• SCUBA

Flabellina iodinea courtesy of Michael D. Miller

At least once every week you can find me SCUBA diving in Scripps Canyon off Black's Beach. The geology is incredible. There are many little tributaries in the canyon that are narrow enough you can touch both walls at the same time. If you go to the correct part of the canyon the walls are covered with so much life that you cannot really even see the rock. I often go diving with the UCSD SCUBA Club, called the SeaDeucers.

Nudibranchs (as shown above) are all over the place in the canyon. If you don't mind the thought of looking at a bunch of little slugs on your dive, nudibranchs are some of the prettiest things you will see in the ocean. Michael Miller maintains the nudibranch home page with lots of great pictures and periodic announcements of the "Branch of the Week." Here are pointers to pictures of a few other nudibranchs I've seen in the canyon.

• Anisodoris nobilis
• Diaulula sandiegensis
• Triopha catalinae
• Chromodoris macfarlandi
• Hermissenda crassicornis
• Cadlina limbaughorum
• Navanax inermis (who eats other nudibranchs)
• Acanthodoris lutea
• Cadlina flavomaculata
• Facelina stearnsi
• Mexichromis porterae

• Go

Image taken from the go client xgospel

This game is very addictive. My Dad taught me as a kid how to play. Now there are different places on the Internet you can play in real time. At least several times a week you will find me on the Internet Go Server. By playing on the Internet I've advanced so much that now I have to give my Dad a whopping five stone handicap when we play. (I think he is proud of me even though he curses me when we play.)

Here is a good place to ftp client programs from if you want to connect to the Internet Go Server. Here is a page with a bunch of pointers to go resources and here is the American Go Association (AGA).

• Comet Hyuakutake

  Here are some neat photographs Phil Blanco and I took of the comet on its recent pass.

• Italy

  
  La Pieta - Michelangelo

  Our family recently took the trip of a lifetime to celebrate my parents' 30th wedding anniversary. The art and architecture in Italy are amongst the best in the world. Here are postcard images of some things I thought were especially neat:

  • The Basilica di San Marco in Venice. This photo shows some of the gold mosaics that cover the inside and depict the life of Christ.
  • The Pantheon in Rome. You walk in and refuse to believe that people two millenia ago could have built this. I like this picture because it shows this ancient structure right next to the modern day buildings that surround it.
  • Siena from above. Closest in the foreground is the Duomo with its beautiful alternating black/white stone. You can see to the right where the Sienese started in 1339 to add on a new nave in an attempt to make it the biggest church in Christendom. But then the plague hit and it was never finished.
  • Inside the Siena Duomo. My Mom likes this place even better than St. Peter's in Rome. The inlaid marble that covers the floor is really beautiful.
  • One of the "Four Prisoners" Michelangelo worked on but didn't finish. It depicts a figure struggling to escape from the stone it is trapped in. One of the coolest works of art I saw. I think it is symbolizing how the soul is trapped in the body.
  • Severe museum overload started to set in towards the end of the trip and SCUBA diving off Elba was the perfect cure. The waters are crystal clear and the island itself is a total paradise. I spent two days in Marciana Marina taking boat rides out to dive sites with some friendly, though somewhat crazy Italians. One of them got attacked by an octopus that wouldn't let go.
  • Our blowout dinner in Rome was the best meal I've ever had.
  • Michelangelo's Moses in the "St. Peter in Chains" church in Rome.
  • St. Calixtus Catacombs in Rome. You start walking through these things and you realize that to bury half a million people (in just this one set of catacombs) you have to keep tunneling for a long time.
  • St. Peter's Basilica - Vatican City. Look at how small the people are in this picture and compare it to the size of the church.

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Last updated 1998 June 15 by Len Wayne