While I haven't played it yet, it seems that it's selling pretty well. Yesterday, I saw a woman at Fry's standing next to a shopping cart filled with plastic bags containing boxes of World of Warcraft. I was surprised to figure out that she was buying that entire shopping cart full when I overheard "That'll be $4638 dollars please. Visa? okay." from the cashier. Well, maybe I got the number wrong, but definetely heard $4600 at least. That's around 85 boxes of WoW!
What do you do with a little less than 100 boxes of a game that requires a subscription? I mean, sure, it'd be nice to give to cousins, but that's ridiculous.
I went to go visit my friend Eric at work (NASA) and take a tour around the area and check out the stuff he does.
We went around the campus a little bit and saw the wind tunnel (the face of it is the size of a football field) and the supercomputing center (2nd fastest in the world as of a month ago or something). Those huge spheres are said to be vacumn chambers for the supersonic windtunnel. Oh, they have some airplanes there too, including a Harrier jump jet. That could make commutes so much cooler.....
In his lab, there's several rovers in various stages of completion. They're mainly used as test platforms. One of them was partially hooked up to a normal RC car/airplane radio, so it's basically a really expensive RC car :P.
K-9 is a rover that has probably everything a rover sent to Mars has. Something like 5+ cameras, a spectrometer, an arm, a bunch of serial adapters, etc. It's a test platform for ideas of stuff to put onto the new models.
I also got the play with the exhibit that was in a bunch of museums when the Mars mission hit the media. The Exploratorium in SF might still have one. The exhibit is a PC running a java app that interacts with a mini-rover and shows an simplified view of how the real Mars missions work.
The minirover has a camera and a uv light and would sit in a small sandbox with some rocks. (in my case, the lab floor) The child at the computer would hit start, and the rover will get a 180 degree panorama of the area around it so he can presumable select a rock. I think I picked a plastic tub. Then you set the distance, and it goes. Along the way, it tries to avoid any objects it'll crash into and if it makes it to the object it will turn on the uv light. The exhibit says "a purple glow shows signs of life. does your rock show signs of life?" Pretty cool. I had it move around some more and actually got it to crash into a chair. Last thing it did was examine my shoe. It glows purple. Maybe I should clean my shoes. j/k
It was developed by grad students at CMU with people at NASA, if I recall correctly. Hmm, if I go to grad school, maybe I really should apply there. This stuff is cool. Right before I was playing with the exhibit, we had to search for a battery pack. And while searching for the battery pack, we saw another one of these marked "Turbo. zoom......." on a post-it note. Hmm....Heh heh.....
Anyways, before leaving, we found out that a fan failed and killed 3 hard drives in the lab's main server, so we switched them out and fixed the fan. If one more drive died, the RAID array would have been a goner. Imagine 1 TB of stuff going down the drain. Not cool.
So this past weekend, I went to Indiana to see my sister's graduation (School of Management, 3.5 years) and to see what living in the midwest was like.
On the way there, while getting off the airplane at Charlotte airport, I saw an mp3 player in somebody else's chair. I picked it up and asked the people around me if anybody was missing an mp3 player. Some girl immediately shouted, "Yes! That's mine!" with darting eyes and a giggle. She quickly snatched it and hurried off. Based on the movement pattern of the people exiting the airplane and noting that I think she was picking up her bag from an overhead compartment like 4 rows off, I doubt it was actually her's. Very shady.
Anyways, so after arriving, Grace showed us a few local restaurants and her apartment. The Boiler Market is like a 7-11 and a Togo's all rolled into one, on the bottom of her apartment building. It's quite convenient, cheap, and tasty. I had a small salad and a chicken sandwich. Oh, and 32 oz. fountain drinks are 60 cents. Yeah :)
In the evening, I followed Grace to a bar and had a few drinks. Most of the girls there didn't interest me, and I wasn't feeling all that good cuz it was filled with smoke. Nevertheless it was interested to see what a bar looks like out there. One thing I didn't expect was that the bar was well illuminated. After going to several in SF, which all look kinda shady, I naturally assumed they were all like that.
The next day, we looked around campus, took pictures, did the tourist thing, and then ate at a place called LovShack. They sell calzones which were pretty good. I think their slogan was something like "so good you'll want to lick the box." The one I liked was the Rocky Mountain High which was chicken, cheeze, and some sort of hot sauce. Dinner was at Olive Garden. It started snowing while we were eating and kept snowing until sometime the next day.
The graduation ceremony was on sunday and was about 2.5 hours. In the morning, my parents and I went to the Walmart right next to the hotel to buy flowers. I've never been in a Walmart before. It's huge! Kinda looks like just a bigger Costco with more stuff. Two dozen flowers cost $30. Not cheap. At least they looked pretty good.
