Today, I joined a bunch of Stanford and Berkeley folk for competing in Google Games, which is kinda like a puzzle hunt and trivia game and a coding competition. I really do love these puzzle hunt activities. I hooked up a bruteforcer to a slitherlink puzzle, coded one of the programming problems, and had valuable insights on several puzzles. One of them, a word association puzzle, was widely hated by all the teams I talked to, but I rather enjoyed the rest of the competition, even if we got quite stuck on silly things a couple times.
Coincidentally, I ran into several folks I'd known before:
It's a small world.
After the competition, our team visited Palo Alto/Stanford (decked out in all our Berkeley gear...this produced some looks and some interesting conversations). We visited the Gates building, and saw the Gates of Hell, and passed by Steve Jobs' house, and the HP garage. Stanford is gorgeous, and very spacious.
Then, we broke out our smartphones and found a pizza place in SF where we had some deep-dish pizza. It was tasty, but a little heavy on the tomato sauce. I prefer Sicilia's, but that's way on the other coast. Alas.