In my CPT S 560 course, the students are currently working with KC to port the e3 text editor to MTX. Right now, I'm working on writing a version of ioctl that can be used with the MTX kernel. To view my progress, you can check out my e3 Editor Google Notebook.
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Uh-oh. When I got back home from school today, I found out that my iPod's screen has gone kaput. Here's what it looks like:
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Just as I was starting to think we might not win any Pac-10 games this year, the Cougars came out and beat UCLA at home 27-7! Along with the rest of Cougar Nation, I'm really happy about this. Some people were so elated, in fact, that they started rushing the field after the game. That's kind of weird if you ask me. Anyway, I've posted an album of pictures from the game. Enjoy.
This and more at Dupyshon.com
I've posted an album containing the photos we took at the Taylor Swift and Brandi Carlile concerts. You can view it here or find the link on the Dupyshon.com homepage.
This and more at Dupyshon.com
On Wednesday Kristen and I went to a Brandi Carlile concert in Spokane. This concert was even better than Taylor Swift's! The opening set by A Fine Frenzy was fantastic. I had previously heard of this band through a free iTunes download, and was pleasantly surprised that they sound even better live than on the single. Their music is eerie yet uplifting, and the lead singer's voice is unforgettable. Kristen really liked this band, and we bought their album from iTunes immediately after the show.
Brandi Carlile and her band were amazing. They sound exactly like their recordings, and their folky yodel-inspired sound thrives on live performance. Brandi interacted with the crowd really well, and she genuinely looked like she was having a good time. She performed some brand new songs she had just written, which is always exciting. There was also one song which the whole band performed acoustically. They didn't even use microphones, so the crowd had to be completely silent. The result was a really cool, unadulterated sound. At the end of the night, Brandi gave a really good encore performance. It included a Johnny Cash song and solo versions of some of her most famous songs. Overall, the concert was a huge treat.
On Tuesday, Kristen and I went to a Taylor Swift concert in the Beasley Coliseum. It was really fun! The opening act was the Jennifer Lynn band. Jennifer and her guitar player are both Cougar alums, so they had a few loyal fans. Overall, though, the crowd seemed a bit bored with the performance. Lynn's music has more of a classic country feel, which is much different from the popular style of today. Still, I was surprised at how uninterested the other concert goers were with this act. People were talking, text messaging on their cell phones, and even shouting to friends in other sections. Needless to say, I was a bit annoyed at some of these people. Did they not realize that they had payed for this part of the concert, too?
When Taylor came out for her set, the crowd became much more focused on what was going on up on the stage. The show started out with some of the more popular songs from Swift's album, and everything sounded pretty good. It's amazing that someone who's seventeen years old can have so much talent. Taylor would often explain the song she was about to sing, saying "I wrote this song when I was 13...," or "I wrote this one when I was 12..." Pretty funny. Swift is actually the youngest country artist to ever write or co-write 100% of the songs on a platinum album. When you consider this, it makes sense that she could be around for years to come. Can you imagine a thirty or forty year career as a country music superstar?
I was very pleased with this concert. It's always exciting to hear an artist perform their hits live. I'll post a DupyPics album with photos from the concert within a couple of days.
While looking at the information on some of the Presidential candidates for the 2008 race, I ran across a great site that effectively summarizes and sizes up all the candidates and issues. It's called Project Vote Smart. On it, you can access information for each candidate including a voting record, which can be quite revealing. I think that anyone planning to vote next year, or ever in the United States, should definitely take a look at this site. This is the kind of tool that an informed voter can and should use.
This week is pretty busy for me, especially because I'm going to see two concerts in two days. Tonight, country star Taylor Swift is performing at the Beasley Coliseum. Tomorrow, Brandi Carlisle is playing at the Big Easy in Spokane. I'll bring my camera and take some pictures, and I'll post them along with blog entries when I have time.
Well, I failed again: left the Festiva's lights on. Of course, it is no longer the Festiva, but according to Emily Cox, her name is Tess. I can see that. She's a pretty temperamental vehicle though. Now that the battery is out for a little while, I won't be able to drive her for a bit. But I'll get Tess to pony up and run again sometime this week, if not today, then maybe Tuesday or Wednesday. I'll have to call parking services, or figure out how to compression start her. How do you get that done again? Grrr! Live and learn I guess...
My research group and my advisor, Dr. Delgado, are looking into ways that reconfigurable hardware might be better for the environment than current technology. The problem is that the existing process of manufacturing integrated circuits uses a lot of energy and produces a lot of waste. This process also has a relatively low yield, meaning that many of the chips are faulty and must be discarded as waste, too. Reconfigurable hardware has the potential to increase the yield of the manufacturing process and extend the average lifetime of each chip. This means that fewer chips will have to be made each year.
