Enough with the emo entries for now.

Last week I was over in the r-dub having dinner at a place Camille recommended. Ah, chicken katsu you are so yum. Anyways, half way through dinner I get a text from Allen... "working this week?" I don't know why he asked me that when he knows I'm basically laid off from work right now. I still technically work there but I've been given a whopping 4 hours the past 5 weeks. That's no typo. So yeah, I answer back "no, why wassup?" and my phone buzzes back "lets go to tahoe haha." Departure in 48 hours. It's unexpected, but that kind of thing just happens with him. I told him I was broke but he insisted that I only pay for gas for the drive back. I text back... "fuck it, lets do this!!" Hahaha.

I was so excited the night before that I didn't sleep. Okay, I slept for about 40 minutes before I had to get up at 3:30am to get ready. Fortunately I'm fully equipped to go boarding these days. My gear sat in storage for the past year, but it's still good. After a 4am trip to Safeway to get some sandwiches and hydration, we're off. I knock the hell out. I wake up and we're in the mountains already with the temperature dropping steadily. Clear roads and clear skies, awesome. After a quick stop at 7-11 for more food, we've arrived at snow covered Northstar.

Ah, our good old faithful boarding spot. Being a Thursday, you'd expect it to be fairly dead. Well on that day you would have been wrong. The Dew (Mountain Dew) tour was there and holding parts of the competition. The place was freaking packed. Whatever. We hit the slopes and I tried to knock off a year's worth of rust. It was my first time boarding through lush powder. That stuff is crazy fun. It's like boarding over pillows. You eat it hard and what would have knocked your breath out and given you a bruise or two, instead is like landing on a fluffy marshmallow. One thing though, every run was exhausting. I don't know if I'm getting old or what, but I've never been that tired at the end of runs before. We called it quits around two, after tiring ourselves out and looking at the overflowing lodge. On the trip home, I gps'd a Claim Jumper and that was dinner. My reward for no sleep, cheap sandwiches and a marathon of cardio was a fat steak and baked potato, washed down with a large long island iced tea. (happy hour ftw) Back home after a nice warm shower, I slept for 12+ hours into the next day.

The Evidence

Tahoe or bust baby!!

Beautiful clear smogless sky.

The village at Northstar. Not rich enough to stay there.

The crowd building for the Dew tour events.

A moment of peace, courtesy of Skullcandy Tune-Ups.

The driver and man behind this crazy trip.

Our rigs.

My faithful rig. =D

Exhausted after a great day in the powder.

That's right. We made it, bitches!

-Louie

When last we met, I was talking about my crazy summer. A lot of time has past since then and many things have happened. It's best to tie up the loose end of the summer happenings... from what I can still remember, here's how it went.

I spent a lot of time on Twitter, meeting people, talking to people in and around the tech/internet industry. So I was invited to a lot of company parties, mixers, etc that were being thrown throughout the bay area. A lot of them were being held by what I call the "silicon alley." It's a section in San Francisco where a lot of tech/web/software companies all seem to be bunched up.

Anyways, one of the parties was the WordPress meetup at the Yahoo! brickhouse. I went over and met with my friends Adam and Holly, who happened to be going to the same party. Me being on filipino time was late as usual. The pizza was gone but there was still an ice cold keg waiting. We had a few beers and went around chatting it up with Yahoo! and WordPress employees, playing Wii. It was a chill kind of mixer. One thing that I keyed in on at these types of things is that even though I was just a lowly student and not someone in the industry, I could get in and rub elbows with anyone. These may be tech heads but at a party you don't want to talk about work. You just want to hang out with good company. Me, Adam, and a couple of Yahoo employees were chatting it up while totally killing the keg. LOL. Topics were housing, beer, economy, and then a conversation/dare where I talked about someone jumping over a wall they had created for the party and trying to hurdle work stations. We were having a good time and as it wound to an end Matt Mullenweg (WordPress founder) came over and invited us to join him for drinks at a bar. We obliged and joined him and some of his staff for many rounds of irish car bombs. That guy can drink them like water. He was treating everyone and I honestly forgot how much I drank. I was pretty smashed when we piled into a taxi to get some late night burgers in the castro. It was just five of us at that point and Matt talked us into ordering a cream cheese burger. Holy hell. This thing had a SLAB of cream cheese on it. It was an awesome night that I had a great time, especially when we talked about "pimping" his ride.

