a coupon even) and they have some of the worst service I've ever seen in any restaurant (the food wasn't bad though, but the service was absolutely horrendous), and what's more was that they didn't take the percent off from the coupon at first so I had to bring that up with them--but the worst part was that even though there were just 2 of us they added the tip into the actual bill (and it's a handwritten bill, so not only do you have to read the bill, which from my experience many people don't do--they just look at the total--but you also have to decipher their rather bad handwriting to realize that the tip is written into the bill).
On Sunday we ended up going to Sonoma County. The first winery we went to was Gloria Ferrer, which specializes in sparkling wines (those and dessert wines are my two favorite types). They don't do traditional tasting so you have to buy the wine by the glass--we bought two glasses (one of the sparkling rose and the other of the royal cuvee) and tasted them. I probably would have bought a bottle of the royal cuvee as I liked the mildness and the subtle fruit flavors of the wine, but after spending $16 on two glasses of wine, I opted not to buy a bottle from them. Since a glass of wine is more than we really wanted to do at multiple wineries (and as we got into Sonoma late), we didn't stop at any other winery into we got into the actual town of Sonoma. When we got into town we went to the local grocery store (The Cheese Factory) and sampled some cheeses and had a peach champagne sorbet--which was really good (the cheese, at least the kind available for tasting was pretty bad though--most were various varieties of Jack cheese and all were low quality cheeses). We then went over the the Castle Winery (their vineyards are located throughout Sonoma County--they just have a little building where they do the tastings in the town itself) and there we did a tasting. Castle Winery, unlike Gloria Ferrer, does tastings the way tastings should be done--you pay $5 per person and then you get to taste an actual sample size portion of all of the wines they have available for sale (we chose to sample just the 5 that were of greatest interest to us). I enjoyed their Pinot Noir, but I ended up buying a bottle of their port instead as I enjoyed that even more as it had just the right level of sweetness for me. I also bought a bottle of their chocolate sauce made from the port, which I highly recommend--it is incredible chocolate sauce. Drinking the chocolate sauce and then tasting the port though changes the flavor of the port considerably--the port by itself is fairly sweet but if you taste the chocolate sauce and then taste the port afterwards the port has more of a bitter red wine taste to it. Oh, and Castle Winery waives the tasting charge if you buy a bottle (making it even more of the right way to run a wine tasting). We ended the day by making a quick stop at Muir Beach for the sunset and the nightfall--we would have stayed a bit longer, but the beach closes at 9.
Outside of Danielle's visit, I'm down to my last three weeks of my internship (once this week finishes up tomorrow). This week was pretty busy and these next few weeks promise to be equally busy. I'm definitely going to miss the California weather. I'm also not looking forward to going from running studies/writing reports/writing occasional code to writing code/writing research papers/running an occasional study as my preference is in running studies more so than writing lots of code (I enjoy the writing part in both cases). There's also the fact that I've met some pretty cool people over here and most of the people I hung out with in Iowa are now gone (finished with their PhD or Masters). I do enjoy my research though--both my funded research (which is a pretty cool project in its own right) and my unfunded audio game project (which I just find fun to work on/like that it exposes me to the visually impaired community that I've learned a lot from). On the topic of grad school, the blog entries I wrote for my class last semester (along with the blog entries the rest of the class wrote) have now been compiled into a self-published book available as a freely downloadable PDF or available for purchase, both of which can be done here: http://www.shinyhappyusers.org. So check it out (and I don't get any money from the book--our class is selling it at cost, so feel free to just download the free PDF version). Credit for the book goes to Derrick (the professor who taught the class) as it was his idea to put one together and then to the rest of the class who spent the time editing it (with moving out to California/starting my internship, I ended up not being able to put much time into the book at all).
And speaking of books... I actually decided to pre-order a copy of Harry Potter at a local Borders, so I'll be getting my copy of it at midnight on Friday. My weekend will likely be spent just reading it until I finish it--this way I won't have to worry about overhearing people talking about it/spoiling it. Plus it IS the final book, so it's worth the loss of sleep to a degree.
On a final note, I recently started being active on LinkedIn (the social networking site aimed at professionals), so if you want to join my network feel free to add me through my profile page.
