In 24 hours, I should be on the road and heading back towards home. The original plan was to have Dan and Nic ride with me and we would drive up to San Luis Obispo to meet up with Nate. We’d hang out in town for a bit, grab a bite to eat and then sleep. Then on Thursday, we’d all carpool up to San Francisco. This way would be nice since we’d break the trip up into 2 four hour segments. Thanks to the crazy storms of the past week, we may have to change up our plans. Highway 101 is closed thanks to landslides, so this eliminates a direct route to San Luis Obispo. Unless it’s cleared up by tomorrow, we may just have to push on towards S.F. and meet Nate up there on Thursday or Friday at my place. Ultimately, we’ll just have to see what tomorrow brings. It’s quite possible that they’ll have the 101 opened up by tomorrow evening since the storms are over.

This weekend, I spent some time hanging out with Brandee, a friend from USC that I made this summer during the internship for SCEC. For my birthday, she decided to take me to see a psychic. That was a fun/interesting experience. After driving around for a bit, we selected a psychic who was located about 3 blocks from where I used to live this summer. We walked in, told her what we wanted (a palm reading) and that was it. She went to work!

So what does my future hold? I will live to the ripe age of 82. I will not die from sickness or tragedy, just of old age. I’ll have 2 children, 1 female and 1 male. I’ll be married between the ages of 26 and 27. That was the general fluffy stuff in my opinion. Then she decided to delve into my past:

Lately, I’ve been seeking out too much advice from others and I need to just go with my gut feeling. (Interesting… I have been asking everyone and their mother about how I should plan this next semester after the hell I went through last semester. But then again, this seems like a general line you can feed to anyone)

I am disappointed with how I did in school recently. And I am not focusing on school as much as I should be. ( Okay, this is totally true. But then again, we’re right across the street from UCLA, it’s obvious I’m a college student. Most college students are striving to do better.)

She said that I went through some very difficult times two years ago. (This was downright wacky and scary. Exactly two years ago, I was in a relationship with someone that I thought was one of the most amazing people I had ever met that was is the midst of crashing into the ground. This was particularly difficult for me to deal with). But she says 2004 was better (she was right) and 2005 is going to be fantastic.

And lastly, apparently there is a girl in my life that I care for very much but she doesn’t necessarily feel the same way about me. (Err, I dunno about this. There are a lot of people I care about, so I can’t really think of who it would be). But she said to “give it time and things will change”. Of course she said this right in front of Brandee. By our body language, it’s obvious we aren’t dating, so maybe she was taking a stab in the dark? I’m not sure. Besides, that would violate my strict policy of not dating anyone from USC. 😛

We hung out at the Getty Center for a bit and then went to go to Dave and Buster’s. I started feeling naceous for some reason and had Brandee drive my car. Then I proceeded to spew my brains out all over the sidewalk on a few occassions. Oh yes. That was classy. It was nice of the psychic to tell me that I was going to be sick too! Oh right, she didn’t. 🙁

Evidentially I caught a nice flu bug that both my mom and dad were having at the exact same time. I was eventually able to drive the hour and a half from Brandee’s house back to my parent’s house (thankfully without having to empty the contents of my stomach). The rest of Saturday night/Sunday was a disaster in terms of this flu. Thankfully I am over it now though! I totally owe Brandee for driving us back to her place and putting up with all of that. She is the only person I know who has gotten a cheesy little Saturn to peel out. Hah!

Anyway, the next time I post, I should be back in the Bay Area!

It was exactly a year ago that I made the decision to move to San Francisco. I find it hard to believe how fast the time has flown by. A lot has happened since then. I feel like I’ve grown up quite a bit since I moved away and started living on my own, and have become quite a bit more responsible as well. Awesome changes all around. I think I have an interesting note I wrote down in a journal back in January of 2004 that pondered where I would be a year from now. I’ll have to dig it up when I return to S.F. in two weeks and post it. It’ll be an interesting comparison.

