1 May 1999: Arturo Sandoval, Bridge, Red Sox, etc.

Saturday, 1 May 1999:

Arturo Sandoval, Bridge, Red Sox, etc.

Whew, it's been another busy week! Pretty much every night since Wednesday I've been coming home and basically just going to bed.

Wednesday I went with John, Ben, John's cow-orker Anders, and John's friend Janet up to the east bay to Yoshi's, which is a Japanese restaurant that also hosts jazz performances (yes, a peculiar combination) to see Arturo Sandoval in concert. We had dinner there first, and I had a tasty sesame chicken dish.

Sandoval is a Cuban jazz performer, mainly playing high-velocity trumpet, but also playing some piano. Obviously, his songs have a lot of latin influence. Anders preferred the latin-jazz flavor of some songs, while I preferred that songs that were more traditional (bop) jazz. The performances were excellent, although I sometimes felt the solos went more for the display of technical skill and less for melodic coherence. (John observed that the sax man was very Coltrane-esque in that regard; I may have mentioned that I'm not a big Coltrane fan.)

Overall, it was a good time. I'm a little more used to shows that start around 7 and run for 2-3 hours, as opposed to this one which started at 8, went 90 minutes, then had a second set later on (which we skipped, as several of us wanted to get some sleep).

Thursday morning I went to the DMV to register my car. This turned out to be very easy: I'd made an appointment, so I avoided the lines. My vehicle title mysteriously reappeared in my car (maybe it was under a seat? I did check under them... I dunno) which made everything very easy. Due to California's smog impact fee levied on most cars imported to the state, I ended up paying $400 for registration, but otherwise it was routine. I got my plates, and drove off.

Of course, I don't have a place on the front of my car to display a plate, and opinions differ on whether this is really mandatory. I do see various cars around which don't display a front plate. I also discovered that my 8-year-old Wisconsin plate in the rear is held in place by screws that are so rusty I can't get them off! So I guess it's off to a mechanic to get that solved.

This was pretty painless, though. I only paid a $12 penalty for having waited past the 20-day limit for registering after arrival in California, which is peanuts. Tuesday I go in for my driver's license, and then I'll finally have finished all the moving chores on my list from when I arrived here.

Which means I'll then be able to think about moving to the peninsula...

Then, Thursday night was another Bridge night. It was a pretty wacky night, a lot of really unusual hands went around which really challenged me in deciding what to bed. I had one hand in which I was concerned I'd overbid, but when I laid down my hand as dummy John said, "You rule, partner!" (I guess when you respond in diamonds having the K-Q-J-10-x of diamonds is pretty good even if you're weak elsewhere.)

Later on Becky and I had a hand which was very challenging to bid, since it wasn't clear to me where we wanted to end up in the bidding, and the bidding got a little weird relative to my experience at bidding so far. Fortunately, I ended up making a reasonable guess, and it turned out that our hands were a total lay-down: I could immediately claim all 13 tricks. The six of us spent a lot of time dissecting the hand, and people generally agreed that it would have been very hard to figure out the optimal bid for that hand, since it relied on some fairly subtle issues which aren't usually communicated in bidding systems. It was wild.

I'm really enjoying playing Bridge.

Last night I went over to Ben's place where he and his three roommates were having a dinner. John and Subrata were also there, as well as a few other people I didn't know. It was a good dinner, and a fun conversation. I discovered to my surprise that I was able to trot out a number of old geek jokes which the non-geeks found immensely amusing. I was also surprised that John had never heard the joke about how if 666 is the number of the beast, then 668 is the neighbor of the beast.

Which only serves that reinforce my Calvin and Hobbes-ian notion that if it's worth telling once, it really is worth telling a hundred times!

And today I met up with Ceej to go see the Athletics/Red Sox game in the afternoon.

I got to see her apartment, which I had glimpsed through her WebCam a year and a half ago when we were cooperatively working on Riven, and I met her husband David again. I also delivered a selection of recent comic book collections on her, which she seemed delighted with (especially Astro City, which is arguably the best comic being published today).

The three of us went off to breakfast, and then Ceej and I piled into her jeep-type vehicle - the Burly Bean - and drove to Fremont where we caught the BART up to the Oakland Coliseum. As Ceej put it, our trip was "pessimal"; we left late (mainly thanks to dreadfully slow waiters at the restaurant), and at BART we discovered that we did not have correct change to make good use of the automatic ticket dispensers, so we ran around a bit trying to see if we could scrounge up change. Finally we arrived in Oakland about 25 minutes later than I'd told my friend Rob to meet us there. As he put it, he'd arrived late himself, then wandered to the Coliseum to see if we'd given up on him, and then ie realized that we were arriving even later than he was. But, it all worked out, finally.

We got good seats, a bit high up on the lower deck, but right behind home plate. Ceej thought the seats were terrific, and they were in fact good, though optimal seats to my mind would have been shifted out from behind the screen behind home plate. But I can't really complain.

We got to see the Sox' ace, Pedro Martinez, throw what was for him a weak game, although he allowed just 5 hits and two runs. He was running counts deep, though, and obviously didn't have his best stuff, but he struck out 13 in 7 innings. Meanwhile, the Sox offense woke up and scored 7 runs with a plethora of doubles, and it would have been more if the A's outfield hadn't saved some runs in the 4-run fourth. It was a good game. We also determined that the Coliseum's garlic fries are not nearly as good as those at Commercialstick Park, so if good stadium food is what you want, go see the Giants rather than the A's. (Although you can probably find better reasons to reach that conclusion!)

Ceej and Rob seemed to get along pretty well; it's always nice to successfully introduce my friends to one another, and I seem to have a lot of opportunity to do that out here. All three of us grew up in the Boston area, which is pretty cool. There were a lot of Red Sox fans at the game, which must have made the team feel good.

Afterwards, we went back to Ceej's place and David joined us as we went out for Thai food for dinner. We talked a bunch about science fiction and television, including dissecting the inadequacies of Babylon 5 (mainly how Sinclair was better than Sheridan, and the weak writing of the fourth and fifth seasons; no, actually we didn't even bother discussing the fifth season). It's cool to talk SF with people like that; although I hung out with the SF group in Madison, it seems like we actually talked SF relatively little.

It's also very cool that Ceej and David seem to like hanging out with me; I think they're neat people. Ceej and I also talked about hiking together sometime.

So that's basically what I've been up to. The cats have been understanding about my absences (as long as I keep them fed). Work has been moving along, although I'm starting a new learning curve climb as I learn (and in some cases re-learn) our debugging tools. A lot to know.

I plan to take it somewhat easier tomorrow. Seems like I deserve it, eh?

Michael Rawdon (Contact)