CK's blog

Dogs in Costumes FTW!

2008-11-21T15:09:00.001-08:00

Dogs in clothes = lame.

Dogs in costumes = awesome.

Dogs in costumes of other animals = win.

Found out today that Riley and Apollo were named as 1 of 50 winners in Nintendo's Animal Crossing Welcom Waggin' contest. Basically it was a contest to take a picture of your pet(s) dressed as your favorite characters from the the game Animal Crossing. We won a Wii, two copies of Animal Crossing: City Folk, and two Wii Speak microphones. We're most excited about the Wii Speak, since we didn't spring for the extra 30 bucks when we bought the game. Now, what to do with an extra Wii, Wii Speak, and two copies of AC:CF...

Link of the Day: http://www.welcomewaggincontest.com
Winning Picture:

One More Cool Pic of Apollo

2008-08-24T22:00:00.000-07:00

haha

He thinks he's people. :P

Apollo!

2008-08-24T21:58:00.000-07:00

Mini-beast

On Friday we adopted our second dog. His name is Apollo (after either the Greek sun god or the character from Battlestar, you decide). He was a stray like Riley, and he was even in the same kennel at the SPCA as Riley. So far they get along great and Apollo has a great attitude (a bit more gentle and obedient than Riley). They can't play too much yet because Apollo's stiches from being neutered are still healing, but so far he is doing really well.

Current Music: Who Cut the Cheese (from a 2 and a half men episode)

Life is decent

2008-06-19T19:52:00.000-07:00

well, except for the weather.

Bought tickets last week to see Nine Inch Nails in September, so I'm pretty stoked about that. Trent also put out a sampler of all the bands that are opening for him along the tour. I checked out their albums and I really like Does it Offend You, Yeah? (Yes that is their name) - kind of a mix between Klaxons, Bloc Party, Daft Punk, and Atari Teenage Riot. Haven't been able to find the album from Deerhunter, who is actually playing at the Oakland show I'm going to.

This weekend while Jen was gone (and I was bored) I reinstalled my MythTV computer with Mythbuntu, a MythTV-specific version of Ubuntu. I must they they did an impressive job on it, only took me about 3 hours to get the whole thing up and running.

Current Music: Does it Offend You, Yeah? - We Are Rockstars
Link of the Day: Download the newest NIN album - For Free (and legally)
Random Picture:

Today I received this picture message

2008-06-05T19:12:00.000-07:00

Your puppy

Checking for monsters, I guess. Or maybe he is a monster.

Busy busy busy

2008-05-29T19:39:00.000-07:00

It's on.

Just finished our first round of registering for gifts at Bed Bath and Beyond (mostly the Beyond section) and Target. Registering is kind of like making a Christmas list combined with shopping. They give you a little hand scanner and you go around and scan everything you like. I registered for my sweet Kitchen Aid mixer, so after that I was set.

We finished our sweet "Save the Date" cards, so those should be going out some time this summer. However, I keep calling them "Saves the Day", because I've said that a lot more times than "Save the date".

Current Music: A Perfect Circle - Magdalena
Link of the Day: Our Awesome Wedding Site
Random Picture:

The Wedding Planning Machine begins to pick up steam

2008-02-28T20:34:00.001-08:00

The planning! The reality! argh!

Not a whole lot of news- we're looking at maybe April-May 2009 time frame for the wedding, somewhere in San Luis Obispo county. Books have been bought. Preliminary guest lists have been made. We are so organized.

Current Music: Dragonforce - Through the Fire and the Flames
Links of the Day: Garfield Minus Garfield - This is such a better comic!
Random Picture: Sometimes xkcd echoes my life so accurately it scares me.

We're Engaged!

2008-02-25T22:02:00.001-08:00

The Song

The Ring

Link of the day: I was all excited to change my relationship status on Facebook :P

I swear, he's nice!

2008-02-25T21:55:00.000-08:00

He just likes to behead his toys

Labragon

2007-12-15T11:08:00.000-08:00

1/2 labrador, 1/2 dragon

I guess I haven't written a post about Riley, our dog, yet so to update anyone who we haven't told about him (or hasn't come over to our house and seen the awesomeness that is Riley), here goes:

In June we went to the SPCA to see what kinds of dogs they had. We had just moved up to Antelope and the one requirement for a place to rent was that we could have a dog. We didn't really intend to pick a dog that day, but I really liked Riley. He was a lab mix that was all black, but with a white belly, and white tips on his tail and paws. He was a big puppy still (6 months old and 60 lbs), but he was very cute and seemed to be very attentive and smart. He was already housetrained, so that was a bonus. We put a hold on him for a couple days to think about it. We went back later that weekend and decided to take him home. Unfortunately it wouldn't be for a few days because he had to go to the vet to get neutered.

