Tag Archives: UCI

Re-creating Ansel Adams’ UCI

Posted on September 17, 2009 by Kelson

Here’s a cool project: In Ansel Adams’ Footsteps, re-creating his photographs of UC Irvine from the 1960s. There are a lot more trees now. (Or, as a friend pointed out, the trees that were there are a lot taller!) It’s a really impressive look at how the campus has changed…plus it’s always fascinating to look at Ansel Adams’ photography. I remember when I was in college, prints of Adams’ photos lined the walls of one of the Student Center hallways.

A couple of years ago I did my own then and now project — well, less a project than a spur-of-the moment 2007 re-creation of a 1997 photo I took of the Student Center as seen from what was then the Humanities Office Building (now Murray Krieger Hall). In this case the trees hadn’t changed much in 10 years, but UCI had flattened the Student Center complex and built an entirely new one.

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Changelings and Vampires and Smurfs. Oh, My!

Posted on October 24, 2008 by Kelson
  • Wow… Kenneth Turan really liked Changeling. Yay JMS! #
  • Trying out LoudTwitter to send daily digests to LJ. (Thanks, andrea_wot!) #
  • Announcement over phone system: “There are cupcakes in the lunch room.” 2 seconds later, loud footsteps running down the hall. #
  • Smurfs are 50 years old? WTF! I thought they were creations of the 80s! #
  • Public Service Announcement: it’s “for all INTENTS AND purposes,” not “for all INTENSIVE purposes.” “intensive” doesn’t even make any sense. #
  • Saw “Let the Right One In.” Less horror, more twisted revenge fantasy/coming of age movie. With vampires. #
  • Also: the Diedrich Coffee across from UCI is now a Peet’s #

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Under Construction Indefinitely

Posted on April 21, 2008 by Kelson

We went to Wayzgoose at UCI on Saturday, which meant getting our annual taste of what’s changed about the college campus. I’d caught the new Student Center last fall, but Katie hadn’t been back since last year, before it was finished.

Some of the meeting rooms buried in the hill still remain from the previous building. In a food court next to the bookstore, I found a window looking down on this familiar-looking atrium.

Through the glass paneling is a stairway that leads up to the ring road entrance. Clone Copy and Clone Notes used to be on the lower floor to the right (off-camera). In the mid-1990s, the area below the overhang to the left was a pool hall whose name escapes me. I think they converted it to a study area when they remodeled the upper floor to create Zot Zone (which has since been demolished and relocated). The area where I was standing used to be an outdoor walkway connecting the main courtyard to the bookstore.

What was really odd was the west food court, where my brain kept trying to overlay the old layout even though I’m sure they ripped out and replaced that section of the building entirely.

The sad thing, though, was that they’re tearing up the large grass area in the middle of the Claire Trevor School of the Arts and putting in another building. Everything in the quad bordered by the Claire Trevor Theater (formerly the Village Theater), the Studio Theater, the scene shop, Studio Four, and the drama offices is a big fenced-off area of dirt.

Aside from the usual uses for a lawn, it was a great place for people to rehearse. It’s not clear how much of the fenced-off area will actually be turned into a building, but they may have finally finished paving the entire school.

I found it a rather ironic discovery to make at this time, considering that Wayzgoose/Celebrate UCI is also combined with Earth Day.

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UCI Student Center: Then and Now

Posted on October 4, 2007 by Kelson

I drove out to UCI on my lunch hour, and got my first view of the newly-completed Student Center. There are actually some parts of the building left over from the previous one, but the whole exterior is new. Then I remembered a photo I’d taken of the old Student Center, back when I was attending the school, from the top of what was then the Humanites Office Building, now Murray Krieger Hall. Since I had extra time on parking, I decided to see if I could match the shot.

Here it is 10 years ago:

UC Irvine Student Center ca. 1997
UCI Student Center: Late afternoon, 1996–1997

And here it is today:

UC Irvine Student Center, 2007
UCI Student Center: Early afternoon, October 4, 2007

Continue reading →

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Web Contest: 11 Years Later

Posted on September 15, 2007 by Kelson

While checking some dead links in the Internet Archive, I decided to see what they had of the website for the Literary Guild at UCI. This was a creative writing club we were both involved in back in college. There’s an abbreviated history of the club still online.

UCI Bookstore WWW page design contestI looked at the earliest archived copy I could find, and noticed down in the corner a badge for a long-forgotten website contest. Every quarter, the UCI Bookstore holds a literary contest, sometimes poetry, sometimes short stories. In spring 1996, they decided to make it a website contest. I had just built a website for the club, and submitted it. Our site was one of the three winners [archive.org].*

Just for kicks, I decided to see which of the sites were still around.

