• Archives

  • Categories:

31 years old

Yesterday I turned 31, and lest I be accused of growing up, I thoroughly enjoyed and celebrated my birthday.

First, MJ surprised me with a trip down to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. I had been in the building before for a holiday party, but they hadn’t completed the major Revolution exhibit that they have now.

We arrived just before 2PM, just in time for one of their tours around the exhibit. Our tour guide selected portions of the exhibit to highlight, which was particularly interesting because he covered some of the lesser known items on display, while glossing over major ones like ENIAC and skipping the UNIVAC (below) entirely. The first stop on the tour was the a replica of the Hollerith Electric Tabulating System from the 1890 US Census. I am somewhat ashamed to admit that I didn’t quite know how pivotal the requirements of the US census had been to the history of computing, fascinating stuff.

Now, the trouble with a computer history museum on your birthday is it has a tendency to make one feel old, as somewhere around 1/3 of major computer history happened within my lifetime. They had an NES on display, as well as the first computer I ever had (which happens to have been born the same year as me!):

It’s a really great museum and we could have spent all day there, but we’ll explore more at a later date.

I’ve uploaded piles of other photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157631659097510/

After the museum, we were able to head over to the Android Sculpture Garden so I could see the new jellybean sculpture (the previous one blew up before I could see it). Upon close inspection you can see that the new jellybean droid has a number of cooling holes so to prevent this new one from losing his head.

For dinner MJ took me out for a spectacular dinner at Le Papillon in San Jose. Every course was delicious, and I wrapped up with their signature soufflet:

Perfect birthday!

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 30th, 2012 at 12:29 pm and is filed under food, life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

6 Comments