Planet EECS

I ran across something new on the EECS website today. It's called Planet EECS, and it's an aggregation of blogs authored by students and faculty of the EECS department at WSU. Cool idea. It makes sense that the most tech-savvy people at the university might have some pretty cool blogs. I've already ready a couple that I'll probably end up subscribing to.

DupyCal

As Dupyshon.com looks to become more of a collaborative effort, it might be nice to have a shared calendar where all contributors can list notable upcoming events. We'll try this out with a beta feature I'm calling DupyCal. It's in beta because I'm not sure if it'll really catch on. First of all, I'm not sure the contributors have enough events to populate the calendar in a meaningful way. Second, I'm not sure if anyone in the world cares to know our future plans. Third, I don't know if the chosen vehicle (Google Calendar) is the right one to take us where we want to go. Oh well, it's an experiment.

Mahalo.com

I just ran into a cool new website - Mahalo.com. It's a search engine which features user-generated results. The site has a very Wikipedia-esque feel to it. Pretty interesting.

Hiccups

I've been having the hiccups like crazy over the last couple of days. I had them for almost an hour at work today. Not only does that distract me from what I'm doing, but I'm sure the guys in the cubicles around me didn't appreciate it much, either. Somehow I suspect that this has something to do with me getting over HFM. Maybe my body is shocked by eating real food again, and my stomach is complaining at the amount of digestion it's being asked to do. Anyway, I hope it all stops soon, my chest is starting to feel sore.

Nearly Better

I'm almost healed up. The only thing that still really bothers me is a sore on the tip of my tongue. Well, that and the fact that everyone stares at the big, festering spots on my face and hand. Once those go away I'll be really happy.

The Festiva

As some of our readers may know, Kylan now owns a Cadillac. Well, I may just be close to owning my own car, but as long as I've already been working on it, it still isn't quite drivable yet.

Over the past few weeks I've been in the arduous process of trying to transfer over the Festiva and make it legal for me to drive. The Festiva is the little red box on wheels with great MPG that Kylan formerly drove.

Well, we had to renew the tabs first of all, but it turns out that we couldn't do that until we got an emissions test. After going one day to the emissions test station, we were told that the idle RPMs were too high. After another two days and some adjustments to some knick-knacks on the engine we got the emissions test over.

But this was only the beginning. The next few steps were going to be actually getting the tabs, pinpointing and fixing the starter problem on the car, transferring the title, insuring it, and at the end of all that, probably gassing it up and stuffing it full of my stuff for school this fall! This will eventually be my first car, and I can see that owning any big ticket items in this life is a major hassle!

But, I suppose it will be eventually good to have my own transportation... Still have to transfer that title though...

Hand, Foot, and Mouth Disease

Looks like I've been suffering from Hand, Foot, and Mouth Disease (HFM). Sounds pretty gruesome. The good news is that it wasn't mono, which would have put me out of service for the rest of the summer. This stuff usually clears up within 7-10 days, which means I'm almost out of the woods. I'm already feeling a lot better. My sore throat is subsiding and all that really bothers me now are some sores on my lips and in my mouth. HFM usually occurs in children under the age of 10, but can be found in adults who haven't developed an immunity to the disease.

My Schedule

Here's my schedule for the fall:

Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
7:45-9AM CPT S 560 Operating Systems		7:45-9AM CPT S 560 Operating Systems
10:10-11AM EE 555 Computer Communications Networks	10:35-11:50 CPT S 561 Computer Architecture	10:10-11AM EE 555 Computer Communications Networks	10:35-11:50 CPT S 561 Computer Architecture	10:10-11AM EE 555 Computer Communications Networks

For Grandpa

Hi Grandpa, I heard from my mom that you've been waiting for me to post some pictures of the Cadillac on Dupsyhon.com. Well, now I have a whole album of photos that you can look at. Just scroll down to the DupyPics section and click on the "Cadillac" link. Enjoy!

