Apple Cup 2007

Wow, what a game! I'm so glad Kristen and I were able to go. Jaron was there with the band, and Dad even got a chance to be there since my uncle Charlie had an extra ticket. This was one of the best Cougar football games I've ever seen, right up there with the Holiday Bowl during the 2003 season. It was so exciting! I just posted an album with my pictures from the game and the Seattle Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, so check it out at Dupyshon.com.

Speaking of Cougar football, the world found out yesterday that Bill Doba will no longer be our head coach. Even though he's faced a lot of criticism over the years, I'm sad to see him go. He's such a nice and upstanding guy, and he instilled great values in his players. For instance, the Cougars never gave up on a single game this season, even during the Oregon State fiasco. Doba is truly a loyal Cougar, having spent 19 years on the coaching staff here in Pullman. Best of luck, Bill, we'll miss you.

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Review of Fall EP

This is song-by-song review of Jon Foreman's new Fall EP.

1. The Cure for Pain

This is probably my favorite melody from this album. The lyrics are a personal reflection on the trials of human life. Water and gravity play an important role in this song because of their relentless nature. It's hard to fight against these strong forces of nature, just as it's difficult to fight one's own human nature. This is a similar idea to the gravity references in Switchfoot's Oh! Gravity. This is the only song on the album to feature horns, and I like the warmth they provide.

2. Southbound Train

The intro to this tune uses the cello and harmonica to simulate the sound of a train. This is significant because the lyrics use the train as a metaphor for hopelessness. Jon feels driven toward something, but is unsure of what. He is in an intermediate state, between two cities of stability and peace.

3. Lord, Save Me From Myself

This is a prayer that laments the materialism of our culture and asks for an escape. Jon identifies the problem as an internal one, blaming no one else for the state of his life. I really like the organ, harmonica, and shaker in this song because they add some texture not found elsewhere in the album.

4. Equally Skilled

In this song, Jon paraphrases Micah Chapter 7. This is a great song because it contrasts God's love and provision (both of His hands) against the evil and sinfulness of mankind (both of our hands). It starts pessimistically, saying "all the godly people are gone," but concludes hopefully with "he'll take my case, bringing me to light and justice." The rhythmic signature of this song is the clapping/slapping on every fourth beat. It is a bit jarring, which is good because tone of the song is meant to make listeners feel slightly uneasy. If it weren't for this sound, the music would be too soft and flowing for the subject matter at hand.

5. The Moon is a Magnet

This the most beautiful song on the record. It begins with some delicate guitar picking and is joined by warm bass clarinet. Jon uses an unusual time signature here, which is becoming increasingly common in his songwriting. The lyrics speak of a longing for love, and the tune ends with a suggestion of hope.

6. My Love Goes Free

"A tune that only caged birds know." This bit of tender singing is a very sad song, written about the end of a relationship. It takes a lot of love to realize that you have to let that person go. I especially appreciate the background vocals toward the end of the track, and I wonder if Jon played the piano part himself.

Overall, I am quite pleased with this offering from Jon Foreman. The songs are soft and heartfelt, making them perfect for quiet moments. As I listened, however, I found them to be entirely too short. The songs all ended too quickly, leaving me wanting another verse. It will be interesting to see how his planned Winter, Spring, and Summer EPs compare.

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Transitions

This week I'm working on transitioning between tasks. I have a lot to do since the semester is nearing its end, and I've noticed that I waste a lot of time moving from one thing to another. I need to minimize time-wasters like checking my email or taking a TV break and just focus on what's next.

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The Most Awesome and Incredible Game of 2007: The Apple Cup

Needless to say, for any collegiate sports fans in the state of Washington, you know what I am talking about. This year in Husky Stadium there was an explosion of amazing sportsmanship and epic feats of skill. I was in the Cougar Marching Band, field level at the west end of the stadium, and in the front row with all the other trombones; how's that for great seating?

Cougars will be celebrating and bragging for at least another year while purple and gold clothing will basically become a substitute for black sackcloth. The respective enjoying and mourning will be tremendous. Of course, in true tradition, those who lost will come up with excuses: we were doing bad anyway, the refs made bad calls, wait until next year, we're still a better school anyway. But in the end, there was not much to defend all those arguments. The Cougars won the game against the Huskies in their own packed stadium even when the Huskies scored on the first kickoff return. And they had Jake Locker!

I will refrain from my tirade for now; we have a whole year to do this, why waste it in one sitting? It really only goes to show that you can't call the Apple Cup. It is unpredictable, improbable, astronomical, in all its proportions. We Cougars admittedly do know a few things about being too sure that we will win. There have been games that were definitely "Couged" in the last 50 seconds of clock time. But in the Apple Cup the book is thrown out the window, probability is erased, sports predictors are baffled, everything is for grabs. It can be Couged or Huskied, won and lost all in the same moment, everyone has home field advantage. This is our legacy, the legacy of the state of Washington, the tournament of the Northwestern realm, steeped in tradition and competition, the pride and glory of collegiate sports in our minds: this is the Apple Cup.

