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ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
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Monday, September 5, 2005
10:56 p.m.
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Various news tidbits that, taken together, should provide a fairly comprehensive overview of how I spent the long weekend: Our top technology story this evening is that I finally installed Linux on my computer! It only took me 13 months from the time I got my new hard drive to the time I installed it, upgraded the Windows OS, and made it dual boot for Linux too. At this rate, by the time I get all my software re-installed the configuration will be obsolete again and I'll have to buy a new machine. I ended up going with Debian Linux, which seems to have a nice European flavour and be highly modularlised (yay spelling!). So far, I've used it just enough to realize that I can't seem to set the screen resolution to anything bigger than 800 x 600, even though I know my monitor is capable of much more than this. It's kind of annoying when dialog boxes are larger than your entire screen, so I gave up Linux for the Blind after about a half-hour and re-booted back into Windows. In activities, I spent a good chunk of yesterday out exploring the city. I took the busway to downtown, then walked several blocks to Point State Park, which is at the tip of the triangle of land where the Allegheny and the Monongahela come together to form the Ohio River. It's actually bigger than it looks on the map, and there were actually people there walking dogs, playing with kids, sunbathing, etc. (Pittsburgh as a whole seems to be worlds more active than Cleveland.) There was a Pirates game about to start at PNC Park, on the north side of the river, so I eventually found my way over there, walked around the outside of the stadium, then re-crossed the river by the Roberto Clemente Bridge to get back to downtown. Stage Two of the exercise involved riding the T (subway/rapid) across the south river to Station Square and taking the incline up to the top of Mount Washington. The incline was lots of fun, actually; it reminded me of those European cable cars they always seem to have in films. The two inclines in Pittsburgh are like little trolley cars that ride on inclined tracks, except the car has a wedge built onto the bottom of it so you can sit perfectly horizontal. Fantastic views of downtown and whatever else isn't blocked by all the hills! At the top, I walked along the very aptly-named Grandview Avenue to the second incline, which I rode back down. The camera was, natually, along for the ride, so I may be able to post some pictures if I remember to scan them when the film comes back. Culinary arts in the last few days featured spaghetti with Italian sausage on Friday night, and hamburgers for dinner today in honor of Labor Day. I finally have a baking sheet that fits in my oven, so the set of possible meals I can make has been noticibly extended. I went out and got vanilla extract today so I could make chocolate chip cookies, but then realized I'd also need baking soda and butter, which I don't have yet.
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Wednesday, September 7, 2005
11:03 p.m.
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I just read in the paper that gas prices in the Pittsburgh area had dropped by about 10 cents a gallon yesterday. The station by my house had been at $3.199 since Friday morning, but today I noticed the price had actually gone down to $3.099. Good stuff, since I'm going to be doing a lot of driving this weekend. I'll be competing in my second sprint triathlon Sunday morning... in Akron, Ohio, so I have to get there and back, plus I'll be making stops at home and at Case to visit people, collect things to take back to my apartment, etc. I'm actually really looking forward to the weekend, though, because it means I've got some stuff to do for once. Today was actually a good day on the social front. In accordance with a newly-formed plan to actually spend more time in the campus part of campus (and not the ravine-like parking lot sector where my building is located), I ate lunch in the UC and stopped by the office of The Tartan, CMU's student newspaper. They're coincidentially looking for good news writers just now, since a lot of their good reporters graduated in May, so it seems probable that I'll be back to my writing career shortly. After class this afternoon, I was looking to a nice sunny place to eat a sandwhich and read about syntax for a while, but instead I stumbled into the annual activities fair and got myself on a couple more mailing lists. Got all excited to find out that the KGB underground tour is this Friday, as well. (Special note: no, not that KGB. I suppose every time I mention this organization I'll have to provide this link just to keep the government spies away.) Another day of research talks this evening from 5:00 until what ended up being nearly 7 p.m. Luckily we've only got one more session of these monsters, plus a few scattered lectures in the next two weeks, and then the LTI will finally consider us thoroughly hazed and properly integrated into their fold. I'm getting really sick of coming home at 7:15, making dinner, eating, cleaning up, and then finding that it's 9:00. I had to compensate this week by doing my Nerds of Whatever running inside on the treadmill because by the time I got around to running it was too dark to do it outside without tripping on an uneven bit of city sidewalk. To make up for it, the treadmill, at least, gives me a quantitative measure of how much I've improved since the beginning of April, when I started running outside: in a 3.6-mile run I'm 0.6 m.p.h. faster than I used to be, so I can officially complete a 5K in 25:30 now. Past performance (i.e. the July triathlon) seems to indicate I'm actually a bit faster yet, but this figure is the only concrete proof I have. If I'm going to be inside for the rest of the year, I think I'll see if I can push this to the point that I can run 7½-minute miles by next spring. In the News: "The spike in gas prices above $3 a gallon is causing a unique problem at some Pennsylvania stations, where older pumps cannot compute prices above $2.99 a gallon. Gov. Ed Rendell said yesterday that those older stations would be allowed to sell gas by the half-gallon." —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. |
Monday, September 12, 2005
9:49 p.m.
