Waffle Withdrawal

So the title of this post only has to do with only a very small part of the last couple weeks. Since I started working, every Tuesday morning the company has had Belgian waffles for breakfast. For the last couple of weeks, however, I showed up bright and early, only to find no waffles. To be fair, the company lists the menu in advance, so I could have looked ahead of time, but I never thought to do so. I always just assumed they would have waffles. Then last week, they had omelettes on Tuesday, which were usually on Thursdays. That made me think they would switch and have waffles on Thursday. Yet again, my hopes were squashed as there were no waffles on Thursday last week.

This week, luckily, was a different story. I made sure to look at the menu, and on Thursday, my prayers were answered. I arrived, salivating, looking forward to my fresh, multi-grain waffle with chocolate chips, bananas, syrup, and whipped cream.It was as delicious as I had remembered, and I almost went back for a second one. I've since learned that they will be rotating between omelettes and waffles every Thursday, so I have at least a couple more waffles days before my internship is over.

On Thursday night, the company rented out a bar/restaurant for Trivia Night. Around 6pm, literally every person at the office got up to head over. We arranged ourselves into teams beforehand, and when we arrived, we sat at a table with our team. One of the prizes for the evening was best team name, and we thought we would win with this one:

'; drop table team_names;

I don't expect most people to understand what it means, but for a software company that deals heavily with database systems, most people got a kick out of it. Unfortunately for us, the judges of the team names are not part of the engineering group at the company, so they didn't think much of it. A familiar theme in my posts seems to do with XKCD references, and our team name is yet another one:

Exploits of a Mom - "Her daughter is named Help I'm trapped in a driver's license factory."

There were 9 rounds altogether, with subjects including pop culture (not my best topic), history (even worse), sports, and famous mustaches. Each round had 10 questions, and we started off really strong with about 5-6 points in the first couple of rounds. We started to decline, though, as some of the questions became really obscure. There were 10 of us on the team, and we really struggled with some of the questions. I chimed in every so often with a couple things others didn't know. We ended up coming in 15th out of about 23 teams, so in the middle of the pack.

Part of Trivia Night included free dinner and drinks at the restaurant. They had a buffet of food there, similar to what we have at work, except with food from the restaurant. The wait staff went around to tables getting drinks, and there was also a bar where you could go up if you did not want to wait, although apparently the bartender had a list of 50 drink orders to fill at some point (so maybe it wasn't that much faster after all). The event took about 3-4 hours in all, after which some people stayed to hang out and continue having a good time. I thought it was a blast, and the "MCs" of the show did a great job - I was pretty much laughing the whole time.

I've also started planning some trips before the summer is out. I've already referenced my friend from school coming to visit, and vice versa. This are looking to happen in the middle and end of August. I'm also planning to spend a weekend in Vegas with some roommates from school. The plan is for some of them to drive across country from Boston to Palo Alto, where they'll spend the night on Thursday and I can give them a tour of the office and such. We'll leave for Vegas on Friday morning, and meet other roommates that are planning on flying in. Then probably on Monday, I will fly back just to save time and the flights are pretty inexpensive right now.

From the looks of it, getting to and from airports in the area isn't too bad. There is decent public transportation to the 2 airports closest to me, and they are reasonably priced. The best option is a bus that is only $2 and goes right from Palo Alto to the airport, and it's about the same time as if someone drove me. I actually have to buy the flights before I start thinking about that, though. I've got everything planned on a spreadsheet somewhere...

Earlier this week, the air conditioning broke in the office. I know there's been a pretty intense heat wave in various parts of the country, but it's still been somewhat moderate here (around the 80s or so during the day). I did notice the temperature rise inside, but didn't think it was unbearable. Some people just couldn't take it, and even went home early. I guess if you live out here long enough, you get used to the perfect weather, and any deviation from it feels like the most drastic change. Maybe some of them should spend a year in New England for a change of pace to know what they're missing.

I also recently decided to take the GRE in a couple months. I still haven't completely made up my mind about life after graduation next year, but graduate school is definitely an option. The ETS had a promotion for registering since they recently changed the format of the test (similar to what happened to me and the SAT in high school). If you registered in August or September, you got 50% off, which was a great deal, so a friend from school and I registered for the same day at the end of September. I ordered a review book on Amazon to start preparing. I had also looked at prep classes, but those looked VERY expensive and not to convenient to attend.

At this point, I'm not really thinking about it too much. I figure it will just be good to have taken the GRE in case I decide to apply to grad school. I think my ideal choice would be to just start work full-time after I graduate, and I definitely would not mind coming back here for that. I just don't know what my options are going to be, so I'm going to try and give myself as many as possible. So far, the test seems pretty similar to the SAT, except that you take in on a computer and that it's adaptive (meaning the difficulty adjusts based on how well you do). The math portions look pretty basic, and I've struggled with critical reading and writing in the past, so nothing new as far as standardized testing goes.

This weekend has the potential to include a hike, bike ride to San Francisco, going to see Captain America, and possibly other adventures as well. Sorry for the lack of pictures lately, I haven't done a very good job of utilizing my camera recently. Hopefully I'll have more opportunities for that during the weekend.