And where will I be in January of 2006? I’m going to New Zealand! (Still not official yet, but I am going to try to do everything in my power to go there). Where there’s a will, there’s a way!

Also, I think that I’ve finally conquered my irrational fear of roller coasters! I went to Magic Mountain yesterday with some friends and we went on nearly all of the rides! I had a blast and definitely wouldn’t mind going back again. Towards the end of the night, we all started feeling queezy though (of course most of that might be attributed to our New Year’s Party the night before). Regardless, it was a good time.

Anyway, changing to a more somber subject, it is amazing to see the amount of support people are showing for victims of the tsunamis. Right now, people have donated nearly 12.5 million to the Red Cross through Amazon.com’s donation system. The Red Cross alone is reporting nearly $48 million dollars in donations, which is incredible. Millions more have been donated to other organizations as well.

Regarding the tsunamis, my website apparently has a high Google ranking for anything relating to tsunamis. However, this is attributed to the fact that I have quite a few posts and photo galleries on this website dedicated to Tsunami Bomb, one of my favorite bands. In the last few days, my website has gotten over 400 hits from people searching Google and other search engines for tsunami related information. As a consequence of this, the search engines take them to my Tsunami Bomb photo galleries!

I know for a fact this isn’t what a lot of these people care to see. So to help facilitate the spreading of information, I coded up an interesting script that runs on all pages of the website. Basically, it uses PHP and it detects if the referring URL contains the words “tsunami” and “bomb.” If so, then the script doesn’t do anything, taking the user directly to the photo galleries, which is most likely what they want to see. However, if it detects the word “tsunami” but WITHOUT the word “bomb”, the script then intercepts the incoming visitor and redirects them to a special page I setup with information on the tsunami. You can view that page here.

I have to say, I absolutely LOVE using PHP for web design stuff. It is quite powerful and you can do some awesome things with it.

Anyway, for those interested (or for future hits from Google that are searching for how to do PHP redirects) I’ll post the code below for your own use.

I’m sure most people have heard about the magnitude 9.0 earthquake that struck yesterday in the Indian Ocean. Upwards of 12,000 dead at the moment, mainly from tsunamis. I’ve been reading news reports throughout the day and this is only getting worse. I donated some money to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, who are appealing for roughly 6.5 million dollars to assist victims of the earthquake. Definitely donate if you get a chance.

Second order of news relates to the asteroid 2004 MN4 that was discovered this summer. Based on observations carried out over the past 6 months, astronomers concluded that there was a small probability of impact with Earth when it passed by in 2029. Initially estimates placed this at a 1/233 chance of happening. Further observations on Thursday required astronomers to revise their estimates to a 1/63 chance of impact and observations on Friday brought that number down to a 1/45 chance! That is still a 98% probability of it completely missing earth, but is still “low” enough to warrant quite a bit of interest. It will be interesting to see what further observations conclude in the next week.

However, using the Earth Impact Effects Calculator that was created by researchers at the University of Arizona, one can plug in some info based on what we know about this asteroid. While this asteroid is dangerous on a regional scale, it isn’t big enough to create global extinctions. That is somewhat reasssuring, though if 2004 MN4 were to hit, it would still leave a crater nearly 3 miles in diameter.

Third order of news: I saw The Phantom of the Opera tonight with my sister, aunt, cousin and my parents. While I haven’t seen the play yet (due to circumstances not working out every time it’s in town), I decided to go anyway! The movie was absolutely phenomenal! At the moment, it probably ranks as one of my favorite movies of all time. If you have any interest in the musical, check this thing out.

Lastly, in a bit of a geek fest earlier today (and taking time out from reading earthquake news), I coded up a neat little search page with the help of this website. I also added a search box. This allows you to search for any sort of subject matter in my blog and it will bring up a list of all posts that contain that word or phrase. Pretty nifty in my opinion. For example: How many posts do I talk about guitars? 🙂 Just a small example of what’s possible.