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So... I owe you guys one gigantic post here — as I hinted last time, it's been a busy weekend. It started on Friday with me waking up and realizing I was sick, going to my computer and realizing that the UNIX server I do my work on was down, and attempting to do laundry and realizing that the dryer definitely needs to be run twice in order to produce clothes that might pass as being dry. Then it was off to campus to work on my second 100-page reading assignment. After our last round of research talks, I spent some time discussing running, triathloning, and where to get food in Pittsburgh with Mike before heading over to grab a quick dinner at the University Center ("the UC"; it's essentially Thwing meets Veale meets Nord meets Strosacker meets basement of Tomlinson, so you can do a lot there). Then it was time for the KGB underground tour that I mentioned last time. I'd sort of envisioned this would turn out to be a group of maybe 20 or 30 people wandering around campus for an hour or two, which would make it an excellent opportunity to meet some current club members and get to know them a bit. Not quite. The initial crowd that met in the UC at 8 p.m. numbered probably between 100 and 150, I only recognized five people, and most of them had either forgotten me already or were too busy to care. Not only that, but this tour of theirs went on for five hours! They'd lead us into the atrium of some campus building or other, wait for everyone to cluster round the speaker, and then tell us what the building was and some interesting "facts" or stories behind it. (I put "facts" in quotes because, while they were quite believable, I strongly suspect that many of them were made up. These are exactly the kind of people who would do such a thing, and do a quite good job of it too.) That's not to say the proceedings weren't interesting. One notable highlight was a rather long story about a particularly outrageous KGB Confuse-A-Bagger campaign, in which various members banded together to mess with the minds of prefrosh visiting CMU on a sleeping bag weekend — it was apparently a traditional activity until this particular episode occurred some years ago. The standard talks of this sort were punctuated by minor disturbances: we'd be all gathered in a hallway, or outside next to a tree, or in a courtyard between buildings listening to the tour leaders talk, and then suddenly parts of the crowd would notice additional KGB members waving at us from some impossible place like 20 feet up in a tree, a narrow balcony above a building doorway, or on top of the building itself. While we were in Wean Hall, in the atrium just inside the door, we noticed several times that all three elevators were stopping on our floor and opening their doors at the same time. It was almost exactly 1 a.m. when the KGB president officially declared the tour completed... and announced that the barbecue would be starting outside of Donner immediately after. I'd managed to fall in with a freshman CS major called Sharon by then, and we'd been talking for a bit about various things, so we decided to head over to the barbecue and get some free food. What with the number of people and everything, it was close on to 2:30 by the time we got our hamburgers, and after 3:00 by the time we eventually left. I got home at 3:17. I needed to leave here by 10:00 the next morning in order meet Erin and Ben back in Cleveland, but the late night combined with a worsening sickness made me more than a half-hour late in departing and around 20 minutes late in arriving. We met up at Erin's cool apartment in Waldorf Towers, then headed to the Ohio City Bike Co-Op to borrow road bikes for the triathlon. This place, tucked away in a shed right along the river on Columbus Road, is an extremely laid-back and under-staffed place, maintained mostly by volunteers, so it took quite a while for us to get what we wanted, fix it up, and leave, but it was way worth it in the end. On the way back the Visitation of Friends began: we stopped in at the apartment in the new dorms where Eric, Jessica, Mark, and Nicole live (and were in the process of making dinner), and after that we picked up Kathi from the apartment she shares with Ben and had a dinner party of four at Tommy's. I spent the night at Ben and Kathi's. The day Sunday began at 5:00, and we just made it to the race site and got ready to go in time for the 8 a.m. start. The triathlon went pretty well overall; for full details have a look at my newly-updated triathlons page, which includes a long description of the day. This is getting pretty long itself, now that I look at it. I think I'll need to save the continuation of this story for next time! |
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
10:29 p.m.
