Back to work today. I tried Xcode4 to see if it would help fix a whole bunch of my linker problems. Do you remember the outrage when MS Office 2007 introduced ribbon-style navigation instead of toolbars? It's basically the same with Xcode4 - they've completely changed the way projects and files are treated and it's utterly confusing. There's no improvement and worse, it didn't fix my linker problems at all.

*TABLE FLIP*

I went to a Chinese place for dinner where I had a combination seafood dish with tofu and rice. Such a relief :P

Our second day started off slowly, since most of us were still rather jetlagged. It wasn't until the afternoon that we actually got on the BART to town. We wandered around San Francisco Westfield for a bit to get some supplies, namely a drink bottle, although the chocolate-covered bacon piqued my curiosity. Jimmy said "do it!!!" so I did and it was disgusting.

We walked uphill for a bit to the Grace Cathedral and then down to Chinatown. Apparently the last time I was in San Fran, approximately 15 years ago, we went to Chinatown for dinner, but I have absolutely no recollection of that at all. There's lots of interesting little shops - although, I was a bit thirsty and decided to try some "tapioca drink", which I thought would be pearl milk tea, it ended up being taro water with pearls.

We made our way back to Powell Street and took the famous cable car to Fisherman's Wharf where we found road side stalls selling bread bowls of chowder. I tried a bit of Jimmy's since I didn't want a full one - it was rich and creamy, and very tasty. We also visited Musee Mechanique, a museum of old-fashioned coin-operated arcade machines (with a few new arcades too). Awesome stuff!

A quick check of the map later and we found Pier 39, bustling with heaps of people and plenty of shops to visit. Of course, I was mostly interested in the chocolate shop and the candy shop, but we also went to various others that piqued Tony's and Jimmy's interests. And yes, we saw and heard the seals too, although it was getting a bit dark by that stage. It was amusing to see them jostle and wrestle for a spot on the pier. We ended up at the Pier Market restaurant, where we each enjoy a root beer, grilled salmon, grilled swordfish and grilled shrimp. Additionally, I also got a white chocolate and raspberry cheesecake. Delicious!

On the way back to downtown, we saw a Segway gang. It was hilarious.

Jimmy wanted to find a bar to get some drinks at, but it looked like a lot of them closed or were too busy, so we ended up heading back to the apartments and calling it a night. Successful day was successful - I have a bag of Sour Patch Kids, four packs of Haribo gummies, two packs of Skittles and one large bag of peanut butter M&Ms. Yeah!

Some things I forgot to mention last week: I saw Hamish Carter, Olympian, Gold Medallist and Auckland Grammar old boy, at the BNZ Food Court. He was buying sushi. I wanted to say hi to him but I was too shy and he was talking to someone else and it would have been cool to get a picture with him in retrospect but there were so many people around I would have looked really stupid and touristy and Azn.

Speaking of Azn, I got interviewed by some Azn magazine so if you see my mug somewhere, you'll know why. She asked me if the Government should be spending more money on the defense force.

Anyway, it has been a pretty bad start to the week. Yesterday I spent the whole day battling with freaking Metrowerksfail over some stupid access paths problem. Apparently, if you have two files of the same name but in different directories, and each of the directories are in your access paths, they are treated as duplicates. What a load of fail.

Following that, I played pretty badly at badminton. I was just smashing the shuttlecock in anger most of the time :p

Today I was just fixing some stupid sound problem and it boiled down to nothing to do with sound, but rather the directories in which the resources were located. Blah.

We watched the failed kayaking races on Friday and Saturday night, much to the surprise of John, Jono and myself as we listened to Dave's enthusiasm for the Kiwis in Beijing. Good effort though, but not quite the result we were hoping for. After that, we decided we would drown our sorrows with some feijoa vodka...so we went to New World and bought some mixing drinks. White Grapetise and feijoa vodka = epic win.

Andrew had cooked a whole pot of rice on Friday night that he didn't use at all, so on Saturday, I decided I would use it in the most Asian fashion possible - fried rice. I will let the pictures do the talking.



Weng-Hao and I also had a 90 minute DotA game where I was Zeus and he was Clockwerk, and we were against Mortred and Spectre. We didn't get sassed, but we just had serious issues trying to break the towers while defending our own. In the end, we broke all three lanes for Mega Creeps and for the win \o/

Went swimming on Sunday again - this time to Freyberg Pools on Oriental Parade. Good exercise, yay, whatever. But more to the point, we went to the Parade Cafe afterwards for a good hot chocolate and some wedges \o/!!! Good food, yay.

Poor Andrew had been stuck in his sleeping bag all afternoon, so when I got home, he was still watching the movies he had rented. I went into my room to do some work on my websites when I heard a crash from the bathroom. I thought it was just the clothes horse that had fallen and made a noise, since I thought Andrew was still lying on the couch...but around 30 seconds later came the call "...Jeremy...". I was rushed out to the bathroom where Andrew stumbled out, saying he'd just passed out, when he started blacking out just as I grabbed him and stopped him from faceflooring. Turns out he was dehydrated and dizzy from sitting in his sleeping bag for so long. Geez.

John came home pretty soon after and started diagnosing all sorts of problems. I offered my advice - clearly it was cancer or AIDS.

Also, FF3 sucks.