Anyway, I hope everyone had a great weekend whether they celebrate Christmas or not. It was definitely great to see a lot of family that I haven’t seen in awhile. Plus… my reunion with pumpkin pie!

Papers turned in! That means that this semester is officially over.

Now it’s time to begin packing in earnest. It looks like I’ll be able to leave tonight at some point.

Point Lobos State Reserve – Wave hitting rocks at Whaler’s Cove. Dec. 18, 2004.

So allow me to setup this story:

Because of busting my ankle a few months ago, I missed an important field trip for one of my classes. My professor believed it was prudent that I should go and make it up. The free time I would have to make it up before I planned to head home was this weekend. The location? Point Lobos State Reserve, just south of Monterey, which is roughly 2 hours away.

I tell my roommate Bre about this last week and she tells me about a friend of hers that lives in Monterey. She said she’d go down with me on Friday night, and we could stay at her friend’s place. Excellent! That means I get to wake up on Saturday, drive about 15 minutes to check out all the geology I need to see and head home!

It turns out, the last substantial meal I had eaten was right before we left our house to drive down there. Once in Monterey, we went out for a few drinks with some of her friends and then came home. At about 9AM on Saturday, I woke up, packed everything up and hit the road! Bre was going to hitch a ride back with her friend that afternoon. That worked out fine, since I don’t think she’d want to tag along while I looked at rocks for a few hours.

I did notice that I was quite hungry and figured I’d just grab a bite to eat at some food place on the way there. The problem was that I didn’t find any food places! Oh well. Time for some geology! After spending roughly 3 and a half hours there (Beautiful place! More on that later!), I decided to head back towards San Francisco. The only problem? How do I get home? I didn’t feel like spending the whole day driving up highway 1, which winds all over the place. So I took the first major highway I saw that headed east. I figured it would eventually have to cross the 101. Besides, I’ve never been to Salinas, time to check it out! (Unbeknownst to me at the time, Highway 101 crosses right through Salinas. Score!)

The whole time I’m driving, I start to realize just how hunry I am. It’s now about 3pm, and I hadn’t eaten anything in nearly 15 hours! Some of you might be wondering how I’m still alive by this point.

I started thinking about my favorite place to eat in the world: In ‘N Out! Unfortunately, the closest one I was aware of was in San Francisco. No problem! I’d just hold out for another 2 hours or so and eat there. It would be like a celebration of sorts!

Finally, the highway I am taking winds through Salinas. I was passing all sorts of fast food restaraunts, but nothing tickled my fancy. It was all about In ‘N Out. I briefly wondered if Salinas had an In ‘N Out, but figured that they were way to cool for this city. Driving a little further, I came upon a sign that pointed to an entrance for highway 101! Excellent! I figured that I should get gas before I leave though.

As I am filling the car up with gas, I take a second to lean back, relax and take in the scenery. I look up to find that right across the street, there was an In ‘N Out burger! I nearly came to tears! It was like it was meant to be. It is for that reason alone that I now know for a fact that God exists. Oh yes!

Anyway, Point Lobos was a pretty awesome place. While hiking on a trail and looking down at my map, I turn a corner to stumble across a young deer munching on some grass. That was pretty awesome to see. I had passed up some parents hiking with their kids a few minutes earlier. So I just sat down and waited for them to catch up, that way they could see the deer as well. I have to say that definitely made my day! Awesome.

I have one last thing to do for school before I can head home. We collected 36 minerals this semester in out mineralogy class, and we have to write out some detailed information on each mineral that we collected. Not too difficult, but quite time consuming. As soon as that is done, I plan to drive back down to Southern California. The current plan looks like I may be driving down sometime tomorrow evening/night. Depending on how I feel though, I might delay it one more day and drive down on Tuesday morning.