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I think I'm going to have to stop studying for a bit and write out tonight's post now. There are several things annoying me at the moment that make reading about grammatical relations impossible — not the least of which are the facts that my apartment seems to have forgotten any concept of life except "stagnant heat" and that I strongly suspect Windows Media Player, in characteristic Microsoft fashion, of making itself the only application on my system capable of playing CDs. It also doesn't seem to come with a compact mode anymore, so if I want to see anything of it I have to let it take up my entire screen. But let's forget about such stupidity for the moment, and I'll pick up where I left off last night. The Triathlons page includes a big long description of Sunday, which I'll probably even expand upon in the coming days, so I guess I should continue the story line with our return to campus around 2:20 on Sunday afternoon. Ben and Erin dropped me off North Side so I could visit Sonnie in Clarke. My visit, unhappily, was brought to a close after like 15 minutes because Sonnie had to leave early for a sorority chapter meeting, and I ended up treating myself (I use the expression slightly sarcastically) to a 30-minute walk from Clarke to Bellfield Avenue, where I'd kept my car. Some things I noticed in my journey across campus: (1) after years of student complaints they finally fixed the sidewalk in front of ZBT, and (2) the sidewalks leading up to the back entrance (road side) of Adelbert Hall have been repaved in asphalt, which somehow necessitated the removal of the small flower bed in front of the door that formerly contained — I especially love this part — a tree that was specially planted there as part of an Earth Day ceremony about three years ago. So much for ecology, then. I had nothing else to do on campus, so I drove home for an early dinner with my parents and two siblings who managed to be around. I was starting to get a serious headache from blowing my nose and breathing through my mouth all day by that point, so I escaped just after 7:00 for the drive back to Pittsburgh. Back here, I felt so awful that I left all my stuff in the sitting room and went to bed at 10:00. And that completed my weekend. Some interesting rambles this afternoon. After class I spent some quality time with Radford at a picnic table on the Cut before wandering into Hunt Library to check my e-mail. While there, I happened to note that the stacks included back issues of the British magazine "Gramophone," so I pulled out the volume for 1965 (the oldest they had) and paged through it a bit. All the ads for record players, tape decks, LPs, etc. listed prices in that weird £/s/d notation that indicates pounds, shillings, and pence in an extremely non-decimal way. This got me wondering exactly how many ds were in an s and so on, so I pulled up Wikipedia and read several pages about British currency. Turns out their money wasn't decimalized (so that 1 pound = 100 pence and that's it) until February 15, 1971! Before that, there were 12 pence (abbreviated d from an old Roman coin) in a shilling and 20 shillings in a pound, along with scads of other strange quantities like guineas, sovereigns, and crowns that had been produced at various periods over the last thousand years or so. The story of "Decimalisation Day," aside from being its own Wikipedia article, was also reported in contemporary news stories from the BBC that are linked to Wikipedia. From there, it was a natural step to the history of the U.S. dollar, which in turned linked to a site that analyzes the "coolness" of an eight-digit U.S. bill serial number. As you might guess, this kept me occupied until it was time to go home for dinner. |
Thursday, September 15, 2005
6:32 p.m.
