Robot Monkeys

I attended Super Happy Dev House yesterday. SHDH is a this open invite hackathon/party type thing. People get together in a house meet people, eat some food, drink some beer, hack whatever, and listen to some five minute talks. It’s a very Silicon Valley type thing, and very cool.

And to think, that I found out about it the night before by surfing Scott Beale’s blog.

Thursday night I was at Lulu’s working at the bar when I noticed the guy next to me. He was in his 40’s with long hair and wearing a worn long sleeved thin black sweatshirt. He had this laptop that looked like it was about 10 years old. It was two inches thick and had one of those color lcds that always looked washed out. Slapped in the side of it was a old wireless card.

It was kind of odd. He looked kind of odd. I didn’t think too much of it. I just wrote it off as sketchy guy with a latte and a really old laptop he bought years ago and never bothered to upgrade.

I had to get up, and when I sat back down I noticed his screen. It was all white. He was typing, but the screen was almost completely white. His screen was crappy, so I wanted to chalk it up to that, but most of screen was definately blank. Was he using Word? I checked again. He was running a full screen xterm. XTERM! He was running fvwm. He was running EMACS. What was he doing in emacs? He was coding! I distinctly saw “sprintf” on his screen. It was C code!

What the hell? Every so often he’d minimize the xterm and swtich to some web browser (probably NS4 given the vintage of everything else he was running) and view pages for motorcycle transmissions, then he’d switch back to emacs and code some more. Sometimes he’d browse around on the motorcyle pages looking at what appeared to be technical diagrams of the transmissions. Then he’d code some more.

It was like something out a Cory Doctorow story. Like 0wnz0red or Themepunks, or something. I don’t want to know what he was doing. It wouldn’t be nearly as cool as I imagine. In my head he’s making some strange and dangerous device. He’s making killbots. He’s postcyberpunk.

In one week, I got a new car, a new apartment, a new job, and a date with a 20 year old intern. So let it be known, I’m the most lecherous one in the group. On the other hand, all of this might mean that I’m going to die at 50.

Now I told you this, not only to bask in lecherous glory, but also to introduce the story about where we went to eat first: The weirdest ass sushi bar in the world, Sawa Sushi in Sunnyvale. We go in at about 8:30pm on a Thursday, and we’re the only two in place. There isn’t even sushi in the counter. It looks closed, or at least was closing in the next few minutes. The only other people in the place is the Japanese sushi chef and who I assume was his wife.

“Are you closed?”
“Closed? No.”
“What time do you close?”
“10 o’clock”
“So we can eat here?”
“Who sent you here?”
“What?”
“How did you find out about this place?”
Brianna says, “No one. I live around the block. I see it everyday on the way to work.”
Seeing Brianna’s Yahoo shirt, “Did someone at Yahoo tell you about this?”
“No.”
“Really? No one told you?”
“No.”
“Strange. Yahoo had their IPO party here. No one told you?”
“No.”
“This is a private resturant.”
“So we can’t eat here?”
“No, you can eat here.”
“We *can* eat here?”
“Yes. You can eat here.”
So Brianna and I discuss it, and decide to stay if they’re not closed.
The chef says, “This resturant is a little different. I don’t have a menu. You tell me what you want, and I’ll make it. Or you can have me make whatever I want and you eat it. Either way.”
Briana asks for some sort of a tuna roll.
“We don’t have tuna.”
“Okay… How about shrimp.”
“Yes. Shrimp. Sushi? Sashimi?”
“Sashimi.”
Instead of playing a guessing game, and to cover the fact that I can’t think of the names of any sushi or sashimi rolls, besides California and Tako, I decide to let the chef order for me. I get served monkfish liver, and it was absolutely wonderful.
While making the roll, the Chef asks, “You just come in? You don’t see an open sign in the window, and just decide to walk right in?”
“What? You’re sign was on.”
“Oh nothing.”
I turn around, sure enough there isn’t any sign in the window. Not open. Not closed. Nothing. The windows and door empty.
As the chef is making the rolls, he asks if we know any Japanese. I say, just konichiwa, arigatto, sugoi (he was suprised with sugoi) and baka.
“Do you know what baka means?”
“It means stupid or foolish.”
“Do you know why?”
“No.”
He says something about people not knowing something. I didn’t really hear him. It very well may have been something about stupid gaijin coming in to resturants with 3 foot red glowing red signs in a stripmall in suburbia and wanting to eat without an invitation.
It was wierd. He’d serve us. He countered every excuse we offered him to not to serve us when we came in, and then he’d drop a comment about how strange it was that we came in without anyone telling us about this place, or that it was private resturant. It was like walking into Hatori Hanzo’s sushi bar in Kill Bill. We got the feeling we weren’t wanted. Briana made an excuse to leave. I paid $25 for three orders of rolls (5 total), but actually paid $40 without bothering for change and said, “I’m very sorry if we imposed,” and then left.

Then we went across the street to Carl’s Jr.

So if you’re in Sunnyvale, check out Sawa Sushi, but you might want to call ahead or find someone in the know before going there.