[Kylan's Blog] Junior Misses

This week Kristen and I are hosting a couple of high school girls who are taking part in the Washington's Junior Miss competition. They came over tonight and will be staying with us through Saturday. By volunteering to be hosts, we earned two free tickets to the competition on Saturday night. Tonight we took the girls out to Tucci's and then went bowling at Zeppos.

[Kylan's Blog] New Radiator for the Caddy

Today we spent over $500 to have the radiator on the Cadillac replaced. Kristen and I have been meaning to get the car checked out for a while now, but we were forced to take action once I started noticing green fluid leaking onto the ground. I wish I could have just bought the parts and done the work myself, because most of that cost was due to the labor involved. The shop actually wanted to do an additional thousand dollars of work to get the Caddy into tip-top shape, but I think I'd rather try my hand at a couple of these repairs. First up: replacing the windshield wiper fluid pump.

[Kylan's Blog] Experimenting with FreeNAS

For a while now, I've wanted to set up a Network-Attached Storage (NAS) drive for Kristen and myself. It would allow us to consolidate our digital music libraries, store our pictures, back up our computers, share printers, and even serve web pages. After some looking around, I decided to install FreeNAS on my old Dell laptop. If it works out well, I might have to upgrade to an old desktop someday.

At the moment, the laptop is connected to our router via Ethernet. I can FTP and SSH into it, but I'm having a couple of minor issues with CIFS and SMB at the moment. The setup is pretty easy, and the administration GUI is very usable. This is definitely a valuable piece of free software.

[Kylan's Blog] Switchfoot at the Gorge

Tonight Switchfoot will be playing at The Gorge in George, WA for Creation 2008. Sadly, I won't be able to go. Hopefully they'll do this gig again next year. If so, I'll definitely be there.

[DupySite] Finally a Favicon

For the first time in Dupyshon.com history, I implemented a favicon for the site. You should be able to see it on your address bar when you go to the Home Page. As you can see, I'm not much of an artist!

[Phrasr] Jon Meyer

"A watched printer never prints."

[Kylan's Blog] Flobots

I actually really like this song: "Handlebars" by the Flobots.

[Kylan's Blog] Tacoma Reception

This weekend, Kristen and I went to Tacoma for our wedding reception. It was really fun to see our friends and family, especially the ones that weren't able to make it out for the wedding. Thanks to the generous preparation and planning of my mom, everything went really smoothly. It was held at ERC, with indoor and outdoor tables. Each table had flowers and wedding pictures. Taco soup was served, along with carrots, cookies, and watermelon. I made a slideshow of wedding pictures so the guests could get a feel for what the wedding was like. A lot of different people came. Both sides of my family, friends from high school, friends from WSU, and people from my parents' church. I think everyone had a good time.

[Kylan's Blog] West Side Wedding Reception

This Saturday (July 19th, 2008), Kristen and I are having a wedding reception on the West Side for our friends and family that couldn't make it the wedding. It's a casual event, and guests can "drop in" any time between 1PM and 4PM. We'll have a bit of taco salad, a slideshow of wedding pictures, and more. It will be held at my parent's church:

Evangelical Reformed Church
7435 South Madison
Tacoma, WA. 98409

This information is also available here. If you'd like to come, the only thing we ask is that you RSVP by contacting us. Hope to see you there!

[Kylan's Blog] Three Great Things

Three great things happened today!

1. Kristen and I have been married for one month.
2. We bought a car, a 2002 Ford Escort. (More details and pictures to come.)
3. Kristen got a job at Sunnyside Elementary as a third grade teacher!

Thank God, we are truly blessed.

[Kylan's Blog] Burger King Steakhouse

Every once in a while, a TV commercial comes along that actually makes me laugh. Why can't that happen more often?

[Kylan's Blog] Snap Fitness

For the past few weeks, I've joined Kristen for her workouts at Snap Fitness here in Pullman. The gym itself is simple and clean, and the staff is really nice. It feels good to be working out again, and a little bit of physical fitness is long overdue for me. I just copy Kristen's workouts, which are pretty intense with weights, abs, and cardio. Yesterday I ran a seven minute mile on the treadmill, so it looks like I'm on the right track.

