The nVidians
I've been hanging out with Thayer's fellow interns from nVidia a lot lately. They're pretty cool guys, and I haven't found a good group from Google who wants to do stuff on a regular basis, so... nVidia it is.
Last Thursday Ross and I met up with Jeff, Carl and Matt and we went over to Craig's house. Crag is a "manager" at nVidia (I'm not sure if he's an intern manager or not). He doesn't like managers, or managing in general, so he finally decided he could fight the system by becoming a manager and not managing. Anyway, Craig has an awesome house. It's up in a really nice area of Silicon Valley, and is just all-around nice. He has a hot-tub, two living rooms with full entertainment systems, and a good-sized wine fridge. We had some good wine and cheese. Very delicious. After some effort Craig finally convinced us to go into the hot-tub. It had been a long time since I'd been in a hot-tub, and it was quite nice. Kinda weird having six guys in it, but still relaxing.
On Friday we watched some Eddie Izzard and finally a South Park episode which was so horrible it was hillarious. Saturday was another (but my first) nVidia LAN party. Six of us grabbed their machines (and test machines) and headed to a boardroom around 1pm. Eventually six new Waterloo interns showed up (at 5pm!), so we had a 12-person LAN party going. Definately the largest I've been at, and really fun. For the first five hours, there were no Waterloo people, and we played CaptureStrike, a Quake3 version of Counter-Strike. It was pretty fun, but Jeff was soooo much better than anyone else. I would have been almost as good as him, were I at my peak, but being out of practice, and with his strafe-jumping (which made him 2-3x faster than everyone else), it wasn't a contest. But the teams still stayed pretty even, and it was a lot of fun. After we tired of the FPS, we did some free-for-alls, where I ended up doing a little bit better, but still consistently around 3rd. I even had 1st for almost a whole game but lost it in the last few seconds.
The quest for food hit an unexpected snare. We got everyone's Quizno's order, and headed to the nearest one, which apparently closed at 7:30! What? We hurried over to another one (after a phone-call for directions), and managed to get there with our order of 12 sandwiches about 7 minutes before they closed. They were very nice and served us anyway, staying 15 minutes over to finish everything. Yay Quiznos!
After food, we played DotA. I hadn't really played before, but it was amazingly fun. We had a few unbalanced rounds, but usually the teams were pretty balanced. Unfortunately, there were no 6v6 DotA maps, so we had to split up into a 2x3v3 tournament thing. The teams eavened out pretty well after the first game, with the exception of the last game, which was 5v5, though a lot of that was just the random hero distribution. We went home at 2am. While Jeff was dropping someone off, I hung out at Carl's (Carl lives next door to Jeff, where I was crashing again). Surprisingly, we weren't tired, so we cracked open a beer and talked for a while. Another beer and several chocolate-mint things later, it was 4:30 and we realized we should probably be getting to bed.
Sunday there was another BBQ. This time it only had around 12-15 people, instead of the 25 from last time. I guess that's what we get when people start leaving. BBQ was fun, I got a little better at throwing a frisbee over-handed, but other than that, not much to tell.
Last Thursday Ross and I met up with Jeff, Carl and Matt and we went over to Craig's house. Crag is a "manager" at nVidia (I'm not sure if he's an intern manager or not). He doesn't like managers, or managing in general, so he finally decided he could fight the system by becoming a manager and not managing. Anyway, Craig has an awesome house. It's up in a really nice area of Silicon Valley, and is just all-around nice. He has a hot-tub, two living rooms with full entertainment systems, and a good-sized wine fridge. We had some good wine and cheese. Very delicious. After some effort Craig finally convinced us to go into the hot-tub. It had been a long time since I'd been in a hot-tub, and it was quite nice. Kinda weird having six guys in it, but still relaxing.
On Friday we watched some Eddie Izzard and finally a South Park episode which was so horrible it was hillarious. Saturday was another (but my first) nVidia LAN party. Six of us grabbed their machines (and test machines) and headed to a boardroom around 1pm. Eventually six new Waterloo interns showed up (at 5pm!), so we had a 12-person LAN party going. Definately the largest I've been at, and really fun. For the first five hours, there were no Waterloo people, and we played CaptureStrike, a Quake3 version of Counter-Strike. It was pretty fun, but Jeff was soooo much better than anyone else. I would have been almost as good as him, were I at my peak, but being out of practice, and with his strafe-jumping (which made him 2-3x faster than everyone else), it wasn't a contest. But the teams still stayed pretty even, and it was a lot of fun. After we tired of the FPS, we did some free-for-alls, where I ended up doing a little bit better, but still consistently around 3rd. I even had 1st for almost a whole game but lost it in the last few seconds.
The quest for food hit an unexpected snare. We got everyone's Quizno's order, and headed to the nearest one, which apparently closed at 7:30! What? We hurried over to another one (after a phone-call for directions), and managed to get there with our order of 12 sandwiches about 7 minutes before they closed. They were very nice and served us anyway, staying 15 minutes over to finish everything. Yay Quiznos!
After food, we played DotA. I hadn't really played before, but it was amazingly fun. We had a few unbalanced rounds, but usually the teams were pretty balanced. Unfortunately, there were no 6v6 DotA maps, so we had to split up into a 2x3v3 tournament thing. The teams eavened out pretty well after the first game, with the exception of the last game, which was 5v5, though a lot of that was just the random hero distribution. We went home at 2am. While Jeff was dropping someone off, I hung out at Carl's (Carl lives next door to Jeff, where I was crashing again). Surprisingly, we weren't tired, so we cracked open a beer and talked for a while. Another beer and several chocolate-mint things later, it was 4:30 and we realized we should probably be getting to bed.
Sunday there was another BBQ. This time it only had around 12-15 people, instead of the 25 from last time. I guess that's what we get when people start leaving. BBQ was fun, I got a little better at throwing a frisbee over-handed, but other than that, not much to tell.
posted by Alden | 22:47
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