Los Angeles: The golf tournament today was successful in pretty much every way imaginable, and I’m pretty much positive that I’ll come down again next year for it. Since I’ve done the LA sightseeing it probably won’t be early like this time, but given how my vacationing schedule turns out, I may hang around for a day or two later if it just so happens to occur around E3 time again (which it should given that it was scheduled for this weekend specifically for that reason). Without my Dallas trip it was my leading candidate for my sumer vacation, and like CES, if you register early enough, the event pass itself is free.
It’s probably a good thing that I have to return my car a couple hours before my flight tomorrow; flying out of LAX on a Monday morning might just be the time that the TSA recommended two hours is an appropriate time to show up. LAX doesn’t feel the need to have free wifi though, so email will likely be restricted to my phone until I’m back at my house. I’ll then be driving to Microsoft tomorrow evening not for work but for an ultimate game unless I’m just super lazy, but as far as “work” goes, home is as close as I plan on getting for that.
Los Angeles, Personal - Seattle
Los Angeles: I don’t care that I’ll be having Chili’s in Dallas in two weeks; I went on a quest for it tonight since you can never have too much Chili’s. I likely would have gone for Whataburger instead if it existed in California, but since it doesn’t and In-N-Out is now in Texas, there really wasn’t much of a reason for me to not find a way to work Chili’s into this trip. My other primary destination of the day was Dodger Stadium which, while it didn’t result in the purchase of a Kershaw jersey as was originally planned (because I wasn’t willing to pay 2x+ the cost of a “replica” jersey which they don’t have at the stadium in favor of an “authentic” one), at least netted me a t-shirt and a picture.
My movie of the day today (and also likely last one of this trip) was going to see Kung Fu Panda 2. Just like with the first one, it falls into a layer of not being an outstanding animated movie, but still above what your otherwise “average” animated movie ends up being. Between this and Dragon, perhaps I need to reevaluate my opinion of Dreamworks animated movies overall. My score: 7/10.
Tomorrow the plan is to be at the golf course between 8:30-9, so I’ll be waking up early enough in order to be able to leave at 8. I don’t expect that a Sunday morning will require any sacrifices to be made to the traffic gods, but my Monday morning return to LAX very likely will. Oh well, that’s just another reason to be very glad that I have a traffic-aware GPS device.
Los Angeles, Personal - Seattle
Los Angeles: If you trash talk about your skills at Mario Kart 64, you better be able to back them up. Alex was not able to, and as a result there was a quite significant amount of ownage that I dealt out, both in Grand Prix and Battle modes. Of all my N64 games, that’s probably the one I overall spent the most time playing, and I clearly haven’t lost my expertise.
When Alex and I weren’t playing 15 year old games today, there actually was a level of sightseeing that got done. We went to a museum called the Getty Center that sits on a mountain overlooking the city, and then this evening we went to Hollywood Boulevard and saw a Pirates in one of the movie palaces there. This specific one, El Capitan (which is right across the street from the Kodak Theatre where the Academy Awards are held), happens to be Disney owned and only shows Disney movies, hence the reason it was showing Pirates. Knowing what to expect with the movie made my opinion throughout much more flat as I enjoyed the beginning since I knew what was coming up, but then once it got better, there wasn’t as significant as an increase. After this viewing it will definitely make the purchase list, but my score of it remains unchanged.
Los Angeles, Personal - Seattle
Los Angeles: The City of Angels, I have returned!! No grad school investigating going on this time though (UW has already won that decision lottery, for whatever sort of a rigged lottery you want to believe there was). I did happen to be accompanied on my flight with some of the Penny Arcade employees with whom I conversed and exchanged tweets once we landed. My favorite part about landing in LA was that the temperature here knows that it’s supposed to be summer and was appropriately in the 80s. This morning in Seattle I had to wear a freaking hoodie in June because it was 50 when I was playing the bus/light rail game.
After watching the incredible Mavs game tonight (take that, Miami!), Alex and I watched The Social Network since I had never seen it before. Yeah, contain your exclamations; I’ve seen it now. It was definitely a good movie, and I can see why it won the awards that it did. I don’t necessarily feel like I missed out on something great by waiting so long to see it, but I’ll likely pick it up on DVD the next time Amazon has a mini-sale on it just because it seems like a movie that I really should have. My score: 8/10.
