So, quick and short: I got an A- in my technical writing class... my last class of my college career. :-D

Work is going to be really fun... I know now that I’m going to be receiving almost $2700 per month with all the deductions taken out. That’s nice... I’m really happy with my job. They made me a placard for my door, which I’ll link to later once my internet at home starts working again. It says "Noah Pritikin, ASI System Administrator". Very cool, if you ask me. :)

For my 2nd day, I’m feeling more apart of this well natured ASI family. I feel I’ve been graciously accepted--especially with the staff that I work with closely. As for work itself, I have a big office, which isn’t furnished yet, but they’re working on that too. I even have a say in the layout of the furniture. The two students that work for me are nice people, and are pretty skilled. I’m looking forward to creating a (slightly) more organizational structure for my students and the way we do things around here. All of my co-workers are wonderful... I couldn’t have asked for better people to work with. Not to mention I "go way back" with Dave Edwards, who taught my speech class a couple summers ago at Allen Hancock College. He’s now the ASI Director, or my boss’ right-hand man. He’s a great/funny guy and it’s a pleasure to work with him.

Yea, so, I’m at work still... so I better get back to working. :) I just wanted to share a bit about my job while I had some downtime... more later.

Pictures are coming soon... :) stay tuned.

I GOT A JOB!! ... finally!! I’m so excited to be the new System Administrator for Associated Students, Inc. at CSU Long Beach!!

It’s gonna be sweeeeeet..... :-)

Time to clean my condo so I can (duh duh duh!) -- move out tomorrow! So, speaking of moving, I won’t be online until the DSL at my Huntington Beach house gets installed... not sure when that’s going to be--hopefully soon! It should be obvious to people that I’m back when I do get back online. I have tons to write about... namely, the wedding and my job. Pictures from the wedding are coming... be patient. :)

So many changes... all of them good. :-D

Here’s one of the better pictures that I’ve seen so far of Alyssa and myself: http://www.cappaberra.com/temp/wedding.jpg

Enjoy!

I’m a married man now! :-D

Totally stoked.

I probably won’t have time to put up any pictures until next week since I’m moving out this week, but we have some gorgeous ones. Alyssa looked stunning and I looked pretty darn good too. :)

More another time!

How I miss you... I haven’t seen you since last Thursday... feels like forever.

I’ll all antsy right now... can’t stand it. I need to get outside.

My mom and I went down to my new house and did some rearranging/unpacking. We made a big dent in the work, but there’s still so much more to do. I put up pictures of the new house here: http://www.cappaberra.com/gallery.php?folder=pictures/huntington/house/

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/14/0147222&tid=126

new 311 album is not that impressive... Speak Easy is probably my favorite so far, but the rest of the songs aren’t that great. Well, next time.

Two weekends ago (right?) Alyssa and I flew up to Mt. Hood in Oregon to go to my cousin’s wedding at Tiberline Lodge. In short, we had a blast. It was really fun... it was the first time that Alyssa and I have flown together; we did quite well. There was plenty of hiking, and of course the festivities of the wedding. The flight going up there was at a ridiculous time of day (6:30am), so we woke up at 4:30am to get there at 5:30am. Ick.

When we got into Oregon, it was a beautiful day... mid 70s, sunny, kinda on the humid side. The drive to My. Hood was about an hour, so we met up with my parents and Danny, Sherry, and Rachel at the airport. We got our rental van (a nice spacious dodge grand caravan) and headed towards the mountain. Alyssa and I were hungry from not having eaten much all day, so we easily convinced everyone in the car to stop for a meal... some tasty local mexican food. The service was good, but the food was "eh." After our meal, we continued to climb elevation until we got to Tiberline Lodge. Being a little early, my parents couldn’t check into the hotel, so we drove around for awhile trying to find the camp site where we were going to camp. Supposedly Ami, Eli, David, and his two daughters camped the previous night, so we wanted to find them too. Sure enough, after driving around the "hidden" campground for a couple turns, we found them eating lunch. After the brief hello, we went back up to the Lodge to check in, and also check out the other pseudo-campsite at the edge of one of the parking lots. Alyssa and I brought camping gear, but we ended up not camping...

We got a few things together and took off on a short hike around a trail right next to the Lodge. I took some pictures, which turned out okay. I was exhausted, resulting in kind of a poor mood, but I tried my hardest to hold out until we got back to the Lodge for a nice couple hour nap. That evening, we ate a scrumptious dinner at one of the restaurants in the Lodge. Besides the awesome food, there were some interesting locally brewed beers. I got a glass, and then got some more people into it, so we ended up getting a pitcher. Well, not that many people drank beer, so I ended up downing probably 2/3 of the pitcher by myself over the course of the 1.5 hours we were there. Hehe... I was quite buzzed. I really didn’t want all that delicious beer to go to waste, so someone had to drink it! :-) So, needless to say, I feel asleep kinda quickly that night, but not as quickly as possible since Alyssa and I took a nap that afternoon.