Jen brought him home during my first week of work. He was pretty crazy around the house and made a lot of trouble. She wasn't working at the time, so she basically spent all day every day with him. After a week or so we decided to take him for a trip to the dog park in Roseville. He definitely loved it and was very social with all the other dogs. The only problem was that he didn't realize how big he was, so he would start playing with puppies that were smaller than him and their owners would freak out.

We went to the vet for the first time for a checkup- he said Riley looked very healthy. He said he wasn't sure what Riley was mixed with (definitely part lab), but that he didn't think he would be over 100 lbs. For the first couple months we would go to the dog park and try to figure out what other breed Riley was mixed with by looking for similar characteristics. In time it became obvious...

A local obedience trainer gave 1 free lesson to dogs from the SPCA, and we knew Riley definitely needed it. After about 12 lessons, he is great at sit, down, up, wait, stay, watch, drop it, leave it, come here, and walking on a leash. We also taught him to roll over, high-five (and ten), crawl, bow (Schaffhausen!), off, get out, and to bring us his bowl when it's time to eat (although now he brings us the bowl when HE thinks it's time to eat- which is always).

When he got to be about 9 months, we realized that he was quite a bit bigger than any labs we had seen at the dog park. His stomach also seemed a bit thinner (labs are usually pretty filled out). We started looking at breeds that were bigger than labs, and we found that there is a color pattern of great dane called a "mantle" that is all black, with a white chest, paws, and tail. We also found that "labradanes" (labrador/great dane) are a pretty popular hybrid breed. There is a purebred great dane named Max that goes to the dog park that is quite a bit bigger than him, but when we watch them play together they have a pretty similar body shape and gait. Riley's head is definitely labrador, but we're now pretty sure he's a labradane. He is over 100 lbs (silly vet), but we think he's pretty much done growing.

He just turned 1 year old this month, and he's starting to settle down a little (although he still gets pretty hyped up when people come over or when we go someplace new). He is smart- when we sit in the living room watching TV and he is outside, he tries to chew on the cable that runs down the outside of the house! He is awesome in the car- we drove 8 hours to Temecula for Thanksgiving and we had to stop more times so that Jen could go to the bathroom than for Riley. We're taking him to my parents' house for Christmas, so hopefully we'll have some cute pictures and no disasters.

Off to the dog park!

Current Music: Nothing in particular
Link of the Day: Space Dog
Random Picture:

This is not Riley. Sorry.

But this is!

It's snowing!

2007-11-27T23:20:00.000-08:00

At least it is here on my blog.

Just a post to update links on the left. Now go read xkcd. All of it. And make sure to read the mouseovers, they are often the best part.

Current Music: "Self-Conclusion" - The Spill Canvas
Links of the Day: This bug is why you often can't read the full mouseover text on xkcd without doing a right-click/properties. Sad how long it has taken to be fixed.
The origin of emoticons... everything comes from somewhere, I guess. :-)

Yay work

2007-11-15T22:31:00.000-08:00

nerd it up

Been doing some cool stuff at work lately. First have been learning how to script Ubuntu installations using Debian Installer preseeds. Pretty awesome stuff, and way better than Fedora. Also have been learning about profiling using OProfile and IBM's Visual Performance Analyzer. Very cool to be able to actually see where programs spend their time.

I just checked out Eclipse for the first time yesterday and I'm pretty impressed. I know a lot of Java people have been using it for years now, but since I really only did C programming in my upper-division CPE classes, I never had a need for much more than a text editor and a makefile. I loaded up the C and Ruby environments, and both seem pretty cool. I have usually avoided IDE's for programming because I always feel like they're getting in my way, but Eclipse seems to be a reasonable balance of useful tools and letting you do your work.

Have been testing out some really cool hardware lately, though can't go into too much detail. Most of the people on my team are software guys, so I'm happy to test out the cool, new hardware. :)

Other than that, just keeping busy playing ogame (3 attempts and still no moon!), reading the tale of 1337 on xkcd and trying not to miss anything major on osnews. Today Jen and I celebrated our 5 year anniversary. I brought home roses and we went to Del Taco. Man are we awesome or what?

Current Music: Cake - Love You Madly (stuck in my head)
Link of the Day: If I know you I'm sure you've already seen Kenya . Now see Brazil! Marcos says's that's pretty much how it is there. Forget Norway.

