Cross Country Drive

Address...

Friday, January 13, 2006, 10:54 AM

Just to let you all know, my mailing address out here is:

Tom Schindler
Apartment A209
555 W Middlefield Rd
Mountain View, 94043

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Windy Road...

Tuesday, January 10, 2006, 09:23 PM

I had mentioned earlier that we went on a really windy road going towards Muir Woods up north of San Francisco... We took a video in the car mounting Nick's video camera on a tripod in the front seat... The road took us 8 minutes to drive, i sped the video up so we do it in 2 minutes... Here it is:

http://www.drivexc.com/rt1_fast.wmv

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Week 1....

Monday, January 9, 2006, 09:17 PM

The past week--

I arrived in Mountain View on Monday to an awesome apartment complex... We have 2 bedrooms, a spacious living room, full kitchen, and a porch overlooking some palm trees and the 40 person hot tub and pool...

I spent most of monday getting settled, then making runs to the airport to pick people up and just relaxing.

Tuesday was filled with going to the grocery store and making a practice trip to eBay to figure out where everything is. We all spend some time in the pool/hot tub tuesday night.

Wednesday was the first day of work-- we were greeted by the employees at eBay and had a few meetings about our project.... We headed for the hot tub after work and just hung out.

Repeat Wednesday for both thursday and friday..

Saturday we all woke up relatively early and headed for Muir woods... We took this awesome winding road through the area north of San Francisco.. We used my national parks pass to take a quick tour through Muir woods.. here are a few pictures we took of the trees:

We then headed south to San Francisco, but we stopped in Sausalito. We found a real nice pizza joint, i took this picture while sitting at the table eating a $8 pizza:

We then headed across the street to take a few pictures, here is the four of us that went in front of the bay/city:

We then went towards the bridge, stopping on a large hill to take pictures of it:

After that we paid the $5 to cross the bridge into the city, stopping down in Ghiradelli square. We had a nice large ice cream sundae which was well worth the $6.75 i paid for it... Here are a few pics of that area:

Sunday we woke up early and went over to the Farmer's market in downtown Mountain View...

We then took the CalTrain to San Francisco. We walked from the train station over to Pier 39... then to Pier 41 to take the boat to Alcatraz... Here is the walk:

When we arrived on Alcatraz, we walked around for a bit, then took the audio tour. A lot of cool pieces of information about Alcatraz were learned here, such as the fact that the prisoners were forced to build their own prison, and the parts they built are now deteriorating because they placed the steel too close to the surface of the concrete.

The audio tour took us all around the prison blocks, we even got to go in a few cells. A lot of history here. A few pics:

After alcatraz, we walked around for a bit then found a nice restaraunt we had seen the day before called Knuckles sports bar and grill... very good food here!

We then walked back to the train station for a very sleepy ride back to Mountain View. Professor Finkel even delayed our Sunday night pizza party since all 11 of us who went to San Fran were late for the meeting... After pizza we all hung out in the pool for a while until bedtime.

Today was a normal workday, but we had a _long_ end-of-day meeting/code review which lasted over an hour over it's scheduled time... Now it's time to head for the pool and relax for a bit :)

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Still Alive..

Sunday, January 8, 2006, 11:42 PM

I'm still alive over here-- things have been busy getting settled in, working a bunch, and of course spending a good amount of time in the pool/hot tub :)

Look for an update of the past week soon... probably Monday evening!

Tom

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Rainy California

Monday, January 2, 2006, 08:25 AM

We left vegas "bright and early" around 9:30am, and headed up towards Monterey... it was foggy and rainy most of the trip, so there are no exciting pictures to post.

Things we drove by/through:

-Edwards Air Force Base
-Mojave Desert
-an Intersection in the Mojave desert
-we dropped below 1000 feet for the first time since Oklahoma

We went out to eat in downtown Carmel... and had a nice dinner at Jack London's restaraunt...

We then drove down to the ocean to complete our "cross country" drive.. It was raining pretty hard, but with the high beams on we could see the ocean.

Today we are headed to San Jose, Eric's flight leaves from there around 1 or so... I'll be in Mountain View for the next couple of months, but this site will be updated with my travels/interesting sights i see...

Time to start our last 75 miles or so... but first-- we shall touch the Pacific to really complete our trip.

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What happens in Vegas....

Saturday, December 31, 2005, 06:34 PM

Vegas.

Last night after we posted, Eric and i headed out to walk around and explore a bit. We ended up grabbing a quick "dinner" at New York, New York at the ESPN cafe. After a nice dinner, we walked over through excalibur and to the luxor. For those of you who don't know, the luxor is a giant pyramid, with a really bright light on top of it. We really wanted to see the upper floors of this hotel, but they are for hotel guests only. I convieniently caught a locked door as someone was leaving, and we proceeded into the elevators to go up. We waited for some guy to use his key to go to floor 10 and followed him. The elevators are really wierd... they don't just go straight up, they go at an angle. The inertial forces you feel as you are going up are really wierd and oyu ahve no idea which direction you are going in!

We got back to the room around 2am, and fell asleep.

This morning we woke up around 9 or so, and spent a little bit of time relaxing and watching the airport. We then went out and walked around to find some lunch, we ended up at the Jimmy Buffet Margaritaville restaraunt:

After lunch i relaxed in a chair for a bit:

We walked over down the strip, walking through hotels all the way... We stopped at the Treasure Island casino and put a few bucks in the machines. Eric played some video poker and ended up down a few bucks. I put $3 into a slot machine and walked away with $22.50 -- not a bad deal :)

On the way down the strip, we saw the ghost of Elvis that we missed in Memphis (refer to Nashville->OK City Post)-- He was in Vegas, who would have thunk!