On Wed. during the week we went with some other Google interns and saw the premiere of Harry Potter 5 at the IMAX in San Jose (I REALLY wanted to see the Ministry of Magic battle on the IMAX--it was as good as I expected on the IMAX, but far too short for my tastes... especially since that was THE scene I had been thinking about for over a year when it came to Harry Potter since it just screams big screen scene...) Then on Friday we went to some Ethiopian restaurant in San Jose, that was the first time either of us had tried Ethiopian but it was pretty interesting. Saturday was spent in San Francisco where we went to Lombard Street (I tried going up the steep part of it, but because the traffic was stop and go--meaning when I stopped my gas engine would shut off and switch to the electric--and the street was steep, I wasn't able to make it all the way to the top as a little over half way up I had drained my battery and the electrical assist was therefore no longer available and without that I had a measly four cylinder engine to work with and that wasn't cutting it). I ended up having to wait for the battery to recharge to at least one or two bars and then I simply did a u-turn and navigated around the steep portion of the hill and to the bottom of Lombard Street so we could walk around and view the curvy portion of the road/take pictures. After that we headed over to Fisherman's Wharf and walked around a little bit over there--it was pretty nice, I expected a lame excuse for a tourist location (like Navy Pier in Chicago), but even though it's equally commercialized it was pretty nice and there were some decent photo locations. We ended Saturday with dinner in Chinatown where we made the mistake of having dinner at Chinatown Restaurant (they were the first place to hand us a flier--with a coupon even) and they have some of the worst service I've ever seen in any restaurant (the food wasn't bad though, but the service was absolutely horrendous), and what's more was that they didn't take the percent off from the coupon at first so I had to bring that up with them--but the worst part was that even though there were just 2 of us they added the tip into the actual bill (and it's a handwritten bill, so not only do you have to read the bill, which from my experience many people don't do--they just look at the total--but you also have to decipher their rather bad handwriting to realize that the tip is written into the bill).
On Sunday we ended up going to Sonoma County. The first winery we went to was Gloria Ferrer, which specializes in sparkling wines (those and dessert wines are my two favorite types). They don't do traditional tasting so you have to buy the wine by the glass--we bought two glasses (one of the sparkling rose and the other of the royal cuvee) and tasted them. I probably would have bought a bottle of the royal cuvee as I liked the mildness and the subtle fruit flavors of the wine, but after spending $16 on two glasses of wine, I opted not to buy a bottle from them. Since a glass of wine is more than we really wanted to do at multiple wineries (and as we got into Sonoma late), we didn't stop at any other winery into we got into the actual town of Sonoma. When we got into town we went to the local grocery store (The Cheese Factory) and sampled some cheeses and had a peach champagne sorbet--which was really good (the cheese, at least the kind available for tasting was pretty bad though--most were various varieties of Jack cheese and all were low quality cheeses). We then went over the the Castle Winery (their vineyards are located throughout Sonoma County--they just have a little building where they do the tastings in the town itself) and there we did a tasting. Castle Winery, unlike Gloria Ferrer, does tastings the way tastings should be done--you pay $5 per person and then you get to taste an actual sample size portion of all of the wines they have available for sale (we chose to sample just the 5 that were of greatest interest to us). I enjoyed their Pinot Noir, but I ended up buying a bottle of their port instead as I enjoyed that even more as it had just the right level of sweetness for me. I also bought a bottle of their chocolate sauce made from the port, which I highly recommend--it is incredible chocolate sauce. Drinking the chocolate sauce and then tasting the port though changes the flavor of the port considerably--the port by itself is fairly sweet but if you taste the chocolate sauce and then taste the port afterwards the port has more of a bitter red wine taste to it. Oh, and Castle Winery waives the tasting charge if you buy a bottle (making it even more of the right way to run a wine tasting). We ended the day by making a quick stop at Muir Beach for the sunset and the nightfall--we would have stayed a bit longer, but the beach closes at 9.
Outside of Danielle's visit, I'm down to my last three weeks of my internship (once this week finishes up tomorrow). This week was pretty busy and these next few weeks promise to be equally busy. I'm definitely going to miss the California weather. I'm also not looking forward to going from running studies/writing reports/writing occasional code to writing code/writing research papers/running an occasional study as my preference is in running studies more so than writing lots of code (I enjoy the writing part in both cases). There's also the fact that I've met some pretty cool people over here and most of the people I hung out with in Iowa are now gone (finished with their PhD or Masters). I do enjoy my research though--both my funded research (which is a pretty cool project in its own right) and my unfunded audio game project (which I just find fun to work on/like that it exposes me to the visually impaired community that I've learned a lot from). On the topic of grad school, the blog entries I wrote for my class last semester (along with the blog entries the rest of the class wrote) have now been compiled into a self-published book available as a freely downloadable PDF or available for purchase, both of which can be done here: http://www.shinyhappyusers.org. So check it out (and I don't get any money from the book--our class is selling it at cost, so feel free to just download the free PDF version). Credit for the book goes to Derrick (the professor who taught the class) as it was his idea to put one together and then to the rest of the class who spent the time editing it (with moving out to California/starting my internship, I ended up not being able to put much time into the book at all).
And speaking of books... I actually decided to pre-order a copy of Harry Potter at a local Borders, so I'll be getting my copy of it at midnight on Friday. My weekend will likely be spent just reading it until I finish it--this way I won't have to worry about overhearing people talking about it/spoiling it. Plus it IS the final book, so it's worth the loss of sleep to a degree.
On a final note, I recently started being active on LinkedIn (the social networking site aimed at professionals), so if you want to join my network feel free to add me through my profile page.
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