A Day Out On the Town

Things were pretty typical at work this week. I had lots of meetings about new software features being planned, and got to see some demos of them. Development cycles here are really quick, as I'll have seen at least a couple full iterations by the time I'm done with my internship at the end of the summer. One of the best things is that for every "major" release (the qualifying details of which aren't particularly important), the company releases a shirt, and we're actually a few shirts behind. I'm hoping to have enough by the end of the summer that I can go back to school and wear a different one every day of the week. On a related subject, I've also learned that the company is coming to the career fair at school in the fall, since apparently my friend here from school and I have been pretty good so far. They sent us an email asking for some info like where they should get food from, best places to put posters, etc.

Thursday night I decided I didn't have much of anything else to do so I went out to a bar with a couple friends. There are quite a few choices in the area, and we walked around perusing the options for a little bit. We ended up at a place we'd been to before since most of the other places either had a cover, were full to the brim, or because we were underdressed (since we literally went straight from work). Overall a fun night, we were only out for a couple hours but it was nice to relax there. Nothing exciting happened on Friday, except that there were Kobe beef burgers and root-beer floats for dinner at work.

Saturday was the real highlight of the weekend. A large part of my team from work planned an outing to Santana Row in San Jose, about 20 miles from Palo Alto. We all coordinated this past week to make sure we knew who was coming and so we could arrange rides for everyone. About 15 of us went altogether, and I got to drive there with my mentor is his BMW Z4 convertible, which was even more fun since he likes to drive fast.

In true California style

Once we got there, we waited around a little bit so everyone else could park and meet up with us. This gave me a chance to snag some initial pictures before we started walking around. It was basically another  open-air mall, the likes of which I am still not used to. Even more weird was that cars can drive up and down the main drag of the "mall", although it is definitely dominated by pedestrians. It is also right next to a couple of really nice hotels, so I guess they want all kinds of traffic to have access.

Interesting teams...

There were all sorts of shops in the area, some really interesting ones too. We started at the outdoor mall, just walking up and down the strip walking into any stores that interested us. We split up a few times as some stores interested some people more than others. The only thing I was in the market for was a pair of sunglasses, but I was willing to go around and see what else there was. First, we went into a little shop with lots of random stuff. Nothing particularly important, but they did have a ridiculous collection of fancy pens, with one apparently worth well over $1000:

...what?

We went into a few stores with sunglasses, but nothing that really stuck out to me. I also realized how expensive sunglasses can get, and so I needed some time to see what the options were. The best store, by far, was the Tesla showroom. For those of you that don't know, Tesla is one of the most expensive luxury car manufacturers, and they started out here on the west coast. The major differentiator for them is the fact that their cars are 100% electric, but they're also performance sports vehicles. The Roadster Sport  features 288 horsepower, and can go from 0-60mph in 3.7 seconds with a top speed of 125mph. A full charge will last about 250 miles. The place at this mall was only a showroom, but they did have a car for people to look at and sit it. I've only ever seen a couple of these cars on the road, and damn do they look good:

If you haven't noticed already, one of the things I want to do this summer is get a test drive of a car like this. We spent some time talking to one of the representatives, but they don't give test drives at this location since it's basically just a show room. They did have some cool stuff with touch screens where you could design your own Roadster. It was good practice for us for when we go to the location nearest to us in hopes of actually getting to take a car on the road. I've even been doing some research about the technology of how the car works so we know what we're talking. For instance, there's only a single gear ratio, which makes sense for electric cars. Pushing down the peddle just increases the strength of the magnetic field, and there's no need to switch gears. There are basically a couple buttons to push on the center console (park, drive, neutral, and reverse), and the rest is all power.

After spending more time than was probably necessary, we moved on to one end of the outdoor mall where there was an indoor one across the street. This one had some pretty typical stores, and we played in Brookstone for a while. They did have a LEGO store, though, and I don't think I ever wanted to leave it. There were kids playing some sort of game/race where they had to build the best thing in 4-5 minutes, and I was tempted to wait in line and compete.

SO many LEGOs

We weren't in that mall too long, since we had dinner reservations. 13 of us went to LB Steakhouse, where the food was delicious. We got all sorts of appetizers and amazing steak. They also had a version of molten chocolate lava cake, and my rule is if I ever go out to eat and the place offers that for dessert, I have to order it. It was pretty good, but not the best I've ever had. Maybe I should start keeping a list of all the places I've had it. The coolest item they had on the menu was the "Royale with Cheese," which my mentor ordered. If you don't get the reference, go watch Pulp Fiction... at least twice.

The Royal with Cheese - with extra meat

We also had plans to see a movie after dinner. A couple people had gone to the theater at the mall earlier to get tickets for "Horrible Bosses." Unfortunately, we stayed at dinner too long and when we got to the movie, the theater was already full. I felt slightly responsible since I wanted to stay and order dessert at dinner, but so did others. We decided instead to go get money back for our tickets and go to another theater down the street that was also showing the movie just an hour later. It was a little out of the way, but still pretty convenient. The movie was alright - it had some funny moments but wasn't particularly hilarious. Charlie Day (from "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia") was in the movie, and I love him on TV, but even he only had a couple moments of brilliance. It was still fun to go out with people from work for the day, especially somewhere I probably wouldn't go otherwise since there isn't any convenient public transportation out there.

For some reason, I decided to stay up really late on Sunday night (late being 3am) so I got to work really late on Monday morning (late being 10:30am, which is still before some people show up). I got to learn some really cool things about the software, and am definitely feeling comfortable with stuff. I'm even at the point where I'm helping new employees and interns with things they don't understand about features I've been working on. There are still plenty of things other people know a lot better than I do, though.

Tomorrow, Craig Newmark (the guy that invented Craigslist) is coming to talk in the area tomorrow, and the company got us in. Apparently, he was born in Morristown, right next to where I grew up, although I'd be surprised if I get the chance to talk with him and bring it up. At the end of this week, I'm going to see the last Harry Potter movie with friends. The 5th movie was on TV last night, and we had some people over to watch it. We also brought back pizza and ice cream from the office for dinner while watching it. I think the others are also on TV this week leading up to the last one. I saw at least a couple theaters where you buy a ticket for the midnight release of the last one, and you can go watch the previous movie right before it.

I've been playing around with Google+ a little bit, and am definitely getting the hang of it. I'm still not sure how it will fit into the whole social networking industry, but it has a couple cool features. My verdict on it is still out since I haven't used all the features. Amusingly, it's suggesting I know Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page, presumably because I'm connected to other people at Facebook and Google that actually know them. I also don't know if it's okay to refer to it just as g+, although one of the people I met from Google has done that multiple times. It's a little odd to see that, since I'm used to using g++ (the GNU compiler) when I do programming assignments, so it just seems like people are forgetting a plus symbol when I see that.

Amazingly, it's only midnight here right now - I'm used to it being later by the time I finish blog posts. Today, though, I left work a little earlier than usual (around 8pm), so I had some extra time. That just means I can get to sleep a little earlier and wake up in plenty of times for waffles tomorrow morning. Although last week, the switched waffle and omelette day, so it'll be a little bit of a surprise when I show up in the morning.