Describe the world you come from, for example your family, clubs, school, community, city, or town. How has that world shaped your dreams and aspirations?

I live in two places at once. This is not because I have miraculously achieved a new method to manipulate space-time, but instead because my rural, secluded hometown of Bonsall and the bustling, lively area of San Diego County, surrounding Bonsall, are each homes to separate parts of my personality.

I’ve lived in Bonsall my entire life, in a house atop a grassy, tangerine tree covered hill surrounded by rolling hills and natural silence. Growing up as an only child, I have always entertained myself by satisfying my curiosity. This curiosity has developed into my constant quest for knowledge and my love to express myself by bringing my ideas into physical form.

My parents have always encouraged me and given me the freedom to explore any subject I like: I have made documentaries of local junior sailing events, built two computers (named Hal and Athen), assembled an eight-inch Dobsonian telescope, launched a website and web store (www.blondegeek.net), and I continue to feed my passion for physics and mathematics with growing piles of books. I jazz things up and “bass” about, make a complete mess of the dining room table with scraps of my latest sewing project, and tear up the local trails on my dirt bike.

My interests branch out from one another. Once I became a dedicated “trekker”, I started to develop a quickly growing interest in the cosmos, particles, and theoretical physics. After completing a quilt square for a 7th grade English project, I was ecstatic to realize that I could bring the clothing designs that filled the margins of my notebooks to life. All my hobbies seem to originate from similar happenstances.

Since I’ve been able to drive about the dynamic county of San Diego for the past year, many of my interests have extended far beyond the borders of Bonsall and I’ve become quite a social butterfly, fluttering about the neighboring cities and towns. I’ve met an entire “band” of people including my bass teacher, my current boss, and several friends through playing bass guitar with the Palomar Community College Jazz Ensemble and I’ve just begun to venture into Discrete Mathematics at another local community college. I never know where these new adventures will take me, but I know I’ll always learn something and meet new, amazing people. For these reasons, I consider the entirety of San Diego - its streets, freeways, cities, taco shops and beaches - as home, fostering my on-going passions.

While living in my personal space of Bonsall and the community of San Diego, I’ve created many goals for myself. Some are big, many are small, but all are possible. I want to journey to outer space, record a jazz album, write a hit science fiction movie that will inspire the next generation, sell a million shirts, sew a pair of pants, discover other dimensions that defy all known theories of spacetime and inspire others! I want to challenge my beliefs, thoughts, and abilities and use that knowledge to make a difference in the world, to leave it a little bit better than before. Then I’ll come back to Bonsall and stand on my old back porch and smile to myself as I remember that this is where it all started.

Labels: college essays, MIT, procrastination of homework, projects, summer

Posted by Tess |

Caltech students have long been known for their quirky sense of humor and creative pranks and for finding unusual ways to have fun. What is something that you find fun or humorous?

My dad and I use to sail Solings with the Mission Bay Yacht Club Soling Fleet. Our fleet had a reputation for being a rather rambunctious bunch that was always having fun. An example of this behavior was a harmless little prank we pulled on a friend and fellow Soling sailor Ian from Orcas Isle, Washington who would come down once or twice a year to race with our fleet.

Around Thanksgiving of 2001, our fleet was going to race in Long Beach and Ian and his crew were coming down to race with us. Ian was also going to take his boat and van that he had left the year before down in San Diego back to Orcas. During that past year the boat and van had been shuffled between fleet members, who would keep it at their house until the neighbors complained. The van was after all an ancient vehicle with a fading, splotchy, multi-hue, powder blue paint job.

Growing tired of the van’s physically unappealing condition or perhaps just seeing the opportunity for mischief, a couple members of our fleet had decided that it was high time to reinvent the van’s image by painting it PINK. So, the van had been painted the most annoying, Barbie bright, uncomfortable shade of pink right before it was to be reunited with Ian.

Ian’s reaction went something like this:
“So, where’s the van?”
“Over there.”
“You mean behind that pink…Oh my God!”

