San Francisco on a sunday

Me and Becky decided to go into San Francisco for the day to go for a walk about and see some of the sites, Chinatown and the Golden Gate Bridge were the main foci of our trip and we couldnt wait to see them.

We began our trip by walking from the Caltrain station up to the Chinatown gate through the hustle and bustle of Market street and past a mad, screaming, homeless guy.  We wandered around the main street and looked at the various food markets, stalls, and shops before getting some Vietnamese food, which was delicious by the way and only £4!

We rode the cable car.. In the wrong direction!  Sort of... 

We got off at Van Ness and walked to the maritime museum before making our way to the Palace of fine arts, and then onto the bridge and up to vista point which gives remarkable views of San Francisco and the bay area.

Oh yes, and this is the lasagne we made the other night.  Was a great success.

Me at the chinatown gate

Me stood next to the strangest mannequin ever 

China town!

Me and Becky on the wrong cable car!

San-fran-cisco

I must go...San Francisco needs my help!

Trippy isn't it?

Yosemite cancelled

Unfortunately there is heavy snow and rain in Yosemite at the minute and its set to continue over the weekend, so we've decided to postpone the camping trip till next week.

I'll keep you updated on any developments

This week

This week I'm focusing on my GIS introductory course which I want to complete by the end of next week!  I will also be developing a data report for the Saudi geological survey on their seismic trace data base and will be camping in Yosemite on friday, saturday and sunday!

So it's going to be quite a packed week to say the least!

I'm just reading up on Yosemite national park and the various hikes you can do and there are so many to choose from.  I really hope that the weather will be fine this weekend, I don't want this to be a repeat of Abel Tasman haha.

Anyway, I'll keep you updated on any developments and will upload some photographs of Yosemite after the weekend.

Here's a random photo taken in Kaikoura, just thought it would make this post look nicer.

Coal Mine Ridge Preserve hike

Again, Meet up has proven to be a great way of meeting people!  Today I went on a hike to the Coal Mine Ridge Preserve in the Town of Portola Valley, just a few miles from the roar of Silicon Valley in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

The hike lasted about 4 hours and I made some good friends in the process.  We're acrually thinking of meeting up again to do some more hikes and do some other things, e.g. Spring break in Santa Barbara and a road trip to Lake Tahoe.

Overall a very good day :)

Silicon valley

Rangoon Ruby and Berkeley

The other night I discovered a really handy website called "meet up" where social groups advertise to the local area online in order to attract new members and guests.  I organised to go on one of these meetups and it was pretty awesome, the group I was with was a group of international expats living in Silicon valley who had organised to go to the Rangoon Ruby restaurant in Palo Alto.  Long story short, the food was amazing, never had Burmese food before but will definitely be having it again.  I also met some people who were organising a hike in the Santa Cruz mountains this saturday, and I got invited to go too!  So this weekend will be very eventful hopefully!

I've also organised to rent a car, travel to Yosemite, and camp there for the weekend with a housemate from Australia.  I think we're going to go next Friday so be ready for some unbelievable pictures!

Anyway, yesterday I went into work and did some more trace analysing before catching the caltrain to Millbrae, then switching to the BART system to get to Berkeley.  Bit of a hectic journey but it was worth it, Berkeley is such an amazing place, filled with life and just general excitement, the downtown area is filled with indie shops, numerous asian restaurants (theyre obsessed with Asian cuisine in California) and historic buildings.  The campus itself is a pleasure to walk around, it is a hive of activity and its reputation for being a centre of political protest and progressive liberal activism was surely shown by all of the different stalls and signs displayed around campus.

I then attended a seminar on microbial sedimentology, which sounds dull but was surprisingly interesting. 

The "meet up" group outside Rangoon Ruby.

Menlo Park Caltrain station.

Big, crazy, double decker, metal American train.

The Sather Tower.

The sather gate.

Hearst mining fountain.

You can just about see the Golden Gate bridge in the background.

The seminar.

I apologise for the poor pictures there must have been something on the camera screen or the focus wasn't right.

Seismic data and Saudi project

Today I've been all over the place.  This morning I continued with my GIS tutorial and got another module completed, I also went for lunch with some work colleagues before I was meant to leave for Berkeley.  

I missed the train by five minutes and the next train after that was in an hour so I decided to give the lecture a miss.  It was a real shame because it was a geography seminar on Brazillian land reform and deforestation so that could have been interesting but never mind.  I'm off to Berkeley again tomorrow for a seminar on sedimentation science, if the weather tomorrow is as good as todays it will be an amazing day!

I also got the chance to analyse some seismic traces from the seismometer stations in Saudi Arabia.  At the moment I'm helping my supervisor with a data report for the Saudi Geological Survey and hopefully by the end of it, it will look very professional and tidy like this Indonesian data report below.

