No matter where you go; there you are.
(Buckaroo Banzai)
And here you are! Thanks for coming. I'm a grad student (i.e. in a Ph.D. program) studying astronomy at the University of Washington. I went to Harvey Mudd College where I lived in a bar called Baja. My alma mater had an unhealthy but marketable reputation for working people hard. One day when I was reflecting on that I came across this picture in an old hmc yearbook. Go on, count the cigarettes.
After college I worked for a couple years at Active Voice, a software company that made voice-mail. My greatest contribution was certainly my winning entry in the chili cook-off. I learned that as you make your chili ever hotter the voice of your shrinking pool of supporters becomes disproportionately louder. You'll win the "hottest edible" prize every time, because there's always someone who can eat it! My greatest gift from that company was meeting a very nice girl.
I've taught and served as a teaching assistant at the UW several times. Two times when I was a teaching assistant for the undergraduate observing course I took some photos. In 2003 my group and I had a grand time at the UW's own Manastash Ridge Observatory (MRO), located outside of Ellensburg, WA. In 2004 we got time on the 72 inch (also known as the 1.8 meter, or the Plaskett Telescope) at DAO in Victoria, BC. This was the largest telescope in the world when it was completed in May of 1918, a title eclipsed just a year later by the 100 inch Hooker telescope on Mr. Wilson. The real claim to fame should be the fact that it held the title of the second largest telescope in the world for 29 years (until the Palomar 200 inch in 1948).
I used to keep other photos on the web, and I found that my students rather enjoyed them -- mysteriously these photos cannot be found anymore. . . .
