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ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
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Monday, August 15, 2005
7:20 p.m.
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We're coming to you live from Apartment Four, Pittsburgh, PA, where it's been a hectic two days of packing, moving, unpacking, cleaning, shopping, and building. But all that in due order. Some of you may recall that the original plan was to move on Saturday, but when I got home from my last day of work at 7:00 on Friday and realized that almost nothing was ready to go, I proposed pushing the madness back a day. That allowed me to go running at home for the last time Friday night, then spend all of Saturday pulling things out of my closet, throwing them into boxes, and shuttling them downstairs and eventually out to the car. And getting yelled at by my dad any time he caught me not doing any of the above. The end of major loading operations was declared around 8:00, and then we all went out to dinner. I went to take a walk around the neighborhood after we got back, but the rain that had been coming down intermittently all day hit the "on" switch again and caught me in a downpour when I was about two-thirds of a mile from home. My bed had been packed into the van, so after I took a shower I spent my last night at home sleeping on the couch in our living room. My dad wanted an early start on Saturday, so I was awake at 6-something that morning and ready to go at 8:30 after some last-minute packing. The van was packed from front to back and from floor to ceiling; to keep the trip slower and smoother than my dad's usual driving habits he told me my car would go first. I hate driving first in a caravan, especially with my dad in another car behind me — our driving styles are so different that I feel like I'm annoying him if I don't pass someone, stay in the right lane, or don't drive at the right speed. We stopped just over the PA line at a rest stop, and happily I got him to go first from that point on. The drive between Twinsburg and Pittsburgh is actually quite nice: right around two hours and mostly light traffic and easy roads to follow until you're almost on top of the city. It's amazing coming into Pittsburgh from the north on I-279: you've spent the last hour going around curves and up and down hills, seeing comparatively little in the way of civilization, and you come round a big curve to the left and then CITY! Tall buildings, more cars, piled-up exit ramps, confusing bridges, and scary merges spring into existence out of nowhere and tell you that you're less than two miles from downtown Pittsburgh. Kind of fun, actually... at least on a Sunday morning. Getting back to the story, my parents and I somehow were able to unload everything from both cars into my apartment in about an hour. The next step was some major shopping, so I jumped into the (seatless) back of the van and we drove out to the Ikea store half an hour west of here. The hordes of people were upon us from the beginning and all the stuff we wanted was quickly disappearing from the warehouse, so we ended up making one trip through the store for the really important stuff and a second to fill in the holes. Even then they were out of the desk and kitchen chair I really wanted. After approximately three eternities and stops at two other stores, the car was once again loaded up with boxes that had to be carried up the stairs into my apartment — and then put together. By my own quick reckoning, I have screwed in 48 screws, hammered in 42 nails, and built four pieces of furniture since yesterday evening, and that is enough to last me a good long while. My parents took home all the empty boxes I had as of 10:30 last night, when they left, and I've got a pile of perhaps six more in my hallway waiting for the next time someone goes between here and "home home." The living space is coming together pretty nicely, at least. Today I feel like I've spent half of my time in food-related activities and other half in the aforementioned process of assembling furniture and putting stuff on it. I was supposed to meet my advisor again this afternoon to start talking about his research project that I'm going to be working on, but when I got to his office around 2:00 he was out. I wandered around campus for about 35 minutes — still out — biked around a bit and found some accessible computers that I can log in to — still out — left a note under his door saying I'd been there, and headed on to the task of finding the nearest post office. It ended up being in a slightly dodgy-looking section of Oakland, and there was no where to tie up my bike, so I gave up my quest for stamps and came home. I've managed to avoid the larger hills so far, but I appear to be situated a longish 1.9 miles from both campus and the only Catholic church I've seen yet. The grocery store, by pleasing contrast, is less than the distance between top of the hill and Cedar-Fairmount back at Case. More environmental details coming later, when I feel like posting another long entry. For now I just wanted to get something down in writing (even though I don't have an Internet connection yet) to document how things are going so far. |
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
6:06 p.m.