Since it's the winter commencement, all the people who were graduating were seperated into a morning and an afternoon graduation. Her's was in the morning since the afternoon was primarily engineering. Since it was in a large auditorium, they had a band and a choir in the background. While the presentation and asthetics were pretty good, they went kinda cheap on the undergrads. You see, for the PhDs and Masters, they read off the names because there wern't too many. For the undergrads, they put all the names onto one huge Powerpoint presentation and just had people walk as music played in the background. This really pissed off Elaine, my sister's roommate. But yeah, that's sorta disappointing.
A reception for the people in the School of Management was held in what I presume to be their building. The fruit punch and spinach dip was pretty good. We spent a bit of time there and then went to eat at Cheesecake Factory since the sushi place we wanted to go to wasn't open at the time. Afterwards we dropped off Elaine at the airport and then went back to prepare for the flight home.
Monday, we gathered all the stuff, dropped off some flowers and chocolates at mom's friend's place and then took our respective plane flights out. Mom and I were on the same flight which took forever to get off the ground from Indianapolis to Chicago. That caused us to miss out flight from Chicago to SF so we had to wait 3 hours for another one. Eventually we made it back and got home around midnight.
Some bastard broke the left rear window on our Toyota Camry and opened the glove compartment, center console compartment, and the trunk. I think this all happened during the hour I went out shopping with my mom.
What did they steal? Some insurance and repair documentation, the manuals, maybe a pair of sunglasses (my mom says she can't find a pair), maybe some oil filters (I don't remember if there were any), and who knows what. All I know is that I came home to see the trunk partly open and a window broken.
What did they leave behind? The stock stereo, all the coins and money (over $5 I think) in the compartments, the chinese audio tapes, a small bracelet hanging on the stereo, a couple of visors/hats, and a used air filter. There were no packages, CDs, or gadgets to begin with.
Of all the targets they could have picked, they went for a car that has almost nothing of value anywhere in the car, that's about to be junked because the transmission is failing, sitting in a neighborhood where there are so many more better outfitted cars parked on the street.
In the end, the only things I could imagine them doing with whatever they took is wearing an old pair of my mom's sunglasses, trying insurance fraud on a car that wasn't moving and shows no collision damage, and maybe stand a chance of getting an expired credit card number.
Idiots.
I have this feeling that I get bored much quicker than a lot of people. You know how when you're a little kid, everything seems like fun? Riding a bike with your friends around the neighborhood was fun. Playing board games was fun. Running around the playground at the park was fun. Going to the mall to look at all the stuff you can't afford was fun. And you always wish you had more time to play instead of going to school and doing homework and stuff like that.
Fast forward to now. I'm out of school and unemployed. And I have no clue what I feel like doing. Okay, I want to go snowboarding, but it's pathetic going by yourself so I gotta find some people to come with me. (damn you all for going while I'm going to Indiana) And it's not like money is that big of an issue either since I have a fair amount saved up from my past jobs. I can't go visit friends out of state/country since I'm still waiting to hear back from potential employers. And I can't visit my friends who are still in the local area because they're usually at work. And while I guess I could drive up or down to visit people at college, they're usually busy with school work.
If and when I do end up finding people who want to hang out, we don't have any sort of clue as to what we feel like doing. (or we're short a few people.) There's only so many times you can go out to eat before somebody feel like they're spending too much money. For cards, it usually requires a certain minimum number of people. There's only so many good movies out. And there's only so many time you'd want to go visit some museum.
Shopping seems to satisfy most girls, but I'm a guy. I go to the mall when I have some idea what I want to buy for myself or somebody else. Otherwise, what am I there for? With the magic of the internet, anything that could possibly interest me will be made known at my desk without the need to windowshop. And even when I see a great deal or something that looks cool, I don't feel like I really need to buy it because I already have so much shit.
I have a nice car. I have the typical techie toys. (laptop, iPod, LCD monitor wireless mouse, Playstation 2, digicam, cell phone) I have stacks of obsolete hardware too. My snowboard works pretty well already, especially with the new boots and pants. I have nice clothes. I also have some crappy clothes. My mom and I went to buy a Donna Karan suit which I like but have no place to wear it to. I have more dress shoes than the average guy, and a couple of pairs of sports shoes which are kinda old but still comfy. And I've come to realized that just because some stuff is old doesn't mean it needs to be replaced.
For the past few weeks, I've been waking up at 10am or later and sitting around at home. Sure, I have started working on some of the project ideas I didn't have time for before, but you can only do one task for so long before your mind wanders. Getting more exercise would be beneficial, I don't have any motivation going alone so I just do a few exercises at home or walk to the grocery store. There's badminton on friday, but of course it's not that fun going by myself to get schooled by high schoolers. I'd like somebody to share the shame with me.
Hmm, I could cook. And while I can cook, I don't know what I feel like eating. What about baking? Yeah, I can bake. But I'm not going to be able to eat it all by myself either.
Go play pool? Don't know of anybody in the area who's interested. Go paintballing? Don't know of anybody else who's interested. Go play video games? There arn't that many games that interest me anymore.
I need to find something fun to do.