Yesterday, I had dinner with a bunch of former EA interns and Anita, the woman who hired us. She's leaving for USC Film School next week, so we decided to all get together before then. We had a nice Peruvian dinner at Machu Picchu in San Mateo.

This, in and of itself, is unremarkable. What I would like to tell you about, gentle readers, were the events leading up to said dinner, and how how they evidence the fact that Buddy and I have quite possibly reached the very pinnacle of Nerdiness.

Since the restaurant was not too far from work, I suggested to Buddy that we carpool to dinner. What follows is an transcript of our ICQ exchange. Normally I don't like to copy and paste IM conversations verbatim, but this is the only way I can properly convey what transpired:

*sigh*....

I finished reading Watchmen yesterday. It was good, if not a little disturbing at times, but one part of it struck me. (Spoilers ahead...) At the end of story, one of the characters stages an attack on New York City in order to prevent the start of World War III. In the face of an unknown adversary, former enemies unite in the name of peace.

I wonder what we would do in the same situation? An attack on New York City by a mysterious enemy, giving our country an unprecedented opportunity to unite with countries throught the world?

Oh wait...

Dear lord, I can't believe I just used the word "blogging." Shoot me now!

Anyway, I'd like to apologize for the lack of updates, or specifically interesting updates. This website has recently turned into one of those "I did this and then I did this and then I saw this person" sorts of websites, which was something I wanted to specifically avoid. However...I can't. I have nothing else I'd care to put here, so here goes yet another Summary o' Sha Sha's Weekend:

Friday night I had dinner with Matt, An-swol, Eric, Brendan, and Diane at Chevy's. I entertained the idea of seeing the Bourne Supremacy (what a dumb name) with Brendan and Diane afterwards, but decided I didn't have the energy to brave opening night crowds.

Saturday I went with Nathaniel to the City to check out a couple of museums. First we went to the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco mostly to see the Geisha: Beyond the Painted Smile exhibit. The exhibit was well-done, and it was interesting to learn about what the geishas really are, and all the misconceptions the Western world has about them. I especially enjoyed the photos of Yoko Yamamoto, particularly this photo. I wasn't able to find a print of it, unfortunately. By the time we finished with the Geisha exhibit, we were both dying of starvation, so we had a surprisingly decent yet unsurprisingly pricy meal at the museum's Cafe Asia. We did a quick tour of the rest of the museum, including a bunch of Buddhist and Hindu sculptures, which I vaguely remember learning about in my Asian Art class in college. I tried to fake my way through a description of them until Nathaniel called me out on it, and I was forced to answer with, "I DON'T KNOW I DON'T KNOW!!!"

Afterwards, we headed to the SFMOMA. I thought one of the more interesting exhibits was Larry Sultan's The Valley, which is a photography series exploring the use of ordinary middle-class suburban homes as sets for adult films. His photographs highlighted the contrast between the sets and what was happening on the sets, making the whole idea (I thought) very funny, and almost absurd. There was also a cool video exhibition called Stir Heart, Rinse Heart by Pipilotti Rist which included, among other things, a tiny video screen which you could see through a small hole in the floor of the gallery where you could watch a woman who appeared to be burning in Hell. She also had a funny installation which was a mirror with a another small video screen about where your mouth was in the reflected image. The video screen played a loop of lips making kissing shapes. Finally, I really liked some photographs by Nikki S. Lee, a young Korean photographer who combines performance art and photography by "infiltrating" subcultures, and photographing herself in their midst. One photo was from her "Skateboarders" project, and another from her "Seniors" project, which shows her as an old woman, struggling to get off the bus.

After buying a pack of Invisible Cards at the Museum Store (for $8, not $12), we asked the woman at the register for places nearby to eat. She recommended that we go to Clement street, although she warned us that it was "quite a drive." We quickly realized that people in SF have a skewed concept of "quite a drive" since we arrived at Clement in under 10 minutes. After wandering up and down the street for a while, we settled on a Thai place, where I had roast duck over steamed rice (mmm...so fatty...), and we also shared some crab fried rice. I dropped Nathaniel off back in Livermore and watched Thirteen, which I thought was all right, but a little over the top. Perhaps it was just my oh-so-sheltered upbringing, but I found parts of it a little hard to believe.

Sunday started off with Enzo jumping on my bed at 8:30 to wake me up, so I decided to get an early start to the day and go to the Farmer's Market to stock up on some fresh produce. When I got home, I went on what can only be described as a cleaning rampage. Since I rarely clean of my own volition, I decided to take advantage of it and just do the whole damn apartment. Feeling sufficiently accomplished, I went to Lee's Comics and finally picked up Watchmen, which I had been meaning to read for a long time. The rest of the day was the kind of day that I imagine gave rise to the phrase "Lazy Sunday", since I basically sat around, read comics, and drifted in and out of sleep on the couch. Good times.

This past Sunday I participated in the San Francisco AIDS Walk. It was a leisurely 10K walk through Golden Gate Park, where I was accompanied by 21,000 other walkers, as well as a number of dogs. The weather was perfect for the walk -- warm but with a nice breeze. As you can see from the pictures, our team had matching tie-dyed shirts, which proved to be very popular with the other walkers. Our team leader had several people ask her if they could buy a shirt (and just as many asking for free games.) In all, the walk raised $3,024,796 for local AIDS organizations. Personally, I surpassed my (rather modest) fundraising goal, so thank you to everyone who supported me!

