Looking for a last minute ride home for winter break, or for more passengers to cut your travel expenses? Zimride can link you to fellow UC Davis commuters that are going in the same direction.

UC Davis has gotten off to a fast start.

UC Davis has turned on a new smart lighting initiative in order to reduce the amount of energy used around campus, leading other universities in following the state mandate of reducing energy use by 60 percent before 2020.

1. “Kobe Bryant – I’ve grown up watching him my whole life and he’s the best player in the world. He’s better than Lebron.” – Amit Ranan, junior, economics and psychology major

I was walking my bike to the Bike Barn to fill the tires with air when I noticed an old road bike leaning up against the air pump. I framed this shot in my head before grabbing my camera and snapping the photo. I was particularly drawn to the texture of the walls – the shapes created by the lines and the contrasting colors. When I chose the exposure settings, I wasn’t concerned with using a creative combination to garner a certain lighting effect. Instead, I used an ISO of 250 with an aperture of f/4.5 and a shutter speed of 1/3200. What makes this photo interesting is the composition rather than the use of an interesting combination of exposure settings. This illustrates one of the golden photographic truths – a good eye for composition is often more important than a knowledge of technical settings.

Nov. 19 – A Davis man was convicted of three felony counts of lewd and lascivious acts upon a child. Demetrio Burciaga, 46, is being charged for molesting his 15-year-old niece after she stayed the night at his house in Davis in February.

There’s an old adage of government spending, often attributed to the late Sen. Everett Dirkson: “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.”

Gender inequalities are not a thing of the past, women leaders on campus say. In order to level the playing field, students have organized the first Women’s Leadership Conference.

On Jan. 4, ASUCD will open a new unit designed to help feed cash-strapped students.

The emergence and seeming dominance of cyberspace may have improved variety and access in the media. One can be tempted to use the overused adage “the more the merrier,” yeah? Well, my industry (newspapers) is anything but the merrier for it. Real hard news is taking a bludgeoning, continually. I daresay that as publishers’ worries about gloomy bottom lines and cost-cutting trump obligatory quality, we risk surrendering the traditional role of the fourth estate. It’s really sad.

Through the last nine columns, I’ve written at length about your health – what you need to do, what you can try, what you shouldn’t do, how you can do this and avoid that, why you should be healthy at all. While I tried to err on the side of simplicity, some of the advice could get complicated, the details too difficult to recall weeks later. So you might have forgotten every tip I labored onto paper. I’m here to tell you this week that it’s okay. Lucky for the both of us, all the advice I could ever hope to impart, and the only advice you ever really needed, was discovered by a long-ago marginalized Greek philosopher.

A penthouse in Manhattan, an editor position at Vogue – just two of the wishes I’d make if a magic genie were to now suddenly appear. Oh, excuse the Aladdin reference; I’m writing this column from home and am sitting beside my baby sister, who is currently in a daze watching the Disney classic.