We got up at the crack of morning (8-ish) so we could get breakfast before they closed for the morning. Today was hardcore hiking day. We brought food and water and set off on a hike around a lake, or that’s what we thought we were going to do. We ended up just hiking through some rather thick (at times) jungle of trees and ground covering. The only major wildlife we encountered was a "cute" banana slug... hehe. The hike lasted just about 3 hours, which was perfect timing, since we got back to the hotel with about 3 hours to get ready before the wedding. Alyssa and I joined my cousin Aaron, uncle Bob, and g-ma Z for a tasty sandwich for a late lunch. Alyssa got a chance to meet even more of my extended family, not to mention a lot of my cousin Aaron’s extended family that I haven’t seen for a very long time. After many introductions and food digesting, we went back to the room, took showers, and got dressed up.

The wedding was extravagant! Very pretty, but I have to say that I love my venue more than Mt. Hood. Shannah looked beautiful and Ted (her new husband) looked snazzy. The ceremony was quite nice, except for the lame, intermittent electronic failure of the PA system... so at times we couldn’t hear a word whoever was talking into the mic. Oh well, we’ll make sure that doesn’t happen at our wedding. The ceremony ended, and we then feasted a bit on hors d’oeuvres before we picked out places to sit in the dining room. Then there were a bunch of pictures with Shannah and Ted. The newly weds had their introduction as they entered the dining room and the party officially started. Diner was delicious, and dancing was awesome. Alyssa and I figured out that we could actually pull off some decent ballroom-type dancing, which was relieving. :-) My cousin Rachel and Alyssa hit it off on the dance floor... they spent probably more time together on the floor than Alyssa and I did together. ;-) The night slowly wound down, and we left the party around 11:30pm... I was SO exhausted... my legs were killing me. I couldn’t wait to crawl into bed and sleep.

The next day, we slept in and got up mid-morning (yay). Our plane left at 3:30pm, so we rode out to Linda’s house (Aaron’s mom) to hang out for a bit before we had to go to the airport. Since Aaron’s flight was at 4:30pm, we hung out with him until we had to board our plane. After we got to the airport, we checked in, and proceeded towards the gate, but since everyone was hungry, we stalled and got some food. We settled down for some tasty cheese pizza for the 3 of us to share. We had a nice meal with Aaron and this random spaghetti-eating contest ESPN show on in the background--quite bizarre. We said our goodbyes to Aaron and came home. Our flight to/from Oregon were problem-free, and it’s always fun to travel with Alyssa!

At the time of Shannah’s wedding, we realized that our wedding was only 3 weeks away... the reality of everything sunk in a bit more once we got to see the whole thing and experience another wedding just like what we’re going to be doing. It’s scary! :-P And now, it’s in less than 2 weeks.. yikes!! It’s really exciting though... I’m more excited than scared, but I’m not downplaying at all how important and committing marriage is.

This past weekend Alyssa and I went down to our new house in Huntington Beach to move in most of Jim’s big furniture into the house. We had a good time... I’ll write more about that soon.

Oh yea, pictures to Shannah’s wedding are here: http://www.cappaberra.com/gallery.php?folder=pictures/calpoly/4th/shannahs_wedding/

WAY too early.

It’s the first day of my last class ever.

It’s been quite a while since I’ve written much of anything. I’m not sure why... I’ve had a bit of time, but just haven’t gotten around to it. That kinda saddens me, but then again, every once in a while (like right now), I’ll muster up some energy to type up a few words of wisdom.

It’s "hot" today in slo... windows are open. fan is on.. I can only imagine how hot it is in Paso Robles. yikes!

I’ve been surfing a bunch more lately. I’ve surfed Hazards 2 more times a couple weeks ago.... that makes a total count of 3 for my lifetime. :) It was so much fun. There was supposedly no swell in the water, but there were head high sets with some umph to them. I went to A-Beach yesterday with Stephan, Alyssa’s uncle. It’s been awesome to find some surfing stoke in Alyssa’s family. We had a blast, as always!

So, right now I’m in my transitioning period between my classes. This past week was my last week in photography. I ended up with an A- in it, which I’m happy with. But more importantly, I learned a TON about taking pictures, and what makes up neat looking pictures. Also, the entire development process from developing negatives to developing prints using an enlarger to spotting/mounting those prints on matte board. It was awesome.

Next week is my last class of my life... at least until I decide to go back to school, which isn’t a foreseen event in my life thus far. Technical writing. Bleh.

On the job front, I’m still working on finding that perfect job. It’s been hard, for some reason. I think I need to try a different approach. I’ll probably head over to the career center on campus next week and see if they can point me in some sort of direction. I really hope I’ll be able to find something when I move down to Huntington late next month. *grumble* I’m still very hopeful though... I have a good lead with SMS, but I’m curious as to what kind of compensation they’re going to offer. The job sounds really fun, so I hope I get into it!

Moving’s coming up really fast... so is the big day. Yikes! :) Less than 1 month away... less than 4 weeks!! Kinda scary. Planning is going well. We have a grand total of 82 people so far that have RSVP’d. This is a bit less than our expected number, which is nice. Catering is decided. Rentals is decided. Cake and flowers is going down middle of next week. Everything’s coming together, which is great to see, and feel.

We’re going to start moving stuff into our new house early next month. It’s really nice having a place to go to once I’m done here in san luis. Now back to job-hunting...

the ad that I copied off Craig’s List --> http://www.cappaberra.com/temp/house/index.html

It’s just about perfect for us. We decided to rent to get a feel for the neighborhood and area. Also, this place is in Huntington Beach, which is awesome. Nice place... close to everything...

new address starting (September 1st): 7911 Ronald Dr., Huntington beach, CA, 92647 :-D

Alyssa and I are _really_ excited.