This weekend Kristen and I went over to the west side for an engagement party thrown by my grandparents on Whidbey Island. We took Jaron along and stayed at Vic and Karl's place. The party was fun... we had it at a Chinese restaurant and got to see all of my relatives on my mom's side. Unfortunately, I forgot to bring my camera so there won't be any album for this event.
The WSU LUG (Linux Users Group) has come up with a zany idea to auction off engineering students to sorority members. They're trying to set up an endowment and scholarship program that will encourage more women to pursue engineering and computer science here at WSU. The event is on October 26th. It's received a lot of media attention, from stories in the Daily Evergreen to articles on Slashdot and interviews with CNN. For more information, you can check out www.nerdyandthegreek.com.
During the summer of my junior year in high school, my brother, some friends, and I made a fun video about a fake news show. Check it out:
With this wedding website business, I need a way to get paid for my services. Kristen and I have worked with a few companies so far during our wedding planning adventure, and it's a little inconvenient when the company can't accept payment by credit card. In response, I've set up a way I can send invoices and receive payments via PayPal. This will allow my customers to pay with their credit cards and avoid having to send checks through the mail.
I'm using Cadence for my VLSI class (EE 586), and the learning curve is very steep. One thing I don't like about is the fact that the program created a lot of configuration and temporary files directly in my home directory, not under my special "cadence" directory. Does anyone know if there's a way I can move these files and not break the program?
Now that I have my scheduling scheme all worked out, I think I need a way to track how much time I spend on different tasks. For instance, I'm a quarter time research assistant so I need to be spending about 10 hours a week on my research. Also, it would be nice to know how long a certain programming project took to complete so I can budget a similar amount of time for comparable projects in the future. How can I keep track of my time? My first thought is to carry a little notebook around with me and record the times that I "clock in" and "clock out" for certain tasks. There's also a variety of software solutions out there, but that requires me to be near a computer all the time. Maybe I'll use a notebook during the day and record the times into a spreadsheet at the end of each day or week. This plugin for iGoogle and Netvibes looks promising, as well.
Even though this is my fifth year living in Pullman, I've only ridden the bus a handful of times. Since I lived on campus during all of my time as an undergraduate, almost everything of interest to me was within walking distance. For trips into town or over the Moscow, I was always able to get a ride or drive myself. I live off campus now, but the bus doesn't stop anywhere near my apartment, so I still have to walk to my classes. Once I'm on campus, though, I can use the bus to get around. For instance, I didn't want to walk all the way to the Rec from Sloan today, so I took Express 2 there and Express 1 on the way back to save time and avoid the effort of walking.
We had an exam yesterday in CPT S 561, Computer Architecture. It went pretty well for the most part. I finished with enough time to check all of my answers and there were no surprise questions to catch me off guard. This might mean that I did well. In the homework assignments so far, I've made a bunch of simple mistakes in my calculations that result in incorrect answers. Hopefully I fixed those problems with my studying. We'll see.
Last weekend was pretty exciting. I went with Joel Sheppard, Kyle Ryan, Emily Cox, Peter Klosterman, Amanda (I don't know her last name), and Naomi (don't remember her last name) up to Spokane to run in the the Spokane Marathon runs. No, I didn't do the whole marathon. Everyone except for Emily did the five mile run. Emily did do the whole marathon at 3 hours and 26 minutes. She got a medal for it.
Kyle got first place in his age division, Peter got second I believe, and I received third in the same division as Kyle for the five-mile. I came in at 35 minutes 26 seconds. It was a fun but very long weekend.
After Kristen and I got engaged, I created a website that our family and friends could visit to learn about the details of the upcoming wedding. You can check it out here. So far, it's received a lot of positive comments, and a couple of our friends have asked me to make websites for them. I've made one already for Kristen's friend Sam and his fiance Sarah, and another is on the way for Vic and Karl. It's really fun for me to do, and it helps them out a lot. So I got to thinking that I might be able to make a little business out of it. If you would like me to create a wedding website for you or someone you know, you can check out my new Wedding Website page on this site.
This weekend Kristen and I went to a fall festival outside Spokane. There were pumpkins, caramel apples, hay rides, live music, and BBQ food. It was pretty fun, although the lines were really long. Kristen took some pictures; maybe I'll post them as an album under DupyPics.
Update: The album has been posted.