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Two days isn't really long enough to get a good feel for a neighborhood, but I thought I'd devote this entry to writing about the sort of place I've found my surroundings to be so far. If I turn out to be horribly mistaken in the long run, at least I'll have these first impressions to laugh at. So. Pittsburgh is a city of disjoint districts or neighborhoods that all have different names — sort of like Glenville, Tremont, University Circle, etc. back home, but the ones here seem to be more in use and appear at the top of the larger street signs. They're sometimes marked on maps, but not with exact boundary lines or anything, so I'm a little unclear as to where I actually live. The best I can do so far is to say I'm somewhere between Shadyside, Friendship, and East Liberty; hopefully in one of the former two but probably in the last. Shadyside is a rather upscale district with a Coventry-crossed-with-Legacy-Village shopping area along Walnut Street, brick apartment buildings, and some larger nice-looking houses. It's also the closest to CMU coming from the north. Friendship, according to Wikipedia, was built as a "streetcar suburb," so the houses are the large three-floor kind you see on Grandview or Bellfield in Cleveland Heights. They seem to be mainly converted into apartments, but they're not quite as nice-looking (or expensive) as the ones in Shadyside. As you move eastward into East Liberty, the upkeep of the houses seems to fall off gradually; I believe Wikipedia mentioned that East Liberty includes housing projects as well, but those must be further east than I've gone so far. The area between these three neighborhoods seems to be centered around Baum Blvd., Centre Ave., and S. Negley Ave. It's a bit dodgy-looking: a few tall apartment buildings like those behind The Triangle, a few car dealerships, two small non-chain car repair shops, a drug store, gas station, and Giant Eagle. It's wonderfully alive with people, though, and that can make up for scary surroundings. The grocery store is open from 6 a.m. until midnight seven days a week, and I've not yet gone somewhere without seeing people walking along the streets with blue plastic bags in their hands. I've noticed kids, college-age people like me, older guys on bikes, women pushing little grocery carts — and from a good variety of ethnic backgrounds, which is another definitely positive sign. I've been to campus and back twice by bike now, but in a few minutes I'll be leaving for the grad student orientation ice cream social, which starts at 7 p.m. and will probably have me coming back after dark for the first time. I can get down to CMU following almost exclusively two-lane roads where I can ride in the street, and the route goes mainly through Shadyside, so I'm not worried about potential safety problems. It will actually be good to see what things are like late in the day; I still need to find and measure out a place to go running in the evenings before I fall completely out of training! |
Thursday, August 18, 2005
4:05 p.m.
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Several things to report since my last post, so I don't know if I'll get around to them all. It's kind of pointless to say this, but I found out yesterday that the only CMU computers I've found so far that I can log into have their command prompts disabled, so I can't use command line FTP to transfer these journal posts like I was planning to do. I want to keep writing things every day or so as they happen, even though my DSL is at least another four days away, so at some point early next week there will be a huge dump of entries detailing how I've been getting along over the last week. By the time you read this, of course, the entries will have already been dumped and I assume you'll have figured it out by now. About that DSL, by the way — it seems the order I placed online last week from Cleveland didn't go through. But it did — sort of. Only not really. I ordered local phone service and DSL from Verizon last Thursday, and eventually got their online system to stop reversing my first and last names and print out a confirmation of both parts of the order. The "service ready" date was supposed to be this Tuesday, and sometime just before sunrise that day my phone woke me up by tinging quietly a few times. (I've got a really cool phone with an actual bell in it, so sometimes small surges in power, I suppose, are enough to get the bell-ringing mechanism partially energied and result in slight noises.) When I got out of bed and picked up the phone I had a dial tone and functioning local service. The DSL package I was supposed to have received never showed up, so I called the phone company yesterday to see what they'd done with it. After a maddening tussle with a patchwork-like automated system that asked for the same information three times in three different voices, I finally got on with someone who looked up my account and said I was signed up for the discounted DSL special they were running but that there was unaccountably no actual DSL order placed. I got her to place a new one right away, but it's still going to take several business days until the package arrives and service starts. Things haven't been too bad on the computing front otherwise, except for the command line troubles I mentioned at the beginning. The Engineering and Science Library in the CS building is well-stocked with nice new Dells, and I'm all set up with an account and a printing quota. By now I'm getting a tolerably decent understanding of the major buildings on the CMU campus, and I must say that this place has the most amazing grades I've ever come across. I'm not talking about academic performance, although I'm sure that's top-notch as well; I mean plain old hills. At Case, it's not unusual to walk into the third floor of buildings on the west side of the quad, but at Carnegie Mellon they carry this to an astounding level. Newell-Simon Hall, where my program is based, is built into the side of what I would most properly call a ravine: you have to go across a little bridge to get to the main doors on the third floor. I'm not sure if there's a back exit at the bottom of the ravine, but there is a little