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This has not been my week for cooking. I bought a canister of bread crumbs on Monday afternoon, so I figured I could make fried eggplant that night and pork chops some other night this week when I didn't feel like something quick and boring. I'd never actually fried anything before, but it's a pretty basic concept so I didn't think it would be that hard. Well, the eggplant I had wasn't anywhere close to ripe, so it came out tasting really bad — at least the ones that the breading stuck to did. I ate less than half of what I'd made, threw out the rest, and then threw out the rest of the eggplant. Since today's the 15th, I've been in my apartment a month now, so I was going to celebrate with a breaded pork chop. Mindful of the Failed Eggplant Experiment, this time I checked a cooking site online for the exact procedure. There were about a dozen recipes for breaded pork chops, so I read them all and averaged the results. The common concensus was to dip the meat in a beaten egg, then coat it with bread crumbs, then fry it in a pan "over medium-high heat" with oil for 10 minutes on a side. Gosh, these cooks don't know what they're talking about! After three minutes in the pan I noticed all the blood from the bone was dripping out and spreading through the bread crumbs on the top. Something that looked like fat was coming out of the side of the chop and making really scary sizzling noises as it went into the oil. After five minutes I flipped the thing to see how we were doing — the other side was already burned solid black. There are certain situations when an individual can do no more on his own, and common sense calls for (or screams for) an expert to be brought upon the scene. Convinced, obviously, that I'd somehow departed from the straight path of culinary delight, I decided to take the advice of the most expert of all experts in kitchendom — viz, I called my mom. The cooking website had indeed lied to me: you're supposed to only brown the chop in the oil by flipping it quite often, then finish the job up with a half-hour in the oven. Or you could leave it in the frying pan, but you have to turn the heat down and still flip frequently. So much for tonight's celebration dinner, then. I didn't feel like scrubbing the frying pan, breading another piece of meat, and trying it all again, so I'm currently eating the fabulously gourmet dish of bread and peanut butter off of a paper towel in front of my computer, prior to restoring some sense of order to the kitchen and running back to campus to meet someone at 8:00. I suppose the only good thing to come out of all of this is that my mom, now fully understanding the seriousness of my plight, is going to send me photocopies of various pages from her cookbook, which hopefully knows the difference between creating a nicely-cooked bit of meat and a six-ounce mass of char-blackened crisp. |
Random Stuff #15
Friday, September 16, 2005, 1:55 p.m.
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This seemed to go over pretty well the last time I did it, so for this Random Stuff entry I'll feature some more excerpts from the backfiles of my written journal. I've felt more like a college student again this week than I had since coming here, so to celebrate I'll feature past entries dealing with the same things I've been doing currently. Giant Reading Assignments. Yesterday in lecture Prof. Matthiesen assigned us reading homework for tomorrow's (Wednesday) lecture. He wrote on the board: "FBS Chapter 17, Callister Ch. 1, Solomons 1.2." FBS, Callister, and Solomons are the names of the authors of our books. I read Section 1.2 in Solomons first because it was only a page, then I finished Callister (10 pgs.) last night. Today I saw Brian at breakfast, and when I asked him about Chapter 17 he said it was 39 pages long! Trivia Club Practice. We played two packets, and about halfway through the second one I started thinking to myself that maybe I really didn't belong in the club since it's a rare event when I answer a toss-up or even know the answer — or have even heard of it at all. Then in the second half of the packet I got three toss-ups! That was a nice change, but I still wonder what I'm doing still being involved with the club when I'm really not at all useful during play. I just like going to tournaments in other cities. —October 24, 2002 Newspaper Work. The April Fools Observer came out on Friday, so Wednesday was production night. I ended up writing three stories for the issue. Karen and Bill did about four hours of production work on Tuesday, so we ran about four hours ahead on Wednesday. I left at about 12:45, and by then layout was almost done. Karen and Bill finished up at about 3:30 in the end, which is when I left for layout two years ago. |
Sunday, September 18, 2005
1:07 p.m.
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A good week; possibly the best I've had since getting here, minus the cooking disasters as reported on Thursday. The continued non-functionality of our server means I've had almost no project work to do, but I ended spending a lot of time that would have gone to research in trying to buy a futon for my apartment — I know how I can fit one into my sitting room, and I found one I can stomach paying for, but there's no way for me to fit into my car to cart it home from Monroeville. This Buick of mine, I'd be willing to bet, actually has less cargo room than my two-door Escort. That's right: the one we called the Sardinemobile back in high school would have been able to carry the futon box or my computer monitor box, two things that come nowhere close to fitting in the Buick. So the actual buying of the couch will have to wait until my parents and their minivan come to visit me. On to a wrap-up of the weekend, then. KGB's weekly Friday 7 p.m. event was something called "Get Board, Get Carded," which roughly translates as "Nerdy Game Night in Porter Hall." I got there about 20 minutes after it started, and everyone was already divided into groups and intently playing a whole slew of those stereotypical table-top nerd games that come in black boxes with gothic gold lettering. The only game I actually recognized was Scrabble, and after a few more late people came in we were able to get a round going, the highlight of which was me scoring 69 points by using the Z tile with a triple word score. Afterwards, we wandered into another room where someone else was looking for people to play a Russian card game with a name that sounded like "Durak," so I got in on that for a while. The evening concluded with me joining a never-ending game of something called Apples to Apples, which was so easy to join and quit that people were coming in and out all the time. Some time after 11:00 a trip to an Indian restaurant in Oakland was suggested because they gave half off the entire food menu after a certain time of night. That excursion concluded around 