Going to the Apple Cup

We're going to the Apple Cup!! Yesterday, Kristen and I were offered a couple of tickets by our friend Courtney. This is great news after a long unsuccessful process of trying to get seats via other channels. Apparently, we'll be sitting in the season ticket section, among all of the Husky faithful. Should make for an interesting game; I hope the Cougars put up a better showing than they did against Oregon State. A win would be really nice ending to an otherwise lackluster season. Thanks, Courtney!

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Searching for WiFi

This morning I'm in Spokane, waiting for Kristen to finish her half day of teaching so we can get on the road and head to Tacoma. My plan was to sit in a coffee shop down the road from her school and surf the Internet using their free WiFi. The problem is that their free wireless Internet is really slow and I kept getting kicked off the network. So I decided to hunt for some free wireless signals in the neighborhood. I've ended up at the local library, which has a pretty good connection. Wouldn't it be nice if cities or companies decided to provide free wireless coverage of their whole municipality? Google's done it in Mountainview, California. I know that this would be costly and difficult to implement, but it would definitely benefit the whole community and maybe even stimulate the economy.

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Fall EP

Jon Foreman's Fall EP will be available for download tomorrow. After a bit of investigation, I found jonforeman.com. It has some information about the whole Fall, Winter, Summer, Spring project, as well as images of Jon's handwritten lyrics.

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Boo Parking Services

The people at WSU Parking Services must be crazy. Even though Pullman is a ghost town because everyone is gone for Thanksgiving break, they're continuing to enforce their parking policies like Nazis. What would be the harm in letting me park outside of Sloan today? I think there's a total of two or three cars outside.

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Building Blocks Interview

Yesterday, Kristen had an interview at Building Blocks Child Care Center in Pullman. They have an opening for an afternoon kindergarten teacher. Her interview went great! Kristen said that her interviewers were very impressed with her portfolio and general teaching knowledge. They've invited her to come back and teach a lesson to one of the classes. If the administration likes what it sees, Kristen could be offered the job. Great job, Kristen!

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Flashback: Miami and RPS

In 2005, I won a trip to Miami to compete in the National Collegiate Rock Paper Scissors competition. Out of 83 contestants from all around the United States, I took home fourth place! This was an amazing once-in-a-lifetime experience. You can view it here. Anyway, I ran across an old web page I made and updated while I was there. It's fun to look back at that trip.

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New Music from Switchfoot

This November is a big month for Switchfoot. They're currently on tour with Relient K and Ruth, and they just released a collaborative song with these groups last Friday. It's called "Rebuild," and you can download it (for free or for a donation) by going to Switchfoot.com. All proceeds go to Habitat for Humanity, so you can help the world while you fill your iPod.

Jon Foreman, the lead singer of Switchfoot, is also releasing a solo EP this month. It's called "Fall," and will be released November 20th on Amazon.com. I'm bookmarking this page right now so I can buy the album next Tuesday.

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WSU Jazz Festival

Today I went to the WSU Jazz Festival Gala Concert to see Jaron play in Big Band I. They had two feature performers - trombonist Dave Glenn and bassist Gus Kambeitz. Just like last time, the band sounded really good. My favorite songs from the set were "National Pastime" (by Dave Glenn) and "Paprika" (by Bob Curnow). On the latter tune, drummer Tiffany Stephens was joined by percussion professor Dave Jarvis for some dueling drum solos. In two of the tunes, Derek Rubio was featured on some blazing fast congas. My favorite solo came from saxaphone professor Horace-Alexander Young on a tune called "A Cup-A-Joe." Attending these concerts are quite a treat; I would recommend them to anyone. I took a lot of pictures, and hope to post the album sometime this evening.

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Site Background Image

I'm playing around with new background images for the Dupyshon.com main page. Check it out.

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________ Hut??

Tonight Kristen, Jaron and I went to Pizza Hut for dinner. I've really been craving some deep dish pizza lately. Once we sat down, though, our server came over and said, "We're pretty much out of everything. All we have are pastas and sandwiches." At first we thought it was a joke, but then realized that she was completely serious. How does Pizza Hut manage to run out of pizza? We ended up going to Thai food instead.

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Image Cleanup

As I noted in DupyNews a few days ago, Stanford recently came out with a web application that can take blurry images and vectorize them. This allows users to resize any image without losing clarity. The service is called VectorMagic. Here's an example using the small Dupyshon.com mascot image and blowing it up:

Before -

After -

See the improvement?

