Speaking of Darren, I finally did a search on "Darren Bleuel" on Google (and if I could remember Jim's last name I'd do the same). I found his website and a comic strip he's been doing for four years. It looks like he did end up in Nuclear Engineering and got his Ph.D. and Masters at Berkeley, which points to the fact that he's really good if he was able to get all three degrees from the same school.

All the things I forgot about him. Gav, his alter ego. Short for Gaviscon Aviscena and I'm not too sure how he came up with that name. He did say that in High School he created a fake HS called Gaviscon Aviscena HS and used it to get restricted school supplies from various companies. Also now I remember that he had Pi memorized to the 90th or so decimal place (maybe that was the max, usually he could only do 70 places or so right off the bat, throwing out the numbers as fast as he could talk).

Obfuscation, he was really into that word. It just sounds good rolling off the lips. I think he started an Obfuscation Club at Berkeley. Oh my Goddess! "This flea walks into a bar..." is one of the most inside jokes our little group had. I think Mike Sterling was telling us the joke as told to him by some drunk guy he met. The problem was the guy gets the joke wrong so he starts with "this flea walks into a bar..." and then gets stuck and thinks a bit, then finishes the joke. And in the retelling we said "that wasn't funny at all Mike" which cracked him up: "I know!" After that one of us would say "this flea walks into a bar..." and it would crack us up. Strangely, I'm not too sure if I remember the other inside jokes Darren has listed. Maybe one or two, but they were more like weird things Darren got other people to say rather than things that would bring a smile to me.

Darren was always the most way-out person in the group. I think that's how he defines his niche, he has to be the most eccentric person in a group. He had all the Calvin and Hobbes books which we'd read in between turns of playing Empire on his computer. I don't know if I really noticed his interests in obscure sciences or death or comics, at least I didn't notice enough for me to remember clearly after ten years. He's always been quite creative though so it doesn't surprise me that he's been doing a comic strip on the Daily Cal for a few years.

Jim Alexander, there we go. Got it from Darren's site. He's into computational linguistics now. I forgot that he got sick of Physics after a couple of years. The man learned to read Russian so he could read their Physics research, that is how dedicated he was. Alas. At least he can put that Russian to good use. Yeah, I guess he was very "square", even more so than I am. He was always neat and when he got excited he'd start shaking and exclaim some expression from bygone eras. Darren was a pig though and it was the way he kept his side of the room in a constant mess that gave me reason to at least not be that bad myself. So Darren is the reason that I don't just leave all my stuff lying around.

Now back to Fall Semester, 1989. So I had the three classes and got an A in CS 60A, a B in Math 1B and a C in Physics 7A. That was quite a disappointment for a guy who had straight A's through most of high school. I learned that I couldn't just cruise through college and expect good grades, although it still didn't help me during the next 3-1/2 years. The workload was not as hard as I thought it would be, leading to my mistake in the next semester when I took on 17 units. Being on my own was great and possibly the best and most valuable thing about going away to college, in my opinion.

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