enclosed bridge (like between A.W. Smith and K.H. Smith) connecting the fourth floor of Newell-Simon to the fourth floor of Wean Hall, the current front runner by a long shot in my ugliest building on campus contest. But the best part about Wean is that it does have a main entrance on the back side of the ravine, which is actually a nice part of campus called the Mall; you can come in on that side by taking a sidewalk alongside the building that goes down 10 or 12 steps before depositing you at Wean's main entrance on the fifth floor! Aside from this wackiness, I've discovered that there are some routes around campus that you can't take your bike on. This is due to a certain overpopulation of outdoor staircases on some of the sidewalks — most notably in the region surrounding the ravine we've been talking about, but also in random other places where someone didn't feel like putting in a ramp. The most reliable biking routes are probably the maze of parking lots and loading docks around the edge of campus; otherwise, I don't think you can bike from one end to the other without going all the way out to an actual road and back in again. And while I'm on the topic of bikes, I might as well finish this entry up with another discovery that I made just this afternoon, and that's that just about any biking ability I can claim to have comes from the nice fact that Ohio is relatively flat. On hills here I have no power at all. Today I took advantage of some free time to head south through Schenley Park because the dust and stoplights of biking on city streets was really getting annoying. By some sort of luck I live in the flattest part of Pittsburgh, so I wasn't quite expecting the grueling mountain roads down in the park. I first went down the largest hill in the history of the world... or at least partway, since I stopped after a mile because I was starting to doubt my ability to get back up. Once I'd hauled myself back to the top, I went out of the park to the east and pedalled slowly into Squirrel Hill. I had no chance of making it up the hill on Wightman, so I turned left onto Forbes. On Forbes Avenue, the roadway suddenly plunged straight down the second-biggest hill in the history of the world (with a red light right at the bottom of it, of course) and deposited me back on the flat end of campus. That was enough for me, so I stuck to the flat streets and headed home after a pathetic ride of less than four miles. |
Friday, August 19, 2005
11:18 a.m.
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Someone obligingly told me last night about a nice computer lab on campus where you can do FTP, so I'm finally able to post everything I've been writing over the past week. Everything is dated as usual, so you'll probably want to start with August 15 and work your way back up to this point. |
Monday, August 22, 2005
10:38 a.m.
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It's official now: I'm starting life in Pittsburgh. My program orientation starts this week, the undergraduate freshmen are starting to invade campus, and all my Case friends are either moving back to campus or leaving this week for other places. Quite exciting, actually. Part of this sense of finality is coming because I spent Friday and Saturday back in Cleveland. After only five days in my apartment, it felt more like a summer vacation — complete change in surroundings and routine — than an actual permanent position. I didn't actually remember, until I was 20 minutes from what I guess I have to call my parents' house now, that I didn't have a bed there any more and was going to have to spend the night on the couch. At that point, though, it was around 3 a.m. and I didn't really care where I was going to spend the night as long as I could sleep a bit. (I had left Pittsburgh at 4:30 in the afternoon, but ended up going straight to Susannah's going-away/birthday party in the evening, which broke up rather late.) So that was Friday. After a few hours of sleep at home, it was off to Strongsville for Aaron and Amber's cookout. A lot of the same people showed up, so it was almost like we were all back on campus again and seeing each other every day. Some of the girls were making plans for one last night out together before Amber goes to Boston on Wednesday and Susannah goes to Toronto on Friday. I also may be getting my first visitor today, even: Jessica and Eric are going camping in Allegheny National Forest and said they would try to stop by. This will make things interesting in my "sitting room" since in order to get three chairs I'll have to use the one from the kitchen table and roll my computer chair in from the bedroom. Either that or someone sits on the fireplace. Yesterday we had our first full day of nice weather since I got here. Previously we'd only had two mornings of sun on Wednesday and Thursday. I made myself take advantage of it by going biking in Schenley Park again, and this time I managed almost eight miles before giving up and heading home. It's not the usual requisite 15 miles that I count as "going biking," but here the shorter course is going to have to be good enough. I found a nice three-mile loop that goes down the giant hill and up it again in another part of the park, and I think this will be my training course for a while. I finally met someone else from my building today! Until this morning I could only assume that the four other apartments in the house had someone living in them, because I hadn't actually seen any physical signs of their existence. I was just putting my bike on the front porch prior to closing the street door this morning, though, when someone came down from the third floor. It was another first-year CMU grad student, thankfully — from Ohio even — who also just moved in last week. She was taking the bus in to campus but planning to bike later on in the week, so we spent a few minutes talking about routes between here and there and where our landlord said we were allowed to keep our bikes. When I mentioned she was the first person I'd met from the building, she said that she'd only seen some Asian women scurrying in and out of the first floor a few times. The rest of our fellow-lodgers are still unaccounted for. |
Thursday, August 25, 2005
8:08 p.m.
