Here are some of my recollections on a few newsworthy events that happened when I went to college. The first was in my freshman year at Berkeley. As I've mentioned before, I lived in the dorms, in a corner room with a couple of roommates. It was a nice day a couple of months after I had moved in. I was playing on my roommates Amiga 500, a game called Elite, sort of like Escape Velocity but with a 3-d first-person view. Jim, one of my roommates, was doing something on his Mac Plus (this was before he won the Mac SE/30 at a BMUG Fest). We lived on the sixth floor of an eight story building. I guess it was October 17th, 1999, a little after 17:00.

That's when the building started swaying. Some slight tremors which got a little worse. Then it stopped. I was in the middle of heading in-system to the next planet. I looked at Jim and asked deadpan "that was an earthquake, right?" He said yup and I kept on playing. Then the next tremor hit, much more pronounced than the first one. You could actually feel the building moving back and forth. That's when we decided to go outside to the hallway, where everyone else was poking their heads out and wondering what was going on. I remember looking out one of the dorm room windows, seeing the other dorms in our complex swaying back and forth. That just brought this feeling that our building was doing the same thing.

It only lasted a few seconds, less than half a minute. And after that every- thing was quiet and peaceful. Still, we all went outside, where a crowd was forming. Couldn't get back in until much later, took me an hour to call home and tell them I was fine. Long term effects for me at least weren't all that inconveniencing. Some buildings were closed due to earthquake damage, but otherwise everything else was fine. Can't say that for the rest of the Bay Area, and for the unfortunate people who died. But I can't say that the Loma Prieta Earthquake affected my life significantly...

Two years later, almost to the day, I was once again living in the dorms. This time my room was a double, with the roommate-who-shall-not-be-named. As was often the case that year, I was across the hall watching something on television with the guys. Unlike the earthquake, this wasn't something that came upon us suddenly. Someone noted there was a fire on the hill, actually quite a large fire. But it was a good six to ten miles away. As the night went on the fire got larger and closer, and it became more of a spectacle.

There were news reports and such, and you could see a good chunk of the hillside in flames. Sirens off in the distance. But the Oakland Hills Fire, although it did a lot of damage, once again didn't really affect me. The fire didn't reach the city itself. My freshman-year roommates were actually living a few hundred feet from where the fire started, and their apartment went up in smoke. Come to think of it, a vacuum cleaner that they borrowed from me also burned. After that they moved into the dorms for a few months until they found another place...

There were two riots while I attended UC Berkeley. The Rodney King riots in Berkeley during Spring 1992 were not a big deal. This was the second riot and everybody was prepared. Stores were boarded up, police were out in force, my friends and I walked around and there was nothing going on. After a day or two everything went back to normal.

Now, the previous riot I missed. That was during my Sophomore year when I lived off-campus so I went home one day and when I came back the next day there was a lot of damage to storefronts and such. I don't remember what this one was about, and really I don't care. There are times when college students go nuts with the civil disobedience schtick. It always seemed to me that they protested because it was the in thing to do. I certainly didn't have the time nor inclination to participate.