Since then, Pink Van has been a symbol for the vivacity and dark humor of our Soling Fleet and in that tradition Ian left the Pink Van down in San Diego for another year.

*****************************************

And the picture to go with the story. I'm sitting on the roof.

Labels: college essays, procrastination of homework, summer

Posted by Tess |

Since I'm on the theme of looking back here are some cached blondegeek pages from way back when. I can't seem to find a cached version of the first blondegeek site and there are definitely some redesigns in between these.

Many of the image links are totally broken, but if you go to animations on Version 4, you can see one of my ridiculous first flash animations with llamas dancing to "Love Shack".

Version 2 - 2004
Version 3 - 2004
Version 4 - 2005
Version 5 - 2007

Labels: procrastination of homework, spare time, summer

Posted by Tess |

Howdy!

I'm at Fermilab for the month (just got here last Thursday), working on MicroBooNE (click for link). I've been programing, helping design a frame to hold some of our detectors, and trying to avoid the ill-tempered, hissing, government-owned geese that flock around the High Rise (picture below). The novelty of living in essentially a town of physicists still hasn't worn off and I'm having a blast.

I'm staying on the Fermilab campus in one of the Fermilab Village dorms where I'm living with many different physicists from all around the globe. Since I forbid myself to take any of my office work back to the dorm with me, I've been spending the evenings socializing with my dorm-mates, playing my guitar, and concocting devious plans of art installation. (Hopefully more about this later, in another post.)

But! Four weeks have past without a peep from me, so I must "tell" you what has happened during this blogging gap. That's right. You know what time it is. It's picture time.

*cue your Flight of the Conchords groove*











That's all folks!

Labels: architecture, exciting times, Fermilab, geese, howdy, photos, physics, pictures, summer

Posted by Tess |

I'm in Berkeley at the moment for a mini-vacation of sorts. This particular day was set aside as a lazy day so I've treated myself to reading by the poolside and doing a bit of swimming and... well that's about it. I've just finished the second book of Terry Brooks High Druid of Shannara Triology. I thought I had the third one so that I could finish the triology up before heading home, but alas I grabbed the wrong book. At least it's the first book of a different trilogy, so I won't feel completely disjointed should I decide that I don't mind switching between eras in the Shannara realm of things.

I haven't done as much reading as I thought I might be doing this summer, but the books that I have plowed through so far have been quite a trip. Buckminster Fuller's (the guy that made the geodesic dome popular) Critical Path presented an a lot eye-opening ideas about sustainability, technology, and why Spaceship Earth carries 6 billion (4 billion at the time the book was written) billionaires who don't realize their wealth. Of course you can label and dismiss the adoption of all Bucky's ideas a utopia, but you can't discount that fact there is a lot to be learned and borrowed from the amazing things this man presented in his lifetime. Also while reading this book I kept thinking how his philosophy, even though based on the service of ALL mankind rather than oneself, seemed to resonate so well with many of Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy, since the both paint a picture of a possible world where creativity and ingenuity flourish and are rewarded. Then again, many utopias paint that kind of picture. This also leads me to think that on the surface, each utopia isn't that different, it's just in the details that you find that each just require specific types of people. That's where the realization of these ideas runs into trouble. Either there's a problem finding enough people to fit the profile or other issues seem to get into the way; call it human nature, upbringing, ambition, or whatever else you wish.

I've also been trying to get some Russian into my blonde nogin. With Rosetta Stone and somewhat successful speaking attempts, I'm making some progress. I'm also interning at an architecture firm, where I'm learning how much paperwork goes into a building. It's quite funnily impressive how detailed instructions get in the specifications for the building things. Care for some light reading on how exactly cardboard is supposed to be disposed of on a job site?

But for now, I'm going back to vegging and maybe starting that other Terry Brook's book if daytime television fails to satisfy.

Labels: Ayn Rand, berkeley, books, Buckminster Fuller, reading, Russian, summer, Terry Brooks

Posted by Tess |