I’m coming back up around January 13th I believe (I was leaning towards the 10th, but it looks like I have an orthodontist appointment to do on the 12th. Doh!). School doesn’t start for us until January 31, so that leaves a whole lot of time to do something. I was personally contemplating a road trip to check out Crater Lake (if we can get up there? It might involve snow showing… hmm) and then perhaps driving up into southern Washington to check out Mt. Saint Helens! Yes, a road trip of geology/volcanology. It really will depend on weather conditions though. Evidentially, my friend Phil was having a similiar plan for a road trip in January and wants to drive up to Seattle! We will definitely have to collaborate.

Anyway, time to go write up a few more minerals before going to bed. All most there, I just need to sprint to the finish!

2 more weeks of school left, 1 of which is finals. However, I only have 2 finals in 1 class (mineralogy), so that eliminates a lot of stress. This is a good thing since this stress is again added back because this next week is another insane week! It’s pointless to even describe it at this point. But I’ve lived through the rest of this semester, no reason why I won’t live through this one…

In other interesting news, I found out something extraordinarily funny and somewhat depressing at the same time. For example, navigate to Google and enter the following phrase: horrible faces. Then notice the first link. Click on it if you wish, for it takes you to a rather unflattering picture of my sister and I! It’s actually pretty funny that we’re ranked number 1 on Google for such a generic term. Who knows how long that will work for, since they update their index fairly often. For posterity:

Anyway, it looks like I have a whole weekend of writing papers and studying ahead of me (and I’m not even procrastinating!)

The best thing about Thanksgiving and the rest of the holiday season isn’t the fact that we get and receive all sorts of love from friends and families, it isn’t the fact that people are so cheery (which they should be all year), or the familiar jingles on the radio that we missed (or dreaded) hearing all year. It’s all about how ubiquitous pumpkin pie is… my absolute favorite desert/meal of all time. I may not be able to live off of it, but I’d be more than willing to try!

So what’s gone on in the last week or so since I last posted? The usual: being absolutely busy. However, some great deity up above must read this blog and felt some sort of pity for me, because two of my exams last week were moved! To next week! That spreads things out, and slightly decreases the stress in my life. Until I think about an optical mineralogy exam on Thursday which we haven’t even had a chance to really go over the subject matter at all. Looks like I’ll be spending Wednesday night in the lab, along with some fellow students. So yes, another week, another 3 exams!

I also talked to the athletic trainer at school about my ankle. I’ve never sprained my ankle, so I don’t know what to really expect. It’s still sore when I pivot or if I walk too much. He explained to me that I could be looking at up to 8 more weeks of this type of pain! After that, I’ll be able to play sports that have a lot of high impact activity again. However, people who severly sprain their ankle have a 70% chance of respraining it again within a year! I think I should do it right now just to get it out of the way… 😉

On Thursday night, I increased the number of Klutzy-Things-I’ve-Done-This-Semester, setting a new record. My roommate Bre asked if I wanted to go out with her and some of her friends to get a few drinks. I almost didn’t know what to do, especially when faced with a decision such as hanging out with a few interesting people or staying in and writing a paper! We all went out and part way through the night, I am talking and somehow my drink falls out of my hand. And spills all over Bre’s leg and foot. Oh yes! That was awesome.

Dave’s Klutz-Point tally so far this semester:
Fall down stairs at school: 4
Spill acid on my notes in lab (whole bottle!): 2
Cut myself with knife in lab practicum: 1
Spilled potable liquids: Countless times
Spilled potable liquid on person: 1

I think that factors out to about 12 million Klutz-Points at the moment. I guess my goal this semester is to see how high the counter can go.

Friday night – Saw Napolean Dynamite. That movie was absolutely hilarious! I definitely recommend it for anyone looking for a good laugh. Plus, the theater we went to on Haight Street was just completely rad as well. I will definitely be going back to that.

Our parents came up on Wednesday to visit Michelle and I. They stayed at her place and enjoyed it quite a bit. I personally like Michelle’s place a lot, and was anxious to show them my place, but somewhat apprehensive too, since I didn’t think it compared all that well. Evidentially I was wrong. Both of my parents were thrilled with it, and my mom even described it as “a modern mansion.” That feels pretty good. I definitely don’t see myself moving out of here anytime soon. I might even be getting a bigger bedroom too if one of our roommates moves out.