Random Picture:
Also awesome: (thanks for the link, Matt)

I am now an old man

2007-10-09T20:17:00.000-07:00

It's probably about time for a quarter-life crisis...

I kinda forgot about the whole having-a-blog thing, and the idea of how you're supposed to update it. Perhaps I'll go through a phase of updating again. We shall see. I had to figure out what the heck my FTP upload account info was again (thanks Jeff for keeping the site up and around) and figure out how to convert my Blogger account to use my *Google Account* (oooh, shiny)

Anyway, it was my birthday a couple days ago- thanks to everyone who wished me a happy birthday via Facebook! I know it reminds you that my birthday is coming up, but it's better than a kick in the ass. Or nobody wishing you happy birthday. :) Speaking of Facebook I suppose I should get back on that... Jen and a bunch of people are on a trivia team and I am slacking off- the only points I have are those that Jen earned while signed in as me...

My new job at ProCurve is going really well and my job is definitely really interesting. It's way different than being at a small company, but everyone is really friendly and easygoing. Jen is interviewing with a couple places in the area, so she's pretty excited about that. Riley (our dog, I guess I haven't written about him here yet) is doing pretty well... he is getting better about listening to us, although he is still pretty hyper sometimes. Fortunately the 110+ degree weather of summer is over and most days it's in the 70's or so.

Well anyway... enough for now, I'm off to play some Zelda: Phantom Hourglass on my DS (Thanks Jen!)

Random Quote: A witty saying proves nothing. -Voltaire (seen on a random Slashdot sig)
Current Music: Ratatat - Remixes Volume II
Link of the Day: ogame.org - A text-based space sim game. I like it because you can log in like once or twice a day, do stuff for 10 minutes, then let things build/research/etc for several hours.
Random Picture:

I am now a published nerd

2006-09-16T17:35:00.000-07:00

woot.

Link of the Day: Bask in the glory of my init script writing skills

Update on Life

2006-04-03T23:30:00.000-07:00

Graduating in June!?

Yeah, holy crap. It's crazy.

I asked Jen how she would describe Boston in two words. She said "Very cold"

Boston was sweet. So much good food. I made my pilgrimage to Nerd Mecca (MIT), and we checked out quite a bit of the city. Also, I experienced Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon in it's best form - A laser show!

I have been crowned King of the Nerds

Clark Turner, a Software Engineering professor was sitting behind me in Computer Security today. He noticed I was taking notes in LaTeX and thought that was pretty hardcore.

"I thought I was king of the nerds, but it seems I have to hand my crown over to you."

pwned.

Nothing makes you feel old like your little brother facebooking you.

Bryan is coming to Cal Poly next year, so apparently he somehow got his email account set up already. I check my email only to find that he has facebooked me!

Current Music: Red Hot Chilli Peppers - Purple Stain
Link of the Day: OMG Ponies!!!

Sony Ericsson w600

2006-01-04T20:31:00.000-08:00

AKA the beast phone

After a bit of searching, I decided on a new phone. The Sony Ericsson w600. No gadget has been this cool since I got my iPod.

Sweet features:
+ Full Bluetooth support (headset, file transfer, even HID- meaning you can use the phone as a mouse for your computer)
+ 256MB of memory which holds about 50 (full-length, full-sized) mp3's
+ Includes USB cable that you can attach and access as a USB storage device
+ Built in mp3 player with COMFORTABLE in-ear headphones!
+ Headphones double as handsfree device
+ My car has an audio-in jack that allows me to connect a headphone cable to listen to music
+ When someone calls and my car stereo is plugged in, the person's voice comes over the stereo and the mic picks you up
+ Nice, loud speaker on the phone

Few changes that would be nice
- Expandable memory (oh well, I have an iPod...)
- Can't use my phone as a bluetooth modem (I suspect Cingular wanting money has something to do with this)
- Weird default orange color (fortunately it comes with a nice dark blue one, too)

Current Distraction: Scrubs

Screw the Cal Poly English Department

2005-12-14T18:32:00.000-08:00

and their grading scheme in which everyone seems to get C's

I got my grades back today and somehow I ended up with a C+ in Creative Writing: Poetry (Yes, I know how funny that is that I was in a poetry class, but it was really a lot of work). I put more time into that class than Graphics or Ethnic Studies and I got B's in both of those... WTF? I think it has to do with the English department's stance of "If you meet the requirements for an assignment, you get a C." It seemed like I was one of the better students in the class, maybe that's why I got the "+".

Working every day this week doing some crazy stuff with IncidentMonitor, SQL, and netViz. Very cool stuff. Too bad I can't tell you what.