Lately, I've been working on applying for a National Science Foundation Fellowship. This is a pretty prestigious program which gives research grants to winning applicants. At first I was very pessimistic about my chances, but I'm feeling a bit better now. I am getting written recommendations from some really good sources, and I'm working out all of the details for the three essays I have to write. The first one is a personal statement, and I'm working on tying my research purpose into my past experiences with Rwanda and the Sudan hospital. Once I'm finished with that, I'll move on to the other two, which describe my previous research experiences and my plans for my current project.
Right now I'm listening to my brand new Radiohead album, entitled In Rainbows. To be honest, I've never listened to this band before, but they caught my attention with a pretty revolutionary marketing ploy. You get to name your own price and download the DRM-free tracks from their website. I decided to pay $10, but you could theoretically get it for free if you wanted. Although $10 is not much for a whole album, I think it's fair because I am taking a risk on this band. The truth is that I would never have bought it at all if it weren't for the promotion.
How did I find out about this? My daily dose of NPR clued me in. I was convinced to purchase the album once the reporter remarked at the deep musical layers and complex textures of each song.
So far I like the music quite a bit. I can't do a full review because I'm only on the fifth track. Still, "Videotape" and "Reckoner" were nice sounding. Very laid back.
Last night Neil gave me a copy of the new, not-yet-released-to-the-public Cougar men's basketball poster for the upcoming season. It's really cool! It features Robby, Derek, and Kyle and the new slogan - "Friel the Excitement." I've already put it up on the wall.
I've just added a new category to Dupyshon.com called "Most Popular." Since only the newest posts are displayed on the Dupyshon homepage, it's easy for quality posts to be forgotten over time. The more popular posts should get a more permanent representation on the site, and that's the intent of this new section. Since I use Feedburner in conjunction with this site, I can easily see which DupyBlog and DupyPics posts are read the most. Using this information, I'll be updating the "Most Popular" section from time to time.
I revisited the code for the Dupyshon.com homepage. As promised, I was able to tweak it a little bit to work better with Internet Explorer. I also slimmed it down a little bit to work with smaller displays. Enjoy!
I think I'm starting to get sick. Today I woke up with a bit of a sore throat. I hope it doesn't get any worse.
Okay, I finally feel like I can comment on the frustrating game WSU played against Arizona State last Saturday. First of all, I was pleased that our team was able to stick with the Sun Devils for the whole game. We had some problems with penalties and Alex Brink was completely cold for most of the first half, but over all I think this was one of the best-played games this year by the Cougars. Second, I would like to take another look at that incomplete touchdown pass from the first half. From what I could see in the stands an on the instant replay, it looked like a good catch to me. Third, I really wish we would have tried for a field goal instead of going for it on 4th and 7. I just don't think our offense had the momentum necessary to try something like that. Finally, I don't think people should get mad at Abdollmohammadi for missing that last field goal. Some students sitting near us were calling him "the next Langley." In my estimation, though, Romeen will have to miss many more kicks before his numbers look nearly as bad as Loren's.
As an aside, I thought the marching band had an excellent show on Saturday. The moves looked good and the music sounded great, even when they were facing away from us.
This weekend a bunch of Kristen's fellow student teachers were in town for Homecoming. She and I decided it would be fun to have a little reunion so everyone could see each other and compare their classroom experiences. We planned to make them all breakfast at my apartment, so we bought a whole lot of ingredients to make pancakes. As the weekend progressed, though, more and more of Kristen's friends began backing out of our invitation. It was a bit sad because we didn't end up seeing some of them at all. Anyway, this left us with way too much pancake batter for way too few people. We invited some of our other friends over to help us eat it all. They helped quite a bit, but we stil have many leftovers. That's fine, though, because I get to have pancakes for breakfast all this week.
On Wednesday, Honors Hall participated in the annual Homecoming games, including chariot races, skin the snake, and tug of war. Honors participated with some classy tie-dyed t-shirts (a lot of hyphens) made last Sunday. I myself drew some black spots on mine with a sharpie, and ended up looking like a cow. So the cow and the hippies made their way down to the field for skin the snake, which is a very odd game.
Skin the Snake involves standing in a single file line with your right hand reaching back between your legs and holding the left hand of the person behind you. When the round starts, the line begins to move backwards and the last person in line lies down on the ground, still holding the right hand of the person in front of them. The second to last person, still walking backwards, straddles over the last person, now laying down. After they have passed the last person, the second to last person lays down like the last person, and so on and so forth. After all have lain down, the first person of the line lays down and gets up and the whole process is reversed. Honors did fairly well, and our chain did not break, which was a major mistake for most teams.