Throat Infection

I have a throat infection. I went to the doctor's office yesterday and found this out. Makes sense, since my neck is visibly swollen and my glands are pretty inflamed. I decided to go to the doctor because I spotted some white patches at the back of my throat. The nurse swabbed my throat (that felt good!) and sent the samples to a quick test they do on site. That test came back negative for strep throat, but they said there is a false negative about 25% of the time. They're sending a swab to a lab for more reliable testing, and I'll know the results by this afternoon. So it looks like I'll be missing work at least through Friday, which I'm not very happy about. It's not very fun to sit around my apartment all day just staring at the TV.

The DupyFeed

The bottom right-hand corner of the Dupyshon.com homepage has a couple links to "The DupyFeed." What is The DupyFeed? It's a combination of The DupyBlog, DupyPics, DupyDocs, DupyLinks, and DupyNews. This allows you to subscribe to all of the Dupyshon.com feeds at once, or pick and choose which feeds you want to follow.

Update: I've removed The DupyFeed for now. The service I was using to aggregate the feeds didn't work as well as I wanted.

You Never Know...

just how good you have it when you aren't sick. I stayed home from work today due to a fever and sore throat.

The Lavender Festival

The lavender festival: a time of flowers, flowers, and... more flowers. Well, my Mom really likes it. We got up today at 8 o'clock in the morning to head off to Sequim, the self-proclaimed "Lavender Capital of North America". A quick side-note, who manages these self-proclaimed titles? I mean, there must be one or two small towns that proclaim themselves the same thing, right? In any case, I'm still a little disappointed that they didn't go for lavender capital of the world.

Ok, ok... I'm done. Anyway, we drove up to Sequim with Mr. and Mrs. Overland. They were staying the night, but we only went up for a day trip. Amazingly, even though the clouds menaced us all day, there was practically no rain the entire time that we were there. That was very good.
The general idea of the lavender fest is to jump around the Sequim area from lavender farm to farm taking a look at all the lavender associated and non-lavender associated merchandise being shown. This is the kind of stuff that the girls like to buy, not really for guys (unless you enjoy a two-fist sized rock with a painting of a butterfly on it for $16... seriously, my mom bought one).
I must admit however, the smell of lavender is quite nice. It is incredible what you can apparently do with the stuff, because people put it in sugars, bath soaps, lemonades, sachets, gardens of course, and all manner and sorts of decorative pieces for interior design.
By the end of the whole ordeal, my dad was so tired that he just stayed in the car for the last farm and took a nap (I did too for a while, probably around 45 minutes). I enjoyed the last farm in particular though because that was the stop at which they had the alpacas, which are relatives of camels and, more closely, llamas. I still want to buy one of the alpaca hats that they have for sale. Alpaca wool is great for warm clothing due to the fact that it works for the alpacas (they live in high altitude climates in South America, near to the Andes mountains).
In any case, it was another everyday adventure with the family, and I did enjoy myself.

CSS and Page Layout

I implemented some CSS into the site today. It's very basic right now, but it lays the groundwork for my future plans. This is the first time I've used floating elements, but they are working great. Hopefully I'll be able to develop a decent looking interface before too long. The goal is to keep everything clean and simple, but to also make it fresh and inviting. I'd like to establish a unified style across all the pages, blogs, and albums of the site.

Feedburner

I signed up for a Feedburner account last night and rerouted all of the Dupyshon.com blogs through it. It seems like a neat service because it provides a lot of detailed statistics concerning your RSS or Atom feeds. We'll see if I end up liking it.

Collaboration

"Dupyshon" is a nonsensical word invented by my brother, Jaron Robinson. I chose to use it as the domain name for this site because it is utterly unique in the world. But I've always felt a bit bad about capitalizing on Jaron's originality. I'd like him to be able to share this site with me as a co-contributor. A while back, we tested a feature called "Jaron's Corner" which allowed him to manage a few pages. The problems were that it wasn't integrated into the site enough, and Jaron is not very interested in getting down and dirty with writing code. We've started a new approach today which allows him to make blog posts that appear directly on the main page alongside mine. His very first entry is listed below. (It cites me as the author, but that's just a bug we'll work out very soon.) So welcome, Jaron, it's good to have you here.