The keg that we killed figuratively & literally.

The ungodly cream cheese burger.

Fourth of July came and went. It was pretty uneventful. I spent it alone. The only nice thing was me finding a spot on a bridge where I could watch both the San Jose and Santa Clara fireworks shows at the same time.

Next up was the wine tasting at CrushPad in SF and the live taping of Gary Vaynerchuck's Wine Library webshow. There were a lot of wines there for tasting. A LOT. Several companies had tables with different wines to be tried and it was also a BYOB event. Tables were filled with different wines that people had brought. There were some ranging from HORRIBLE "two buck chuck" wines, to some really really nice ones. I chatted it up with some Revision3 interns (they host a couple of my favorite web shows... Systm, Totally Rad Show, Tekzilla), saw Kevin Rose and a few others there but I didn't bother going up to them. I did catch Gary V for a quick word and photo after the taping. Awesome. He's got a great show online that reviews different wines without all of the pretense. He's also been on tv shows like Conan O'Brien & Ellen, making them taste dirt and other crazy stuff to build their palet. lol. Needless to say, I left that event pretty buzzed. That also happened to be the night before the Apple iPhone 3G was released. I had a few friends that were crazy enough to camp out at the big SF Apple store for the thing, so I headed there after the wine tasting. It was fun standing there, hanging out with them a bit while people walked and drove by yelling at how big of losers they were. We engaged in some smack talking with people. I wouldn't wait there all night for that stupid phone, but my friends were determined to. Well, all of them except for one that I convinced it would be better to just go home and sleep and buy it later in the week. My favorite exchange with a stranger was someone yelling "why don't you get a REAL phone!" from their car. I yelled back "why don't you get a REAL car instead of that KIA!" I left my friends there on the sidewalk and drove the one who came to his senses home. We did, however, roll by to yell "IPHONES SUCK!" at them just for laughs.

Me & Gary Vaynerchuck

Some of the wine that I tasted. Really liked this Malbec.

Another event was SocialMedia Camp. Again, I met with friends there. People were giving presentations on how to capitalize on the social media explosion and talking about various aspects of it. Adam gave a quick presentation as well. We munched on free food while providing color commentary on the presentations from the balcony seating. The Qik team was also there, presenting their service, and I had a quick chat with them about features and things I thought needed improving. I believe that was also the night of the Mashable party. (I think) That place was packed. Me, Adam, Laura, Holly & Gabe met up before heading inside. I was doing the usual shmoozing with people, whoring for free drinks, and watching as people's Twitter comments were being broadcast on a screen. (big mistake by the party planners) Some hilarious messages were being broadcast on that thing. I met a few cool people, including Michelle from socal who was interning up here for the summer. I tried to give her tips on how to go up to people at these events, being more open & outgoing. I ended up doing the robot (the dance) to prove a point next to some guy that thought he could dance (way too drunk) and got a cheer out of the crowd. Just have fun and don't get sloppy drunk. =P Met up with Sarah Meyers of Pop17 and had Patron shots with her. Wow she's amazing looking in real life. The night ended after we grabbed burritos in the mission.

Batman The Dark Knight was a big movie release during the summer. Some friends and I had bought IMAX tickets for the 1am show the night it came out. I was excited for that and then got an invite for a private pre-screening of it by zivity.com. Crazy me, I decided to go to the zivity screening, their afterparty, and then the late night/early morning IMAX showing, even though they were the same day. The movie was amazing, and the afterparty was cool. They really didn't cheap out on the food that was catered for it. There was good food, I was getting free drink tickets, and half naked women were all around. (that's the kind of website zivity is). I had an interesting conversation with a performer about the costs and technicalities of performing with flaming hula-hoops. =P I took off after a few drinks and a full stomach to catch batman for the second time that night. The IMAX showing was packed and we were all lined up in the hallway, waiting to be let into the theater. Ugh... it was warm and some people needed to work on their hygiene. That movie on IMAX was just WOW!

Whew! I think I covered most of the major events from the summer finally. I'm sure I'm forgetting something but oh well. It's nice to remember the summer. Summer was fun and then fall came. Fall was horrible.

-Louie