Honors won the first round of tug of war because the other side did not show, and the hippies and cow went back to the stands. In the second round, Honors was easily defeated by the C.O.P.S. team (which eventually won third place).
The true test was the chariot races. Props to Scott in Honors for his design and construction of our new chariot this year. She flew magnificently and Honors was second or third in its heat.
Congratulations to all Honors participants this year and go Cougs!
Tonight at the WSU Volleyball game there was an Arizona player named Randy Goodenough. Wow, I'd really like to hear her parents explain that one.
I've been a bit obsessed with making lists lately. It helps me sort out what's on my mind. Apparently, there's a lot. I'm up to about three or four lists per day now, and they're each pretty long.
It all started last spring, when I made a big Excel spreadsheet to track the due dates of all the assignment in my classes. This was a nice list because it challenged me to look ahead far into the future and encouraged me to finish tasks early. Surprisingly, it helped me fight the insatiable urge to procrastinate (if you're a student, you definitely know what I mean). However the list did have some drawbacks. The format I was using didn't allow me to make a daily schedule of the things I wanted to accomplish, and it left out other tasks not related to school.
I began making a daily pen-and-paper list to supplement my spreadsheet. This list was a bit crazy because I would write down every task I could think of that I wanted to do, including things like taking a shower, eating meals, clipping my fingernails, etc. Some people poked fun at me for using this level of detail, but I liked it because it gave me a sense of accomplishment to be able to check off so many things each day.
Once school finished for the summer, I no longer had a spreadsheet for my school-related to-dos. But I did start listing during my internship at Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories. I was (and still am) working on a large project for them, and it was helpful to list out all of my duties each day in a hierarchical fashion. At work I have a Post-It pad that is tall and skinny, perfect for a long list of functions to write and errors to debug. My Post-It lists were partnered with two others: a spreadsheet that showed my total progress on the project and a global pen-and-paper list of actions to perform on each and every file.
That sounds like a pretty ornate/complicated system, but it's nothing compared to what I have going on now. Grad school is keeping me pretty busy, and I'm being pulled in a lot of different directions. In order to cope, I've been planning my schedule with 8 Google Calendars. They include:
Three for my classes (one per class)
One for my research
One for personal events
One for events that happen every week
One that I share with the world (The DupyCal)
One for my to-do list
Here is my birthday list for those of you who are planning to get me anything. If not, that's cool too.
- i-Pod stereo system and/or radio-cd stereo system
- cooking equipment (bread knife, pots, pans)
- Amazon.com gift card
- metronome and/or tuner
- trombone mutes
- TV DVD series (Star Trek, Dr. Who, Stargate Season 1)
- Star Wars Episode IV DVD
- Guitar music books
- a tie
- cookbook
- raquetball equipment
- nerf guns and/or nerf ammunition
- anything that may help me with law school or political science
This video shows why the One Laptop Per Child project is so cool:
I'd really like one of those XO laptops myself. They have bunch of neat technology crammed into them, including an ultra-high screen resolution, great power management that extends battery life, and mesh networking. In November, they'll even be for sale in a Give 1 Get 1 deal. I wonder if they'll be a popular Christmas present, and what their resale value will be in Ebay.
Beards for Bowl Games began on October 1st and will continue until the Cougars reach a bowl game or until the end of the season. Originally practiced only among Cougar Marching Band members, this year the invitation is extended to all WSU students (and alumni as well) to grow beards in support of the football team. Think of it as a Sampson sort of thing: the more hair we grow, the stronger we get. This represents a fan's commitment to cheering on the Cougs. If your commitment to your girlfriend is bigger, that is understandable. But still! Those who don't have girlfriends have little excuse. So grow your beards men! Show the football team that you support them!
Tonight I went to the WSU Vocal Jazz and Big Band concert in Kimbrough to watch Jaron play his trombone. It was a really good concert. The vocalists sounded solid, and the band was amazing. Jaron did a really good job, even among all of those music majors who are aspiring to become professionals. Apparently, the band was recently featured in Downbeat magazine and WSU was ranked among the top jazz schools in the country.
Tonight I went to Sella's with Jaron after he finished band practice. It was fun to see him again after a whole week. We had a good time playing Pictionary and watching a bit of Monday Night Football. Jaron told me about a YouTube show called Look Around You, and we watched a short episode when we got back from the restaurant. It's pretty funny, so check out DupyLinks if you're interested. It's nice to go to college with your brother.