Yay... got my cell phone back! :-D

I accidentally lost my cell phone when I went to the Kern River. Man, it’s really sucked not having it. :-( The administration at the lodge said that they found it, and are shipping it back to me today supposedly. I want it... :P

Alyssa and her family has had a trip planned to Kern River for a couple months now. It finally came together last weekend... It was a blast. Lots of driving, but it was so worth it. I couldn’t remember if I had been there or not... anyone from my family know if I was? Anyway, we started the 3-4 hour drive to the river/lake in the middle of the desert in the early afternoon on sunday. Hence, we got there mid-afternoon and had trouble finding The Kern Lodge; the place where we were staying. Once we found it, everyone was openly un-impressed by the look of the place. That initial judgement did 180 and everyone was really happy with the place once we saw what it looked like on the inside. It was gorgeous... A little house it seemed. Living room and dining table, big couches, a bar (that soon turned into the kids’ "store"), 1.5 bathrooms, 2 bedrooms, and a large kitchen. Alyssa’s Uncle Steven won the big suite in an auction, I think, and then rented another bedroom that had 2 beds in there so all of us could fit.

There were a total of about a dozen people that were there--it felt a lot like the fun times of my numerous family trips. Even though I’m not legally apart of their family yet, I sure feel like it. I love that. They’re wonderful people, and they love me, which is awesome. Unc. Steven and his two little boys adore me. Anyway, back to the trip...

That afternoon we were there, we walked down to the town and checked out the scenery before going down to the river to socialize and have a good time. We didn’t go in the river the entire time we were there, surprisingly. I had to take 2 rolls of b&w film for my photography class, so throughout the whole trip, I did that... I got some neat shots down by the river. Everyone started getting hungry, so we walked back to the lodge and started fixing dinner.

The amount of food that everyone brought looked obscene... SO MUCH food!! But guess what? It was pretty much all gone by the time the trip was over just 2 days later. We had a delicious meal consisting of salad, potato salad, beans, ribs, chicken breasts, and a birthday cake. It was Leanne’s birthday on father’s day (last sunday), so we celebrated! :) Happy birthday (again) Leanne! We all love you!! After dinner, a bunch of people went in the pool or hung out at the pool. Later on in the night, part of the family played a very cool game called Whoonu. You learn a lot about the players while playing. It became the talk of the trip, and we played often. Somewhere before or after the game, I watched a the basketball finals with Steven and Grandpa Alan (sp?)... it was an AWESOME game. Some unbelievable moments, with lots of hootin’ and hollerin’. ;-)

I slept like a rock that night on a fold-out-bed that were tucked into the couches in the living room in the main suite. I got up around 9:00am or so the next morning, and everyone lazily had breakfast... Each meal was preplanned and all of them were home cooked, which I loved. For breakfast, Steven made these great pancakes, as well as scrambled eggs, bacon, and bagels and cream cheese. By this time early afternoon rolled around and the family had to make a decision. River rafting or giant sequoias? Steven and I headed the effort to figure out which would be best. We discussed doing both, but that felt like it would be too rushed. After about an hour of discussion and opinions, we opted for the sequoias since that was something eveyone could do. We made about a dozen turkey sandwiches along with some other tasty food for our picnic lunch, and packed up to drive up the mountains to some big trees.

I remember going to another part of Sequoia National Park, but we ran into some pretty big red woods where we went too. We had lunch on the side of Dome Rock, and then hiked a little bit around to see the big trees. It was a lot of fun, and I got tons of pictures. I got a lot of mosquito bites from that hike. :-( The bugs were incessant--totally sucked.

We came back to Kernsville, where the lodge was located, and everyone relaxed and hung out for a bit before dinner. I got in the pool and took some more pictures. For dinner we had hamburgers and all the fixings. Very very tasty. And, of course, we played Whoonu again. ;-) Around 10:30pm or so, Alyssa, her brother Nathan, and I left to come back to the coast. The three of us had to cut the trip short since I had school on Tuesday morning... and after already missing monday, I couldn’t miss another day.

It was a blast. I had a great time. It felt like I was gone for a week... :) I can’t wait for the next family outing.

Here’s the link for the pics: http://www.cappaberra.com/gallery.php?folder=pictures/calpoly/4th/kern_river/

That time of the quarter again ... This quarter was hellish. Five classes plus my senior project... I must be nuts. But the good news is that I passed everything. Anyway, on with the grades!

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING II: B
Generous grade considering how much work we did. I loved this class though. Dan Stearns is a great professor.
INTRO TO DATABASE SYSTEMS: B-
Fun class. Learned a bunch. Grade was expected.
SENIOR PROJECT: A
Totally expected; and earned too. (Now I just need to finish the paper and turn it in.. *grumble*)
POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY: D
Heh... my 4th D in college. :) Er, I guess I should be unhappy about that. Well, in any case, I PASSED!!! YES!!!! I’m so happy about that. :-D
ADVANCED COMPUTER NETWORKS: B-
Yay... another great class that I loved. Happy with the grade.
CONTINUOUS-TIME SIGNAL & SYSTEMS: B
Lame lame lame lame lame lame LAME class! I hated this... it was a waste of my time.