12:45, and I ended up catching the CMU shuttle (= Greenie equivalent) to get home at 1:00. Yesterday, after the requisite sleeping in, I spent a day touring the eastern suburbs in a combination of futon shopping and partying. It was at the Value City Furniture in Monroeville (= Chapel Hill equivalent) that the discoveries described in the first paragraph took place. I also got to increase to three the number of total strangers who have commented on me having an "English" accent: this time it was the saleslady at Value City. College must have permanently goofed up my phoneme set or something, because even friends and family back home have told me I have an accent. Anyway, I finished the futon business at 12:30, but wasn't due at a barbecue being put on by a second-year LTI student in Penn Hills until 2:00, so I wasted the intervening time wandering around Monroeville Mall and browsing through the offerings at Barnes & Noble. The barbecue was a pretty good time. Pretty much all of the first-year American students formed a subgroup from the rest of the party, which I suppose gave us a chance to know each other a bit better outside of academics — although we did talk a good bit about the class we're all in together. In the middle of a discussion on advisors I found out that Emil is extrememly fluent in French and was looking for someone else to practice conversation with; this signalled the departure of the two of us from the main group several times on French-language dialogues that (I think) either amused or annoyed the others. My final conclusion was that my French should be a whole lot better than it is after studying the language for eight years. And now on to all that homework I've been ignoring.... |
Monday, September 19, 2005
11:07 p.m.
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I'm having a hard time getting myself motivated to do work, both school and research, so I've been spending a disproportionate amount of time mucking around on my computer and finding distractions around the apartment. These have had some small benefits, though. I forced myself to go swimming yesterday afternoon, for example, and — even better — forced myself to work on swimming the "right" way with my face in the water. Can so far only do this for 100 yards at a time before spectacular breathing failure, but am beginning to understand the nature of this failure and how it might be corrected. Then I came home and baked chocolate chip cookies, which activity has the clear positive result of giving me a jarfull of good stuff to eat for free. Have you ever tried mixing cookie dough with one of those old-style manually-cranked hand beaters? Not for the weak in heart... or perhaps weak in wrist would be a better description. The only way I was able to do it in the end was by placing the mixing bowl inside a copier box on my kitchen floor, then putting my foot inside the box next to the bowl so that the bowl couldn't move anywhere. While reading the recent posts on cmu.misc.market, a bulletin board for buying and selling random stuff, I came across a mummy bag being sold for $35. The one Erin bought online cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $100, so I figured this one was a deal worth looking into. Net result, as you might guess: I'm now the proud owner of a 28-ounce blue-purple-ish sleeping bag that could stand to be washed before being used again. So much smaller and lighter than the bag I had been using. Of course, when I got home from picking the thing up this evening, I had to waste some more time in looking for places to go camping that are about halfway between Cleveland and Washington D.C. Anyone for a trip to Ohiopyle State Park in October? I guess I should also mention, for completeness, that instead of doing my reading assignment last night I reworked the Textbook Quotes page to make it a little less... juvenile looking. Its address is changed as well to something that makes a little more sense. The ugly CWRU Professor Quotes page is next in line for overhaul. Read All About It! My first article for The Tartan was published today; it's a story I co-wrote with another new reporter. He did all but one of the interviews, and I served more as a writing coach and fact-getter. The overall result, which you can peruse yourself here courtesy of The Tartan Online, was pretty good and got a few compliments from some of the editors. I was pleasantly shocked to find it running in the upper right corner of the front page in the print edition. |
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
11:29 p.m.
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I think I may have run 6000 m (= 3.73 miles) today in 28:11. This is 7.94 m.p.h., or the same pace as running a 5K in 23:29. Either I miscounted my laps around the track, the track isn't 400 m long, the clock on the scoreboard was off, or I'm just a good bit faster than I thought. Probably one of the first three, although I suppose it's possible that I got a boost in speed from the atmosphere. All the treadmills in the UC were being used, so I craftily snuck outside and onto the CMU track that surrounds the football field. The football team was having a practice, some organized group of athletes were running in circles up and down the bleachers, and a few unofficial people like me were circling the track, so it was a pretty hard-core environment overall. The other random tidbit of news I want to report is that another glimpse into Nicole's mind-bogglingly complete world of fiction has enticed me to pick up some notes I made over the past year and try to extract a short novel or medium-length story from them. This will probably come to nothing more than a half-completed Chapter 1 sitting around on my computer's hard drive until the end of time, but there's nothing wrong in trying. I can usually sketch out a scene or two and develop a set of characters, but then I stop dead when I realize I don't have any idea what to do with them. What's the plot? Where's the conflict? How do the characters change? What do they learn? A book needs to kind of be about something in order to justify its existence. I suppose that's why anything I've actually managed to complete so far has been the shortest of the short stories, the sort of quick vignette or abrupt contrast study that O. Henry was putting together 100 years ago. I think I've got one of these at home that ran to three pages typed, and I know of a few others that didn't even make it off the first page. Within that small amount of space it's pretty easy to set up a scene, make a conclusion, and end without having to worry too much about a grand theme — sort of like in poetry, where the point is to share an image or experience without exactly saying what it's meant to be. But we'll try the book thing again, I guess, just to see what happens; if nothing else, I'll have yet another way to avoid doing my homework! |
Thursday, September 22, 2005
11:14 p.m.
