For the
farewell lunch we threw for Victor we went to Chao Praya in San Mateo.
We seem to go there a lot. Good food with a good selection of
vegeterian dishes. I usually buy one of the fried rice dishes. This
time I had the Pi-Ki Fried Rice with chicken and anchovies. Didn't
really taste the anchovies though; I was expecting something more like
salty fish.
Meanwhile Aravind is looking for a replacement for Victor. Apparently
the résumés he's received have all been underwhelming. So
he's asking around to see if any of us know anybody. Unfortunately, I
don't have any programmer friends and my brother Christopher did not do
well enough at school for us to hire. I hope Aravind doesn't settle for
someone underqualified.
Ben Haller, Macintosh programmer, has ported the classic color arcade
game, Solarian II, to Mac OS X 10.3. It's almost exactly the same game
with the same graphics and controls. The sounds are supposedly cleaned
up a bit, though the game had great sound effects as I remember it.
It's $10 shareware which I immediately paid to make up a bit for not
paying for it so long ago.
Solarian II is a Galaxian-type game where you are on the bottom of the
screen shooting at these bad guys that swoop down from the top of the
screen. When not swooping down the bad guys fly from side to side in
formation. In Solarian II you have shields and can get powerups, the
bad guys have different behavior, and the last level has this really
hard to kill single bad guy that shoots like crazy.
This was one of the first color Macintosh games and required a 640x480
display (not exactly a given way back then). Loved playing it in
college.
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Dave called me
at 16:00 or so saying that the South Bay people were going out to
dinner at 19:30. I agreed to go then I had a couple of hours to kill.
Give me too much time in a limited environment (i.e. not at home) and I
can get pretty bored. Sure I have things to read and do, but I don't
have the desire to do any of it.
Finally left and met the guys at the Tell Me HQ. We went to Frankie,
Johnnie & Luigi Too, an Italian place on El Camino a block south of
Shoreline Boulevard in Redwood City. Lots of people waiting out front
so we waited half an hour to be seated. Donald was still driving in
from Berkeley and he hit heavy traffic.
It was Dave, Woo, Fulton, Woo's housemate Ivan, and I at the table. We
ordered some appetizers until Donald arrived quite a bit later. I had a
chicken alfredo dish that was really good. Fulton's order was wrong
because the waiter had missed his order and when Fulton said "same as
him" he apparently pointed to the wrong person.
Donald also got the wrong entreé but he didn't mind. Dave had a
Heffer Vison that he said looked awful so he ordered a different beer
later. While Fulton ate his lamb we ordered and ate dessert. I had the
Dutch Apple Pie which comes with vanilla ice cream on the side. I love
the hot pie/cold ice cream combination. We were all full by meals end.
It ended up beaing about $180 total for six people, fairly good
actually.
Dave and Donald went to work while the rest of us went home. I pretty
much went straight to sleep when I got home. Woke up later that night
with a bit of heartburn. That's what I get for eating too much. But it
was very good food.
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