Believe it or not, I’d never played DnD before, so my friend Karen invited me to join in for the one-shot campaign they were planning to run during the break. Everyone in the party started out as Level 20, so we were all completely overpowered, which was quite a fun (if confusing at times) way to start. Our opponent was similarly hilariously powerful, teleporting us to some alternate dimension where we were forced to play Hearts with a cursed deck of cards for the entertainment of a live audience of monsters. Touching each card had a mystery effect, from changing the weather to turning party members into dragons!

If you’re curious, my character was a Bard named ‘The Sign Painter,’ inspired by the barely corporeal, mostly omniscient entity from the game World of Goo.

My great friend, Senior Director of Student Activities Tom Mannion, went on (a much deserved, much overdue!) vacation for the first week of spring break. While he was gone, he entrusted the care of his house¹ and David, a.k.a. Davie the golden retriever, to my friend Ethan. In return? Free reign of everything in Tom’s kitchen — which was a LOT, as he teaches weekly cooking classes at Caltech — on the condition that it would be shared with students who were still around for spring break.

Ethan was only too happy to do so, and he proceeded to cook an entire turkey with gravy, sweet potatoes², and pasta. He had help with the pasta, and I took care of setting the table in the back room– but Ethan is by far the MVP here for carrying this feast on his shoulders.

It was such a cute moment, and a rare one at Caltech, when people from multiple houses were all sitting around a table and dining together. Imagine having a conversation with more than four people at once and it not being in a group text chat! It was a diverse group of people representing a smattering of houses and corners of campus, which made the gathering all the more entertaining.

Also, Tom Mannion has been working at Caltech for more than 30 years, so the amount of treasures, artifacts, and lore (and junk) his house has accrued over time was fascinating to behold. Just the middle bookshelf in the picture below alone had a plethora of books about different world cuisines; old photographs; and a bottle of olive oil made from actual olives grown on the trees on the Olive Walk³.

1. only a block away from campus, easily walkable ↩︎
2. or yams, depending on your politics ↩︎
3. the southern path on campus that runs from the North and South Houses to the turtle pond ↩︎

The Honor Code is strong among Caltech students, but apparently it is not strong enough to counteract some people’s temptation to steal Tide Pods from anyone who leaves their personal stash in the communal laundry rooms. I’ve learned this the hard way, after spending $20 on a brand new Tide Pod jar and writing my name all over it and thinking that would be enough to ward off the thieves. The next time I came down to do laundry, half of the Pods were gone!

This simply would not stand, I resolved. A vision came upon me: a booby trap inside of my Tide Pod jar, which would play a loud sound and shame anyone who opened it. And so I embarked on a DIY engineering adventure to construct exactly such a trap. Here’s how it went:

The best part is, whenever someone triggers the trap, it sends me a text message, so I can run down and confront the thief!

It was a bit of a nightmare to get the arduino inside the trap connected to the internet in order to send the text message. My arduino absolutely refused to play nice with Caltech’s wifi network, so I had to set up my own dedicated router in the laundry room… it’s actually still there, untouched, as of April 2025, which I’m kind of astounded by.

The Stall Street Journal is an open, collaborative publication that has been posted in the toilet stalls of Dabney House since at least 2016. Anyone can write content for it, but it is their responsibility to print out 18 copies and tape them up in the 18 toilet stalls in the house! From all of my dealings with arduinos and microcontrollers in various projects, class and personal, I was inspired to write this article about chips!

By the way, if you want to experience the Stall Street Journal for yourself but are unable to visit Dabney House, look no further than this “StallStreet Journal Simulator” that I spent an inordinate amount of time coding: ssj.guutz.com

I bought a veie-pound pre-cooked spiral ham from Trader Joes, and I thought it would be fun to prepare a nice Christmas-style feast for my friends who were around during the break. The ham was easy and only needed to be warmed up in the oven for a while, allowing me to focus on the cheesy potatoes dish — a family tradition! Also MVP first year Sam F. contributed fresh pineapples! It was a very wholesome time, sitting outside and having a nice, slow-paced meal with friends. What a concept!

First of all, if you don’t know what a theremin is, look up “theremin performance” — it’s a really cool musical instrument that you play by not touching it! You actually wave your hands around these antenna things, which sense the position of your hands, and that controls the pitch and volume. Nice theremins are really expensive, but you can (and I did) get a cheap DIY one on Etsy for like $100:

Anyway, this thing was laying around in my room, sadly neglected – because (in case you hadn’t noticed) I have a ton of other projects going on – … until this spring break! I decided it would be fun for it to live in Dabney House lounge. That way, all of the talented Dabney musicians (genuine!) could play it at their leisure.