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So much for all the homework and such I needed to get done last night. I went to trivia practice from 7 to 9 as usual, and was planning to bike straight home and pull out the schoolwork, but then Sharon and I ended up sitting on the concrete wall by the tennis courts and talking about various and random things. Then someone else came by and said it was midnight, and we realized we'd been sitting there for three hours! Definitely good times — after two weeks at trivia club and two weeks at The Tartan, I'm starting to feel like I know, and am known by, a measurable number of people. Now if I could just get the names of the buildings and res halls down, we'd be in good shape. I was able to get my homework done this morning, so it was still turned in complete and on time in class this afternoon, but the newspaper stuff I was planning on doing in the morning got pushed to after class, instead of work on research stuff like I usually try to do. Turned out this wasn't such a bad thing either, because I ended up running over to the Tartan office to see if someone could decipher the building abbreviations from the online directory. Apparently, the Powers that Be around here find it vital to waste one slot in a three- or four-letter abbreviation for the word "Hall." So instead of shortening Hamburg Hall to something sensical like "HBG" or "HAM," they produce "HBH." In another stunning bit of logic, Doherty Hall is "DH," while Doherty Apartments are "DGH" (yay for random letters) and Donner Hall is just plain "D." But I digress. On my way to the business school building I ran into Sharon and Lauren, both trivia people, so we ended up talking for a while... to the point that someone who'd passed us near the beginning of our discussion went off to recitation, came back, and asked us why we didn't have any homework to do. I eventually went back to the newspaper office to put together the miniscule part of my story that I could, and therefore ended up meeting some of the other staff members and getting to understand the general operation the paper better. The office, apparently, almost always has someone in it, so I'll probably be stopping there a lot to do my articles right on campus instead of biking the mile and a half to use the phone at my apartment. I did manage to put in an hour's worth of research work this evening, and I can finally compile the multi-engine C++ code without getting any errors. Next up is the Java wrapper that calls the C++, so I can see if the thing actually runs or not. The current most annoying part is that my 600-MB network space is telling me it's full whenever I try to put more than 11 MB of data on it, so I had to move everything over to a local server. Which is something I was trying to not do, incidentally, since the last local server our stuff was on, after crashing repeatedly for almost a week, was diagnosed with a bad motherboard and is still in the clutches of the SCS Facilities people. Quote of the Week! [Two women pushing large strollers containing a total of seven kids walk by.] |
Friday, September 23, 2005
11:42 p.m.