So, that’s it folks.. I now just have the summer left, which is going by quickly and is a lot of fun. I’m really excited to be done...

I woke up nice and early to get to my first photography class at around 7:40am. Class was at 9am, but I wanted to be a bit early to find the room. Unfortunately, the room was too easy to find, so I stood around for awhile. This class is going to be fun... Cuesta College has the nicest photography lab (dark rooms, etc) on the central coast. Brand spankin’ new equipment + small class + good prof = good times. It was fun to tour the labs. We got a brain dump of information today... a typical first day. Right off the bat though, we’re going to be doing a lot at a fast pace. I’m going to barrow Alyssa’s camera since I don’t have a real 35mm camera.

With a laundry list of things to get for tomorrow’s class, I got everything (textbook and padlock) except for a silly roll of film! So annoying... I tried Rite Aid, Albertsons, a liquor store, and 3 gas stations. Ugh. No one has 36 exposure, 100/200 speed, color film. Maybe cause graduation cleaned everyone out? So, I’m going to have to get up extra early to go downtown to a photo store and get some film. Lame..

I arranged to have a summer job at Cal Poly with the department that I worked for during my freshman year. I got there around 1pm today... Ever since class got out today, I felt overwhelmed with everything I had to do. I wasn’t sure how much they were going to pay me, but I soon found out. I check the Cal Poly Student Pay website out, and noticed the $9.50/hr rate. "Ugh," I thought. I went outside real quick to call Alyssa to talk to her about it, and I figured that after taxes taken out I would only make about $1200 in 2 months at 40 hours per week. This didn’t settle well with me. I had much bigger fish to fry than trying to scrap together some extra "cash" for the summer. I need a job... I need to help plan my wedding... I need to help find a place to live next year... I need to focus on graduating. To make a long story short, I quit before I even started. I think it was a good move. I wasn’t going to be happy since I would be so much more stressed out from not having enough time to do things during the day (it would be school/work all day from like 9am-5pm). That sucks. I could definitely do it if I didn’t have 3 or 4 of the most significant life changes in the next 4 months to prepare for. :-P ’nough said.

Alyssa and Leanne (her sister), are coming over right now. We’re going to the Drive-In movie theatre her in town to see Madagascar and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Should be fun. :)

In other news, I was disturbed to see that Michael Jackson got off from all the counts against him. Maybe OJ should buy him a beer, or better yet, a box juice... *grumble*

Check out the moblog... some more pics went up recently, including the STACK of 3x5 cards we submitted to the wedding sweepstakes. :)

Oh yea... I did the whole walking in graduation thing last saturday. That was pretty fun. :) Except, I always knew that day that I wasn’t completely done yet, so it wasn’t as "real" as it could have been. Nevertheless, I had a wonderful day, not to mention having a cute little lunch with my parents and part of Alyssa’s family from Paso. It was good times. :)

I’m tired, so I’m gonna stop for now... g’night all.

IT’S OVER! This ridiculous 22-unit quarter is over... I’m still in shock! :D

I’m stressed out right now for some reason... school’s over (pretty much; just 1 final left), but I’m still feeling a lot of pressure. Maybe of my joblessness? Maybe ’cause planning a wedding is hard? Maybe ’cause Alyssa and I don’t know where we’re going to live yet? Maybe ’cause my senior project is time consuming? Maybe ’cause I need to do laundry? Probably all of the above... Well, I will have more time this summer. I also partially worry that I’m going to be working part-time, plus going to school, plus working on my senior project--several things to get in the way of job-hunting, wedding planning, and house-shopping. Life is definitely crazy. Time to focus on tomorrow’s final.

So, for the 2nd time in the past 3 months, I went surfing this morning around 7:30am with Nick. We went to Morro Bay and had about an hour to surf before Nick had to leave to get ready for work. It was fun to get out there! The waves were really weak and jumbled. Since it was a wind swell, you either had to get a peak, or else you got nothing. There were like half-dozen guys out surfing this one area where there were peaks, but I had a hard time gauging the ocean today. I keep thinking that it’s because I haven’t been surfing much, so hopefully I get back into the swing of things. I felt pretty weak (in my arms) towards the end of the (short) session... I need to go more. :P I also got drilled on an outside set. It pushed me all the way down to the bottom (probably 10ft or so), then as I floated back up for air, the instant I got to the surface another round of whitewater covered me--d’oh. Fortunately, I didn’t panic, so I was ok. There’s nothin’ like a little pounding to get me back into shape. ;) On the flip side of things, I did watch a couple waves, but my balance is quite off... sucks.

Anyway, in other news, Alyssa got STRAIGHT A’s this semester! :D We’re all very proud of her! Excellent job sweetie!

It’s been awhile since I’ve written, and I have a spare moment, so why not, right? For starters, I recently went down to Line6 for a post-screening interview, which was really fun. I loved what I saw there... especially in the bathroom stalls: http://www.cappaberra.com/showMoblog.php?id=1117069221 ... hehe, I’m glad I snapped a clear enough picture so that you can read the words and the equation. :)

Right now, my todo list for this quarter’s hell is dwindling down slowly but surely. I’m almost done with my Networks paper (that’s tightly coupled with my senior project) that’s on load balancing. It’s a good read... :) Maybe I’ll post it once it’s done.

Anyway, I’m waiting eagerly to hear back from Line6 early next week (I hope). I got a good feeling from the interview, and I love the facility and the people, and I feel that I would fit in there very nicely. *crosses fingers*

In other news, Alyssa and I have now been together for 15 months. weee... She’s been working hard on throwing together some of the beginning details (with local SB help from my mom) for our wedding, which we’re looking at having towards the end of August, this year. More details to come, as they come...

I’m not sure if I ever mentioned, but I put up pictures from my 24 hour stay in SB for passover this year. Alyssa was able to come with me, which was a lot of fun! It’s always a good time introducing her to more of my family.

I’m going to be walking in graduation ceremonies on June 11th... Cal Poly allows Summer grads to walk in June, which is kinda neat. I got my cap/gown/tix/info, so it’s actually starting to feel a bit more real.

On the senior project front, we’re receiving a massive shipment from IBM, which they graciously are donating some hardware (storage) to our cause!! It’s very exciting since we’ll then have some more room to grow and flex a little bit. I just hope we can get it working with our current equipment. Supposedly it should be no problem, but I doubt it’ll be problem-free... nothing is in this business. ;-)

Time to wrap up a decent draft of my networks paper, and hit the sack... I can’t wait for this quarter to be over. I can’t wait to surf more regularly again. Oh yea, I surfed The Ranch a little over a week ago during a very-off-season winter swell that kicked up some really awesome surf for the entire CA coast. It was offshore and beautiful, but the water was ice... the most frigid water I’ve ever surfed in at The Ranch. brrr... :P

Welp, time to get on the ball and finish up that draft.. then it’s some quality time with my pillow.

I’m still alive and kicking. School’s been so insane, so I obviously haven’t been that available to write much here unfortunately. I’m going to write a bunch more once school’s out which’ll be towards the middle of june. More later! :)

What’s the 2nd most expensive zipcode in the US for 2005? Yup, 93108.

http://www.forbes.com/2005/04/25/cx_sc_0426homeslide_2.html?thisSpeed=1649267441664000

Although, I was surprised to see that Montecito is referred (often enough to mention?) to "Moneycito"?

heh... good ol’ 93108.

some other miscellaneous things: Passover 2005 pictures up here.. I’ve been non-stop in school as of late.. also, I’ve been spending many hours working on my senior project. We got load balancing working using LVS, but we’re now having trouble getting the other servers to see the storage. :- Not sure what’s up with that.

I really need to surf... it sucks having so much school to do. :-(

It’s now been 14 months to the day that Alyssa and I have been together... Our first date seems like yesterday! Every moment with her keeps my imagination vivid and my happiness through the roof. This is the first monthly-"anniversary" where we’re engaged! I love you, Alyssa... :)

This week’s short term work load is over with .. yay!

My senior project is in full force. We went public this morning by getting a few pinholes in the cal poly firewall. Check out the site!!

http://san.csc.calpoly.edu/

We have a full x86/ppc/amd64 debian package mirror and a gentoo distfiles/rsync available to whoever can get on the internet. It’s pretty sweet. The rsync port isn’t open yet, but that should be there by next week, I hope. I’m already utilizing the SAN as my source mirror for gentoo. It’s pretty sweet. :) ... and, very exciting! :D

Still not done with my work for monday ... will be soon though.

some SAN pictures: http://red0x.no-ip.com/code/san/san.html :-)

Been working all day... sucks so much. So tired... I want passover to come! :P

Requests sent:

- Get IP addresses for servers
- Get DNS entries with Cal Poly
- Get pinhole for public access to SAN

Todo:

- Wait a week until the above are completed ... --> celebrate!

"And just like that... *poof* ... it’s gone." (free time, that is)

Ryan and I got the SAN just about completely working this evening!!! It’s so exciting... about months of brutal battle with this massive piece of equipment, we have it by the reigns now. We already started loading all kinds of linux distributions on it--even the entire 2.6 kernel source tree. :) Most of you reading this are like, "huh?" but that’s ok... I just needed to vent a little bit. We have a few more things to do, like get the rest of the drives online by buying a cable and installing it. Then the next step is to get the SAN registered with cal poly to have it’s own name and address on the internet... after that, we’re going to request making it available for the public to use. :) EXCITING stuff! :D It’ll probably be something like http://san.csc.calpoly.edu ... of course, that doesn’t work yet, but that’s what we’re hoping for!

So, by now, you should know that Alyssa and I got engaged today. What you don’t know probably is how it happened, which is pretty funny, in my humble opinion. So here’s the story...

some background first: Alyssa and I had been talking about getting engaged for months, and I let her in on the design of the ring all except one thing, where the diamonds came from. So, she knew the jeweler’s name (which is Laurie Lehman, a friend of my mom’s from Santa Barbara -- see http://floraljewels.com/), roughly when the Laurie was going to send it to me, and knew that it was coming from SB. So, Alyssa dropped me off at class today and came back to my place where she was going to do some work before she had to pick me up at 4pm...

The mail man came up to my door with a little package for me, and Alyssa being the only one here, opened the door... she noticed it was from Laurie not to mention it was from SB. D’OH! ... so, she signed for it, and (surprisingly) didn’t open it before I saw her. She came to pick me at school around 4pm and, naturally, brought the package with her to show me... I immediately saw it and was shocked, since it was supposed to be a surprise for me proposing. At this point, both of us felt really awkward, but it was so funny at the same time.. we just cracked up the whole way home. When we got back, while I had the unopened box on the table in the living room, I proposed to Alyssa in my bedroom as she clenched her beloved Dexter (one of her dogs). She said "yeaaaa.....", then she followed up by saying, "You’re supposed to open the ring first." Shortly after that, she gave me a firm, "yes." I admit, after-the-fact, that that probably would have been better, but as I also later said, the proposal was far from traditional anyway. ;-) So, I went into the kitchen by myself, and opened the package to discover a stunningly beautiful ring inside. It was carefully packaged up in like a billion different layers of tissue paper, etc, but it was worth the excavation. I came back into my room with it, and gave it to Alyssa, telling her that "This is for you.... I love you." She was stunned by it’s impeccable beauty. She looks so good with it on her hand too! :)

If you didn’t see the pics yet, see them here: http://www.cappaberra.com/gallery.php?folder=pictures/calpoly/4th/ring/

Jim, who would have loved to hear of this news, wrote this to me about the diamonds a while ago:

Your great, great grand father was a diamond cutter in Amsterdam in the 1800’s and if you look on the chain of his watch, you will find a very small hand, which was at that time, "the signature" for diamond cutters. He cut those diamonds and they were from your great, great, grandmother’s wedding band. Of course your father used other diamonds to make his ring, and if you look closely at the diamonds you will see that some of them are of different sizes. The larger ones came from her ring.

So, there ya have it. Alyssa and I are getting married! We’re thinking next spring. Who wants to come? ;)

here are some pictures that _attempt_ to capture its beauty...!

http://www.cappaberra.com/gallery.php?folder=pictures/calpoly/4th/ring/

It all started 13+ months ago... and it will now continue forever: Alyssa and I are engaged!

Two down ... eight to go.

I haven’t updated my journal in a loooong time... I’ve been insanely busy with school. I can’t believe I’m actually managing my work load decently. Week 2 is upon me... 8.5 more to go until school’s out! I can do it...

It is April 6th.. well, here, it almost is, but in India (where it matters) it is!! :) Happy 32nd Birthday Bro!!! :D wooo hooo!!! YEA!! 8-P

I don’t remember if I ever wrote about, but there’s been a problem with my schedule, which as of late, hasn’t been resolved. I’m on the verge right now though! I have two minor time conflicts in my schedule, so I turned in a form to get one of them resolved... at the top of this form says: "only one of these forms may be used per quarter -- NO EXCEPTIONS!" Now, I assumed that since it said "NO EXCEPTIONS" that I couldn’t use two, so I went on to explore other ways to get the requirements that I needed... this dragged on for about 2 weeks now, and to make a long story short, it ends up that there is an exception to that rule. How bout that.. My scenario is one of them. *major sigh* ... one should have asked about that. So, I think one of the major things I’ve learned at Cal Poly is that "rules were meant to be broken." :-P So stupid.. anyway, it should all work out tomorrow when I officially turn in the form.

In other unrelated news, my website is down for the time being because I’m in the process of transferring my domain to a different registrar. It should be back up by next week at the latest. Well, I gotta do some homework. It’s crazy that it’s so light out at 6pm! :P nuts..

Today marks the day that Alyssa and I have been dating for 13 months!! :D I love you sweetie... we went out to eat at our favorite mexican place and went to the beach in Cayucos where Tessa and Dexter ran around for awhile. It was a lot of fun!!

So, I didn’t follow through as I wanted to... I had a lovely time for Easter up in paso, but I never had a good time to sit down and write about Havasu. School starts in, let’s see... maybe 8.5 hours, so I think I’m going to get some shut eye. *sigh* ... I really still want to write about it. Maybe tomorrow? or tuesday perhaps.. I only have 1 class on tues/thurs.

grr... I really am going to write about Havasu soon. It’s been nagging me, so I’m going to do it before school starts. I spent a lot of time with my sweet Alyssa this spring break, which has been very nice. Yesterday we got our cars’ oil changed, picked up some new headphones for her cd player, made waffles for breakfast (with fresh strawberries and whipped cream), a big sandwich for lunch, decorated some eggs for easter, and another smaller sandwich for dinner. Fun! :) I spent a good 10-15 minutes drawing detailed outlines of Earth’s continents without a map as a reference: North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and Antarctica (not very interesting picture; so it’s not included). The X’s represent where I’ve travelled. There’s a ton in North America, so I didn’t include them all. :) I made it by doing the outlines in green crayon, then filling in the outlines completely, then I dunked the egg in blue dye where I soaked for like 10 minutes "creating" the oceans... What do you think David? Do I pass? :D

Tomorrow’s easter (Happy Easter!), so I’m going up to Paso Robles to go to church and hang out with Alyssa’s family... Should be fun. More to report tomorrow on that.

I went surfing with Jacob a few days ago (and, no, we never made down to Baja this time spring break) at the pit at The Rock in morro. Let me set the stage: howling onshore wind, blown out waves, small/weak swell, and frozen water... why did we even go? well, we did because we were desperate for some surf. :-P Both of us got some decent waves, but the conditions really did suck.