Current Music: Flaming Lips - One More Robot / Sympathy 3000-21

You can tell this was a busy quarter

2005-12-08T13:44:00.000-08:00

because my last post was before Fall quarter started

Basically I am almost done with finals (just have Graphics tomorrow) and I am pretty glad the quarter is ending.

I saw Nine Inch Nails last night @ Cal Poly. It was an awesome show- probably the best I've seen, or at least tied with seeing Something Corporate at the Ventura Theater when they were filming their DVD. I never realized NIN was such danceable music...

During one of the stops in "March of the Pigs" Trent said "I think this is the weirdest place we've ever played." I guess he doesn't play that many concerts that are like 1/3 frat guys :)

Anyway, awesome show.

Current Music: NIN

Getting all technical

2005-09-10T17:36:00.000-07:00

No, not techno.

In light of it being summer, I'm currently going through what some might call "academic withdrawl". I strangely yearn to buy every book at Barnes & Noble and just spend the rest of my life reading about programming languages and web design.

I've been spending some time learning Ruby on Rails, and let me tell you, it is pretty sweet. I now have enough knowledge to put together a working schema and site, which is not too bad for such a short amount of time. Now I just need to learn AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML) so that I can make some sweet change-the-page-without-reloading-it actions ala Google maps/mail/personalized and also CSS so that my pages aren't all ghetto black & white where the most exciting style change is when I bold some words.

Ruby, Rails, AJAX, and Penguins

What I'm using as a learning project for Ruby on Rails is something I've been thinking about for a while. Basically it is a database with information about different Linux distributions. My reasoning behind this comes from looking at DistroWatch all the time- seeing a new version of some distro that has come out and wondering "OK, so what makes this one different?"

The idea behind this project is that someone could go through the process of entering a new distro and choosing from categories that it might differ in from other distros (i.e. does it use KDE, Gnome, or something else?). I also want it to be extensible in the respect that if your distro uses "something else", you can enter that item (like, say XFCE) so that other people entering distros can re-use the information you have entered. To make it even more customizable, I want users to be able to add categories, like desktop environment, DHCP client, package management program, installation defaults, etc. Amazingly, I made this idea become a reality in the form of a set of web pages in one day using Ruby on Rails. We're not talking a full day either, this was like 2 hours when I woke up, 2 inthe afternoon, then an hour or so before bed. Like I said, all that's really left now is to make it look nice and to put some AJAX code in it so that if you choose "Other" for an item or click "Next Category" that it adds the necessary form fields to the page immediately. I think down the road I might also want to find a way to make it wiki-like so that if sometime replaces the description for Fedora with "TEH N00B DISTRO", then we can roll it back to when it was something useful. More on my RoR work before long.

Lastly, I leave you with:

CK's favorite OSX apps (so far)

Instant Messaging: Adium
Text Editor: TextMate
FTP: Cyberduck
VNC: Chicken of the VNC (hee hee!)
IRC: Colloquy (IRC has never been so sexy)
MySQL frontend: YourSQL
Note Taking: OmniOutliner (pasting from OmniGraffle for drawings)
Web Browser: I still don't know... Safari is decent... trying Firefox 1.5 right now, though.
Collaboration: SubEthaEdit (multiple people can edit a document at the same time, why hasn't someone done this sooner?!)
Network Utils:

KisMAC (for finding the networks)
Ethernal (for sniffing the data)

System Utils:

SizzlingKeys (for controlling iTunes)
MenuMeters (for seeing what's happening)
Growl (for getting notified)

Games (let's be realistic here... I have a trackpad and don't want to buy a "mac edition" second copy of every game I own)

TuxRacer
Frozen Bubble

Current Music: Scott Weiland - But Not Tonight
Link of the Day: Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby - cartoon foxes teach you about Ruby (eventually)
Quote of the Day:

jewong@chimera:~ $ ls

Segmentation fault.

jewong@chimera:~ $

chimera is our server. ls is what you type to list files in a folder. Segmengation fault means the program is broken. jewong is Jeff, the guy who runs the server. Not shown is Jeff bashing his head against the wall and screaming obscenities (ok, so maybe that didn't happen but it's funny to picture). This is why my blog was down for a bit.

OK, now for the techno.

A post for the non-nerds

2005-09-09T22:31:00.000-07:00

Lake & Bake

We just got back from the lake (Berryessa), where we went for Labor Day weekend. It was pretty sweet, although we barely made it out for any morning runs. It was weird wakeboarding for the first time in two years. I managed to avoid sunburn the entire time except for the last day. The last day Bryan and I went out with our friends who have a cabin up at the lake. We left at like 8 and didn't come back until after 12. As our campground check-out time was noon, Jen was obviously not a fan of me leaving her to pack up our stuff on her own (eek!) Despite my last-minute stupidity, the weekend was a lot of fun.