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I hate to say it, but KGB was a little bit disappointing this week. Today's event was called "Linear Regression," in which we were supposed to revert to the elementary school versions of our former selves who played four-square and dodgeball. That lasted about... an hour and a half before the games broke down. Not that they were going that strongly to begin with. I joined a group of four-square people, and we played kind of half-heartedly with between two and four people until someone suggested a version of dodgeball, which ended up being complicated enough that the game only lasted one round because people drifted away as soon as they were out. Then followed an interesting interval of talking about random subjects, during which I learned more than I ever thought existed about unusual varieties of pet rabbits and listened to some fun Tom Lehrer songs I hadn't heard before. For the record, I seem to be just about the only person who hasn't memorized "The Elements." At some point, Val (who was playing me the songs and talking about the rabbits) and I noticed that everyone seemed to be moving towards Wean Hall in order — as we ascertained once we got there — to start a cluster rave. This warranted some explanation, since I couldn't quite mesh the concept of a standard university computer lab with a dance party involving loud music and colored lights, and was therefore able to make no sense out of what everyone was all excited about. Silly me; this is CMU, a place that caters to people who were born with a laptop in one hand and a manual on how to be a UNIX sys admin in the other. So I guess it shouldn't be too surprising that someone figured out a way to get every computer in the lab to simultaneously play the same music while all their monitors displayed cross-fading colors at various rates. Turn off the lights, et voilà: cluster rave. The UNIX cluster in Wean has a set of sliding wall-like doors in the middle of it, so while the rave was being carried out in one half, the other side of the room served as home base for the dozen or so of us who weren't into the dancing thing. Some people started playing Internet Scrabble, but the game had already gotten underway before someone pointed me to the site, and I had nothing to do for about a half-hour and was considering going home before 10:30. Even after I managed to play a game against another guy who beat me by a good 60 or 70 points, the overall scene wasn't that exciting so I did go home. By then, people were either in the rave room or intently clicking away at their terminals. Coming home early did have some advantages, though. I made myself a cup of tea and talked with Camellia online until she decided to go to bed a few minutes ago. It's 12:50 a.m., so that doesn't sound like a bad idea! |
Sunday, September 25, 2005
4:38 p.m.
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Three and a half cheers are in order this weekend for Ross and a fantabulous bike ride he invited me on yesterday. I forgot to mention Friday that I finally swapped IM names with some CMU people, and I'd not been awake for more than 45 minutes Saturday morning when Ross sent me a message asking if I was interested in trying out a loop through the city he'd worked out. Earlier in the week I'd been reading a giant compilation of bike routes all over Allegheny County, but was thinking I didn't so much want to try most of them alone because I don't know a clean way out of the city. There's supposedly a 14-mile loop of trails here in town, but maps I've seen so far show that a whole bunch of sections aren't actually finished yet, so there aren't many long stretches where you can go without stopping. What I'm trying to say is that Ross's invitation was perfectly timed, and about 45 minutes after his IM the two of us were heading east on Penn Avenue towards Point Breeze. We eventually hit the corner of Frick Park and rode through a network of dirt and gravel trails until coming out right by the freeway on Braddock Avenue. There was supposed to be a connection to a trail on the north side of the Mon (= Monongahela River), but after enquiring the way we found out we'd managed to come out on the wrong side of the park. In order to get to the other side we had to climb a ravine trail, which I think my hill training in Schenley Park a few weeks ago actually prepared me for. Then we zipped down Beechwood Avenue from near Forbes all the way to Brown's Hill Road, which we took down the hill and across the high-level bridge to the Waterfront. (A lovely ride all the way from Forbes, but I don't know if I'd recommend going back up that way!) We came back by going along the Waterfront shops until the road ended, brute-forcing our way along the river to another road, which fortunately connected us to East Carson Street (another good ride if you don't mind an endless stream of cars zipping by at 40 m.p.h.), which led to the Hot Metal Bridge and the Eliza Furnace Trail back in Oakland. From there we made the climb up Neville Street right by the CMU campus and headed down Fifth Avenue into Shadyside. And so back home, for a total ride of 24 miles with only three real climbs — something I wouldn't have thought possible in this city. So now I've probably bored 90 percent of the people who read this, since that's about the proportion who live somewhere other than Pittsburgh, but I wanted to have our trip down in print somewhere in case I ever decide to try it again. The vertical component of the Pittsburgh street system often makes designing a route by looking at a map impossible, since streets that look like they cross each other on paper sometimes don't because one of them is a bridge. I've been led astray, even by Google Maps, a few times just for this reason. For the Climatologist. On a slightly related note, we've been enjoying generally good — and even hot — weather for four weeks straight. It's the last week in September, and the only signs of fall I've noticed so far are (1) that McIntosh apples have finally appeared at the grocery store and are going for 89¢ a pound, (2) apple cider is consequently also in stock, and (3) the sun sets way too early. I guess there was also last Saturday morning, when I came out of the house for my futon-shopping and barbecue-attending trip and noticed that the air had a fall-like feeling for the first time, but that hasn't been repeated yet. |
Monday, September 26, 2005
6:49 p.m.
