March, 2002

I took the following photo's of various locations around
University of California, Irvine (UCI), in March, 2002.

The pictures are sorted roughly by location, so that
you can imagine a walking tour of the campus.



FIGURE: UCI: Garden at main plaza of UCI's campus.



FIGURE: UCI: Administration Building.
Some bureaucratic functionnaire drone in the basement
workspace of this diabolical facility really wanted my 
undergraduate degree on file badly -- at ANY human toll!
UCI students pay their "Zot Bill"s here.
Some scenes in the 1973 movie "Conquest of the Planet
of the Apes" were filmed at this location.



FIGURE: UCI: Administration Building (view #2).



FIGURE: UCI: Administration Building (view #3).



FIGURE: UCI: Administration Building (view #4).



FIGURE: UCI: Administration Building (view #5).



FIGURE: UCI: Student Center.



FIGURE: UCI: Very tall trees on "Outer Ring" of campus.



FIGURE: UCI: Shade of tree on border of Aldrich Park.



FIGURE: UCI: A path to Aldrich Park.



FIGURE: UCI: Very tall trees on the "Inner Ring", Aldrich Park.



FIGURE: UCI: Looking outward from the "Inner Ring" at Engineering Tower.



FIGURE: UCI: Looking outward from the "Inner Ring" at Engineering Tower (view #2).



FIGURE: UCI: Tall trees on the "Inner Ring".



FIGURE: UCI: The "Inner Ring" path, looking toward the Main Library.



FIGURE: UCI: The "Inner Ring" path, looking toward Physical Sciences 2.
(now known as "Frederick Reines Hall")



FIGURE: UCI: The "Inner Ring" path, looking toward Physical Sciences 2 (view #2)



FIGURE: UCI: Aldrich Park trees.



FIGURE: UCI: Aldrich Park trees and ground plants.



FIGURE: UCI: Aldrich Park trees and ground plants.



FIGURE: UCI: Bench in Aldrich Park, looking toward the Main Library.



FIGURE: UCI: Social Science Tower, looking toward Engineering Gateway.



FIGURE: UCI: Social Science Tower, courtyard.



FIGURE: UCI: Social Science Tower, looking toward my apartment!
Well, you need X-Ray vision to see through University Tower
(that spotted cube slightly to the right of center) to my 
apartment in Dartmouth Court (on *Stanford* Street!).



FIGURE: UCI: The Sun: "A big fiery ball at the center of our Solar System...
But that's not important right now!"



FIGURE: UCI: Engineering Gateway, home of engineering departments.



FIGURE: UCI: Soylent Green student harvesting plant.



FIGURE: UCI: Stacks in vicinity of Engineering Gateway building.



FIGURE: UCI: Center for Embedded Computer Systems.
(i.e., the voice that the government and AOL put in your
head to make you love n*sync and "The Mummy 2".) 



FIGURE: UCI: Center for Embedded Computer Systems (view #2)
What goes on in there?



FIGURE: UCI: McDonnell Douglas Auditorium "supporting" arch.



FIGURE: UCI: Computer Science related building.



FIGURE: UCI: Engineering Tower.
Many awful Engineering T.A.'s live in there I'm told.
The annual "Egg Drop Contest" of E-Week is held there; 
they toss your contraption from the roof.  One year my
friend Jim Chiou participated in that contest (to win a
Western Digital hard drive) and the student judges (members
of a campus Engineering club) screwed up big time by taking a
brief look at Jim's smashed contraption and throwing it away
without counting the surviving eggs (one of the scoring criteria).
To make a long story short, the judges acknowledged later that
Jim won, but only after Jim dragged a sloppy, egg splattered
mess from the dumpster after someone else was awarded the
hard disk drive.  I was a witness.



FIGURE: UCI: More computer science and engineering buildings.



FIGURE: UCI: Computer science buildings and Engineering Tower.



