This is NVD's summer bash. It happened in July, and now it's toward the end of December as I write this. Why the delay? Well, all these happy pictures were mass-distributed to us in the form of pointers to publicly accessible powerpoint slides. That's right - Powerpoint! They couldn't just post them as jpgs like any normal person would, but rather, had to wrap them up into powerpoint presentations, each consisting of one roll of film. The totals: 17 separate powerpoint presentations to the tune of 30M of disk space (after using tar and gzip). I dumped them somewhere at the time, and only now have had time to grab them onto my own machine here since I don't have to be asleep right now and can afford to tie up the phone line...
Come on, it was a picnic. Therefore, there was free food. Don't remember who catered the thing, but it wasn't bad. I actually don't remember much of it at all at this point (yeah, five months after the fact), but still, I know I ate a lot. Not only the food, but there was free beer too so people could get piss drunk and start acting like idiots! Yay! Here's a shot of the beer area:
Then there were the people who were raised in the fake wild and ate fake bugs and rats:
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And even better were these people here who wanted to make some fake soup out of these fake creatures. They even had a fake menu....
So at the time this picnic happened, CBS' "Survivor" show was hip. The radio stations were all talking about it and stuff. I could have cared less, but what the heck - AMD used the survivor theme for the thing. They split us up into tribes (segregated by shirt colour) and made us do stupid things against each other. In the end, the group VP's tribe won. Big surprise...
There were some silly sounding names. The only thing I remember is that I was one of the purple people in the "moola moola" tribe. we almost won. here's a group shot.
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Another cheesey thing they made us do was to put on these fake tattoo thingies. Each tribe had a different one. Here's two people who put them on their legs. Take another look -- in order to get the posed angle for this shot, just how scandalously are these two people sitting near each other?
There were games. Like Volleyball.
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And also this thing called musical tubs. kinda like musical chairs, except they're tubs. for kicks, exactly one tub was full of water, and everyone had the option of getting soaked and taking it for the team, or weening out. Eventually, there were some funny scenes when people would fight over who gets soaked. This was interesting and all, and I thought it would be funny if this particular sequence was animated.
And who can forget: "Eat poisonous watermelon, collapse, and have your tribemates beat you senseless with baseball bats while you're lying prone on the ground"???
Actually, this was really a screwy take on the whole "spin yourself around and run in a straight line" thing, where the twist involved having to eat watermelon without regurgitating it. It was a funny sight, though not exactly pretty...
But the thing that topped off everything was when they decided to make the head honchos (directors, managers, or whatever) dress up in some pseudo hawaiian garb and dance to some boy band music. Again, it was a funny sight, though not exactly pretty...
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So yeah, this is all there was. At the end, there was a raffle where the prizes ranged anywhere from digital cameras to MP3 players to gift certificates to hard cold cash; aside from that, you have to wonder - is this how AMD chooses to spend all the money it makes? No wonder those stock analysts on Wall Street have AMD stock so low - they just don't know how to goof off....