We're currently on a tour-de-California, as we came back from the lake, then left the next morning to go to the beautiful city of Temecula! Yeah, it's great. And I love malls. :) I guess I kinda owe Jen after putting up with the lake for three days. Tomorrow morning we're leaving at 8am for Las Vegas. That should be a good time- I'll probably play more arcade games than casino games, but hopefully we can find a good sushi buffet

Random Picture: This is Sam, the World's Ugliest Dog. I was watching the new while writing this post and the lady who owned the dog came on was holding him and talking about him. The dog was barking and growling all vicious-like. :::shudder::: So creepy, so very creepy.

At least hell is warm...

2005-06-29T22:24:00.000-07:00

Random Picture:

I'm alive!

2005-05-29T19:10:00.000-07:00

But I have no life...

The lack of updates to my blog this quarter has been stupifying, I know. There's something about going to work 8am-noon, then school 1pm-5:30pm, then homework 6-10pm that doesn't leave much room for blogging. Here are a few of the things I have been meaning to put up here for a while:

Great quote from one of Marcos and my lab reports:
"In this lab, we learned a great deal about equipment reliability. Our measurements, while generally seemingly correct, were probably slightly erroneous. "

Proof I am with the right woman:
JenJollyJen: why is internet explorer such a slow peice of shit
K DoubleUp: haha
K DoubleUp: i love you
JenJollyJen: i love you too
JenJollyJen: but i HATE ie

Life Update: I bought a 12" Powerbook

Conversation of the Day:
Jen: So what kind of food do you want?
Brynn: Food that makes my vagina not hurt.
Carrie: What about pineapple juice? Oh wait, that's something different.
(note, Brynn had gone on a bike ride to Avila)

Current Music: Coheed & Cambria - Blood Red Summer

Random Pictures:

70 T-shirts and 11 pairs of jeans.

2005-04-09T12:27:00.000-07:00

OK, so Jen helped me get rid of about 10 shirts and 3 jeans, but still...

I actually filled up my closet. And it's a walk-in closet.

Current Music: Ludacris - Growing Pains
Animation of the Day: "Get Perpendicular" - I have never seen a funny demonstration of new technology, but here it is. GG Hitachi.
Link of the Day: "Maynard found Jesus" - The resolution (whew!)

..."For all I know, it was Willem Dafoe."

Random Picture:

I'm back!

2005-04-06T23:36:00.000-07:00

When you get a new computer, you forget that you can do non-gaming things, like updating your blog.

Well so far this quarter has been pretty nuts. I'm working from 8am-12pm MTW, then going to school 1pm-5:30pm MTWF and working all day Thursday. When I come home from school it feels like it's been a whole day since I was at work. Last week was really hard for me and seemed so long. This week has seemed really long too (it's only Wednesday?!) but I'm learning to handle it.

Kevin Roberts has a new nickname... K-Bob

It all started when we were making chicken shishkabobs. Well, it's not exactly a long story. Someone (was it me? I forget), was like "Kevin Roberts... K-Bob?" That's about it. Sorry the story isn't cooler. The true sign that Kevin accepted it was that he changed his name in Smash Bros. to "KBOB".

Today I heard the saddest news ever

Maynard James Keenan (lead singer of Tool and A Perfect Circle) has "found Jesus."

When Jen told me this on the phone, my first question was "where, tied up in his basement?" Unfortunately, this was not the case. I then asked "Is it an April Fool's joke?" and apparantely a post was made to toolband.com on March 31st and was no joke. Worst of all, he is stopping work on the current album (possibly permanently). I think this is worse than him dying.

Damned Christianity... always getting in my way.

April is: Math Awareness Month!
Current Music: Jay-Z - The Threat
Link of the Day: A breadtangle of pizza
Random Picture:

Bought it.

2005-02-08T22:13:00.000-08:00

I could wait no longer.

Since I have a performance review (and hopefully a raise) on friday and it will take 8-12 days to get here, I got my new computer. The specs are on this post.

I'm glad I ended up getting the Power Supply I did, because the one I was going to get, the Ultra X-Connect, although it looks cool, it blew itself up in this test conducted by TrustedReviews.com. Instead I got the almost-as-cool-looking, but rated a 10 in MaximumPC, Antec NeoPower 480. That's right. 480 watts. Booyah.

Link of the Day:The most common ways to kill a PC
Random Picture: