weekend report

thursday: movie: the ring

friday: movie: love actually, at Wheeler Hall, which was super funny. It's always better seeing films with a student audience, because they respond to the film so much more - they applaude, laugh, hoot, and hiss as appropriate, and for some reason it actually makes the films so much more interesting.

saturday: trip to to the Mission with diane, michelle, and heather, including yummy mexican food and a secret radio antenna tower. hottubbing in a not-warm-enough hot tub at wilde. oddly I'd never been to

sunday: trip to steep ravine environmental camp with diane. it was a -0.5 ft tide today and we arrived right at low tide, hoping to find the hot spring there, which is only accessible at extremely low tides. all documentation available just said "minus tide" or "negative tide," so I figured -0.5 ft might be enough. we arrived at steep ravine and a nice man with a ranger friend gave us a ride in his pickup truck down to the sea. he didn't know anything about the hot spring, but his ranger friend said, "oh yeah, you can only get to it during a -2 tide." shucks. we hiked out along the beach and the strong scent of sulphur dioxide told us the hot spring must be down there in the crashing waves somewhere. instead of hotspringing, we built a house out of driftwood in which we took shelter from the rain while we read physics. then we went home and drank hot chocolate.

now: reading solid state physics. trying to figure out this whole band theory of conduction and trying to remember all that business about semiconductors. something about standing wave solutions of the matter-wave at the brillouin zone boundaries? fortunately I have Britney's Guide to Semiconductor Physics to help me out. And this guy's guide to home-made lasers is pretty nifty too.