Damn, I accidentally erased everything I had just typed…. guess I’ll retype it all…

So, I’ve been gone all weekend with a coworker (Scott) down at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Jose and visiting my parents and brother in Palo Alto/Sunnyvale.

Gas prices are about $2.10 for the cheap stuff down there. In Portland they are about $1.90 or so (but might be higher now since I last looked 5 days ago).

While down there, I saw a bootleg copy of Hero, Jet Li’s new HK movie which came out about a month or two ago. It was pretty good, definitely better than most if not all of Jet’s American films. Breathtaking cinematography; it was heavily influenced by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The characters weren’t as well developed I thought, but still worth checking out if you get the chance. I’d love to see this movie in theaters or at least a legit copy since the one we saw was done with a video camera and the contrast was set too high so details were lost in the bright and dark areas. What was the worst, though, was the guy with a chronic cough who must’ve been sitting right next to the camera. I don’t get why the pirates didn’t redo it…

Scott and I went over to my friend Song Gong’s house for a bit, after the three of us went to the conference expo together, and we watched my brother’s copy of Shaolin Soccer. My god, this movie was excellent. Released back in 2001, they keep pushing back the US release date, now slated for August 2003. Go watch this in theaters when it comes out. Or do like I did and buy the DVD from some Asian movie place.

Coincidentally, Chris, I had Krispy Kreme fresh for the first time on Sunday, too. I’ve had it before like a few hours old; not the same! Robin ate a dozen or so of them over the course of a weekend last time we were down in the Bay Area; they didn’t impress me then. This time, right as we (my friend Song Gong and I) walked in, they handed us each a free donut. Still hot, melt in your mouth. Pretty darn good. We ended up getting half a dozen more, but I brought three of those up for Robin.

While Scott and I initially went for the conference, we really went down for the food. On Scott’s list was In-N-Out. On my list were Hot Pot City (pictured above… no I don’t know who those people are) and Ba Mu Yuen (my best guess for the English version of their name) which is a place that serves Chinese hot beef noodle soup.

So, Hot Pot City is kinda like Chang’s except that you bring all the raw meat and seafood and noodles and stuff over to your own table and dump it all in this pot of boiling water. Around the pot is a flat grill covered in tin foil where you can bbq your meat if you would rather go that route. The meats come either plain or pre-marinated. Now that’s good eatin! Careful, though, cuz it’s also a good way to get sick if you accidentally mix up your cooking chopsticks with your eating chopsticks. I can’t imagine a place like this would ever work in Portland, or any place where the white devil dominates.

In-N-Out was good in that standard burger type of way. Sometimes you feel like a plain burger, sometimes you feel like a fancy burger.

Ba Mu Yuen was excellent. I can’t find Chinese beef noodle soup outside of the Bay Area. Here’s hoping Seattle has places like Hot Pot City and Ba Mu Yuen…