Into the second week of summer in Cali and I thought I’d share a little summer update. Intel has been great, the weather has been pretty good (hot), and my TV time-wasting skills are coming back. In my two weeks here, I’ve definitely needed to discover a few things to find out what works and what doesn’t. Thought I’d put a few things on the blog about things that don’t work since I haven’t blogged in eons. None of this is practical advice.
A hack that doesn’t work:
Eating Yogurt Without a Spoon: Imagine your worst-case morning scenario. You have an early meeting and you are hungry. You walk down to the cafeteria to get your breakfast and coffee to bring back to the desk. At your desk you take inventory. Then it hits you: You have yogurt and you forgot the spoon! With no time to make a silverware run and a meeting impending, disaster has struck.
No need for panic yet. You are an engineer and can come up with an engineering solution. You know that you are only a short walk from the kitchen, which does not have silverware but does have more wood stirrers. Solution? Take three wood stirrers and form a solid surface to mimic the spoon. Seems like a good idea until you are halfway to the bottom of the Yoplait cup and find that the shape does not cooperate at all with the wood stirrers. This engineering solution was terrible but serviceable at least for a while. Thank God for plastic spoons.
Things in general that just don’t work:
1) Work computers
You would think that working at Intel means your computer is going to work. False. First day I received my fancy Lenovo X201 laptop. It was great when it worked! Too bad it didn’t work very often. In the words I gave to the IT department, it suffered “sporadic deaths”. No warnings, just a helpless “eek!” and before the power cut out. Lovely. To be fair to the IT department my replacement has been perfect. It joins my growing collection of computing machines.
2) Packing a summer in a Mazda 3
You can already see where the problem lies here: Bringing enough to stock an unfurnished room for 3 months in a space smaller than a box of cap’n crunch. At least I was able to put my subpar Tetris skills to work.
3) Using a rice cooker without a rice paddle
When you try to pack a summer into a Mazda 3, you are bound to leave a little summer behind. I forgot two things: staples and my rice paddle. The first problem I solved by going to Staples to buy staples (how ‘bout that). The second problem I tried to work around by using a normal spoon to scoop the rice. It’s just not right. Time to find the Asian store.
Other Notes (In pictures):
1) On the way to Folsom I decided to visit the University of Oregon. Here is Oregon’s $230 million Matthew Knight Arena: That’s no basketball arena. That’s a Death Star. Apparently they spend money on athletics at OU.
2) Game of Thrones Foiled by Java Update.
3) Here’s a Lake
4) Here’s a Sunset
5) Here’s a funny-looking Android
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