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Things have come a long way towards becoming relatively normal in the last few days: I've been spending most of the day on campus, have done some fun things on the side, and finally (as of about half an hour ago) have Internet at my apartment. I see I haven't really written about orientation yet, so I guess I'll do that now. Last week was the overall graduate student orientation, which mainly consisted of sessions with titles like "Auto Ownership in the U.S." that were mainly directed at international students. Not too much new content for your average U.S. citizen, except for the part about health insurance and some of the services on campus. I was mainly hoping for it to be an excuse to meet some people, and that part seems to have come out quite well. Last Thursday the university sponsored a sort of three rivers cruise downtown; any new grad student could go by buying the ticket for $10 and (because they'd run out of places) finding your own way to Station Square across the river. I wasn't really planning on going at first, but then one of the few people I'd met at that point said he was going, so I bought a ticket Thursday morning and figured out how to take the bus to downtown Thursday night. Of course, I never did meet up with the guy who said he was going, but almost immediately I bumped into Ian from the University of Michigan, who I'd crossed the day before when we were sticking pins in a world map to show where we came from. I ended up spending the first part of the cruise talking to him and Katrina, who had come with him, and then by extension to the various people who they'd already managed to meet. Ian was the one who told me about the nice computer lab (see entry from Friday, August 19) so I could start posting my journals again. Ian and I crossed paths again at the computer lab Tuesday, and he happened to mention that he was going to a scavenger hunt that the KGB was putting on last night. (This needs some explaining. Once upon a time there was the Carnegie Involvement Association, what seems to have been a general-purpose group for CMU students who liked doing various things together. Eventually, though, it was felt that the group was focusing too much on one particular activity, so a divergent faction broke off and formed a separate organization. Since the first had the alluring acronym of CIA, they decided to call the second the KGB even though it doesn't actually stand for anything. Since then, some people have suggested it stands for Keeping Geeks Busy.) At any rate, it sounded intriguing, at least, so I said I would meet him there. The hunt was a lot of fun, actually. I ended up in a group with Ian and Ross (two other grad students — we were the only ones in attendance, so we stuck together like the freshmen we are), two undergrad freshmen, and two sophomore KGB members who filled us in on some general campus knowledge. The things we were supposed to bring back were subject to some interpretation (e.g. "the sun" and "invent a country and provide proof of its existence"), and sent some of our group members scurrying to the Squirrel Hill Giant Eagle for Sweedish fish and bean dip ingredients. In the end, our amazing and completely-improved 32-second skit about the life of Andrew Carnegie — in which he's resurrected from the grave, becomes president of Washington, D.C. (which had broken off into its own nation), receives reports from two cabinet ministers, greets the emperor of Japan, is shot at by an assassin, and saved by a Secret Service agent — netted us massive amount of points by combining about a half-dozen of the hunt items into one and resulted in us being the first-place team by a nice margin. You should all definitely expect more reports on KGB activities in the future, because they certainly sound like a fun group of people to do things with. Think of late-night editing at The Observer combined with natural freakiness of CS majors and you'll have the right idea. This is already a really long entry, so I guess I'll have to save a recap of the LTI orientation for next time. Those events don't end until tomorrow anyway, so I'll just talk about them as a group and try not to get sidetracked. |
Friday, August 26, 2005
9:35 p.m.