Our turkey dinner didn’t turn out as planned, but despite that, it was still fun. And I think we all made up for it by having extra helpings of pumpkin pie! OH YES.

They also brought the dogs up as well! I miss them and wish I could have a dog up here. We took them to the beach and they LOVED it. It’s too bad the beaches in Southern California don’t allow dogs. They had fun and frolicked through the waves with a lot of the other dogs that were on the beach too. We saw a side of them that we’ve never seen before. Took quite a few pictures too. That was enjoyable.

The parents and the dogs both left earlier today to go back home. That was nice to see them again and was probably one of the best Thanksgivings that we’ve ever had as a family. Michelle and I will be back down in So Cal around Christmas time though, so that will be the next chance to see everyone again.

Anyway, happy holidays.

It’s nearly 2AM and I have a paper due in Structural Geology in roughly 10 hours. Of course I’ve had about 3 weeks to do it, but in true college student fashion, I wait until the night/morning before! I should really do something about my procrastination problems, but I figure I’d just put it off.

Anyway, my insane schedule for the next few days:


11/17. . .Wednesday. . . . . . Paper due in Structural Geology
11/18. . .Thursday. . . . . . .Mineralogy Identification Exam
11/20. . .Saturday. . . . . . .Mineralogy Field Trip
11/22. . .Monday. . . . . . . .Exams in both Structural Geology and Stratigraphy
11/23. . .Tuesday. . . . . . . Another exam in Mineralogy


Yes! Despite overwhelming odds, I will try to keep a positive attitude about this. I welcome these exams with open arms! Bring it on!

Also, an awesome link recommended to me by my friend Peter:
TerraGalleria – Lots of high quality photos of almost every national park in the United States. Awesome!

A site I stumbled across earlier today showed some amazing pictures of the Auroras/Northern Lights that are currently going on. These pics were taken just a few days ago:
http://www.extremeinstability.com/04-11-8.htm

As the title suggests, this past week has been a tough one. Michelle and I ended up leaving on Monday since she had to be at work on Tuesday. We rolled into the city quite early in the morning. I had noble intentions to make it to minerology (which was a mere 6 hours away), but when my alarm went off, I threw it out the window along with my noble intentions.

So effectively I only had 2 full days at home, which were spent hanging out with Nic and Dan, purchasing things (Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas), playing said things, studying for a huge minerology exam and writing a paper. Sadly, because of this somewhat hectic schedule, I wasn’t able to meet up with some other people I had wanted to see and ended up flaking out by not even calling them. Ugh. I apologize guys.

On Wednesday, it was raining which naturally made everything quite slippery. I decided to celebrate by throwing myself down the stairs! In the process, I slightly tweaked my *other* ankle! So now I have two gimp ankles! Let’s hope I won’t have to be running from any predatory animals, man-eating cars or other villans in the next few days.

I decided to make the best of Thursday by taking an exam for Mineralogy, where I coughed up random knowledge of mineral formulas, such as the chemical formula for cerrusite (which is PbCO₃) in case you were wondering). A late night study session at school on Wednesday night with some fellow friends greatly helped out, so I feel slightly confident about my exam. It will probably turn out to be a 32%, which (thanks to the insane curve in our class) will equate to an A-. Yes!

As if I didn’t torture myself enough on Thursday, I decided to continue writing a paper for my stratigraphy class which was due on Friday. I stayed up until 1:30 in the morning writing it, woke up at 5:00am and finished it at 9:00am, which was just in time to go to class. A total of 3 and a half hours of sleep! I think I was able to make it through the day simply based on how delirious I was.

We also had a field trip this weekend for our stratigraphy class which we voted to turn into a one day trip. So we leave tomorrow at about 7am.

