I just went to a screening of The Cove tonight and was absolutely blown away.
Following a group of activists who go to Japan to record the annual dolphin slaughter in Taiji, the story is part documentary, part thriller. The team schemes and plans, disguising cameras as rocks, trespassing in a dangerous areas and using military [...]
Monday I went to Gravity Summit at UC Irvine. I’d first heard about Gravity Summit when I went to the Tweetup after the UCLA conference. I got to meet one of the founders, Rodney Rumford, as well as some of the speakers, like Angie Swartz, as well as some other interesting people. So when I [...]
Last week, Kacie and I went to Mindshare LA. I’d been meaning to go to this event since I first read about it the fall, but had never actually made my way over to hear the talks and mingle with the rather intellectually elite crowd. But then I started getting more into LA’s tech evets, [...]
Our final project for Design Fundamentals, other than our design journal, was a calendar. We needed to show a change over time or some sort of metamorphosis while also displaying the 2010 calendar.
I started sketching some cute, boxy little owls, and created a little love story between the two of them. I didn’t know how [...]
One of the best days of my trip to Pittsburgh was spending a Saturday out in the countryside visiting Fallingwater and Kentuck Knob, two Frank Lloyd Wright houses.
We got to Fallingwater first and were set to take a guided tour with a small group of about 10. We all gathered at the visistor’s center, and [...]
Friday was a beautiful, sunny day, so I decided to go check out Phipps botanical garden and conservatory, Schenley Park and some of Oakland’s other sights.
The botanical gardens, almost entirely housed inside a giant glass house, were lovely. To add to the already impressive array of trees and flowers, there were also Frabel glass pieces [...]
I finally got to head back to Pittsburgh for a second visit and I arived in the city on the brink of summer. Everything in lush and green, the sun is out and my allergies are making my nose run and eyes itch.
Like my last trip, I’ve had a good amount of time to wander [...]
Yesterday, my friend Jared and I went for a hike in Griffith Park. I hadn’t been hiking there in a while, and it was great to get back out there and experience some of the nature LA has to offer.
The paths are mostly wide and sandy, and they wind up and around hills where there [...]
FrancineKizner.comSince Evan and I left London, I’ve wanted to go back. Luckily, we had tickets waiting for us (the last leg of the around-the-world trip plus our original return tickets). We thought we’d be using them over Thanksgiving, but since we’re still unemployed, we decided to move up the date and head out the first [...]
When we decided to go on our around-the-world trip, we knew we wanted to pack light. We didn’t know how much we would need to carry our bags and we didn’t know where we’d be staying each night, but we knew we didn’t want to be weighed down by unnecessary items. We went completely basic [...]
Our last stop was Hawaii. We arrived in Kona, on the big Island, and we had a flight booked on Pacific Wings to Kahului in Maui. We started looking for the Pacific Wings sign, and we made it all the way to the end of the airport without seeing it, so we asked a baggage handler where it was. He pointed down the road and said, about a quarter mile that way.
On August 14, we took the Shinkansen to Tokyo. We had reserved seats, but they turned out to be in a smoking car — and at the very front of the train. We decided to look for new seats, but all the unreserved calls are at the back of the train. I walked from car [...]
Getting to Kyoto from Bangkok involved a very long day of traveling, which seems to be a recurring theme on this trip. First we took a 5-hour flight to Tokyo, then had to hop on an hour-long train to get to the 3-hour-long Shinkansen — where we had to stand in the unreserved smoking car [...]
On the night of August 4, we took the sleeper train from Chiang Mai to Bangkok because we’d heard it would be a fun way to travel. In retrospect, we probably should have just spent the money on booking a flight. We rode in a second-class car, and I had an upper bunk while Evan had a lower one. The food was inedible, and there were no veggie options, though we had the good sense to bring some snacks. The car seemed to be infested with what looked like baby cockroaches — I squished quite a few, and saw many more scurrying about under our seats and on the walls. And sleeping on a train is no real substitute for sleeping in a bed, especially when there’s some anxiety about vermin, so we arrived in Bangkok exhausted.