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I just spent the last few hours creating my first professional website in the sense that it presents me as some sort of official member of the higher-higher education community. It's quite basic so far, but that's probably all that can be expected after being sort-of officially around for only a week. Making the page appropriately was an interesting experience, and partly why it took so long (the other part is because I'm really picky about having things just so in my visual design). I felt like I had to sanitize myself down to some intellgent up-and-coming-academic-professional version — I was going to include a link to my personal page, for example, but then imagined some university dean at MIT or Berkeley coming across this journal and thought better of it. If it turns out that these people are just as zany as I am, I might reconsider my decision. The new page contains, as you'll note by visiting it, the most recent fully-licensed and authorized version of a hideous picture of me; it was taken this afternoon as our last LTI orientation session. One of the LTI professors serves as sort of the unofficial department photographer, so all of us new students had our pictures taken by him for the "people" display case in Newell-Simon Hall and so we could use them on our websites. (Per our orientation papers: "It is important for you to have web presense. You are now an SCS graduate student, and people want to know about your work.") The professor e-mailed us proofs of the photos this evening and asked us to pick one for the display board. Of course, all of mine turned out relatively revolting, but the one I ended up using for both the board and the site was the least offensive of the four of them. I might as well put in some notes about the LTI orientation as a whole, then. It was a pretty good experience, what with the free breakfasts and lunches three days running. I can now recognize a good number of fellow students, and — if they're not too unusual — remember their names. The whole thing started off with a reception on Tuesday night, which had the nice benefit of re-uniting the little knot of people I remembered from the open house back in March. They all ended up coming to school here, and they all — except for me and one other guy — live in Squirrel Hill. I also saw the Ph.D. student who was my student contact in March. Wednesday began the actual content, with a series of talks and lectures. We started with presentations by the LTI administrative staff, who told us which forms to fill out, which people to see about getting keys and computers and accounts and copy codes, and which classes to sign up for. Then the faculty members working in various areas of language technologies started talking about what's going on right now in those areas, and those sorts of lectures took up the rest of Wednesday, all of yesterday, and half of today. An endless succession of PowerPoint, as usual. Today's talks included one on speech and one on linguistics, which sounded so cool that it started me thinking that I'd rather get involved in one of those areas instead of the project I'm already attached to. Trying to make a switch now, though, even if it is possible, would be the height of bad form. I'm already committed to a different project, which (as you can recall from my entry of August 4) came along and saved my sorry self by plucking me out of no-man's-land at a point when I wasn't sure I'd even be able to go to school this fall. On top of that, the official research fellowship offer letter showed up in my mailbox today, and the stipend amount listed is so extravagant that I couldn't possibly walk out on people who are paying me so much. The only thing to do, I'm afraid, is to live with what I've got and do a good job on it — they certainly deserve at least that much after what they're doing for me. Getting back to the storyline, now: After we were released for the day, I headed over to the CMU bookstore to see what I'd need for my classes. Answer: too much. I'm only taking two courses, but between them there are six required textbooks and at least three more that are listed as "optional" by the professors. I bought three of the cheapest ones for one of the classes today, but will have to see about finding the rest online, because that's just too much to buy at the publishers' inflated prices. Classes start on Monday, so expect a full report about that aspect of things after the weekend. If I come up with more interesting stuff to say before then, you'll hear from me sooner. |
Friday, August 26, 2005
10:28 p.m.
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Well, that wasn't very long to wait, was it? I've been inexplicably drawn to my computer ever since my DSL started working last night after dinner. I had just posted the last entry, actually, and was kind of sampling people's away messages while deciding what I wanted to do next, and a line in Sonnie's provided the impetus for this bonus entry. The line was "9:00 Casino Night," and it immediately brought back memories of the Casino Night I went to at the beginning of my sophomore year at Case. And I thought that I'd retell that story here in the hopes of keeping this thing more journal-like and less an incoherent patchwork of events that don't involve anyone who reads this. The tale of CWRU Casino Night 2002, then. It was the Friday before the first week of classes, like today is, and all of my friends had duly moved back into the dorms and were unpacking stuff and getting ready for a fun weekend. Brian was a newly-hired RA in Sherman, and was thus actually participating in Casino night by working one of the tables. Susannah and I thought we'd go over and see him in action, so we made our way down to Thwing, collected the standard allotments of fake money, and started working our way around the room. Brian was in charge of blackjack, I think, and had gone all out for the occasion by donning a black dress suit and white gloves. At some point we noticed that it was starting to rain rather steadily outside, which immediately caused us to realize that we'd all left our windows open and fans running because of the heat of the day. Since water blowing onto expensive computers and other electronic equipment is generally not so optimal a state, we decided we'd better risk getting wet a bit to run back to North Side and close the windows. So we set off. Our leaving Thwing gave the imperial signal to increase the rain volume by about 500 percent, and we were absolutely soaked by the time we reached the porch of Guilford House. I remember I had grabbed a copy of that day's Observer from the rack in Thwing, and had in vain tried to defend myself from the elements by opening it out over my head. The paper was a crumpled wet ball, of course, before we'd even cleared the Mather Quad, so I threw it away. From Guilford we decided the best we could do was to stick close to the walls of buildings and look for any overhangs or trees along the way. Our first attempt was a straight line run to the side of PBL, which had just been completed but not yet opened. Brian went first. Along the far curb of Bellflower there was what appeared to be a large but shallow puddle, which Brian attempted to navigate by the most direct route: straight across. Unfortunately, the construction equipment that had been parked on the road for the previous two years hadn't really left behind a smooth surface, with the important result that the puddle was on the order of six inches deep. You can imagine the consequences for Brian's leg. I think from that point we didn't care about shelters or overhangs much, and just shot down the street in a blind run until we got to Sherman. Brian went inside to change clothes, and Susannah and I continued on to Clarke and Hitchcock to do the same. And to shut our windows and turn off our fans. That's my experience with Casino Night: a wildly pathetic, yet strangely enjoyable run through the rain. Now that's the kind of thing college is all about! |
Sunday, August 28, 2005
6:53 p.m.
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The weekend got off to a rather inauspicious start yesterday morning, when I realized that I'd allowed a pen to go through the washing machine in the pocket of my shorts. Luckily I discovered this before moving everything into the dryer, and luckilier still the pen was a nice one that didn't come apart and spew ink all over my clothes. It's just a bit... cleaner than it was before. I should mention that we have coin-operated laundry in the basement here, which is a pretty good deal because using the machines is as cheap as it was at Case last year and I don't have to walk half a mile to the nearest laundromat. The bad side is, though, that I get to go up and down two flights of stairs about a dozen times in order to finish the job. I don't really mind doing this, but in an old house like this one I feel like the creaking floorboards that announce my trip each time are probably annoying the crap out of the other tenants. Another related problem is that the machines don't have nice displays telling you how long you have to wait until they're done: they just sort of do their thing and finish up whenever they feel like it. This naturally increased the number of times I had to run downstairs to check on them. Once I'd finally gotten my clothes taken care of (and hung the stuff that was still wet up in the bathroom to dry), I got the car out and headed to Wal-Mart to pick up various things I needed. These included apartment essentials like an answering machine, a baking sheet, and a wall clock for my kitchen. There's a sporting goods store in the same plaza as the Wal-Mart, so I called in there as well to see if I could find anything synthetic to run my next triathon in. (Two weeks from today!) I wasn't in any particular hurry to get back home, so I spent a good long while browsing around the store and trying things on. I now understand why my sister and her friends used to do the same thing for fun, and I really understand the power of clothes to completely subvert your outward appearance. I'll illustrate this last point a bit. It's safe to say that I have not one of the world's greatest bodies. It's not hideous, certainly, and it's gotten a lot nicer looking since I started training last year, but it invariably falls short of the general "cool" look that you see in magazines and catalogues. I used to think I was a lost cause until I started shopping for myself in the last few years, and now I'm convinced that you could get Quasimodo of Notre-Dame to look stylish if you dressed him up in the right outfit that fit in the right way. (That's the secret of all those magazine ads. If you had a league of professionals planning your hair, posture, and wardrobe down to the last collar button, you could be in one too.) Yesterday, just for fun, I tried on one of those sleeveless synthetic compression tops they have for serious runners or whatever, and the effect it had on my scrawny self was mind-boggling! I seriously had no clue I could look that athletic! The advertising agencies out there will be glad to know that I bought the shirt. It was sort of what I was looking for in the first place, and it was on sale for what I thought was a pretty reasonable price. It's a good thing, too, because that's just about the only part of my shopping trip that had a positive ending. When I put a battery into the wall clock I discovered that the clock was already broken: half of the time it doesn't tick, and when it does only about half of the ticks actually advance the second hand. I'm pretty sure I even saw it move backwards once. So that's going to have to go back to the store, and I'm going to have to find something else for my sitting room wall. Then I took the cardboard off of the baking sheet, cut out the recipe for chocolate chip cookies it had on the back, and put it away in my cupboard. On second thought, I pulled it back out and slid it into the oven to see how it fit. (I have a really small old stove, and I had previously measured the width of it to make sure the thing I bought would fit.) Well, the door wouldn't close; the baking sheet is about an inch too long. So I'm now the owner of one worthless metal tray and one $5 recipe for chocolate chip cookies. |
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
10:24 p.m.
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Ugh! I'm only too happy to throw aside the homework 'n' such for a bit and write the obligatory beginning of semester post. I should start by spelling out clearly what exactly I'm going to be doing this year, because I don't think I've ever offered a coherent explanation in this journal before. The professional website I posted about on Friday may have helped, but here it is straight from the student's mouth. I am working on a M.S. degree at Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute ("the LTI") within the school of computer science. The LTI is all about applying CS techniques to really hard problems in natural language processing, like automatic translation between languages, speech recognition by a computer, searching and question answering, having your computer read your e-mail and do stuff based on what it reads, etc. They also do a bit in the psychology of learning domain with some computer-aided language learning tools. The applications are really interesting. My job — at least for the next year — is to work 20 hours a week on a multi-engine machine translation project that produces better output than a single automatic translator. Given a common input (a set of sentences in Chinese, for example), it takes the various translations produced by an arbitrary number of machine translation engines and synthetically combines them by picking individual words out of each one and smashing them together into a new translation that's better than any of the originals. There's a lot more to it than that, of course, but that's the main idea. So far I've just been reading through the code and trying to figure out what it's doing, and I'm hoping to be able to run the thing myself in another day or two. Aside from that I'm taking two "regular" classes within the LTI curriculum. The first is called Grammars and Lexicons, which is all about linguistics and syntax; the second goes under the hideous appellation of Algorithms for Natural Language Processing. (It's the first word that's supposed to send chills down your spine. Or at least it does for me.) These each meet twice a week, so I end up with just one 80-minute class per day... except on Fridays, when I've none at all! The real news of the week, though, is that all the new LTI grad students have to spend four evenings a week for the next two or three weeks listening to a series of research talks given by various faculty members. This essentially equates to rather more than a dozen hours of PowerPoint presentations about professors' pet projects, and yesterday was sufficiently horrifying to convince me that I'm not looking forward to the rest of them. I arrived on campus around 9:30 a.m., slogged through some project code until 11:30, ran off to take care of some errands, ate the lunch I'd packed and brought with me, went to Grammars and Lexicons at 1:30, went back to look at some more code, realized I was really really hungry and hadn't brought anything with me for dinner, got some food from a little Asian food vendor in the atrium of my building, and showed up for the first talk at 5:00 with a half-eaten container of Kung Pao chicken and feeling like it was time for bed. The third talk (6:00 to 6:30) was given by someone with an American name, an undecipherable combination of New Jersey and Arabic accents, and a somewhat boring intonation. It doesn't help that yesterday and today have been those kinds of days when you think twice about breathing in because you're afraid you might drown. All the papers in my room have gone limp and shrivelly because it's too hot to close the windows but too humid to dry anything out. The wet sponge that I put by my kitchen sink on Sunday night was still damp when I went to use it 48 hours later. I can reliably get from here to within a half-mile of campus by bus in the morning, but the return route is being detoured because of some construction on Fifth Avenue and I don't know a good way to get back without walking most of the way anyway in order to find a bus stop that I know is in service. This was not at all enjoyable when I left campus at almost 7:00 last night. |
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
11:11 p.m.
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I've just completed the "interesting" activity of totalling up how much money I spent on various things since I moved into my apartment, and the result is not happy. The budget sheet I made up right before I moved in had me spending $800 a month on various necessities like rent, Internet, food, gasoline, housewares, etc. It turns out, however, that two weeks of actually living by it revealed that I neglected important categories like school supplies and non-repeating expenses like clothes. It's also the case that groceries are much more expensive than they've any right to be. Net result: a new budget. Now we're hoping for $880 a month, textbooks and non-repeating expenses not included. And somehow I was still able to exceed that in half a month! We'll have to see what September brings, once I'm not buying so much general stuff for the kitchen and whatnot. Our third day of rain today, but it was much lighter and eventually stopped by the time I had to walk home at 6:45. I bought a newspaper on my way home yesterday and again today, and I guess I shouldn't complain about the water or humidity here because the poor people in New Orleans are getting several Niagaras more than they bargained for. We've had storms and tornadoes here (I guess I mean "in Cleveland") that have knocked out power in small areas for a few days at worst, and that's usually considered pretty major, but I read today that it will be on the order of a month or so before they have any electricity in New Orleans and several months before the place is really liveable again. I don't think I can quite comprehend damage on that scale — how could a city of almost 500,000 (Cleveland, for example) be uninhabitable for so long? I'm generally the sort of person who prefers it when nature reminds us we humans aren't as unstoppable as we think we are — like when we get hit with a snowstorm and everyone's precious SUVs are stuck in their driveways for a day or two — but this is a bit over the top. Very slow progress at work today. (When I say "work" I will generally be talking about my research, as opposed to classes at "school.") I spent most of the morning finishing reading assignments for Grammars and Lexicons, and most of the afternoon with another guy in figuring out why we couldn't add a directory to the path list in my .cshrc file without screwing up just about everything else. In between, though, I went out to lunch at a fun Peruvian place on Walnut Street with Brooke (LTI receptionist), Eric (LTI programmer), and a really nice girl whose name I annoyingly can't remember or find online. It's all the more annoying because I met her at the study abroad table during the grad school orientation and we talked for several minutes then too. I guess that's enough for today. Lots of catch-up to do tomorrow, both in reading assignments and in research work. |
Thursday, September 1, 2005
10:53 p.m.