Filed my taxes several days ago ... only owed the feds about $85 this year. I’m finishing up Alyssa’s taxes and she’s getting a phat refund, which will be nice for her.

You’ll also noticed the latest feature to my emails (if you get emails from me)... the Mood at the top under the date; neat huh? :)

I put up a tentative school schedule here: http://www.cappaberra.com/classes.php?quarter=spring05

So, after my application to Google, I’m still waiting to hear from them... considering how long I should wait until I follow up. I also applied to a company in Costa Mesa for another Test Engineer position. I’ll post more once I find out more.

Once again, the Havasu details are coming... I promise! :)

yea! That time of the quarter again ... I finally got all of my grades back, and I didn’t do as well as last quarter. Nevertheless, I’m still happy that I’m almost done with school, and last quarter being overwith. On with the grades!

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING I: B+
Completely expected... respectable grade for what I did in the class.
PRGRMBL LGC/MCRPRCSR-BSD SYS DSN: C
Hrmm... I thought I was going to get a B, but I guess not. (Maybe I didn’t do so hot on the final?) ... I donno, I’ll go in and see what the deal is next week.
INTRO OPERATING SYSTEMS: C
Expected. Known from the beginning what my grade was, and plus, the material wasn’t that easy.
DIGITAL ELEC & INTRGRTD CIRCUITS: D+
Heh... my 3rd D in college. :) Er, I guess I should be unhappy about that. Well, in any case, I PASSED!!! YES!!!! I’m so happy about that. :-D
DIGITAL INTEGR ELEC LAB: A
Welp, go figure... I got a D+ in the lecture and an A in the lab ... This was a nice surprise.

So, that’s it folks.. another quarter (my 3rd to last).. two more to go. One more insane one, then an easy one to finish it off at a community college! :) I’m excited to be done...

Three finals down, one to go (in about 30 minutes). I went and saw a career counselor today to get feedback about my resume. I came home, and sent off my newly polished resume to Google! :) I really want to be a Test Engineer, I’ve decided. The work I did at CMC was lots of fun, and I would love to continue the excitement of testing. :) ... now I’m in anticipation about hearing back from them... heh, if you work at Google and you’re reading this, welcome to my journal... enjoy my website! ;-)

I always thought this was amusing: http://www.ee.calpoly.edu/~dbraun/courses/easyexam.html :-)

Today was my last day of classes for my last winter quarter here at Cal Poly... *sniff* I woke up at 6am this morning to get some more work done before my 9am class, which I did get done. It’s amazing what happens with some sleep under one’s belt. More ideas, the logic, creativity, etc... Finals are coming up fast. I have one on Monday night, a couple on Thursday, and one Wednesday. There’s two that I’m somewhat worried about, but I can plenty of time to do more preparing.

Yesterday, which seems like an eternity ago, I went surfing in the early morning (~7am). Robert picked me up around then and we headed off to UCSB for some fun surf. Many many years ago, he actually went to UCSB and surf most everywhere around there EXCEPT Coal Oil Point, since it didn’t seem surfable way back then for some bizarre reason. Well, now it’s heavily surfed, and the spot impressed him, which is saying a lot. The only major problem was that there were TONS of people in the water... 15 up at the point... another 10 just below the point... then another 20 or so scattered down the cove. Once on a wave, it was awesome, but getting a wave was challenging with the crowds.

what else ... Southpark season 9 started. :P weee. I’m gonna be super busy through next week. Keep it tuned...

I was really looking forward to going to The Ranch tomorrow... I would love to see the huge waves. As of right now, it’s not happening, and I’m trying to decide what to do tomorrow for surfing. Santa Barbara would be amazing, I think. Coal Oil Point is going to be going off. Tides are perfect, waves are big, .. i donno. I’m in such a funk right now. My resume is upsetting me, since it’s hard to get it formatted just the way I want it in latex (a typesetting language), I’m not going to The Ranch tomorrow, my senior project is nothing but frustration, finals are coming up and adding some stress, ... hm, that’s about it I guess. AGH! I’m going insane... another sign I really need to surf.

MavSurfer said this about the swell arriving tomorrow:

The outer Buoys are the biggest we’ve seen in the past five years or so. And the entire coast of California is on a high surf advisory for the next three days.

At last check the Southeast Papa Buoy reached 30 ft swells at 20-second intervals. Basically when this swell hits Mavericks the waves will be double that size. As we speak crews are on their way out to Cortes Bank the worlds newest Big Wave Surf Spot located one hundred miles west of San Diego. Also guys are gearing up and heading out to Todo Santos Island another well-known Big Wave spot just south of Ensenada Mexico. The first giant sets should start rolling in at day break Wednesday morning.

It should be awesome... I’m probably gonna go to The Ranch on Thursday if Robert makes it out alive tomorrow. :-P We’ll see how it is... it’s going to be massive. weeee.... I’m hoping to get some pictures for all to see. Keep it tuned here for the latest!

This morning, Alyssa and I went to The Rock for some surfing. It was really fun -- I helped her do some more learning, and then I went out to surf on the outside for a bit. It was big. I mean REALLY big... "nothing I couldn’t handle," I thought. I did get a few waves that were overhead. There were three of us surfing wayyy out there. One guy went under a wave and snapped his leash, so he began swimming in to get his board. I tried to save the board, but couldn’t make it to it in time before the next set rocked us. So, it was just me and this other guy.

