As you’re about to learn, last week was really crazy. Normally if I had been away this long, I probably wouldn’t bother to write about what happened, but since it was the last week of the summer, I feel like I should cover it to be complete.
On Sunday, August 20, I went back down to the San Jose Jazz Festival for the afternoon. It was another gorgeous day, and I saw thousands of happy people walking around. Unfortunately, no one I knew was there, so I had to listen to the Salsa, Latin, Blues, Big Band, New Orleans, etc. stages by myself. I still had a great time.
Monday was a pretty standard day at work. Matt and I had finished most of the stuff that FindLaw asked us for already, so we went over our code base and documentation with Chris and Gloria, then began working on our news classifier again. This time, our focus was developing a clean training mechanism.
Tuesday was my birthday, so I was planning on going out for a nice lunch or dinner. I was also planning on selling my car at Hayward Mazda during lunch… So I took off work at 11:30 and told Matt to leave to pick me up in half an hour (to give me some time to double check everything and actually get the check).
I got there around noon, talked to Arash (the manager) for a while, and he agreed to buy the car. “15 minutes and we’ll get you the check,” he said. 15 minutes later, the legal guy who was supposed to write the check comes downstairs and says, “Let me see your ID. I cannot write this check.” Turns out the problem is that they didn’t know what to do with a title from a dealership, and they wanted to make sure I didn’t steal the car. So I told them that Dad owned Portage Motors. Then they wanted Dad to be there to sign the bill of sale himself (I guess it’s a California law…). By this time, Matt had arrived and started waiting in his car. I called Dad to tell him what was happening, and he was pretty incredulous.
We talked to the people at Hayward Mazda, some more, and after about half an hour convinced them to accept a faxed copy of the Portage Motors dealer registration and a note from Jerry telling them that I am an authorized representative. They didn’t know what to do with it, though, so they called some lawyers and told me to go out to lunch and come back later.
Matt and I went down to Subway for lunch, and I could tell he was already getting a bit impatient. By this time, it had probably been an hour since he arrived. When we got back to the dealership, they were still waiting on the lawyers, and I just had to keep sitting there. Eventually, the lawyers called back and said that if Dad could get a notarized version, we would be ok. So now Dad had to leave work, drive home to get his notary kit, drive to Portage Motors, and notarize Jerry’s note. This took another 45 minutes, though in the mean time, I was able to start filling out forms to transfer the car.
Finally, I was done and had a check by 4:00, after expecting to be back at work by 1:00. So now, all I had to do was get back to Sunnyvale/Cupertino… But Matt had left because he couldn’t wait any longer to get back to work, so now I had to figure out how to get there. It’s a bit of a drive, so a taxi would have been $60+, and I decided to see if I could take some sort of public transportation.
Little did I know that Hayward is not an easy place to get to from my neck of the woods. After some discussion, I determined that I could take the BART rail system to Union City, the Dumbarton bus over the bay to Palo Alto, the Caltrain to Sunnyvale, then walk to work. I got off the Dumbarton bus at about 5:40 and was about to head for the Caltrain station when I saw another bus coming down El Camino Real. I decided to hop on and see how far I could get. It was getting pretty late, so I decided to just head back to my apartment and skip the rest of work for the day. The number 22 bus got me to Wolfe Road and El Camino, but no closer. I still had a one to two mile walk left (edit: I just checked Google Maps, and it’s actually three miles; note that I couldn’t even take the expressway since I was on foot).
I walked and walked until I was within half a mile of the apartment, walking down Steven’s Creek talking to my mom on the phone. Suddenly I heard a shout from a car driving by, “Mike Daugherty!?” Surprisingly enough, Bryan Shieh was driving by. I hadn’t realized that he was in town starting his full time job yet, so I haven’t seen him all summer. Apparently, he didn’t even know that I was working around there, so he was just as surprised to see me. I ran over to his car when it stopped at a red light and hopped in. I saw his apartment, and we went to eat at In-N-Out, where we talked about work, life, cycling, etc. until about 9:00. Bryan was planning to make a fancy dinner on Wednesday, so he invited me over to eat it with some of his friends.
Overall, not one of my better birthdays, but at least it ended ok – when I finally arrived back at the apartment at 9:30, I found some balloons and a happy birthday card on the door from the people who run the apartment.
For lunch on Wednesday, Chris, Gloria, Matt, and I went to Kam Pai (I think), a new “Japanese-Fusion” restaurant in Sunnyvale. Apparently Japanese-Fusion means Japanese food cooked in a French style; don’t ask me why you would want that… I wasn’t terribly impressed with anything there, even though they were obviously trying very hard. I was reminded very strongly of Chen, however, by the square plates and the waitress admonishing me for setting my plate down in the wrong orientation for their plating.
After work, I went over to Bryan’s place and Matt went to pick his mom up at the airport. Bryan made rack-of-lamb and mashed potatoes. I thought the lamb was delicious and the potatoes were a little salty (but he knew they would be when he spilled the salt into the pot). Overall, though, it was really good. I also met Bryan’s roommate, a coworker, and a woman who graduated from MIT two years ago and is currently a Stanford medical student. I never met a package engineer before, but I guess that’s what Bryan’s coworker is.
Thursday and Friday were pretty quick days at work. We didn’t have much left to do there, but we had a lot to do at the apartment – cleaning, etc. Friday, however, we did sit down with Chris and give him a demonstration of our classification engine along with the training tool we developed. Overall, I’m very happy with it. We’ll have to see if they take our prototype and actually develop it into a part of their infrastructure, but if they don’t it’s their loss.
We spent Friday night cleaning the apartment from top to bottom; after all that work, I sure hope they don’t try to charge us cleaning fees from our security deposit.
Finally, I flew home on Saturday; it was a pretty long day travelling, since I got to the airport really early because I had nothing to do at the empty apartment. I ended up travelling from 10:30am to 11:50pm. Anyway, I thin this is probably a long enough entry for now. Soon I’ll write about my time at home and meeting Diana, my family’s exchange student from South Korea.
