Thinking back to the last week of February, when I made my decision to work for AMD instead of waiting for that offer to come from Cisco, so far, three weeks into the six-month internship period, things are looking good for that decision. I'm actually happily relaxed at work, I'm meeting new people, and most of all, I'm able to see how that random shneka I learned in EE141 manifests itself and rears its ugly head in the real world. Not only that, but I got yet another e-mail address too, which is nice and spiffy.

Anyhow, just three weeks into the internship, there's this spiffy little Millennium Celebration. It's a bit like a company picnic, but it's designed to celebrate the fact that the Athlon^® is saving AMD's processor division's ass, that there's a new fab in Germany which can start producing these Athlons about as fast and as often as John Rocker can piss off people, and to stir up more AMD pride, instilling the "Intel Sucks!" mentality....much as the "Stanfurd Sucks" mentality was ingrained during CalSo at Berkeley.

So this one was no different. The San José Arena (or rather, the "Shark Tank") was rented out by AMD for a big bad family party (that's right - the whole arena!). Incidentally, word is that last year, San Francisco's city hall was rented out...but that's another issue. Since I could bring up to three other people with me with my entrance ticket, my cousin Kevin and Ted (who incidentally, was skipping his own Infineon company picnic) came along for the free food.

So one of the first things we notice upon entering were these things which are hard to explain. They fill with air and flop around. People often grab them and play with them, and even jokingly beat their friends over the head with them. And sometimes, if you're not careful when walking by, it will spontaneously attack you. What is it? Take a closer look....hmmmm...ponder ponder.

The theme of this thing was something to the estent of "rocketing into the future" and as such, there were many pseudo-futuristic thingies all over the place, some of which were quite amusing. Features included VR stations, many many people dressed up in psychotic looking clothing (the clowns of the future!), and perhaps most amusing - the robots that walked around bugging people.

And here's one of those robots. The first thing we heard this thing "say" was Wasssssssup! (a la the Budweiser commercials); from then, we just tried to talk to it as if it were a Furby or something...

And the food. Free food! Not just that, but free good food! Not only the stuff that is usually served at Arena events for free (i.e. the pizza, the nachos, the burgers and hot dogs), but at the club level, the fancy "normal" foods which I still don't know how to make properly on my own. The high-class fancy club-level grill or whatever it is with the jazz playing and the yummy free food. Basically, the free food here put HKN general meetings to shame. And that's saying a lot.

And here's something else - perhaps modern art? Two people underneath a red blanket who sporadically move and change position to form weird shapes and the like. I was tempted to poke them in the face, but thought better of it, cuz that would've been mean.

So after wandering the free food displays, there was a mass exodous into the main arena (the seats, the ice surface, the bball court, whatever), where they were preparing for the opening ceremonies. There were the people with the glow-sticks (so that's why they were handing them out), which made for a pretty spiffy-looking atmosphere upon entering the darkened arena...

Here's a view of the whole inside from the nosebleed seats.

And additionally, there were tons of laser displays. Yup. Lasers. They were green. From the nosebleed area, i noticed that there was a mirror with a laser beam shining directly into it (apparently, the reflection was being used for something or another). So in my curiosity, I had to move the mirror temporarily to get a shot of it; and so here's what it looks like to stare a laser straight into your eye (or actually, almost straight into your eye):

Anyhow, getting back to the floor level inside the arena, there were many many weird characters, decked out in glowy clothing. Is this supposed to be futuristic? If this is what happens to humans in the future, damn, that'd be scary. And the people who had to dress up like this and act these parts and dance around as entertainers...the running joke between Ted and me was something to the extent of "ah, so this is why I'm still in school...so I don't have to do this later in life!" Ok, mean, but partly true...

Here's some dude doing some gymnastics trick. Talk about upper-body strength. Insane. Cool to watch, but it'd be hard to do.

And here's someone on stilts. Walking around and dancing to R&B on stilts. And apparently, a Sith lord in training (as evidenced by the lack of length on the eveeel red lightsabers)

Here's someone decked out in a ton of neon green. Shortly after this picture was taken, proving that she is indeed human, she asked Kevin and me where we got our spiffy neon light sticks...

Here's a futuristic angel of sorts. The wings put on quite a light show themselves. Now the scary thing is that there were men on stilts dressed exactly like this too...

Here Ted poses with the cool spiffy blue umbrella dude. He rode around in the coolest thing - it's like a scooter which is really shaped like a big shoe (see below). And such a shame that I didn't get his spiffy umbrella in the picture.

The Main Event(s)

After all that madness, it finally came time for (Colnel) Jerry Sanders, CEO of AMD, to come out and speak. He was there, live, in person in San José (and being telecast by sattelite to the fools in Austin...hahaha). He seems like a cool enough guy, praising AMD, dissing Intel, and he even gave mad props to the Flash Memory department (yay Flash!) for already whooping Intel.

Above: The Colnel makes his grand entrance, as if floating. The applause this generated was insane. Below: Sanders starts speaking. The thing to notice is that he's wearing leather pants. What's with that???

Then, the Faith Hill contert began. Yeah, a free Faith hill concert. Yay! Ok, so maybe if I were more of a country fan, I would have liked it more, but still, can't complain. She was wearing green...yay AMD! The amusing thing was that she would spend a lot of effort trying to get the crowd to clap along...to no avail. Also, between songs, there were these people who would swap guitars with the guitarists. Then that started happening during the middle of the songs too. That was funny.

Here's a shot of all of them on stage...

And here are two of the less blurry shots of Faith herself. The contrast thing with the dark lighting and the spotlight just killed any potential for details on my poor dcam
(which I stupidly forgot to recharge the night before).

And the kicker came toward the end. Somehow she got on a tangent of saying how she liked to sing and play the piano occasionally, and some guys in the front shouted "me too!" In the end, she called them up on stage to sing "This Kiss" with her, and that was quite a riot. It was also right about then that the battery on my camera died too, so here are the last two shots I managed to get:

So after the concert was over, there was some filler, then some R&B group came in and did the most amusing covers of some classics out there. There was even this one guy with a lime green suit that put Ted's leisure suit to shame...ah...

And in the end, this is just another perk in the life of corporate America. Yay capitalism. Yay perks. And most of all: yay for free food!