  • Literary Guild at UCI – gone. The club disbanded after the 2000 school year, and the defunct website was removed 2 years later. I still keep an archive of one segment, the collaborative writing projects, but it used to have 10 times as much writing, meeting minutes, club info and news, etc.
  • The Orchid Weblopedia – gone. It appears to have moved around a bit for several years, but the top search result for the title brings up its last web designer, and a note saying that “this page no longer exists.”
  • Ishmael’s Companion – the study guide for the book, Ishmael is still around, but it’s now a tiny part of author Daniel Quinn’s site.

1 out of 3. And even that one’s at a different location.

And so the link rot continues…

* I was hoping to link to an independent announcement, but the UCI Bookstore website only lists the most recent winners (Spring 2007), and while the Anteater Weekly regularly announced the winners, their archives only go back to 1997. I did find the announcement in the May 30, 1996 Zotmail Archive, but it doesn’t return linkable results, so you’ll have to search for it.

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Happy Fence

Posted on July 9, 2007 by Kelson

You know how tarps stretched across fences will often have holes cut in them to allow the wind to pass through, rather than turning them into sails? This fence around a construction site had half-circles cut into each segment. Someone with a sense of humor had altered several panels, though:

Fence with happy face cut into it

Which brings me to this sign spotted on the ring road at UC Irvine a few months ago:

“No” sign on the ground: horizontal bar with two circles above it.

My best guess was “No bored vampires,” but that didn’t seem likely. After walking to the other side, it became a bit more clear:

“No” sign on the ground: horizontal bar with two circles below it.

Aha! No skateboarding! Though it could easily be “No flat dollies.”

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Caught in the act

Posted on December 3, 2005 by Kelson

This sort of thing just goes to prove that no one has quite the same college experience, even at the same college. (In this case, the UCI School of Humanities, where I spent two years before coming to my senses and switching to a major I actually liked.)

It’s probably just as well.

The best line has got to be the grad student saying, “You’ll report me for your having sex in my office? ”

(via The Esoteric Science Research Center)

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Finding an Inn

Posted on November 7, 2005 by Kelson

How often do you get to revisit an old in-joke? Six years ago, Katie and I were driving past the Inn-N-Out by UCI and noticed the sign was only half-lit. Katie exclaimed:

It’s an inn! The out is out on In-N-Out!

Last Friday we went back to UCI for a play and had dinner at the Indian restaurant across the street. As we left the parking lot, we saw this:

IN-N

Ah, nostalgia!

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Yes, it does rain in L.A.

Posted on April 28, 2005 by Kelson

An intense deluge woke us up briefly around 5:00 this morning. I think I was awake enough to say “Damn!” and fall back asleep. It reminded me of something that’s been bugging me.

I looked through the first few pages of Otherworld #2 in the comic store yesterday. As at the end of the first issue, one character made a big deal about how it never rains in L.A.

Admittedly, people drive as if it were true. It starts drizzling, and people freak out. Three days of rain is billed as Stormwatch 2005 on the TV news. Some years we don’t get much rain at all.

But every 7 or 8 years, we get drenched.

I’ve heard people cite this year’s near-record rainfall as an example of the extreme weather that climate models predict for global warming. While I do think there are plenty of valid examples, this isn’t one of them. We got just as much rain in 1997—eight years ago—when the UCI campus flooded, stairs turned into waterfalls, streets and underpasses became rivers, and one student infamously bodysurfed naked down the hill next to the Student Center. (A yearbook(?) ad later remarked, “Who says nothing happens in Irvine?”) We got nearly enough rain two years before that. I knew someone from Vermont who brought friends out to visit during the heaviest period of rain. They got their preconceptions handed to them.

Every once in a while the cycle skips. Those skips coincide suspiciously with droughts. I remember tons of rain and the occasional hailstorm in the early 1980s, then it was all dry until 1995.

The thing is, while a very wet winter is uncommon for Southern California, it’s not unusual. In fact, it’s very regular. I recommend looking up El Niño as a starting point.

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Bunny Xing

Posted on September 25, 2004 by Kelson

Across the street from the Irvine Civic Center:

Bunny crossing?!?

This brings back memories of days in UCI’s student housing. There were rabbits everywhere. The complex was right next to a big empty field, and rabbits would hop through all the time. “Oh, look, a rabbit!” “Yeah, yeah, same old, same old.”

But this is the first time I’ve seen a road sign. Of course, given that even the people in Irvine can’t stick to crosswalks, I expect there will still be problems with jaywalking (jayhopping?) rabbits!

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