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I guess one of the good things about being a grad student is that no one cares how bizarre your schedule is. (There are professors, even, who don't show up in their offices until noon if they can help it.) This flexibility may be making it impossible for me to decide whether I'm going to "work" or "school," but it sure is nice to not have to worry about having to clock in at 8 a.m. or anything like that. Especially after last night. I wrote up my post and went to bed before midnight, as I've been trying to do this week, but ended up having one of those nights when my brain doesn't understand the concept of "off." Around 1:15 I gave it up, turned the lights back on, and started messing around on my computer. Eventually it was 3 a.m. and I had my alarm set for 7:30, so I went back to bed and eventually fell asleep. But of course I was in no mood for waking up four and a half hours later. I got up some time after 8:00, had a nice breakfast, did some reading for class, checked up on a few things for my research, and didn't end up biking to campus until 11:30 — and when I got there I went swimming, ate lunch, and read some more class stuff before finally appearing in my "office" just after 1:00. (I have to put "office" in quotes because it's really just a big room shared by at least a dozen master's students and a handful of Ph.D.s as well. We each get a desk and a computer, and I think there's a phone or two hiding around there somewhere.) Class at 1:30. Today it was Algorithms for Natural Language Processing, which for the next three or four weeks is going to be a review of formal language theory, i.e. everything we did junior year in EECS 343. Project work after class until 4:30, a research talk on the fascinating area of speech synthesis until 5:15, and then a quick bike ride home got me back in time to make chicken and rice stir-fry for dinner at a reasonable time. I noticed this morning that gas in my neighborhood was up to $2.899 a gallon, having jumped 32 cents overnight. There was a good-sized article in the paper today about crude oil possibly getting up to $100 a barrel and $4 gas at the pump being standard before the end of the year. Yesterday they were saying the same about $80 oil and $3 gas, so it appears that the true situation is essentially unknown right now and people are just making up worst-case scenarios. I think at this point, though, we've all had enough sticker shock that it doesn't matter how much higher it goes. I remember getting all excited during the first major price spike — it must have been back in the summer of 2000 — when I saw the super premium gas selling for just over $2, because it was the first time I'd ever seen a gas price starting with a figure "2." I complained during this past year when the price hovered between $1.60 and $1.90, but after the cheap stuff passed $2 again and stayed there I guess I just sort of got used to it and the exact numbers lost all meaning. Well, today I've seen a price starting with "3" for the first time in my life, and the sight really didn't have an effect at all. The only thing I care about now is seeing some kind of drop in the sales of SUVs and ego-boosting trendy gas-wasters in favor of smaller, more responsible cars. |
Saturday, September 3, 2005
11:54 p.m.
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Two things, quickly, before I go to bed: (1) I may come to regret admitting this (semi-)publicly, but I found tonight that movies are still capable of making me cry. Not even particularly sad movies, at that.... I think it's a question of timing and my current mood. (2) This solitary life isn't all that great. I used to think that I'd be happiest just living by myself somewhere, taking walks through tree-lined streets and spending quiet evenings at home reading, drinking tea, listening to music, etc., but this point of view has been somewhat modified in recent years. One wants to go out and do things with people every now and then. This week especially, as all the CMU undergrads came back and started playing frisbee, meeting up on the Cut, or wandering around the streets in groups, it's really hitting home that I miss everyone back at Case. |
Random Stuff #14
Sunday, September 4, 2005, 11:33 p.m.
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Three by O. Henry In the midst of my aimless rambles across the Internet today, I recalled that it's possible to look up the complete text of various stories written by O. Henry. I suppose the copyright's expired in the course of 100 years or so. Since he's one of my favorite authors, I spent a long time after dinner clicking through the pages and reading several stories that I hadn't seen in a while, and thought I'd offer you some random highlights thereof: "A Newspaper Story" — As a college journalist and newspaper reader in general for some years now, I found this one particularly amusing. |
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