The last four weeks have been a blur.  Life comes in three-hour cycles now.  Sometimes there is daylight outside.  Sometimes it is dark outside.  Things are much cheerier when it's light outside.

My cousin Justin died on January 30 from injuries he received in a car accident.  He was riding with a drunk driver who hit an embankment.  Justin wasn't ( Read more... )

For the most part, I always enjoyed living in Sacramento.  One of its drawbacks, which is obvious to anybody who tries to drive around the city, is that it has some of the worst traffic planning known to modern civil engineering.  No matter where you are, and no matter where you want to go from there, the trip will take at least 45 minutes.  This ( Read more... )

Anybody who has lived in Sacramento (or around Sacramento) has heard of Mark S. Allen. He got his start as a DJ on FM 102.5 back when it was a good station (in the mid 1980s), and now he is a co-host on Good Day Sacramento. And he's a movie review whore. For years stinky_monky and I have looked for his glowing reviews of the world's worst movies. He is ( Read more... )

After weeks of wrangling and a last-minute change in research destinations (which came about today when my adviser asked if I could spend a day at UCLA instead of Stanford despite the hundreds of miles separating the two), I finally have an itinerary for my trip to California next week:

• Monday: fly to Los Angeles
• Tuesday: research at UCLA
• Wednesday: ( Read more... )

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