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| What's in the fossil drawer? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Hello! I'm a geology masters student from Boston, MA currently in school at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. You'll most likely be seeing alot of pictures of me and my friends here, as this is mainly a way to comment on thier LJs. However, I want to work with fossils some day and always go on field excursions to collect all sorts of stuff that could end up here as well. My other interests vary, just look at my info, and hopfully you might get a kick out of the few things I put up here. I love to draw, although I find it hard to put time aside for it these days, but you can check it out over at DeviantArt. Just use the link above. Cheers! | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Dec. 14th, 2007 @ 12:22 am Random funny stuff | |||
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| Hullo folks! I'll have a real update as to how the heck I'm doing soon, but for now some funny stuff: So I guess at the end of this game Portal, one of those qwazy Half-Life PC games, you get treated to a neat song by the AI character in the game. Some dude did an awsome parody/remake thingy of it about Mario that is pretty hilarious... Also, one of my favorite webcmics has a flash animation for the original song which is pretty sweet too. http://www.vgcats.com/comics/extras/stil | ||
| Oct. 14th, 2007 @ 07:32 pm Cheers from Grad school! | |||
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Hello everybody! I made it safely to Nebraska in about 3 days with the help of my Dad. Oh, and lets not forget the navigator, a kickass GPS unit my girlfriend and her Mom gave me. I miss all of you back home very much and hope to see you either during Thanksgiving or Christmas break. I'll try to keep up to date on this thing, but in the meantime here are a few notes and photos.   Yep...lots and lots of corn.  Once you hit Ohio the landscape becomes unbelievably monotonous. And I-80 oh boy what a highway! In the words of my Dad, "It is the longest, straightest, flattest road I've ever been on!!!" Busy would best describe my schedule so far at grad school. The classes I've taken are pretty interesting, but fairly time consuming on the homework side of things. I'm also teaching two evening introductory geology labs during the week. Somehow I've simply powered past my fear of speaking in public and usually have a pretty good time helping folks out in lab. Grading however....meh, not so fun. I did make it to one Huskers football game this year; a thrilling 41-40 victory over Ball State. Unfortunately, I could tell the rest of the season was not looking good since we were supposed to blow them away.  Husker Memorial Stadium  A sea of red. Me and three of the other new geology grad students have formed our own little clique in the last few months: chilling in the geosciences dept. during the day, going out for a few drinks at the end of the week. Just recently we took part in the Alumni Banquet for our dept. and got to get all dressed up. Here's me at the Starlight Lounge after the banquet:  Alrighty folks, till next time! Cheers!! | ||
| May. 14th, 2007 @ 06:47 pm Hehe... | |||
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Father to a murdered son. Husband to a murdered wife. And I will have my Matthew, in this life or the next. | ||
| Apr. 30th, 2007 @ 10:42 pm I'll be your penguin! | |||
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My girlfriend Shannon sent me a link to some pictures the other day and I can't help myself from smiling and giggling like an idiot whenever I think of them (and I think about them alot :P ) Here's just a few of them. Enjoy!  | ||
| Apr. 24th, 2007 @ 06:26 pm Gniess and Shist, Sox vs. Yanks and...Corn Huskers? | |||
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Well, things have been super crazy busy lately as I come to a close on my senior year of undergraduate college at Northeastern University. I've spent 5 years at NU and as of this Friday it will all be over. The most amazing news is that not only did I get into the college I wanted, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, but they waived my tuition and gave me a teaching assistantship!!! I'm now officially a UNL Husker! To be able to move in on time and prepare for the start of my Masters program I'll need to leave some time in mid August and make the 1500 mile road trip to Lincoln, NE. I'll miss my birthday, but since I don't think it has actually ended yet we might still be able to celebrate (only of few of you will get that joke :P) So, there's gonna be a huge party for my sister and I for our graduations with tons of Chinese food. I hear there's gonna be gallons of hot and sour soup and mai tais! This summer is going to be pretty interesting as well because I need to start saving up money by working for the Army Corps again, but I also NEED to spend as much time as possible with my best friends and all those I love. It's not like I'm going to the moon (although Nebraska may sound boring enough) and I'll be coming back every chance I get. I'll just miss you guys (you know who you are!). Back to the present though: Yours truly is now a published researcher! An abstract of my work with my advisor Prof. Bailey is now online here: http://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2007NE/finalp and I presented a poster of my results at the Northeast Geological Society of America Meeting on March 13th. For the past 5 months or so I've worked on a 5 million year old coral thicket my teacher discovered in Virginia about 15 years ago. His work deals with a much broader range of questions but my own work, which will go into his papers as well, deals with bioerosion of the corals after they died. Basically a bunch of small marine invertebrate critters that attack hard surfaces went gangbusters on the coral and I pulled together an analysis of the effects they had. It may not be the most breathtaking research in the world, but it's mine!  