Funny Items You Can Buy

Also last weekend, I went to a store called 'Bed, bath & beyond'. It sells, as its names suggests, bedding, bath, kitchen and general household items. I was browsing the store when I just happened to find a fat finger person remote (Doug you might want one :P). This instantly brought back memories of the Simpson's quote where Homer becomes massively obese and tries to dial the phone - "The fingers you have used to dial are too fat. To obtain a special dialling wand, please mash the keypad with your palm now." hehe, so I now had a perfect remote for someone who would be accustom to mashing the buttons on their normal remote - thank goodness I don't need such a device :D

The other interesting find was a sponge/scourer holder for the kitchen.. Okay to get why I laugh I guess you just have to understand my fascination with monkeys and the question why anyone would design such a 'kitch' looking thing to put in their kitchen?..

Taking it easy

Apologies for the slow blogging, I haven't felt I have done exciting/interesting enough activities worthy of a blog lately.

So last Friday there was a taco themed potluck - Mmmm tacos. So what I brought was two kinds of salsa, which I both made. So the constituents of Chef Stefan's basic salsa were a white onion, jalapeño, tomato, green capsicum all nicely chopped and diced together with a bit of habanero (a very hot chilli). This was then blended for just a second so that it had some juice to it.

The second salsa I made was from a recipe, it was for Salsa Verde. You wont find this salsa in New Zealand, no, as its main ingredient is tomatillos. Tomatillos are a green tomato looking fruit, however they are enclosed in a papery husk, which you remove obviously. You can't eat them raw (or at least I wouldn't), so you need to bake them for a bit until the flesh softens.. Anyway, once they were soft I blended them with some onion, cilantro, jalapeño, and some habanero for a bit of kick.

All I can say is that the ability to make awesome Mexican food here is very, very easy. Of course I ate way too much at the potluck, however that wasn't unexpected. Alas I didn't get any photos of the food to show how great it was :/

The Beach

So for the first time over here I actually specifically spent the day at the beach. Santa Cruz, as reported earlier in my great ability as a blogger, is just over a the hills from San Jose, and so it also lies on the coast with a nice beach.

The other times Ive been at Santa Cruz, it wasn't really that pleasant, as the weather turned or it just wasn't that warm. However yesterday it was very enjoyable! Warm, a slight breeze and not too hot, but enough to make you think about jumping into to the freezing ocean that is the Pacific here..

So the beach was a little crowded, however not as packed as Oriental can get, so I managed to find some room to play frisbee :) However since I enjoy being able to feel my extremities, I did not take a dip or a swim. An interesting attraction was being talked into to do a music video - haha don't ask me where it's going to play - but it was some dance stuff that will air at some festival..

As mentioned probably many times earlier there is the board walk at Santa Cruz, so finally... well no yet again I did not manage to try any of the rides :P Although I did play at the arcade and managed to get my arse handed to by a girl in air hockey and frogger.. >_<

VIP take II

As important as I am, I got called up to be a VIP at Vivid.. hehe I havent made it quite like that here. But yea I have cool hookups and he was more than happy to give me and my entourage VIP status at Vivid, a club in downtown San Jose.



Sure downtown San Jose might not be as classy as say places in San Francisco, however that night was quite fun. I had a fun group of people, we enjoyed the music and each other's company :D We were treated to some free alcohol - we were VIPs ;) after all - So it was a very inexpensive night too!

Baseball As vs Angels

So as part of this weekend I went to the Oakland As vs Los Angeles Angels game. Sure I'm not the biggest baseball fan, however at this game, along with the discounted tickets, there was an all you can eat BBQ which is what sold me into going. Mmm the sausage and meat patty were very good!

Anyway this game was at the Oakland Coliseum, also home of the Oakland Raiders NFL team, which is a rather uninspiring concrete structure. The seats that we had were field level, so if there was a foul ball we had a chance to catch it, but none came our way :(


The game itself wasn't that captivating, as it was low scoring, however it became interesting in the second to last inning (there are nine in baseball) where it was tied 1-1 and then Oakland managed to score from an error and take the lead. So then it was some tense pitching to see if the Angels could hit back, which they didn't and Oakland won 2-1.

Trip to Google

So yesterday I managed a trip to google for their engineering open house. :D It was cool! We got fed, chicken skewers were excellent, and we got to watch three presentations. I went with a couple other interns here at IBM. Note: they have a dinosaur skeleton on their campus!

The first one was on google gears/api, basically an overview of some of the projects people have been doing with the API. Some were rather neat, however on reflection I can't really remember what the projects were exactly, so obviously they weren't that cool. But I do remember that with the API people can make really cool stuff without having the hardware to do those sorts of applications themselves :)

The second was on google desktop and how they did it. For instance what kind of indexing challenges they faced, problems they encountered with user behaviour, etc. The project seemed like a cool thing to work on as yea you had problems to overcome, but you needed good performance as well as overall user satisfaction..

The third was on street view and how they came about producing it. This was really interesting as the presenter explained the different prototypes that they went through and the results that it produced, ultimately showing how they made the final version.

One of the outcomes of the presentations that I got was that if you want to do cool projects - you need a postgrad education at Master's level at least, and that working with or for Google sounds really fun!