Polish Festival

So Sunday was the Polish Festival in San Jose. I had no other reason to go, apart from going to eat! I had kielbasa, some pierogi, and an assortment of cakes. Too bad I am a poor student, otherwise I would have feasted and bought more stuff to take home.

This festival did seem pretty complete. They had food, arts & crafts, games, Polish Folk dancing, and the Polish-American engineers club. At the latter I found out there is in fact a Polish club on campus and I also signed up to the engineer's mailing list...

Stanford Game

My first american football, a.k.a. grid-iron game was Saturday night. It was Stanford v San Jose State, at Stanford, at their massive stadium (see video).

The game itself was probably more interesting than I thought, probably because it wasn't televised so there wasn't any waiting around for TV commercial breaks. I did get a free supporters t-shirt - yay.


Stanford had a poor first half, but came back strongly in the second to win. The half time show was interesting. I got to see a marching band with some creative license (Stanford's) and a traditional one. Both were interesting, but they did give the insight to what all the marching band business was about, as I actually got to see one doing what it's made to do.

Anyway I think I might return next time to a game of sufficient caliber, like Stanford v UC Berkeley, otherwise I think I might skip a couple of games...

Busy Busy Busy

I have been quite busy this week; orientation activities, meeting people, eating food, buying food, looking at courses, rememebering people's names, sleep, swimming, etc. Basically this has been a pretty fast week!

This weekend is quite heavily booked also. There is some time to relax, however I will most likely be spending that time researching what courses to take next week, as that's when they start. So most likely I will be sitting in on about six courses of which I will choose three. Well this quarter the choices will probably be easy, given that I have to statisfy some breadth requirements, so it would be good to get them out of the way. Hopefully everything will pan out... :)

I have forgotten to take my camera around to the events that have been happening, but I will hopefully remember to take it from now on, so that I can pictorially represent what I've been up to.

Moving onto Campus

So in the weekend I also managed to move onto Campus. Thankfully I don't own any furniture, so it was easy enough to fit all my stuff into two car loads.

This was technically my first time onto campus, which some found hard to believe, even though I have lived relatively closely for the past year and a half. My impressions, are just like everybody else's in that the campus is huge, and is very pleasing on the eye. Well at the moment there is a bit of construction going on, however once that is finished, things will look really nice.

The interesting part of my move, was that the apartment I moved into, was a one bedroom apartment shared by two people. One person sleeps in the living room, the other in the bedroom. Of course I got given the apartment with someone living in it already. The story gets more interesting, as the person already living there was away for the Summer and had subleased it to a friend.

So here I am, unlocking the door and walking in. Gag.. Oh dear, the place stinks - a cross between stale curry and body odour - yuck! The kitchen is a mess, the stove looks untouchable, the blue carpet has lots of white dots all over it (which turn out to be rice...) and yea I'm pretty disgusted. Thankfully the bathroom was in a usable state.

Anyway the guy comes out, is apologetic about the mess and explains he thought I was coming tomorrow... So he goes about cleaning up, which he attempts, but doesn't really do well. I.e. he doesn't use the right setting on the vacuum cleaner so nothing gets sucked up, and he just tidies the kitchen a little bit so it's a bit better, but by no means clean.

So being proactive I went about thoroughly vacuuming so I could at least unpack a little. This took me about an hour of going back and forth with the vacuum. Luckily I didn't really clean anymore as the housing front desk lady called me and apologised and said that they would send someone to clean the place. Thankfully I handed the move-in evaluation form promptly, as otherwise I would have expended all this time and energy cleaning when I didn't have to.

Skydiving II

Well last Sunday we decided to try to go skydiving again. We had the vouchers from our last attempt, and we were a little bit wiser, in that we got there punctually at 9am so that we would be the first to jump.

So we were the first in line to jump - hooray! So we were thinking that we would jump. We even got into the harnesses, had the training, and were waiting for the GO word from the pilot to jump on the plane. The early morning fog did lift, however unfortunately for us, the low cloud persisted throughout the day enough to make the three mile clear sky radius never eventuate, so we were left watching the clouds... :( Oh well, we are just going to have to try for another weekend..

Nvision

So last week I attended the Nvidia driven Nvision graphics conference in downtown San Jose. It was an interesting conference and it definitely has got me thinking whether computer graphics (and related) would be a cool career path...

Anyway I got to see Buzz Aldrin at the premier of an animated movie specifically made for 3D viewing. In case there are people who don't know who Buzz Aldrin is, he was the second man on the moon. The movie was called "Fly me to the moon" and featured some flies that hitched a ride on the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. The 3Dness was cool, however I did leave the theatre with a headache. The movie itself is for five year olds, so needless to say I was a little bored. However the 3D glasses technology was interesting, as they were like spherically polarised lenses or something...


Some of the other things that I saw were at the exhibit hall. There were many stalls and some of them were by companies that were selling/doing lots of cool stuff. For instance I got to see what the latest developments with facial recognition technology were and play around with them; there were stereoscopic 3D LCDs, ones with glasses, the others without; graphics card manufacturers galore; unreleased games that you could play; etc.

There were also workshops and presentations that I could attend. So I went to one about how NASA is using graphics recognition for unmanned space station docking prototypes; SPORE (it's a game) and how they did some graphics stuff; some sessions on how to do cool stuff with photoshop; and a meet and greet with the guys from myth busters.

The conference I think was cool and well worth the $10 price of admission. Especially since I won a graphics card. It just so happened that the guy doing the photoshop presentations was from New Zealand, and he had free stuff to give away, and one of the questions was whether people were from out of the country. So I got given a graphics card since I was from New Zealand as he thought that was cool... :D