Ok, at this point my memory is not that great and everything runs together, so I guess I'll just relate some anecdotes. First off are the times we used to go to lunch, back when there were only four of us. Not often, but like once or twice a week we'd go out to lunch for a couple of hours, and if nothing else we found out what restaurants vegeterians could eat at. After a while I started missing those lunches as more people came aboard, because I started coming in later and later.

We went shooting once. It was Michael Yin (Slick), Kris Beagle, James Coffey, Savvas (forgot his last name), and myself. Savvas is a bit different. We hired him as a contractor (he had also consulted for Scopus, which is why Dave knew he was good) to work on the early Routing Module with Prasad. Savvas is Greek, from South Africa, big into guns and Linux, and a good guy.

Anyways, we get to Jackson Arms, in South San Francisco, which has a small indoor shooting range. Savvas and Michael and Kris bring some guns (and ammo of course) and everyone has some experience with guns -- I have very little, my previous experience was a bit of shooting the time Pick, Sweet and I went to an outdoor range near Concord. It was fun and Michael was good about instilling gun safety into me. I fired Michael's Glock and a .22 pistol.

For some reason, I kept shooting low and to the right with all the pistols I tried (it's not a rifle range). So eventually I compensated and shot up and left of where I thought the bullet was going to go and that helped. The .22 was a lot easier to shoot with as it had practically no recoil. It takes a while to get used to the recoil of a Glock and you have to concentrate to hold it steady as it's firing. One can see why most shots in a gunfight miss. Michael is a very good shot, consistently achieving close dispersal patterns in the center of the target. He's also fastidious about collecting the empty shell casings -- he makes his own bullets which is a lot cheaper than buying them.

The only trouble was with James, who was a bit too careless with the guns. Michael got mad at James because James waved one gun around, thereby putting everyone else in the line of fire if it accidentally went off. Sure, the safety was on, but it's good practice to always be careful about these things. Guns are dangerous and conscientious owners are safety-conscious. Perhaps before Michael had a bad opinion of James, perhaps not. But afterwards he just didn't respect James' ability to be an adult.

We've had two group picnics, both staged in the Fall when there is a slight chance of bad weather. There is a strip of water that comes in from the bay to sorround Oracle on three sides, probably built that way for Marine World. Between the Oracle Parkway road paralleling the strip of water and the water itself, is a strip of grass with a nice path going along it. Opposite our building that strip of grass is deep enough to have picnic tables and an area for some outdoor activities.

Each time we've had the picnic it has been quite nice. We invite the QA people and anybody else who is even peripherally involved with our group. Lots of food and lots of vegeterian food, and lots of beer. Enough beer that the leftovers wind up in Dave's office. It's a day to relax and bond a bit and we haven't done it for a couple of years it seems. I'll have to try to organize one next year, after the cold season.

We used to order take-out food at night, and for a period of a few months we seemed to do this three nights a week, because there were half a dozen people working after-hours. We've tried Waiters on Wheels to order food from some restaurants, but it's really slow and can take a couple of hours. Barring that, there are two restaurants that we always seem to order from.

One is Amici's Pizza. They always deliver within 30 minutes. East Coast pizza, which I suppose means thin and greasy judging by the pizzas Amici's makes. But it's very good and they're open late. The other place is China Village Seafood Restaurant which I like more, probably because I don't often have Chinese food. About average but also fast and delivers until 22:00. And cheaper too -- it's easy to get a lot of Chinese food without paying a bundle and I have no idea why that's the case.