After 4 years at Cal, I've finally gotten to graduation. This past Wednesday, May 10th, was the Class of 2006 Commencement at the Greek Theater. It is supposed to be all majors attending, but in reality few people do attend. I was one of them. The commencement for the CS major is this coming Sunday, the 21st, so I'll post pictures of that after sometime.

One thing that did suck about our graduation though is that our speaker, Fabian Nunez, didn't show up. First of all, I wasn't too excited to hear from a California State Assembly speaker. I mean other schools get good speakers (Stanfurd with Steve Jobs, William and Mary with Jon Stewart). And since Cal is the best public university in the world, one would think that we could be able to pull someone worth listening to. Instead, we get this Fabian Nunez, who then doesn't even show up!. There were a handful of people outside the Greek Theater picketing, thus creating a "picket line" that Nunez couldn't cross. That is ridiculous and he just lost a vote for life. So we had our master of ceremonies give another speech instead. Thanks Fabian Nunez for making the commencement memorable for life, but not in a good way.

Updated:

I graduated! My CS graduation happened yesterday and it was a good end to 4 years.

Go Kings! We're about to take the Spurs. I'm not going to say how many games it'll be in, but just that we're going to win.

One thing I do want to see, is for the Lakers and Clippers to win in the first round. How sick would it be to watch that series. Each game would be at the same arena, just with different floorboards and different colored jerseys. Of course, I want to see the Lakers lose that series so the Clips play the Kings in the Conference championships.

I decided to mess around and add RSS 2.0 to my site. I spent a little time, but got it up and running pretty quickly without too much fuss. It doesn't yet validate as there are a couple things I just didn't want to work out yet.

At least now you should be able to tell when I update my site, without having to check it all the time. Hopefully somebody other than myself will start to use this.

My roommate Joe and I have been itching to do the Fentons challenge again since they have new t-shirts. We were finally able to find the coupons in the Daily Cal, and we decided tonight was the night. We gathered up a couple other people and took the challenge. Basically, we have to eat a very large sundae consisting of 3 really big scoops of ice cream, carmel, chocolate, whipped cream, strawberries, almonds and a cherry. All on top of a whole banana. It's big. And you have to eat it all in 20 minutes. That may sound easy, but... those 20 minutes go fast, and the room in your stomach goes even faster.

Needless to say, Joe devoured his, and I barely made it in time, coming close to bringing it back up. But we did it and we got our t-shirts to prove it, and the pictures.

Like I said in my last post, I've started work on integrating my gallery into my site's feel. After some Gallery2 documentation reading, I got the background, header and navbar all up. So I'm going to continue to work on the feel of it so that it matches a little bit more. Stay tuned...

Update

I finished up all the Gallery integration I want to do for now. I basically made it 1 column, and made it so things stay inside that column. So it does look like a different part of the site, but its the gallery, and it should be different.

Well, as I figured, the site didn't render right for IE. I hate GIFs and like PNGs, which have much better transparency support. So, most of my graphics didn't show up on IE. Thus, I added some code that switches to GIFs for IE users (a combination of Javascript for recognition and a new stylesheet to use GIFs instead).

I went ahead and changed the look of the site a little bit. The basic layout is the same, but I really didn't like that old red thing that went around the picture at the top. As of now, I have no idea how rendering in IE works, and according to the logs 34% (1st place) of the hits are from IE. It makes it hard to test since I only use Mac OS X or Gentoo. You should be using something more secure like Firefox anyways.

I also fixed the XHTML validation as all my posts had unclosed breaks in them. Thanks to Andrew for reminding me that I should get around to doing something about them. I've still got plans to one day finish the gallery integration, and to update the About and School pages. And I should hopefully be posting some of my projects soon, one I get them to a point of release.

First of the new things, Happy New Year! It doesn't yet feel like a new year, but I'm sure it'll kick in soon enough.

Secondly, I finally decided to go ahead and get some real hosting going on. I eventually decided upon BlueHost as they had a good deal with all I wanted out of hosting. I think it should work out better than my previous solution of my personal computer on a dynamic cable connection. Not too mention the fact that my personal computer, on a wireless connection, is a laptop. I'm quite optimistic that the new solution is going to work out fine. So far everything has been painless and I got everything transferred easily.

While working on the hosting transition, I decided to do some upgrading to my site. I updated the styles and worked on the backend a bit. But, what I'm most proud of is my travel section. I got a Garmin eTrex Vista C GPS for Christmas, and I've set up a nifty little page. Basically, wherever I go on travels, I'm going to keep track my trip as a route on the device. I can also add waypoints at points of interest. Then, I simply export all that data and upload it. Then the page draws all the trips and plots the waypoints on a Google Map. I think it should be pretty cool showing all the trips I end up taking with the GPS. Eventually, I'll add more information on the page, but not for a little while as I'm pretty happy with what I've got done so far. I'll just have to go on trips and collect waypoints now. I'll let ya'll know when I do post updates ...

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Well, for the third year in a row, I got tickets to see them in the playoffs. And this is the second year I've seen a game six. With the Kings' win today, I have never... maybe I should fly to Minnesota for Wednesday... Anyways, here are pictures from the game.

So a week ago, my roommates and Matt went to Las Vegas to celebrate Marcus' birthday. We had a really great time. Unfortunately we lost a collective $220 on Cal's loss to UCLA. Overall, I didn't loose too much there, and would go back again, this time to take their money (if such a thing is possible).