overt.org

Just returned from “Trek to Tahoe” ‘04. Fun as always. Leslie took off school on Friday and we drove up early, grilled some steaks, sat beside a crackling fire, talked. The next day we skied/snowboarded in gorgeous weather on mediocre snow. I snubbed the SSX-style high jumps and bars this time in favor of the company of others who are not as insane. We wore ourselves out by early afternoon, napped, I cooked up a pasta dinner, enlightened the 9 women I roomed with on the evils of the male psyche, played a half-assed round of King’s Cup, and then slept. Today was absorbed by the drive back, studded with fast-food sins and the smell of snicker-doodle coffee from Truckee.

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Comments

george — 2004-12-15 14:53:49

doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom

george — 2004-12-15 14:54:16

doom doom dooddoom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom oom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom m doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom

the end.

Susan — 2004-12-15 16:51:58

I don’t understand…..er, George’s comment(s). But the snickerdoodle coffee and the skiing sounded great!

cameron — 2004-12-16 09:28:50

http://namco-ch.net/katamari_damacy_ps2/index.php

Catie — 2005-01-02 19:40:36

No mention of Oprah…I suppose you repressed the really negative things that happened in Tahoe :) Happy New Year - good luck getting back into the groove at Berkeley!

bryan — 2005-01-05 20:05:38

I have a selective memory.

snapshot of today’s events:

sleep until 9:30. 9-fucking-30.

hop on the train. actually enjoy the hour and a half commute because of kavelier and clay

feel at home on campus. meet with james’ grad students over free beer and bbq.

enjoy train ride home. ride home through playful, impotent drizzle. what passes in norcal as weather. smile the whole way.

i’ve arrived.

What a wonderfully lazy holiday. I kicked things off on Tuesday by purchasing “World of Warcraft,” a video game I’ve been waiting on for some time and participated in the beta test of. I spent most of the rest of the day wasting time with that, and on Wednesday we headed off to Sebastopol for Thanksgiving festivities with Johanna and her family.

Wednesday night we spent with some good pizza, and then a trek out to “Old Main,” one of three bars in Sebastopol, which had approximately 2000 people stuffed into it, all of who’d just gotten in for the holidays. I met a wide array of high-school friends of Johanna, had some bad beer, and eventually retreated with Les and Peanut around 11:30 to home and bed. Thanksgiving was classic: buying food, fixing food, eating food, with all the nooks and crannies filled in with board games. Huge quantities of board games, including Lord of the Rings monopoly (Park Place / Boardwalk become Mount Doom and Barad Dur) and “Loaded Questions,” a suprisingly fun get-to-know-you game that will hopefully be converted into a drinking game for our upcoming ski trip.

Nothing was accomplished for the rest of the weekend other than slaughtering virtual wolves and human zealots with flaming bolts of death from my undead warlock (disarmingly named “Arla”) and her trusty imp Grimnar (he prances).

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Comments

leslie — 2004-11-29 19:14:23

He does prance; I’ve seen it.

cameron — 2004-11-30 11:23:54

did you get the collectors edition or regular?

i signed up for the closed beta months ago…apparently they weren’t interested in letting in someone with zero MMORPG experience. :(

bryan — 2004-11-30 11:55:25

it was the regular. it was hard enough to justify the cost at $50, and i didn’t feel like paying $80 for a giant box and the priviledge of having a mini diablo tagging along with me.

leslie — 2004-12-10 09:17:07

You guys are such dorks! I love it!

About four years ago my friend and I did this thing called the “UT Puzzlehunt.” We had a blast, and all the puzzles and answers were recorded on a website. I wrote the site in ColdFusion, so when we moved to the new server the site stopped working. But I just found a free clone of ColdFusion server, so the site is back. I wanted to get it back up because I think I’m going to try to do one at Berkeley in the spring. If you want an interesting walk down memory lane, take a look at them here. What a crowd! And how we’ve changed…

I’m not sure how we got to this point in the semester, but here we are.

Let’s see… I won’t try to recap the minutiae of my life. It’s worth mentioning that I finally finished the hellish task of porting SLIDE to Mac OS X. Just for “fun” I also ported it to Linux. So hopefully that’ll stop being a draw on my time now if I can help it.

Last night I saw a really good movie from Hong Kong–no kung-fu involved. It was called Infernal Affairs. Well, actually it’s called “Wu jian do” in a roman transliteration. It was just a standard-issue action-thriller-crime drama, but it was done really well. Like Hollywood might make if they didn’t have to follow the same damned formula every time they make one of those movies.

I’ve also been playing the open beta test of World of Warcraft, an online RPG set in the Warcraft world. Now, you have to understand that I played Diablo and Diablo II a lot. These are some of the most pointless games ever made, from an absolute perspective. You literally spend hour after hour clicking repeatedly on randomly created little monsters in randomly created little dungeons, hoping to obtain the Truculent Mace of the Cursed Cow or something. Somehow, I found this entertaining. WoW is like Diablo, except instead of there being 15 or so people playing in your world at any given time, there might 15,000. They’ve also replaced the 2D sprites with chunky, lowest-common-denominator 3D stuff. Not compelling to a normal person, just to me. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to cough up the $50 + $10/mo to play it once the beta is over in a week.

I finished my NSF application for the third and last year yesterday. At this point, it’s just obstinance. But the fact that I’m now at Berkeley is sort of proof that obstinance can work. So off went the application.

I’m looking forward to the next few months. Doug shows up to take my old job at Apple in a couple of weeks, and it will be great to have him in town (not that Houston wasn’t great, I’m sure). Sometime in mid Dec we’ll be heading down to Texas for some holiday fun with the Halls–should be a blast. Then, the day after Christmas, we’re heading out to Breckenridge via Denver for some snowplay with my family. We land back in Cali on 1 Jan. There’s also talk of a potential trip to Hueco Tanks in early Jan with some old friends from Texas. I wonder how much tickets would run…