| 19 nov 2001 *sigh* so what's happened so far? the problem with not writing over the weekends is that i forget stuff. hm. friday i took jay up to SFO so he could fly back to new york. brother's bachelor party. i wonder what seedy stuff happened there. heh. i've only gone to tame bachelor parties, and i really regret missing alex's down in vegas a month ago. oh well. saturday night, i went up to the city with sonya and some of her friends. it was actually pretty silly. one of the guys, howard, heard of this event put on by a group called the stanford bachelors. sounds like fun, right? but then i looked at their website, and they only had two pictures of people hanging around, and the main one had pictures of these really OLD women! like 35+! so we wind up at the fairmont hotel, seeing all these rather aged people milling about. so we're thinking, "ok, this must be some other event going on." but then we walked up to the main ballroom, and we see the sign that said "stanford bachelors reception." shit. these people WERE part of the event! they were walking around, all old people, listening to music straight from _the big chill_ soundtrack. like the four tops or something. shit. and they were walking around with this ridiculously large wicker cornucopias. *sigh* i know howard was a little bewildered when he found out what he thought was a cool party turned out to be nothing but some hobnobbing event for rich people... we even saw mayor willie brown there... so unless he went to stanford, this event had nothing to do with the school... we wound up going to jillian's, a club in the sony metreon. we danced for a bit, and i had two smirnoff ice's and two shots of tequila, which did nothing for my system except fill me up on liquids. the dancing was ok, i guess. they had this super house techno segment when all these bubbles started floating from the ceiling, and the strobe light just went into an epileptic seizure. it made two of the people in our group feel a bit sick, and it was amusing to see them stop dancing and just close their eyes and look like they were about to throw up. i enjoyed it. strobe lights are cool! i went home with my ears ringing. i was praying that i didn't develop tinnitis or something. yesterday, i grabbed a couple of calzones at fjl (frankie, johnnie, and luigi's) and ate them at jeremy's while watching the patriots/rams game. jeremy's a patriots fan, so i was rooting for the team with him, but they lost by a touchdown to the rams. i swear, marshall faulk is a fucking specimen of a football player. all day sunday, i read my old ee284 book on networking. mohammad told me to study up a little bit on ethernet and layer 2/3 switching. but my book was way too high-level and conceptual for any good details, so i resorted to going on the web and doing some google searches. i found some white papers by cisco, and just spent the whole afternoon reading those. yeah, it's as boring as it sounds, but it's a good idea to be prepared for an interview, right? so today i had my highly anticipated interview with cisco. the interesting thing is that the interview questions i'm getting are very different from a year ago. last year, i got a lot of technical questions and puzzles and brainteasers and stuff like that. this time around, the people seem more interested just in what i've done. but i still got a few technical questions, and one of the guys gave me a question on data caching/SRAM bypassing that totally blew me away. i am pretty pissed because i felt just dumb . i've never designed caches before, so i really didn't know how to work through it. i mean, if i didn't have any pressure on my back, i know i could just sit down with a pencil and pad and figure it out ok, but standing there at the white board with a dry erase marker in my hand, my brain just blanked. i don't blame the guy if he thinks i'm an idiot. *sigh* but we'll see. i should hear from them by wednesday. i'm just crossing my fingers and hoping for the best. the other people were pretty nice, and i think i got along with thtem pretty well. walking through the building and seeing all those sequestered cubicles... it made me really hate the engineering world... all these people cramped in little pens, so close to each other yet so far... it just made me feel really lonely for all the engineers out there. and besides, the cubicles at cisco were really small! it really felt like working in a tiny closet. very sad. oh yeah. saturday night, i ate this whole pizza again... the al bundy from pizza chicago (feta cheese, basil, sun-dried tomatoes, sausage, and TONS of garlic). and the next day, when i took a dump, it just smelled really weird. like armpits. ewww. they say that when you eat a lot of garlic, your pores just emanate it for the next few days. well, i've never been able to smell that on myself, but shit... i sure stunk up the bathroom with some funky aromas. friday night, i plugged my old playstation into the tv and popped in a few games. but after switching in and out of some of my old favorites, i realized that i just wasn't interested in video games anymore. it's weird. i used to LOVE playing. i mean, i just couldn't get enough! at the peak, i would spend eight hours each day on the weekends online playing starcraft. but now... no interest. zilch. maybe i've grown up. or maybe i've just become _that_ apathetic to things that require some brainpower. now i gotta figure out what i'm doing for thanksgiving. it's coming up soon, and i still don't know where i'll be spending the holidays. i need to call up gwen and see if it's not too late to head down to SLO (san luis obispo). their family has an annual slideshow (kinda silly, but kinda quaint, too), and i know i'll be in it because i went to her house last year for thanksgiving, and plus there'll be pictures from the japan trip. i don't know why it's a big deal for me, but i just think it'd be neat to see my face pop up in another family's slideshow. i'm rather amused by that prospect. the only think i won't be looking forward to is the three hour drive. other than that, not much going on. i just want a good job so i can get some peace of mind. this idleness is making everything in my life rather blah and boring. i can tell from reading my recent journal entries that it's also making my writing (or at least, reporting) really dull. |