Fun week, but I'm still at work now...

The below was written on the train this morning... I'm still at work, pushing out a new feature now!

Hey all,

Boy, this has been an exciting week! I visited Berkeley on Tuesday, delivered a slightly-old-but-still-delicious pair of Patties burritos to Shelley, and hung out with Sketchy-David and his friend Janik (probably butchering the spelling, pronounced Jan-ick) for a while which was lots of fun! It also made for my 3rd tip to Berkeley in 4 days, which was a little much, but worse things have happened in life.

My brother and his friends arrived in San Francisco on Wednesday and I had dinner with them and then train/car-ed back to my house for an evening of chatting and watching hilariously awesome shows on TV.

As a sidebar, I don't really watch too much TV, but I've gradually accumulated a fairly large list of TV shows that I watch and really really enjoy. How I Met Your Mother, 30 Rock, and Big Bang Theory are the major three. All are fantastic and come highly recommended. Maybe I will gush more about them in a different post.

Anyway, my brother and friends stayed with me on Thursday too. They managed to see the MOMA and, unfortunately, mis-timed seeing the Exploratorium, but overall got a good tour/wander through the city. We had delicious delicious back a yard for dinner and then again engaged in chat & TV. I was particularly happy to go for a walk with just my brother and get to just chat with him for a while. Its always great to actually get to chat ^_^.

Friday was exciting because I presented the paper on GFS to the rest of engineering for work as part of a paper-reading group that we are doing. I think the talk went well overall, but that is largely because it moved primarily to Q&A pretty quickly. I was once more reminded that, no matter how casual of a talk, *I* always need to actually practice beforehand or I will get a bit lost & confusing while I actually give the talk. I'm a bit frustrated with myself for that, but I guess I will make it better next time.

Sunday is the final notable part of my past week. Greg was in the area for a conference that ended around noon yesterday, but he doesn't leave until today (monday) at ~3PM. So, I picked him up around 1:30 and drove up to SF to meet up with Doug and Shelley. We had an all-round fantastic, if not too exciting, day. I was extremely happy seeing Greg and getting to hang out with all of them!

We basically wandered around SOMA & surrounding neighborhoods. We went to the comic book museum that I walk by every day at work. I have decided that such museums are not great for groups of people that just want to socialize, but nonetheless it was very neat. I found the Watchmen exhibit to be particularly excellent, especially since it had real props and costumes from the movie!

After comic books we wandered to Yerba Buena gardens and had lunch/tea at Samovar which was *delicious*, beautiful, and much better for chatting. The one downside is that I forgot that most tea has caffeine in it. I don't normally ever drink anything with caffeine, so I credit the tea with messing me up for the rest of the day a little bit (basically just loopy/tired).

After wandering through Union Square we retired to Berkeley for dinner at a Thai/Soul Food place that was excellent, and provided us with plenty of food. We hung out at Shelley's for a while after that, stopped by Doug's, and then I took Greg back to my house where we rockbanded, chatted and went to sleep far to late for this to be an entirely excellent day of work. Overall, fantastic day ^_^

Thats all for now folks!

Cheers,
Jason