In another philanthropic endeavor, I attempted to donate blood today. I say "attempted" because they eventually gave up on me since my blood was flowing so slowly. That has never happened to me before -- it's always been slow-going, but they've never stopped the donation because of it. It was kind of disappointing because I don't think they are even going to use the half-unit that I did donate.

In unrelated news, this past Saturday at soccer I scored four goals, all completely intentional. To celebrate, Jan and I spread our arms like wings and ran around the field, Bend-It-Like-Beckham-style. That evening I had a nice dinner with Eric and Domi at the Spice Island's Cafe. During dinner, I told Domi (as I've told other people) that she is one of the few people I know who is very sure of who she is, and doesn't let other people's opinions stand in the way of it. I admire her for it.

On a final note, damn my neighbors are loud. I'm not sure if they are having domestic disputes or just enjoy speaking at 100 decibels.

Another oddly eventful weekend, which unfortunately makes for an especially uneventful post.

On Friday, I went to see Sarah McLachlan in San Jose. The opening act was someone called Butterfly Boucher who was all right, although it was decided that I could have done a better job, and had better fashion sense to boot. But Sarah (yes, we're on a first-name basis) was incredible. Her voice is almost beyond description. The songs were a little more "rocked up" than they were on the albums, but they were still amazing. It was also fun because she talked to the audience a lot about the meanings of the songs and what was going on when she wrote them. I thought it was cool that as an encore (one of many), she did a great version of The Beatle's "Blackbird" (hence the otherwise unrelated title of this post.) I even saw two people from work at the concert, reaffirming my faith that people at EA do indeed have lives outside of work. Imagine that.

Saturday I joined some friends for soccer on the Stanford campus. Unfortunately, only 4 of us showed up. It was fun, but 2-on-2 soccer is definitely tiring, and I walked away sweaty and sore. But it was good to get some exercise in besides walking Enzo.

On Sunday we took Nathaniel to Monterey to see the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I was especially excited to go because they recently installed an exhibit called "Sharks: Myth and Mystery," but I was a bit disappointed with it. There was too much myth and mystery, and not enough sharks. But the jellyfish exhibit was really nice, and we got to see the giant octopus change colors. The only logical thing to do after spending a day looking at fish was to have sushi for dinner. It was good.

Pictures are forthcoming, but due to the poor lighting conditions, most of my pictures turned out frustratingly blurry. Plus, Movable Type has been crapping itself lately when I've tried to upload pictures, so who knows when I'll actually get around to posting them.

Imagine, if you will, the following scenario.

I was sitting in Buddy's cube at work the other day, and he was forwarding me some information via e-mail. Our worldwide address book is integrated into Outlook through an Exchange server. So he put my name in the "To" field, then double-clicked it to make sure it was correct. Up popped my address book information which includes things like my cube, and my phone extension. However, in the "Title" field, something was amiss. Before that day, it had always said "Software Engineer I" (except for the couple of days where it said "Intern", but that's a different story.) However, on this day, it said "Tools SW Engineer II."

Hmm... this was curious indeed. I e-mailed my manager and this was his
response:

So I met with my manager Jim, and it turns out that I was indeed promoted
to Software Engineer II. Along with this comes a pay increase, which is always a Good Thing. Of course, this also means higher expectations and more responsibilities, as well as greater scrutiny of my work. As I am no longer a "Junior Engineer", this greatly increases my fear that I am getting ever closer to the day when I am exposed as a programming fraud, and promptly fired. Oh well.

The past weekend was uncharacteristically full of activity. Saturday night I had dinner with Matt, Buddy, and a few of Buddy's crazy Canadian friends at Patxi's Pizza in Palo Alto. While I was walking from my car to the restaurant, a couple of guys stopped me and asked if I knew anything fun to do in the area. Sadly, I had no answer. After dinner we went to see Spiderman 2. I went in with extremely low expectations (the first movie greatly disappointed me) so I thought this one was pretty good. There were definitely some amazing action sequences and the story was all right, but Lord help me, Kirsten Dunst's "MJ" character made me want to stab my eyes out. Good times.

Sunday night Peter, Walter, Mike, and Justin had a good ol' fashioned all-American 4th-of-July barbeque in their swanky campus apartment. Afterwards we headed up to Redwood City to see a nice fireworks show. I was just excited that they had the smiley face fireworks that I had first seen in New York a few years ago.

Monday, Mariel and I met Nathaniel and a couple of his friends in San Francisco. First we went to Dolores Park and saw the opening day performance of the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Before you conjure up images of people with painted faces being trapped in invisible boxes, let me explain that this particular mime troupe is actually a left-wing group of actors that puts on satirical musicals about current events. ....Okay, so maybe the invisible box is better. But it was fun, and we had a nice light picnic lunch while we watched. Afterwards we wandered around Castro (or is it "The" Castro?) where I finally got my cartilidge re-pierced (my previous piercing got pulled out during a particularly vigorous haircut). You can sort of see it in this picture from Nathaniel's site. The prodigal piercing returns. We ended the day with a great dinner at the Crêperie Ti Couz in The Mission.

Finally, in a completely unrelated note, Becky sent me this. It's so....I don't know: MarryYourPet.

I am participating in the San Francisco AIDS Walk on July 18 with a team from work. If you feel so inclined, donations would be much appreciated. You can donate through the website here, or by cash or check. Any amount would be very much appreciated.