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Guestbook Spam

I created a PHP guestbook for my wedding website, but it gets spammed a lot. That's annoying. If I get some time, I'll have to figure out a way to prevent this from happening more. Maybe I can implement one of those "secret code" verifiers which gives the user a set of letters in an image and asks them to type them into a text box before submitting their comment. If anyone knows an easy way to do this, let me know.

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PPA

Yesterday Kristen rocked the socks off of her Performance-based Pedagogy Assessment (PPA). The PPA is a big hurdle on the way to an elementary education degree, and it has more than 50 requirements that must be satisfied over two in-class observations. Kristen was able to satisfy all of the requirements in just one session! Her supervisor said that she is the first person to accomplish this feat in his 15 years of observing student teachers. Congratulations, Kristen!

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Gmail 2.0

I just got to use the new version of Gmail for the first time today. It took a while to get to me, since Google likes to roll out their new products in waves. Anyway, it seems pretty neat. To the naked eye, not much has changed. This is good, since I liked the old version so much. If they had changed the interface or features too much, I think a lot of people would have complained. One of the biggest differences I can see is the Contacts list. It now uses a two-panel approach, which should make organizing and navigating easier. The word on the street is that this list will be more compatible with other Google products soon. Another difference I noticed was that Gmail now prefetches messages for you. This significantly reduces load times when you're browsing your mail. It makes this web app seamless enough to make you forget you're using the Internet.

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Term Projects

In graduate school, I've found that it's common for a class to assign a term project. It took a while for them all to be assigned, but now the details are all finalized. Here's what's on my plate...

Porting e3 Over to MTX

This project is for my CPT S 560 Advanced Operating Systems class. The professors is giving us the opportunity to contribute to his very own Unix-based operating system. He's been working on it for years, and all that's needed to make it a standalone system is a text editor and a compiler. To accomplish this, two other students and I are trying to port an editor call e3 from the ELKS operating system to MTX. So far the progress is very slow. Our professor is working on it, too, so that helps. My job at the moment is to emulate the functionality needed for ioctl syscalls to the MTX kernel.

Designing a 32-bit 512-word DRAM

My partner Kevin and I are doing this as part of our EE 586 VLSI class. We will be using Cadence to lay out all of the transistors needed for this device, and will be analyzing the performance once we're done. This project is going to be slightly tedious because it involves a lot of repetitive CAD work.

Creating a Tomasulo Simulator

In my CPT S 561 Computer Architecture class, we've been studying an instruction-level parallelism approach called Tomasulo's algorithm. This involves issuing multiple instructions, executing them out of order, and committing them in order. My partner Jonathan and I will be using C++ to create a simulator with variable cycles-per-instruction for different instruction types.

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Craigslist

Pullman and Moscow just got their own section of Craigslist recently. Before, everyone in this area had to participate in the Spokane section, which made it hard for buyers and sellers to meet up. Since that isn't a problem anymore, I decided yesterday to put my old iBook and my old iPod up for sale. In less than 12 hours, I've already received four inquiries, and I'm meeting someone on campus today who's interested in buying both.

UPDATE: I sold both my iBook and my iPod today, less than 24 hours after I posted it. Cool!

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New iPod

I bought a new iPod yesterday. It's the green nano I was talking about earlier. So far I like it a lot. The new user interface is really nice. I appreciate Cover Flow and the way the screen displays a clock and the battery status while it's idle. The touch wheel is smaller than the one on my old iPod, so that will take some getting used to. The anodized aluminum front seems pretty scratch resistant, but the shiny back is a different story. To keep it looking nice, I bought a clear hard cover made by Griffin. This case even covers the screen, so that should keep it relatively safe.

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Dressed-Up Professors

This is a strange week because all of my professors are dressed up. People who usually wear t-shirts and jeans are donning suit coats and ties. This is because the School of EECS is being visited by the accreditation committee this week. Everyone is on their best behavior, since approval is critical.

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NSF Fellowship Application

I'm almost finished with my National Science Foundation Fellowship application. Good thing, too, because it's due tomorrow at 5PM. The forms are all complete, the test scores and transcripts are sent in, and I have all of the essays written. Right now I'm editing them and trying to squeeze in a few more morsels about the "broader impacts" of my planned research. In this case, the two page limit per essay is very restrictive. It's forcing me to make every word count.

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iPod Replacement

I've been looking at the possibilities for a new iPod lately, and have decided to go with a green 8GB third generation nano. The anodized aluminum is nice, it's very small, and I really like the fact that it has 24 hours of audio playback on a single charge. Also, there are a variety of cases available to keep it safe. The iPod Touch was very tempting, but I'm a little afraid that my day-to-day activities might be too rough for its screen.

When and where will I buy it? WalMart is having a special starting November 4th that will give me a free $25 iTunes card with the purchase of the nano. I'll miss out on the free engraving that the Apple online store offers, but that's okay.

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