Analysing earthquake traces on the mac

GIS tutorial

I decided to go on a bike ride around the stanford area and upper Menlo Park on Sunday, unfortunately I didnt take any pictures because... i couldnt be bothered, I know, what an awful excuse, but take my word for it, it was beautiful.  i'll make sure to take pictures the next time I go out on a random outing like that.

On Monday and today I have been getting on with my online GIS introductory course and have already completed 2 out of the 8 modules.  The content of the course is actually quite interesting and well explained but some of it is understandably quite complicated but I've just been powering through and doing my best to be honest.  I'll probably read over the course material again and again to help it sink it, a lot of it is on statistics and software functions.  

I am actually sort of a test guinea pig because the USGS have never had a high school level intern do the GIS training before, so I'm sort of an experiment to see if it can be done.  

Again, the Lumix is not doing me proud, but the picture is basically of my desk in the GIS lab.  On the screen is a map template of Florida and the south east of the USA that I've been working on, my task was to map where the towns with the biggest population of over 50 year olds were.  Another map I worked on earlier was of a tornado path and I had to create a tornado path prediction and calculate the cost of damage caused by the tornado.

Proof that I'm doing GIS! 

The other day I was instructed by my supervisor to create a brief presentation on the missing flight MH370 using BBC news material.  The USGS was thinking of getting involved in the recovery mission as they have some experts on sound wave physics, so my little presentation is going to be used at a future meeting, which I think is quite cool.

Santa Cruz

As a part of my San Francisco Bay hazards projects I was advised gy my supervisor to travel to the coastal city of Santa Cruz in mid coastal California.  This town is the stereotypical California beach town that I have always imagined that I would visit!  There were volleyball matches held on the golden beaches, while surfers rode the waves and the pier on the main beach is the home to a colony of California sea lions that have migrated north from Mexico.

Its situated on the northern edge of Monterey bay, 72 miles south of San Francisco and is well known for being a centre of liberal progressive activism.

I caught the caltrainat half seven in the morning to San Jose then switched to the Santa Cruz metro shuttle which took me directly from San Jose to Santa Cruz.  The ride was about an hour long but I was able to see a lot of wild forest areas and beautiful landscapes on the way there.

I made my way to the beach as soon as I got to Santa Cruz and walked up the pier and down the main beach and across the main beach and twin lakes beach, i also visited the Santa Cruz natural history museum and then made my way to central Santa Cruz.

Its disturbing to see the huge amount of cliff erosion here!  Some of these houses are just a metre away from falling in to the sea.  It only takes 1 tsunami, earthquake, or a big storm to carve huge chunks out of these cliffs.  This will definitely be one of the themes featuring in my presentation.

The main beach at Santa Cruz.  On the right is the arcade and amusement park and on the left is the pier.

The lighthouse on twin lakes beach

Santa Cruz pier

California Sea Lions basking in the sun at the side of the pier

See what I mean about cliff erosion!

A very small museum

The head of a north American Mastodon in the Santa Cruz natural history museum.

Santa Cruz central pictures.  Above is the town clock tower.

I then went for a lecture at the University of California Santa Cruz.  The subject was "the rise of Oxygen in the earths early ocean and atmosphere".   After this I then went back to the town centre and made my way home via the shuttle.

Stanford and Berkeley

I've been going to Stanford a lot recently, aminly for research material as they have an amazing collection of books in their several libraries.  I've also attended a seminar on glacial scanning at Stanford which, I'll be honest, completely baffled me as it was designed for a post graduate glaciology audience.  But looking on the bright side, the stuff I did understand was really interesting.

Stanford campus is huge, I'd say its definitely bigger than Darwen and it's so well kept and just generally really pleasant to walk about.

The oval (looking at the main quad)

Main quad entrance

 (Hoover tower)

Memorial church

The oval

I dont have many pictures of Berkeley right now as they're on my USGS camera which is in the office now so that'll have to wait for another time.  However I'll just say that I found Berkeley to be like Stanford despite the architecture and the landscape (berkeley is hilly). They are both amazing places and I will be hopefully attending more amazing lectures there.

San jose

My work desk

Dinner I made the other night (a good change from tuna salads and noodles!)

The basketball game from last Saturday

Terrible picture - a NOAA presentation at the tech innovation museum in San Jose.

This really intrigued me whenI found it in the museum.  Scientists have sent off probes into space with crpytic information about Earth and our species, the hope is that aliens will intercept the probe and will be able to understand the symbology and drawings of the presentation and will make contact with humans.  It was very eerie and strange how they summed up the human race in a 4 minute video.

A tsunami pod - in the event of a tsunami a person would climb into their pod and would bob to safety with rations of food hidden under the carpet.  It's a pretty cool invention in my opinion, and yes it was invented by the Japanese.

Downtown San Jose.  Its a really nice town and the weather was perfect for my visit.

Pretty random garden ornament