I don’t have any photos or videos of it, so I had to raid the archives of event photos from the house Historian, and I found a few with the theremin set up in the background! These photos have fun stories which would be a shame to leave out of context so I’ll briefly describe them below. (Click to open the full size image)

One slightly unexpected aspect of being a somewhat public figure at a place like Caltech is that you get emails from random people. This is probably also exacerbated by the fact that, for some reason, the Caltech Astrophysics webpage publicly displays the email addresses of all the astro undergrads as well as the grad students and faculty. Anyway, most of them get sent to spam automatically, but sometimes the real gems make it through. For example:

I chatted with some of my astro major friends, and it turns out that this guy emailed every public address he could find on the Caltech Astro website, as well as probably several other universities as well! However, I think I must have been the only one who responded to him. Obviously the natural response for faculty who are too busy to engage with crackpots is to immediately delete and block, but for me, I find these sorts of epistemological debates fascinating! Conversations (in good faith) with people who have convinced themselves of “alternative science” theories are incredibly enriching for scientists because they force you to think hard about how you really know what you know. Thus began a several-month correspondence, which I spent a bunch of spring break engaging in. I’ve also compiled all the messages with Monte’s permission, which you can read if you’re curious: https://guutz.notion.site/ebd/1cd96d709f22800ab138c454b43143ba

I don’t have much to show for this activity, but I spent an inordinate amount of time on it and figured it’s worth a mention. The (still) current website for the student newspaper I run, The California Tech, is at tech.caltech.edu — and I built it entirely by myself. It is a rather horrifically assembled set of static page templates that uses Hugo for the back-end and Tina for the content management system.

Since we had recently hired new webmasters, I figured it was about time to switch over to a website system that would be much more permanent — i.e., that I wasn’t the only one who knew how it worked. But how to go about it? Ideally, the new website would include both a front-end, which controls what people see when they visit the website. It would also have a content management system (CMS), which is where article drafts live and evolve throughout the editorial process, from idea to published story.

I want things to be as efficient as possible, and admittedly that means my standards were a little too high to be realistic. After days searching through several pages of Google search results (I was that desperate), I finally found an all-in-one solution that some Australian company was developing, and if it had actually turned out to be what it was advertising, it would have been GLORIOUS.

However, there were two problems that prevented me from proceeding. The first was, for some reason paying $3 for a product trial to this Australian company turned out to be extremely troublesome, as evidenced by my text correspondences with our business manager…

The second, and more fatal, issue was that the company had decided to pursue their AI writing assistant feature and basically abandoned development on the CMS platform that I was interested in in the first place… and they sent the email notifying their customers of this barely a few days after spring break ended. So I guess it’s a good thing we didn’t invest more time or money into switching our operations over!

I think we’re actually going to continue using the website I built after all. It’s not so bad, and it mostly works as-is. For the editorial process, we use a Notion board (screenshot below if you’re curious) and Google Docs, and then we just manually convert articles into markdown for the website. I’m planning to make a script to automate that reformatting one of these days as well. You can’t stop progress!

This was a spontaneous trip one morning with some of my friends in Dabney House. It was a ton of fun! Ruth had a car and was able to drive us, which was great. But the California Science Center is also very easily accessible via the LA Metro. I highly recommend the exhibits, and they are 100% free!

My aunt and uncle live relatively close to Caltech in the part of Southern California known as “the Inland Empire.” It’s pretty far away by car, but, luckily, one of the LA Metrolink routes goes directly to there from Union Station, which itself is just a Metro ride away from Caltech. It’s still a pretty hefty journey of 4ish hours, but with my Caltech ID, all of the fares are FREE!

It was a lovely trip, and I hadn’t seen my aunt and uncle or abuelita or numerous clans of cousins in a while –so it was nice to spend time with them. They showed me a bunch of old pictures from when my dad was just a baby — what a cutie!

This one deserves a blog post all on its own, but I will describe it briefly here! The Caltech-MIT rivalry has rather subsided since the days of MIT stealing the Fleming Cannon, Caltech giving out mugs with hidden messages to MIT freshmen, etc. UNTIL NOW! Inspired by a previous prank from 2007, I decided to reconvene the Caltech undergrad Prank Committee and team up with both The California Tech newspaper AND MIT’s newspaper (just The Tech) for an epic double-campus April Fools’ newspaper prank!

In reality, what this looked like during spring break was me begging people to write prank content.

THE PLAN:

The idea: a group of Caltech students fly to MIT’s campus, travel paid for by the PRANK FUND (which is a thing that exists!), and deliver a fake issue of the MIT Tech all around their campus. (It ended up being a glorious issue, you can read it here: https://campuspubs.library.caltech.edu/3442/1/California%20Tech%20%202024-04-01.pdf)

The MIT Tech staff pranked us back by creating their own fake issue of The California Tech, which was delivered to Caltech’s campus on the same day! Read that here: https://campuspubs.library.caltech.edu/3443/1/California%20Tech%20%202024-04-04.pdf (They didn’t bother to fly out to Caltech though. They didn’t even write enough content to fill the pages, so I had to give them some filler content. MIT needs to step up their game for next year! 😉)