👋🏻  Hello!

Thanks for visiting! You'll find a bunch of musings I've been writing around these parts since the early 2000's. Lately, I've been reviewing a lot of books. But I also write about code and my experiments using generative AI. But really, you're just here to see pictures of Benson.

Blog Posts

San Francisco Pillow Fight – 2008

On Valentine’s Day, thousands of people in San Francisco gathered near the Ferry Building at 6pm for a massive pillow fight.

SF Pillow Fight - 2008

SF Pillow Fight - 2008

SF Pillow Fight - 2008

Red Bull Girl

SF Pillow Fight - 2008

SF Pillow Fight - 2008

SF Pillow Fight - 2008

SF Pillow Fight - 2008

Almost 3 hours later...

My World at Work

Ah, the messy desk of a lowly scientist…

My Poor Cubicle

Lookin’ for a Leader

Today is the day that many of us get to do our civic duty. Get out there and vote folks. In honor of today, here’s one of the most kick ass Neil Young songs, “Lookin’ for a Leader.”

Published photos

An email today from a professor at the University of Texas requested to use one of my photos for a new geology book for children. Awesome! The lucky photo?

Caliche layer close up

It will apparently be used to teach children about caliche.

Snowboarding Ninja!

Went to Tahoe this past weekend to enjoy the fresh powder…

Dave - Snowboarding Ninja

Time flies

Wow, I was browsing through my photo library in iPhoto and came across my New Zealand photos. Exactly two years ago today we were mapping uplifted coastal terraces at White Rock on the North Island.

Beach

Lunch in New Zealand

Working on a project

Pranks Around the Apartment Building – Esoteric Humor

Among our friends, my roommates and I are known as pranksters, constantly pulling random jokes on each other and other people that we love.

Over the holidays, our landlord posted an interesting sign in the lobby and elevators of our apartment building. It basically said that the building could not accept 12″ x 12″ x 12″ boxes over the holidays. Included with this announcement was a helpful drawing of a 12″ x 12″ x 12″ box, just in case someone didn’t know what a square looks like.

"Reminder to Tenants"

These signs had been posted for over two weeks. One evening, when my roommates and I were taking the elevator up to our apartment, we thought of a potentially funny idea (at least to us!). We thought it would be funny to have the sign say the exact same thing, except that the drawing would be a rectangle with 12″ x 12″ x 12″ dimensions. Below that would be a message that claimed the drawing was not to scale.

A quick trip to Kinko’s resulted in the following:

"Reminder to Tenants - Drawing not to scale"

We set about posting these around the building one evening. Happy with our work, we went to bed. Upon awaking the next morning and setting off for work, we found that someone had scrawled in angry block letter on one of our signs, “YEAH, NO KIDDING!!!!” with a giant arrow pointing to the “Drawing not to scale” message! Hah. Pretty funny.

By the time we returned home at the end of the day, all the signs had been replaced with correct ones. Ah well. I wonder if our landlord at least laughed?

Us science geeks can have a pretty esoteric sense of humor at times.