Jaron's Europe 2007

So, as Kylan had mentioned in several other posts, I recently returned from Europe. Twenty-one days of the excitement of foreign places, strange (but good) food, expensive exchange rates, and not being able to read any street signs! But seriously, it was fun. I traveled with Chris Wong, a friend from high school. We were supposed to have two more guys go with us, but they didn't manage to make it for various reasons.

Beginning on July 11th, we took a straight shot flight from SeaTac to London's Heathrow airport. The exchange rate in Britain at that time was about two dollars for every pound. That means everything is already twice as expensive not counting the cost of living difference from Tacoma to London. I probably spent the most money here. Chris wasn't exactly thrilled about London, and it was a little difficult for the first few days of this trip. We had to adjust not only to price difference, but to British accents, the climate, jet lag, and having to walk everywhere.

For me, London was not a picnic, but it still was exciting. I saw the Tower of London, London Eye (a giant ferris wheel basically), Westminster Abbey (my favorite in London), Big Ben, and Buckingham Palace. It was incredible. I have pictures too, so don't worry (I took about 800 over the duration of the trip).

Paris was next on our stop, and I still don't see why people think it's romantic. It really is just a city. It's a moderately dirty and busy city with its share of tourists. Still, I did see some interesting things. We went to the Eiffel Tower of course, and that was quite a view. We went to dinner once at a place called Brasserie Lipp, following the suggestion of one of my travel books, and boy it sure seemed as though the waiter did not like us. Because neither of us were fluent in French, we couldn't pronounce anything, and the waiter made sure we knew that.

That one restaurant aside, we had a good dining experience, not excellent, but the food was high quality and the service generally good. But perhaps the most memorable moment was when we had to break out of our hostel. Needing to catch a morning 8:45 flight to Venice, we attempted to inform our host at the hostel that we needed to check out at about 5:30 in order that we make it to the airport on time.

I still don't know if there was a language barrier issue, but the fact was that when we went downstairs at 5:30 in the morning, there was no one in the office and the outer doors to the hostel were locked. These are not the kind of doors that can be opened from one side when they are locked. After trying to wake anybody up for the next 15 minutes, we decided there was no other choice: we had to make it to the airport or we were stranded.

Utilizing a small open window frame for passing keys and items to the office, Chris entered the office area and nabbed the keys to the doors from the desk (sitting in the open). That window frame was about the size of a tennis racket. Unlocking the doors and then throwing the keys back into the office we proceeded to book it to the Metro. I was definitely having an adrenaline rush at that moment! We had just broken out of out hostel in Paris!

Well, we did manage to get the flight with plenty of time to spare, but we probably watched our backs to see if Interpol was chasing us for the next two cities. The next city was Venice, and my favorite one in terms of sights and general feeling, though it was very hot.

I am willing guess that the first day in Venice was somewhere in the high 90s if not 100 degrees even. The following days were better, but Italy is simply hot in general. There we filmed our YouTube motion picture, The Pigeon Whisperer, which you can find somewhere around here on Dupyshon.com. We saw the Doge's Palace, ate Gelatto at every possible instance on account of the heat, and ate cuttlefish pasta. That last one is a spaghetti dish with small squid in its own ink. It may sound gross, but it's good (just have to make sure that you floss and brush really well to get all the ink out.

We took the train to Florence, which was my least favorite actually. We arrived on Saturday to find that our hotel wasn't actually in Florence, but in Campi, a suburb of Florence about 30 minutes away by bus. Not good for the morale.

The next day we got up on Sunday and went to the town. Unfortunately on Sundays a lot of sights in Florence are closed, considering that most of what we were going to see was church related, like the Duomo. The line to the statue of David was the definition of "long". The line to the Uffizi Galleries was even longer, but we waited that one out for one and a half hours to get in. It was good in the end though, we got to see one of the most important collections of renaissance art in the world.

The only really really good thing about Florence was a Gellato place called Vivoli. It had the most exquisite flavors of sorbet that I've seen so far. I got hazelnut chocolate and caramel pear. If you are ever in Florence, don't pass it up, I think you'll be impressed.