Here's a shot of me standing in front of my poster at the GSA meeting :) I recently went on a field trip for my structural geology course to Western Conn. and Eastern N.Y. to look at evidence of metamorphism and folding/faulting of rocks in the field.  This is a shot of me mapping a fold in Precambrian Gneiss along Rt. 84 about 10mi into N.Y. I'm using my orange field notebook as a flat surface to prop my Brunton Compass on to to take measurements.  This is the whole class standing in from of the Taconic Unconformity. This marks a major mountain building event in Earth's past with vertical beds on the right overlain by tilted beds on the left; two units separated by many millions of years time. I'm the Gordon's fisherman on the right. I also got to see a Red Sox vs. Yankees game at Fenway Park on April 23rd. Yep, the night the Sox blasted 4 consecutive home runs for the first time in the club's history!  Ahh, Fenway Paaahk!  This one's for Carolyn. Jason Varitek! | ||
| Mar. 5th, 2007 @ 08:30 pm Yall don't know me! | |||
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Current Mood:
 chipper Create your own Friend Test here I have some real news to go with my silly little tests. One of the graduate schools I applied to, the University of Kansas, has accepted me for their Masters program! Now I just need to hear what sort of finance deals/assistantships/etc. they can offer... | ||
| Mar. 5th, 2007 @ 07:53 pm I shall fahreeeeeez Gatom City!! | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Your results: You are Mr. Freeze
Click here to take the "Which Super Villain are you?" quiz... | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Oct. 28th, 2006 @ 12:08 am Medieval Pirates and Cheesesteaks | |||
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Current Mood:
Well, as per usual it has been quite a while. I'll try and give an update on some of the cooler things that have happened recently, but I'm sure somethings will go by the board. chipperCurrent Music: Shannon's Voice In early October this year I finally got bakc to King Richard's Faire (Carver, MA) after a few years hiatus, and this time I got to share the experince with my girlfriend and a few carloads of joviality. We had something of a caravan of ~14 people treck down there from Boston, and I somehow fit 8 in my mothers station wagon. It was like driving a clown car full of trick-or-treaters, I just hope I didn't leave anyone crammed under a seat cushion or anything.  This is mostly everyone from the trip.We certainly freaked the hell outta alot of people coming in. There was some confusion during the day as to where eveyone was going, but all in all it was quite fun. Me and Shannon dressed as pirates, and while you may think there were no pirates in this time THINK AGAIN!! They had a whole crew of pirates running around the faire, so HAH! I thought we looked pretty snazzy together, and Shannon's was particularly impressive since she put it all together herself! (Although I did design my jacket :P) We got to play knife throwing and watch the jousting for awhile (alas our evil knight was killed by the goody twoshoes). Best of all, Shannon had the courgage to have our picture taken while she held a live Red-Tailed Hawk!! Ok, so she claims it looked into her soul and could have pecked her eyes out, but she is smiling right?  Just this past weekend I went with 9 other students and my Prof. Dick Bailey for 4 days in Philadelphia attending the Annual Conference of the Geological Society of America. We drove down in one of the Geology department's vans, and I stayed with Bailey in his hotel room with a classmate(free, WHOOO!). At these meetings students and Professors alike can present posters or give talks pertaining to some new or interesting research they are pursuing. One year they even had a WHOLE DAY of talks just about dinosaurs! This time though I went in search of a grad school. I made quite a bit of progress and have about 3-4 sweet selections, but the best part was meeting a world famous dinosaur paleontologist and University of Pennsylvania Professor, Dr. Peter Dodson. After having heard nothing in the first few days of the trip my though was that he had become busy, and couldn't make it. Early Monday morning, however, he drops me a line on my cell and withing 30mins I'm talking with him at the convetion center! He was a really great guy, funny, and a hell of a thinker. Hopefully I can keep in contact till I get a Masters degree, then who knows...I could be going for my doctorate in Philly.  Self Portrait with Philly in the background. Speaking of Philly, hoh boy is it a great city. I felt very comfortable there and really enjoyed the statues, architecture, and people. Also amazing was the really wide streets, lack of traffic, and absence of college students!! These are alot of things I've not experienced in Boston! And of course, the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia was also a treat. One word: DINOSAURS!  The Benjamin Franklin Parkway, looking east. A statue of George Washington is in the foreground and city hall is the white tower in the background.  This is a sculpture of two deinonychus outside the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.  GIGANOTOSAURUS!!!! | ||
| Sep. 6th, 2006 @ 07:54 pm Of Birthdays and Fish Tales | |||
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Current Mood:
 giddyCurrent Music: Stephen Segal kicking ass On August 28th I turned 22 this year, and had a pretty good time to boot. It was my first time spending a B-day with my awsome girlfriend Shannon, aka | ||
