Another Break from Stanford
As I mentioned in my last entry, I was away from Stanford for most of the first half of this past weekend, first in Palo Alto with my grandparents and then in Monterey as a part of a summer college trip. My busy weekend was made complete yesterday, when I spent the day in Marin County (where the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge is located) with my grandparents and my aunt and uncle.
I got up early (easier said than done as I had been up extremely late the night before) and walked to the CalTrain station, and then I somehow managed to buy a ticket, get on the train, and ride it to San Francisco all by myself (I know you’re proud). I met my family at the San Francisco station and then rode with them across the Golden Gate Bridge and into the somewhat mountainous region to the north of San Francisco. The road was windy, barely clinging to the mountainside at times, and it reminded me of driving in the mountains back in Arizona or Colorado or Utah. We ended up at Muir Woods, a little national monument that tries to protect one of the few remaining redwood forests in this area of California. We hiked around for a few hours, enjoying the peacefulness of the small creek running through the bottom of the valley and commenting on the trees’ incredible circumferences.
Afterward, we left Muir Woods for Muir Beach, where we relaxed for a while on the sand and rocks near the crashing surf. Then we all began to feel the hunger that stems from spending half a day walking around, so we drove to Sausalito and had lunch at a nice seafood restaurant there. I had some excellent halibut with pesto garlic mashed potatoes. After eating, we grabbed some ice cream at a little store down the road (can you tell by now that my family spoils me whenever I see them) and waited around a bit for a ferry to reach the harbor so that we could get back to San Francisco. Once on the ferry, my grandpa took some really nice-looking pictures of San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge (the fog had conveniently cleared for him). The ferry was exceptionally fast, taking only about half an hour to go from Sausalito to San Francisco’s ferry terminal. After reaching San Francisco, we walked to my uncle and aunt’s apartment south of the Financial District and sat around for a little while, watching a movie and talking. Finally, it was time for me to return to Stanford and back to my normal life as a student (my metaphorical homework pile was starting to get high). Rather than ride CalTrain, I was driven back so that I could take with me a nice camping chair (the chairs in my room are terribly uncomfortable).
When I got back, tired and ready to sleep a normal number of hours for the first time in several days, I somehow got sucked into watching the unrated version of The 40-Year-Old Virgin (don’t forget, parental units, if you happen to see this, I refused to watch such morally reprehensible trash). When I got back to my room at about 11:00, I found about seven people in there talking with my roommate. Garret, the same kid who I was with in Monterey, amused us by prodding random things with his “long, hard wood” (it was a board from one of the beds), and some innocent stories (full of innuendo, of course) were told. I was surprised by the fact that the three girls present seemed to laugh at the overt sexual references just as much as the boys did.
Eventually, everyone cleared out, leaving me to crash on my mattress (now located in a hole beneath my roommate’s bed) and sleep a lovely nine hours. Unfortunately, sleeping that long cost me both breakfast and lunch, but at least I didn’t miss CS, which was at 1:15. Class today was a bit better than usual, the subject being the char primitive data type and its uses, as well as a quick introduction to the String object. After class, I went back to the computer cluster at my dorm and remained shut in there for the next four hours, working to finish my version of the “Breakout” game for CS. I had some really annoying bugs that had to be worked through (usually not faults in my logic, but rather issues that came up because of differences between how Java works and how PHP works), but I managed to fix them, improve my physics calculations hugely (from four vertices per collision check to 22), and add some extra features (sounds when the ball collides, etc.), all while firming up the core architecture that my code is built upon. It might have been my most productive day since I got here, but that didn’t keep me from feeling tired (and incredibly hungry) by the time dinner rolled around.
Unfortunately, I had to miss dinner too - I had to meet with my CS section leader at 6:55 to go over the code I wrote for my first assignment and find out what my grade was. He seemed impressed and gave me a check-plus for both functionality and style, which was about what I had expected (equivalent roughly to a B+ or A-, yo creo) because the first assignment left little room for being creative or adding on extra features.
After the meeting, I grabbed a box of Pop Tarts at the student union’s convenience store and inhaled two of them once I had gotten back to the dorm. Luckily, I just recently heard that we’re going to have In-N-Out burgers at our house meeting in about an hour, so I won’t have to go hungry for much longer.
Bleeg, this was a crappy entry, sorry. This will be a busy week for me (lots of CS and word roots homework tonight, a CS contest entry due in a week, and a CS midterm on Thursday night), so my next one might not come until early next week. *returns metaphorical nose to metaphorical grindstone*
Update: In-N-Out burgers are awesome. And Eclipse desperately needs to either move deleted files to the Recycle Bin or have an undelete feature; I just lost four hours of work.