July 31, 2008 - Cuz Im your cuz, cuz!

Quick stop in Asheville, NC to see my great cuzzin Katie and her husband Tom. Talk about a hip-hippie town. DAMN. Anyways, we apparently have alot of cool ideas about making our own clothes and stuff, so maybe you'll be seeing some hip threads soon!

July 30, 2008 - Get off my cloud!!

Well after a day of *thankfully* uneventful driving, we arrived in Cherokee, NC. I have some rather strong, mixed feelings about Cherokee that Im going to save for a later date but let me just say that I think CASINOS SUCK. Anways, after passing through Cherokee as quickly as possible and getting into the park we drove up to Clingmans Dome and where immediately offended by all the 0ther tourists there and left. Best to just go hiking in the woods... let the masses enjoy their 2,000 meter dome. People on the east coast are so easily impressed by anything they have yet to pave anyways.

July 29, 2008 - Happiness is a drooly dog

July 28, 2008 - On the road again...

Yeah, Im not sure if this picture needs much explanation, however, let me tell you, there are hundreds of people who were on the road from Florida to New York who have a similar picture in their cameras/camera phones.

July 27, 2008 - So long and thanks for all the fish..

Saying goodbye to some good friends...



and I dont know how long its been since Ive seen these two together, thank god Ive got photo documentation for posterity.

New Planet!

born out of pure procrastination and the tailend of a hangover... It reminds me of the little prince

It looks pretty volcanic to me... more later gotta get back to work...

hangover posts...

To nauseous to do real work, too guilty to go back to bed... this is yet another photo manipulation... I'm really diggin' on the monochromes with a splash of color. On a side note, this photo was featured by the Earth Science Pic of the Day folks this past January. Click on the picture to see the original with an explanation written by a professional volcanologist

the snow white future

Its so hot outside right now it makes me want to vomit, Im really looking foward to having this view in the coming winter :)

this is a fun photo-manipulation I did of this equally beautiful picture

July 26, 2008 - How to placate loss with food

So today is the anniversary of my papa's death. He was a huge influence on me and filled all the gaps that my father left. Its especially hard on my Nana so we took her out to dinner at the Colonnade and then to Bern's Steakhouse for desert. Two of my favorite, albeit pricey, restaurant. Ive actually only been to Bern's several times in my life but most of those times have been with my Nana and Papa, so it had good memories for me.

Here's my chubby as about to mow down some soft-shell crab.


And here is my actual P-365 submission for today. A nice shot of our server at Bern's preparing our Banana Flambe.

July 25, 2008 - Adventures in Eating`

Mmmm.... tried something new last night while out with friends... here is the before



and the aftermath....

can you guess what kynd of eggs those are/were??? I'll give you a hint, we poured the raw yokes into sake.... dericious!

July 24, 2008 - Zorch!

Haha! you have been blogged my friend... see you in Toronto!

July 23, 2008 - bland photography

Hey at least I tried to get a good photo for the day.... Im trying to bust my hump to finish the revisions my committee gave me so the photo today is nothing spectacular, just the staircase in my building (with a few post-processing tweaks). After doing this Project 365 for just a few weeks, its really hitting me what a commitment this is. I know you must be thinking it only takes a second to snap a photo, but when you really start thinking about composition and lighting and making your photos interesting, plus blogging about it, it can really consume a chunk of your day...oh well... Soon though, I'll be churning out quality photos again....

July 22, 2008 - Oh Alain!

I submit to you 1/2 of my dirty foreign officemates...

Alain, our time together is almost over...
But thats ok 'cause your quite the ogre...
I tried to make you pretty and paint your nails...
and I was hoping you'd forgotten after we'd drank all those ales...
Im leaving my swish friend in the souse...
But he knows that I love em' even if he sounds like there's marbles in his mowfts...

July 21, 2008 - Back to the grind

Defense in hand, all's left to do is revise the thesis and get the hell out of Florida!
Here is my friend Jen's daughter mining for fossilized amber in the dig-kit I got her for her 4th birthday. Such the young professional dont you think???