[Kylan's Blog] First Batch of Wedding Pictures

I posted the first batch of our wedding pictures to KylanAndKristen.com tonight. These first photos are part of an album called The Setting. All of the pictures in this album help give an impression of where the wedding took place and how everything looked.

Over the next few days, I'll be finalizing the rest of the wedding picture albums. Every time I finish one, I'll post the highlights to KylanAndKristen.com. In the end, there should be about eighteen or nineteen albums in all. If you're too impatient for all of that, you can already view the entire collection here. Feel free to download the pictures and share them with others. If you have a Flickr membership, you can also print photos directly from their website.

Lastly, if you were at the wedding and you brought a camera, I'd really like to get my hands on the pictures you took. Flickr, Email, and snail mail are all good options. Kristen and I would really appreciate it.

Anyway, enjoy the pics.

[Kylan's Blog] The Bird and the Bee Sides

I just bought Relient K's new album, The Bird and the Bee Sides. I was warned that this album is only for die-hard fans, but I'm really enjoying it so far. It's a compilation of previously unreleased and/or unfamiliar tunes that really shows off the diverse abilities of the band. Besides, $10 for 26 songs is never a bad deal.

[Kylan's Blog] Wedding Pictures Are In

Yesterday in the mail, we received three CDs of wedding pictures from our photographer. There were 577 shots in all!

Now we're beginning the long process of reviewing, editing, and sorting. The plan is to upload all of the original and edited versions to Flickr, so everyone can look at them and (optionally) print copies for themselves.

I will also categorize the photos by theme and create a Flickr set for each theme. These sets will contain the better-looking pictures, and will be featured on KylanAndKristen.com.

In addition to the Flickr uploads and our personal website, I will be working on a slideshow for our reception in Tacoma. Kristen is creating a picture book on Shutterfly.com, and will also be printing some of the pictures to put in frames around our house.

If you took any good pictures at our wedding, please send them our way. We would really appreciate it!

[Kylan's Blog] SEL Wedding Gift

Apparently, the company I work for gives a gift and a card to its employees that get married. What a nice gesture! It certainly reminds me that I am part of a great community.

[Kylan's Blog] Switchfoot Webcam

Live webcam video of Switchfoot in the studio working on their new album:

[DupySite] Content Management Experiments

Over the past few days, I've been working on a new website for my KylanAndKristen.com domain. Since the wedding is finished, a redesign is due. The wedding website will be preserved under www.dupyshon.com/wedding, so you can still visit and sign the digital guestbook, if you like.

Anyway, I wanted to try something new with this site. In the past, I've coded up all of the HTML and CSS on my own. It's been a fun learning experience, but it also takes a lot of work. Additionally, since I'm not a graphic design guru, the sites end up looking less polished than I would like. This time around I decided to try my hand at implementing a content management system that can handle all of the backend details. I tried out three different options:

TextPattern

At first I was sure that TextPattern would be the right tool for me. My friend Mike Sun runs a photoblog called Sojourning Days using this software, and it looks really classy. TextPattern is extremely simple, almost to the extent of being bare-bones, but that let me feel like I had a lot of control. There were some issues regarding navigation between pages and auto-generated content, though, so I decided to move on.

Joomla

Joomla had the advantage of working right out of the box. However, it seems like this product is meant for a much larger-scale implementation. The support for many users, polls, and other features were just overkill for what I wanted. Plus, most of the extensions and themes are non-free, making customization much more difficult than I would have liked.

Wordpress

I've been wanting to try Wordpress for quite a while. I really like the way users can create blog posts as well as web pages. There is quite a large community supporting this product, which means that there are plenty of free extensions, widgets, and themes. Out of these three, Wordpress is easily the best choice for KylanAndKristen.com.

KylanAndKristen.com is now up and running, with pictures from our wedding to be posted later this week. Stay tuned, because the site should grow pretty quickly over the next couple of months.