Meetup Lan, International Zombies, and a return to the DMV

So I tried this thing called Meetup on saturday. It’s a site for organizing get togethers for people on the interweb. I spotted this group called The South Bay Geek Club who were based San Jose Sunnyvale area more or less areas close to me and their previous events were things like Anime evenings Boardgame nights and that sort of thing all in alignment with the sorts of things I might enjoy. In their upcoming events I saw they were running a Lan party on saturday. I figured it would be a good way to get my feet wet as it were and see what the group was like.

It was held at a internet Cafe in sunnyvale so I drove over and found a shop front that had been completely blacked out with the cafe’s name on the door. I wandered in and found a group of people hanging around who promptly greeted me and asked if I was there for the meetup. It was a friendly group of people and they made me feel welcome while we waited for the organiser to show up we chatted and introduced ourselves and it seemed like this had been a good move. The cafe itself was pretty well setup a lot of machines all with the popular stuff preloaded ready to go. Comfy chairs and a selection of drinks and snacks and computer games for purchase. The specs of the machines was reasonable I think my home machine beat most of the ones we used but for extra cash you could use some water cooled Behemoths.

Soon the organiser showed up and we got down to business of playing games. First a quick go on borderlands which didn’t last long as the starcraft 2 became the overiding game of choice. I joined one of the smaller games with the guy sitting next to me whose name I forget. We played 2 vs 2 ai players and won and lost in equal measure as we tuned the difficulty. It was a lot of fun but eventually we felt like a change and switched to L4D2 with some other guys around us. Somehow we only got 4 players for this I think for some reason the cafe had run out of licences but it was still a good laugh playing VS against foul mouthed little children. At least judging by their spelling they were children. Anyway we started having issues with L4D2 something about a new patch being dodgy so switched to the 4 player co-op Alien Swarm which was a lot of fun and we played into the night on that till they kicked us off at 12am. All in all it was a great evenings fun for only 15 dollars. I’ve already booked in to go to a book discussion on Charlie Stross’ Glass house which I read the other day in prep hopefully there will be a bit more getting to know people as the Lan environment is great but not very social beyond “do you fancy playing a game of *?”.

On Sunday I had some games time with the chaps from the UK, fairly low turn out but enough for a 4 player L4D2 campaign. Byrnie, Pete, myself and eventually Dwain were in attendance. We had a few voice coms issues but generally a great old time. Next month is shaping up to be very busy with PAX and my parents coming over for a week or two so I figured it would be nice to get a round in before then.

Today I had my rescheduled practical driving test, it was booked for 9:40 so I got there at 9am knowing how that place operates. It took me till 9:30 to find somewhere to park. I then joined a queue to have my insurance and registration documents checked. It took till 9:50 to get to the front of that queue. I was then told I had to get my car and drive down the side of the building to the lane marked with the yellow arrows the driving test lane. I did this and joined another long queue this time in a car. We crawled along and it was 10:50 by the time I reached the front and was allocated a driving tester, a nice lady who’s name I forget. She checked the car function and made me do the hand signals (which I had just looked up on my phone while in the queue seeing the previous person tested on them.

With the checks all done she got in and directed me down the street. What followed was basically a very straight forward drive with none of the hard parts you would have seen in say the UK test. No turn in the road, no reversing around a corner, no parallel parking, no emergency stop, the most complex maneuver was having parked to reverse parallel to the curb for a bit. It was all on very calm streets with low traffic. At the end of the test we returned to the DMV car park where they thankfully have reserved spaces for people coming back from the driving test otherwise we would have been there all night. The lady indulged in some small talk asking me where I was from what I was doing out here and so on I suggested they needed a bigger car park, she countered with that they just needed less people trying to use the one they had. Once we were parked she informed me I had passed and handed me the paperwork and told me to join queue D. Looking at the form I got one thing wrong I can’t decipher he coded markings to tell what but I would guess it was something minor. Anyway I went in a joined the thankfully quite short queue D and after a while got my interim licence with the proper photo one in the post in the next few weeks. I exited the building at about 11:30.

It was fairly ridiculous that it took 2:30 hours all told to accomplish the simple job of driving about and then handing the form in and this was with a prearranged appointment. In the UK I’m pretty sure you got there in good time and then waited for your appointment then you were off right away. None of this frequent queuing. Anyway it’s done now and I will finally be able to buy beer at a target.