July 20, 2008 - Goin' out in style

I really wish I had taken the picture that could truly capture the mayhem of the going away party that my advisor threw for me. Alas, it was not a safe place for my camera and all I have to show for it is this stuffy pseudo-graduation picture we took with my Nana before she left and all hell broke loose. On that note, it is really empowering to throw your advisors into a pool and/or be half drowned by them. And a whiffle ball to the face a few times cant hurt either....

July 19, 2008 - Flugtag Fantasy Fun!!!

Flugtag Fun + Metrocon = One hell of a way to spend the remaining time I have in Tampa. For those of you checking this blog looking for good photos, I apologize but as I suspected my long lens was not working correctly at long distances and hardly any of the distance shots of the Flugtag teams came out. Here is a link to the Tampa Bay Times photo gallery though... Nice to meet ya'll!!

Oh and somewhere in this mess of photos, that is not in any particular order BTW, is my Project 365 sumbission.... Which one do you think best represents the day?

July 18, 2008 - MS Thesis Defense..... runway!!!

Ok, I dont know why I built it up so much, it really wasnt that bad. Im not saying I did the absolutely fabulous job that I had envisioned in my head, but it wasnt the dreaded student slaying I had nightmares about.

Although I dont feel that I did a great job (of course everyone else says I did) I should have stopped while I was ahead. As Diana put it I 'poked the bear' and got a mathmatical tongue lashing from Dr. Vascher.... Oh Academia, how do I love thee, let me count the years....

July 17, 2008 - Where is my mind?

I cant believe Im taking even a minute to blog when my defense is tomorrow! This might explain why Im so tightly wound. Oh well, no new picture for today so here is *hopefully* a snapshot of part of my poster I presented at AGU last year, for some reason blogger hates ridiculously large figures and wont let me upload the entire poster. Alot has changed but at least if anyone has been missing me or wondering what the hell Ive done with my life, this is it.

Anyways, this is a map of Utah (ah hem, that I wrote the code to make **toot** <-- thats my horn and I'm tooting it ) with its major tectonic provinces, the black rectangle is my field area and the red are all the volcanoes. Capeesh?

July 16, 2008 - still too busy

To busy to take pictures, Im freakin' out man! Oh what have I gotten myself into? Well, only a few more days and its over right? Oh wait, after that its another 4 years! Good lord.... anyways, no time for Project 365 so here's a picture of some stuff Im working on. I was able to use the distance of blocks ejected from my volcano to determine their eruptive velocity which I was then able to use to determine the energy of the eruption. Turns out an individual explosion from Tabernacle Hill is probably on the order of 1 kT. Which is comparible to some of the earliest nuclear tests... This picture is from Operation Plumbbob in the Nevada Test Site from the 50's. They decided it would be cool to have an airship in the area to see what happens.

July 15, 2008 - werkin hard

So this totally is not a photo I took, but so help me I love it soo much that Im going to risk life and limb to climb through the woods every chance I get in hopes of creating a photographic composition as cool as this one. Here is the artist's link. Im far to busy getting ready to defend my thesis to take any good pictures, expect bad things until after this Friday...


Oh, and by the way, I dont even like spiders **shiver**

Holy Hell!

Thats pretty impressive (the crystal not the old trout)! From Earth Science Pic of the Day

July 14, 2008 - Future old friends

Im sad about already starting to say my goodbyes. Jen leaves for Africa tomorrow so this was the last time I saw her.

July 13, 2008 - Whoops!

An interesting thing happened last night... It started out innocently enough, Nik and I just wanted to go out an have a nice romantic dinner at Simply Thai. Unfortunately, by the time we got moving everthing was closed. What to do? Eh, go to O'Briens (my old neighborhood's irish-themed pub). It was nice to kick back and have a few drinks, and as always I ran into someone from high school there. Skip to hours later and we've closed down the bar, gone to my friend Jeremy's house and Nik passes out. I actually had a great time, Jeremy and I (drunkenly) argued over the safety of airplanes vs. cars for something like 5 hours. And to top the night off we had a bit of a fist fight. Hey, at least I took off the brass knuckles before I landed one on his jaw! Good times! Seriously, it was nice to stop thinking about my thesis for a few hours and to be fair, my jaw is sore today too ;)
Oh, and here is today's P-365 sumbission