| Sep. 5th, 2006 @ 08:08 pm Your It!! | |||
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Current Mood:
1. Grab the nearest book.  soreCurrent Music: Spongebob Squarepants 2. Open the book to page 123. 3. Find the fifth sentence. 4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences in your Livejournal along with these instructions. 5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "ultra intelligent" book in your closet, bitch! Just pick up whatever is closest. 6. Tag three frickin' people! "But there are some events and processes that are so unusual, or so huge, that they cannot be studied in the modern world. The grand pattern of the evolution of life over millions of years is too big and too long-term for any biologist to understand simply by looking at living plants and animals. Mass extinctions, great impacts and world-scale volcanic eruptions happen only rarely - perhaps on time-scales of tens of hundreds of millions of years - and again studies of the puny events that we witness from time to time can only give hints of what the larger catastrophes were like."-(When Life Nearly Died, by Michael J. Benton) I tag zimmyzimconfectionmancriisaw_reddd | ||
| Aug. 9th, 2006 @ 10:17 pm After all we have Surprise on our side... | |||
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Current Mood:
The age of Sail is just awsome, as well as pirates, so here you go... giddyCurrent Music: Shannon's whistling | ||
| Jul. 31st, 2006 @ 09:19 pm Oh, you mean that sign for no tresspassing... | |||
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| This weekend consisted of my girlfriend, ducks, and dinosaur footprints... On Saturday I took my girlfriend Shannon into Boston to see the Common and Public Gardens. We stopped off first at Quincy Market. After buying some claw chowda at the Boston Chowda Co. we hovered over the other diners like vultures to wait for a seat. Just when a table cleared ourselves and another couple raced for a seat. We both decided to share, and it ended up beaing a nice husband and wife from Cincinatti. Afterwords I took Shannon to a mineral and fossil shop to look for a gift for her Mom, and check out some minerals she had not seen before. I get excited when I see cool stuff like that, so naturally sahe got me a great present. Evil, eeeviiil! It is a 2.5 in wide globe of Labradorite, one of my favorite minerals, that changes and flickers different colors in the light. It definitely remindes me of the palantir seeing stones from Lord of the Rings. Below is the best picture I could take of it to show of some of the different colors that shimmer inside the stone. If I can get a better shot I'll upload it.  After that I finally got her to the Public Gardens and the famous Swan Boats. We saw the two swans the city had aquired for the park, which had apparently made a nest and laid eggs last year. No baby swans though, since they're both female birds. Only in Boston!! There was, however, a family of ducks with 3 little chicks that was ver cute.  On Sunday my father and I snuck into a quarry out in western Massachusetts. Why do such a silly thing you ask? To grab some dinosaur footprints before they're blown up of course! A fellow geologist I work with told me of these prints a friend of his had discovered. Apparently they sneak into this traprock quarry all the time to collect minerals. He gave me directions and even a sketch of the outcrop. Well, these trace fossils were essentially in a large pit within a huge quarry. We srambled down the slope into the palce and casually made our way to them. After some crawling around on the rocks we found them, on a mudstone bedding plane inclined at a 45 degree angle. Unfortunately the layer they were preserved on was not thin enough to break away without using heavy duty powertools, and was incredibly hard. So we took some pictures of them. They were "Eubrontes" prints: big 1-1.5 ft prints made by early Jurassic dinosaurs like the theropod Dilophosaurus. It was incredible just looking at them considering the odds of seeing such a relatively rare find in a quarry 100 ft or more below the surface. Me and my Dad had alot of fun, and hopefully my cooworker can go back with me to cut them out with a rock saw some time.  | ||
| Jul. 25th, 2006 @ 07:51 pm Olde Tyme Fun | |||
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Current Mood:
Well, I might as well start this thing off somewhere... drainedCurrent Music: Guster - Ganging Up On the Sun My girlfriend Shannon and I both dig the renaissance faires like King Richards on Cape Cod, MA and such. So this past weekend we had found out that there was a short one being held in this real castle (Hammond Castle) in Glouchester, MA. We both got all dressed up and when we got to the parking area we didn't see ANYONE in costume. We both got kinda nervous and started slinking down into our car seats. Once inside, however, we realized all the other geeks had showed up already. So we had a bunch of fun, including a round of human chess and a half hour spent with the charicature table folks getting to know them and hiding from a torrential downpour. Shannon looked great, as you can see in the pics below. My costumes ok, but I really like 17th/18th century naval/pirate dress. Hopfully I'll get something together by the Pirate Faire in September :)   | ||
| Jul. 19th, 2006 @ 05:09 pm Hello there! | |||
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Current Mood:
 confusedCurrent Music: My fan Hello denizens of Live Journal! This page will mostly be to view and comment on my friends journals, but you may catch the occasional picture or drawing of friends, dinosaurs, geology, and other such things I'm interested in on here. | ||
busy
dorky
bouncy