Earlier this evening I was reorganizing some of the photos in my gallery and deleting a lot of useless/redundant/bad photos. Specifically, looking through pictures of Tsunami Bomb that I took this summer at the Troubadour and getting rid of a lot of random photos there, so now it should only consist of the best. Some of them are even posted on their website too! If you go to their photo gallery and scroll down to the July 16th show, you will see 3 rows of pictures from that show. The last row of photos are mine. Awesome! No credit on the site though. Ah well.

Changing subjects once again: This semester, I’ve been tasked with rebuilding the SF-ROCKS (Reaching Out to Communities and Kids with Science in San Francisco) website. You can view the old website here. We just went live with the new site last week, and you can find it here. I’m pretty happy with it overall. Still some stuff to add and things to clean up, but I think it’s quite an improvement. Of course I might be biased. 🙂

Next week is the annual Geological Society of America conference in Colorado. Many of my professors will be attending next week, so some of my geology classes are cancelled. I’ll be taking advantage of this situation and flying back home to So Cal for a few days to visit family and friends. Then on Tuesday I will be driving back up, which means I’ll have my car! It will be nice to be mobile again. However, it was still pretty easy to survive up here without a car for the last 10 months.

I went with a friend from Berkeley and saw a play entitled “The Real Thing” last night at a theater downtown. That was fun, especially since I hadn’t been to a play in quite awhile. I think I prefer live theater to seeing movies. It’s a lot more fun, and interesting how complex and large stories can be told using a simple set and few props. Pretty powerful experience in my opinion.

My temper has kind of cooled the last few days and I’m not as angry over the results of the election as I previously was. However, I saw some pretty sketchy stuff at school on Tuesday that made me sad at how people have to act. I posted about it on a friend’s website:

The dread I was feeling probably represents what can/might/will happen on both sides of the political spectrum, and it was especially evident today at school. I get to school to find a large protest forming in our quad and chants of “NO MORE WAR”. Noble I suppose.However, as I approached, I noticed a table in the center of the crowd and two people sitting down at it with emotionless looks on their faces. Turns out it was a Bush/Cheney table. Not sure why they were setup on November 3rd, but regardless!

Anyway, I guess this whole crowd and makeshift protest started when two Muslim women ran up to their table with a Palestinian flag and started irrationally yelling at these two Bush/Cheney supporters, as if every problem in the world is specifically these two students faults. How they had the balls to sit in the middle of this crowd that was yelling all manner of obscenities at them, I don’t know. But I admire them for that and I am truly ashamed at the complete bullshit that “my” side was giving them. I walked away in embarrassment.

At lunch, I sit back in the quad to see what new antics are going on. These four girls were making quite a big deal of the failed prospects of Kerry and espouting such insightful lines like “Bush had to cheat to get through Yale and had to cheat to get through this election!”

Maybe I’m confused, but even through my ultra liberal eyes, I think Bush handily won fair and square, and by a large margin. The claims of cheating were LUDICROUS. Then a group of guys decides to tell them to, in a polite way, “Shut the Fuck Up!” Of course this sets the crazy women off and a screaming match ensures about who can say “George Bush Sucks!” or “Fuck You!” the loudest.

Ugh. The hypocracy that the liberal side showed today was downright shameful and embarrassing. Many of us have claimed that we get the “Patriotic = No Dissent” quite often from conservatives and are shouted down for offering our point of view. Yet, these exact same people turned the tables and did it to others! Yelling at people, insulting them, dehumanizing them and screaming profanity at them, all because they believe that their guy is doing the right thing. It makes me sick.

I’m not happy with the results of this election, and I was angry/depressed this morning. But the majority of Americans spoke and approved of Bush’s policies. I accept that fact. It makes me unhappy, but I am willing to accept it and move on. While I still disagree on many of his policies, I will not shout people down simply because they voted for him.

Ugh. At the moment, I don’t see how the nation can be unified. We are so completely polarized (and the split was still almost 50-50 for all intents and purposes). There are many angry with each other on both sides.

Regardless of who is our President, I think it’s a sad state of affairs when we degrade our brothers and sisters simply based on their idealogical beliefs.

Anyway, it’s time to finish packing!