Jon's Home

Photo of the Day

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 05:09:32 +0000

César started this cool thing where he's taking at least one photo per day. I really like the idea, so I'm going to try to do it too. I think I'm also going to try to include only photos that aren't adjusted/manipulated, but I don't know if I can pull that off... anyway, here's my 2008 Photo of the Day gallery.

Graduation, work, and...

Sun, 09 Sep 2007 21:22:38 +0000

It's been almost a year since I last blogged. You haven't missed much - well, except maybe the whole graduating from college thing. After graduation, I started working (surprise surprise). But today, Valentine's Day 2007, six years after Kathy and I started dating, I have some new and exciting news to write about. =D

I give you...

Jon's pictorial guide to proposing marriage

Step 1. Go buy an engagement ring.

Step 2. Find a romantic spot to propose.

Step 3. Ask: "Will you marry me?", and wait for her to say "Yes"

Step 4. Have a friend camp out with a zoom lens and take pictures of you proposing.

Step 5. Surprise your new fiancée with the pictures, then show your friends and family.

Here's a link to the entire gallery from Valentine's Day.

Busy busy busy; New Photos!

Sun, 12 Mar 2006 00:25:09 +0000

Whoa! I blogged! Yes, it's true, but the entry is going to be depressingly short. Life's been good, but incredibly busy. I've been trying to put in more hours at work (and at other work) to help offset the costs of my new car. It's not even the monthly payments - it's the monthly payments plus the insurance plus the gas. The gas is the real killer - I have to get 91 octane now, so a half-tank fillup is $25-30. ::sigh:: I've gotten a lot better at driving it though, so it's more fun now, and less scary. ;-)

School's been busy too. I'm actually pretty interested in my classes this quarter, so I'm taking them pretty seriously. I have a networking lab (it's a project course, ICS 156) that delves really deeply into TCP/IP, routing, etc. So, for example, I know how fragmentation works now, and that modern systems try to avoid fragrmentation with MTU path discovery. Neat stuff. Unfortunately, the class is a ton of work (of the busy-work variety). The lab reports are long (like 30-some-odd pages) and somewhat redundant, and in addition, we had a midterm and will have a final exam, which is kind of weird for a project course. I'm also taking a security course (ICS 168), which mainly deals with crypto/hash algorithms (RSA, El Gamal, DES, AES, MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, etc.) and protocols (DSA, X.509, zero-knowledge authentication, etc.). The midterm was hard, but I've learned a lot about the crypto that I use on a daily basis, and I feel better knowing a little about how they work. Formal languages class (ICS 162) is also really cool - it's not I-don't-get-this hard like I thought an upper division math course would be, and at the same time, it's actually useful. I finally know what P, NP, and NP-complete mean, and why we can't do things like check for null pointers at compile-time.

So I guess the entry wasn't so short after all, although it's a lot nerdier than I intended. ;-) In between classes and work I've managed to sneak out and get a few new galleries posted since my last post, so head over to the gallery and take a look! Here's a preview (because photos in blog entries make them that much better):

EDIT: (heh, Stephanie does this a lot on her blog) hung out with Amanda last night for her birthday, then with the guys from work for poker - I won at Texas Holdem for the first time ever! Pete - your music is cracked out. And Brad - stop playing it on repeat. ;-)

The Penguin Effect

Sun, 12 Mar 2006 00:20:46 +0000

As you probably already know, I've been wanting a Nissan 350Z for a while now. It was on my Christmas list last year, and Kathy even went so far as to get me a die-cast model of one. But it's not quite the same as having the real thing:

Yup, that's right! As of Saturday, January 28, 2006, I am the proud owner of a brand new, 300 horsepower, 6-speed manual transmission, Nissan 350Z. =D

The way people turn their heads when I drive by is hilarious. It's what I call the Penguin Effect... small groups of people simultaneously turn their heads to follow the car. Tonight I was driving by these three guys, and when Kathy saw them turn their heads, she said to me: "you used to be one of those people." So true, heh.

I'm still learning how to drive it (only have about a week's worth of stick shift experience under my belt so far...), but it is *so* fun.

And I am *so* broke. But that's another story. Enough talking... go see more pics...

New homepage...

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 09:49:04 +0000

Upgraded to buzzword 0.9svn (which kicks serious "a-word", by the way) and customized the theme. It's obvious that I don't blog much, except the technical article here and there, so this site is going to be mainly dedicated to photos (like the one in the header) taken with my new camera (a Digital Rebel XT). If I have time later, I'll copy my old blog postings over...

For now, head on over to the gallery.