FIGURE: UCI: Physical Sciences 2.
PS2 is now known as "Frederick Reines Hall", named after
the late Frederick Reines, former member of the faculty
of the UCI physics department, and winner of the 1995 Nobel
Prize in physics for the experimental detection of the
"neutrino" particle in 1959.
I had a brief conversation with Frederick Reines, which
brings my total "Nobel Prize" conversation tally to at least
four: Reines, Watson, Crick, and some other biochemist...



FIGURE: UCI: Physical Sciences 2: Bronze likeness of Frederick Reines' head
In the lobby of  "Frederick Reines Hall" there is a pedistal 
with a bronze likeness of Frederick Reines head, complete with
glasses (without lenses).  The creepy part is the fact that 
they erected the fixture while Dr. Reines was still alive
and going to his office (2nd floor, I think).  So he had 
to pass by his own statue every day on his way to the
main elevator in the lobby for at least a year...Yikes!
I mean, it's not quite like passing your own tombstone,
or your own open casket and grave ditch every morning,
but it must have been a little bit unsettling for him
to see what was destined to become a memorial shrine.
Actually, what would have been really funny is if Dr. Reines
broke a bottle of Champagne over his bronze head during the
building re-dedication ceremony.

I'm not sure how the idea developed between me and my friends,
but somehow we came up with the idea of a teen summer horror
movie that would feature Dr. Reines (when he was alive) being
drawn to his bronze head late at night.  We'd see him with a
pained expression on his face, begging the bronze head to stop
tormenting him with his awful proposals.  Later we'd see Dr. Reines
beating sorority girls to bloody pulps using his bronze head
as a weapon.  The head would be returned to the pedestal,
but during normal daylight hours people would notice that
the bronze head had dented glasses frames and what looked like...
...what looked like...No, it couldn't be, and yet it looks
just like...dried blood!

I guess Dr. Reines would eventually have to have a showdown
with his bronze head, and there would be some maddening 
realization regarding the truth of their connection, and
Dr. Reines would laugh maniacally at the horrifying irony.
"It's all neutrinos!  The girls, the fever, the killing!
The neutrinos!  It all makes sense!  Ha, ha, ha, haaaaa!"

Anyhow, PS2 / FRH is where I worked and played as a physics
graduate student.  Margaret ("Margie") Suniga, on the Physics Dept
staff at the time, went out of her way to see that mail going
to my departmental mailbox would be returned to sender
starting from the day I quit school, rather than leave things be
for a couple of weeks while I made sure the "Change of Address"
took effect.  PS2 wasn't always a happy place.




FIGURE: UCI: New Construction.
This building looks like it would fit perfectly
with PS2 -- like they were interlocking pieces to something
bigger, maybe some sort of giant intergalactic combat mech.
Anyhow, among the many alternative readings of the 
acronym "UCI" is "Under Construction Indefinitely".
Even after 30 years, there is plenty of construction
in progress at UCI.



FIGURE: UCI: Biology building.
Looks vaguely like a plant cell...or a ROBOT!



FIGURE: UCI: Biology building, view from Aldrich Park.
You can see "(ant)'Eater's Cafe" on the right.



FIGURE: UCI: Science Library on "Outer Ring" of campus.



FIGURE: UCI: Science Library (view #2).
You can see people studying in there.



FIGURE: UCI: Humanities Instructional Building.
You can see a reflection of me taking the picture.



FIGURE: UCI: "Arts Bridge" near the Humanities Instructional Building.



FIGURE: UCI: Humanities-related building (across bridge) brickwork.



FIGURE: UCI: Humanities-related building (across bridge) steps.



FIGURE: UCI: Track.



FIGURE: UCI: Track (view #2).
The sprinklers are going.  You can see mountains
in the distance. 



FIGURE: UCI: Wide view of track and stands.
I think high school soccer teams were competing on
the field.



FIGURE: UCI: University Drive
I'm pretty sure this is University Drive.
This is just beyond UCI's track and field and 
new baseball field.  You can see the bike path
that follows the, uh, river, flood channel, to
Upper Newport Bay, and eventually goes to the 
ocean (see the Newport Beach pictures for another 
"Back Bay" bike path photo).  Again, you can see 
mountains on the horizon. 



FIGURE: UCI: Flower in UCI's rose garden (near Administration).



FIGURE: UCI: Interesting tiny flowers close to the ground.



FIGURE: UCI: Some kind of flowers.



FIGURE: UCI: Flowers clinging to wall of an engineering trailer.



FIGURE: UCI: Gravel surface on a stone trashcan.


HUMAN INTEREST BACKGROUND STORY
===============================

I was a physics graduate student at UCI, starting in
fall quarter of 1993, and leaving with a Master of Science
degree in 1997.  I was a Teaching Assistant (T.A.) during
the entire time I was a student at UCI.  I was kicked out
for a year (1994-5) because I didn't have an undergraduate
degree yet (a french exam I never took).  I passed the
physics department "Qualifying Exam" at the Ph.D. level
after re-taking the Quantum Mechanics portion of the test
a second time.  I did experimental research for two weeks
before my advisor (Dr. Hopster) fired me for not
spending enough time actually sitting in his laboratory.
(But in that time I did study and fix the amplifier
circuit that controlled the piezoelectric crystals in
his home-brew Scanning Tunneling Electron Microscope.)
I received very high ratings from students for my work
as a T.A.

Before my image in the department was tarnished by being
kicked out of school, I was slated to be the T.A. for the
graduate course in Mathematical Physics -- at the
beginning of my second year!  I would have been a T.A.
to my peers!  I was very proud of that achievement, and so
I really felt destroyed when destiny (Office of Graduate Studies)
caught up with me, and effectively ended my career in physics
at UCI.  I wasn't a great student, but I'm pretty sure 
potential thesis advisors (Claire Yu, Steve White) turned
me down mostly based on bad buzz. It's hard to put all of that
stuff in to perspective, considering that my profound, lazy
procrastination was to blame for the sabotage and all the fallout.
And it's nutty that it still bothers me a little bit today.

Now I see that degrees don't matter, and career choices
don't matter.  If I wanted to do research in physics, I
am sure I can find a place to do that.  If I want to change
what I am working on, I can find a new job.  After all of
the stress of college and graduate school, and of working
life, I just feel silly for buying in to the "seriousness"
of it all.  Now I just want to find a way to meet my basic
needs (food, shelter, car (hey, I live in SoCal!), enlightenment)
so I can work on my own creative projects without distraction.

Instead, "The Man" has me paying $100/mo for Cox Digital Cable,
$100/mo to SBC/Verizon/GTE/AT&T/Sprint-whatever for the phone,
$20/mo for trash collection, $1,255/mo rent, $100/mo to SCE
(and Enron?) for going over the "baseline" kilowatt-hours,
$100/mo for 91 octane gasoline for my commute to work(!),
$6/mo for use of non-BofA network ATM's,  $20/mo for
my Earthlink e-mail account, $20/mo for my Earthlink WWW site,
$10/mo interest (computed using "daily periodic rates") on
my credit card balance -- despite automatic full payment 
of the balance at the end of each month...and today I got
the second parking ticket in my entire life: $40.
Yes, indeed, "The Man" made school seem important, and
then enticed me with information and technology so that
I'm as hooked as a junkie and can't avoid being enslaved
by the corporate machine to support my multimedia addiction.

Basically what I'm trying to say is that I am an authority
on the history, evolution and meaning of the UCI campus.
I am bringing my unique experience to bear on the problem
of understanding the UCI campus through digital photography.
(Wait, some of my neighbors are laughing at something, and
it's 2:13 A.M.)  UCI Spring Break ended today, so my apartment
complex will be noisy again.  That is exactly the kind of
depth I can bring to this subject.


--- Colin
cpfahey@earthlink.net