After Florence we once again took the train to Rome. The Coliseum was impressive, as was St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican City. I was disappointed however in the Sistine Chapel: I thought it would be bigger and brighter, but I suppose for renaissance art it is a rather big achievement. We also saw the Spanish Steps, Trevi Fountain, the Pantheon, and the Roman and Imperial Forums, or what's left of them. Rome really seemed like a modern city, except for the little pockets of ruined buildings and things fenced off from the other buildings. It was very interesting.

The next stop was Berlin, which seemed like an American city with everything just spelled wrong. The food was good because we were staying with Chris's aunt and uncle. They know how to cook very well, but they more importantly know where to get good ingredients.

That is pretty much all of my trip. I may edit this later and get more details in.

The Engagement

Kristen and I got engaged Sunday evening in Spokane. I had been planning this for quite some time, but it was a total surprise to her. We had been talking about the possibility of getting married, but I told her that I would probably wait until the fall to propose. Now, Kristen is very hard to surprise because she is quite a planner. She always knows the details of her schedule well in advance and has been known to finish school projects with weeks to spare. I really wanted to make my proposal a special event that she wasn't expecting, so I had to be very secretive with my preparations.

It all started in June when I was visiting Kristen in Illinois. We were browsing for rings at jewelry stores in town when we found out that it usually takes more than six weeks from start to finish to buy a ring . Since we would only see each other once more during the summer (four weeks later), any proposal would have to wait for the fall. Or would it? When I got back from Illinois, I called up one of the jewelry stores we had visited. This store had Kristen's favorite ring, and I asked the saleswoman if there was any way to speed up the purchasing process. She looked into the details and concluded that I might be able to get the ring just in time for Kristen's visit. This was good news for me, since I knew Kristen would never expect me to propose then.

After emailing and phoning the jewelry store almost every day, I finally received the ring with a few days to spare. All the while, I had been telling Kristen that the order had been delayed and the ring would not be ready until August.

When Kristen got here, I had to be very careful to hide the ring and to not hint at the big surprise. It was hard to do, especially since I was so excited to pop the question! The plan for this visit was to go to a wedding in Plains, Montana and then spend a day and a half together in Spokane. The wedding was fun because we knew both the bride and the groom. Kristen was a bridesmaid, and she even caught the bouquet at the reception!

We wanted to leave for Spokane on Sunday morning, but were met with an unpleasant surprise when we walked out to the car that morning. We had a flat tire! Kristen went and talked with the hotel staff, and one of the employees let us use his air compressor. We hoped the tire would stay inflated long enough to get to a larger town, where we could find a repair shop. The tire made it, but we soon found out that all of the mechanics are closed on Sundays. My proposal plans would be ruined if we waited until tomorrow to get the tire patched, so I decided that we had to chance it. We kept on driving toward Spokane and stopped periodically at gas stations to check the tire.

I had told Kristen to pack some dressy clothes to wear to dinner on Sunday. She looked beautiful! I was taking her to Clinkerdagger, and we planned to walk through Riverfront Park on the way to the restaurant. I put the ring (in its box) in my camera bag and told Kristen that my batteries were running low so I couldn't take many pictures. We wandered around the park for a while and finally arrived at the footbridge that overlooks Spokane Falls. We looked at the falls for a few minutes, and then I made my move. I gave a little engagement speech before dropping to one knee, getting the box out of my bag, presenting the ring, and asking, "Kristen, will you marry me?"

For a moment she was just very surprised. Then she became very excited and a huge smile quickly spread across her face. "Yes!" she exclaimed, and gave me a big hug. We took some pictures and headed off to dinner. And that's the story, don't forget to check out the Engagement photo album under DupyPics.

We're Engaged!

Kristen and I got engaged this weekend! I'll make a post tomorrow with all of the details, but until then you'll just have to look at the Engagement photo album under DupyPics. Needless to say, we're very excited!

Funny Italian Pigeons

Jaron got back from his Europe trip this week. Sounds like he had a lot of fun. I'm trying to convince him to post his pictures to his WSU web space. In the mean time, you can watch this video he made with his friend Chris.

Hargrove Resigns

Today Mike Hargrove resigned as the Mariner's skipper. Here's what two of the players had to say:

1. "It's like breaking a heart to a woman" - Jose Guillen
2. "It's like chopping off the head of a cow" - Miguel Batista

How tragic.