Los Angeles, Personal - Seattle
LA, 8:50 PM: It’s probably for the better that I didn’t have a pedometer with me as I don’t really want to know how far I walked today. If I had to guess, I’d put it at at least 2 miles, possibly even 3-4. Primarily this is due to my hotel being at the opposite side of the campus from where most of the buildings were that I needed to go to, and I made basically two giant loops through the campus today (one in the morning, another in the afternoon). When I go on the walking (oh, joy) tour tomorrow, I’ll probably already know where a bunch of stuff is. At least I won’t get turned around nearly as easily as I’m prone to when walking around an unfamiliar environment.
There was a noticeable difference in between how much each program wanted to talk with me. The Interactive Media program had faculty that was very happy to speak with me, answer questions, and even tell me what was going on later in the day so that I could go see some classes in the afternoon. The CS program, however, was close to the exact opposite. The email response I got contained little more than just a building and room number to go to, the head person told me to just go speak to students in the lab, and that I could read about the program online. I’m not saying that I don’t think they cared that I wanted to learn more about the program, but it was just a very apparent difference in how each program responded to my request for more information. I’ll still apply to both and this will probably have a virtually minuscule impact on my final decision (assuming I get accepted into both), but my curiosity just makes me wonder why each program acted like they did.
Los Angeles, Personal - Dallas
LA, 4:30 PM: Alex is currently interning with a company called Illumination Entertainment, a production company involved with the upcoming movie Horton Hears a Who! On Wednesday we were talking, and he informed me that he received an invitation to an advance screening of the movie on the 20th Century Fox lot. He was allowed to bring family/friends, so I went with him. The screening was earlier this afternoon, and the whole experience was really cool. We didn’t get to see that much of the lot, but I did take a couple of pictures on my phone of semi-interesting stuff that we walked by. The movie itself was also extremely good and funny, something that I wasn’t sure I’d be saying since the studio behind it (Blue Sky Studios) also did the Ice Age movies and Robots — good movies, but I didn’t particularly love any of them. This is the first movie that I’ve ever seen before it was actually released, and by extension this is also my first score I’ve given to an as of yet unreleased movie: 9/10.
I’m about to go walk across the street and wander around the USC campus so that I can hopefully get a good enough map in my head of where the various building are that I need to visit tomorrow. I also just thought and changed the time zone offset for the blog so that I wouldn’t go a week or more with posts timestamped off by an hour. My body thinks that it’s a cross between 4:30 and 5:30 right now, so I’m fairly well adjusted to the time zone change already. Coming back on Tuesday I have half a week to fix my internal clock, so that shouldn’t be too much of a problem either.
Los Angeles, Personal - Dallas
LA, 9:57 PM: Expect this post to be expanded past the midnight deadline as I just spent 30 minutes on the phone with Radisson tech support attempting to get the internet connection fixed in my room.
Ok, so here’s what went down. I checked into my room shortly after getting here, and then Alex and I went over to his apartment for a couple hours to do basically nothing (but that nothing was more than the nothing that could have been done here in my hotel room). When I came back to my hotel, it was around 9:20 (so 11:20 blog time). I spent a few minutes resting, and then I pulled out my laptop to make a post. The way this hotel works is that some floors are actually student housing, so every room has two ethernet cables: one for the hotel’s internet, and one for the USC network. Well, the physical port on the wall for the hotel internet wasn’t working in my room, so I could only ever get as far as being prompted for a USC username and password.
After spending close to 30 minutes on the phone with Raddison tech support (so by this time it’s getting perilously close to 10:00/midnight), an engineer came up to my room and determined that what I thought was actually the case. Nothing could be done about it until Monday, so they ended up just moving me into a different room. As far as I’m concerned, I got my post in for yesterday, the streak is still alive, and if you don’t like it, you can go create your own blog and rant about it.
By the way, I’ve had tomorrow’s post title planned out since I think Wednesday, and it’ll be based on something happening tomorrow that should be really, really cool.
Los Angeles, Personal - Dallas