After a little lull in the waves, this double-overhead+ set came out of nowhere and broke maybe a few hundred feet in front of us. It sucked BIG TIME... ditched the board... dove down as far under as I could go... hung out under water for about 10 seconds, then popped up my head to another set wave breaking really close to me. This went on for another 3 waves or so, until I got back on my board and forcefully rode some gnarly white-water back to shore. No fun. But a strangely exciting experience. I didn’t think I was anywhere close to drowning, so stop thinking that. :) I realized when I was changing out of my suit that I would have totally not gone out in those waves have I just drove up to check them out... they were enormous. Occasionally, but more often than not, the waves on the outside would get amplified significantly from the "side-waves" that bounced off The Rock, creating a huge peak that sucks up and throws its lip out causing a great deal of vertical and horizontal energy.

Meanwhile, Alyssa was poised over on The Rock watching my every move, but she never saw me take any of the big waves... just me getting pounded over and over again. :-P Oh well.. next time I guess. ;)

I’m sooo tired right now... I’m gonna go to bed any moment I think. I’ve been to The Ranch the past two days, but only surfed one. On Wednesday, Alyssa, her dogs, and I drove down to meet my uncle to surf, but we were greeted with SE winds -- which is the worst wind direction for the ranch. It was super onshore, blown out, stormy, kinda rainy, and cold.. also, the wind destroyed the swell--it was pretty much flat.

Today on the other hand, was awesome; except for the getting-up-early part. Robert calls me at 5:30am and shouts in a pleasant/funny kind of way: "Get Up!" ... so, I rose and started getting ready to meet him there at 7am. I left while it was still dark out around 5:50am, and headed south. I got there a few minutes before 7am, and was greeted by sunny weather, a very light offshore wind, and a very decent size swell. Robert and I surfed with about 6 other people at Big Drakes for roughly two hours. It was awesome! The sets were roughly 5-7ft with the occasional 8 footers. The walls were big, juicy, and delicious. :) I got tons of waves, and Robert did too. I made it back to slo around noon where I helped Alyssa do some last minute studying for her o-chem exam today (yuk).

So, sleep is sounding very lovely.. I think I’m going to crash.

So, today marks Alyssa and my 1-year anniversary!! Well, technically speaking it’s the 29th, but since there is no February 29th this year, March 1st seemed like a totally different month, so we’re going with the last day in February for each year. :) It’s hard to believe that I’ve known and dated Alyssa for a little over a year... weeee. I have loved every second of it! I love you, Alyssa. Happy Anniversary from me! ;D

Wow, so, it was *stormy*... The entire time on my way there, while I was getting ready, and while I started paddling out, I couldn’t figure out why I was doing what I was doing.. seriously.. I think I’m addicted to surfing. :-P It’s nice being addicted to something that keeps me sane and is good for my body, but man; the weather sucked, I was somewhat lazy, and curling up in front of my computer all warm and cozy sounded better to my mind. Somehow, my body just kept going, and at the end, it was fun, but it felt like a hurricane enveloped Morro Bay.

It was big-time offshore again along with plenty of overhead sets. I was worried about it being much smaller than the past few days, but there wasn’t any problem with size. I got out there, but had trouble getting my first wave: either in the wrong place or too far out. So, I kept paddling around, fighting the current, and placing myself so I could get a good one. Today was the one day that I loved having a hood, except I forgot it at home!! ahh... d’oh! :-P sucks.. it was still fun anyway. I got a lot of good waves, and best of all, it started pouring sheets of rain (aka "cats and dogs") for the last 20 of so minutes I was out. When I got out, the wind made the rain horizontal (literally), and it pieced my face and hands with a pin-pricking force.

Once I got back to my van, I carefully put my board down so that it wouldn’t get blown away into the storm, and opened my van’s hatch for some convenient shelter. It was awesome-- I purposely parked my van backwards because I knew the wind would be coming out of the south, not to mention the rain. If I had parked normally, I would have had to deal with rain/wind blowing directly into my van (ick). This way, not only was I sheltered from the nasty rain, I didn’t have to deal with the gale force winds either. *pats self on back* ;-D I changed and climbed into my van and sat there amused with myself for a minute before I headed home.

Alyssa and I pre-celebrated our 1-year anniversary last tuesday by going to see a really cool modern dance performance at Cal Poly titled Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. Here you can see the following descriptions of the repertoire titles we saw: Diphthong, Gimme (I think), Love Stories (my favorite; danced to awesome jazz music), and Rooster. I know there’s probably a few others I’m missing, but the show lasted for 2 hours and was quite good. Alyssa really liked it, too, which I’m happy about. :) Our real anniversary is on the 29th on February, which doesn’t exist this year, so it’ll be the 28th. ;)

I’ve been surfing a few times in the past week... the one great thing the rain brought with it was these wonderful (offshore) SE winds. The surf’s been really fun because of the conditions. I’m probably gonna go surfing again today, so it should be fun. :)

I forgot to put up a movie too of last weekend... it’s kinda dark so you can’t see much, but the sound is funny. Check it out: http://www.cappaberra.com/listMovies.php?folder=movies/calpoly/4th/SB/

Enjoy!