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Of course, I had to open my big mouth and start talking about the weather, thereby putting the official hex on it. Today it rained, I forgot to budget enough time to take the bus to class, and just barely made it to Wean for the start of Grammars & Lexicons at 1:30. I thought I was actually going to be late by five or 10 minutes, but I guess the 71A must have figured out how to go slow enough to take advantage of reverse time dilation. Which is quite possible, if you've ever tried to ride that particular route; sometimes it feels like it would be faster to crawl backwards down Centre Avenue in a lane of traffic than to take the bus. I'm writing this from my "office" (one of the master's student labs) in Newell-Simon, my presence by the phone being required until around 7:00. My advisor is spending the week at a giant project meeting in San Francisco, and is giving a talk and possibly a demo of some of our stuff there today, so he asked Justin and me to be available in case the server went down. The idea, I suppose, is that he can call us and we can get it running again before the people at the meeting get upset and leave. Staying here until 7:00 — two more minutes — is actually pretty arbitrary, since Alon said he wasn't sure what time this afternoon he'd actually be showing the demo, but the server's been running for a week straight without any trouble, and I doubt too much will be going on after 4 p.m California time if they've already been in a bunch of meetings all day. My second article was published in The Tartan today. It's on a proposed budget for the city of Pittsburgh that the mayor just released, and depending on who you talk to the article is either very well written or completely irrelevant. (This comes from reading the comments the Tartan editors and copy staff have been posting on the intranet where the articles get turned in.) I'd like to state at once that the second group is absolutely right: the article is extremely irrelevant insofar as I wasn't able to tie it to CMU or students in any way, and the only reason the letters "CMU" even show up in the thing is because I interviewed a professor here as an expert in budget matters, but I would counter with the fact that city news is still newsworthy in a university newspaper — especially if most students don't read the Post-Gazette, which in the end didn't even address the matter from the same angle I did. I'll leave the well-written-ness judgement as an exercise to the reader, although personally I think the fact that I just constructed what I assume to be a correctly punctuated 100-word sentence (check the last one) should count for something! It is now 7:14 and dark outside, so I think I should be making good my escape and heading over to the UC to do my Nerds of Tin swimming. |
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
10:31 p.m.
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An average day today — clear and cool to the point that it was actually cold in my apartment when I woke up this morning, but I guess that comes of sleeping with all the windows open. It was a nice change, actually, because I was able to have a cup of tea without overheating while I read the paper after breakfast. Good times. Class today, however, was not. My out-of-town advisor also teaches the Algorithms for NLP class that I'm in, so today he was replaced by the TA, a Ph.D. student whose office is in a small room off of the master's lab where I sit. I went to one of his recitations a few weeks ago, which was all quite coherent and easy to follow, but he must not have prepared so much for this lecture because it was pretty awful. It started out OK, but then he wanted to go through a series of proofs, each of which had to be shown in both directions because they were ifs and only ifs, and his only guide for doing this was our professor's notes. The TA definitely seemed to not know how to do the stuff alone, so stuff was appearing on the board with little or no explanation or context. And then he started getting his Greek letters confused, saying "nu" and writing etas all over the place. And then we got into shades of Dr. Singer's Calc III class: I discovered to my annoyance that the TA's lowercase epsilons and "element of" symbols, which were already indistinguishable from each other, were also idential to his lowercase sigmas. The net result is that the margin of my notes is full of stuff like "Losing it...," "Lost," and "Lost again," and I eventually just threw down my pen in disgust and didn't write anything else for the rest of the class. After dinner I went back to campus to go running at the UC and noticed that what appeared to be a soccer game was going on at the stadium just outside the window. I tried following the scoreboard, but the score never changed and I couldn't figure out what posessed the clock to count down from the various values it decided to count down from. When I first got there, it showed 13:30 left in what looked like Period 1; after reaching zero it was reset to 10:00 and counted down again, still showing Period 1; then it jumped to an incredible 45:00 and started going down again, with that "1" still floating off on the side underneath the score. So my question is: what exactly is the structure of a soccer game? Is it in fact an infinite contest in which neither team scores nor has the satisfaction of moving onto the second period, or half, or whatever they're called? That would certainly explain why soccer people always look like they're in fabulous shape, but I'd suspect the game would get rather depressing after a while — say three or four hours. Or is it perhaps that the time clock is hooked to some sort of random number generator, so the teams play various first periods for various lengths of time until they get one that they both like before moving on to the second? I think I shall have to consult Wikipedia. In the meantime, I leave you with: Fact of the Day. Do you know what baby pandas look like? I had no clue, until Val, who seems to be my definitive source on small furry animals, passed me this picture of a newborn panda. Have a look. Apparently, when they're born, pandas are the size of a stick of butter. The tail, however, must be exempt from the general growth spurt that obviously follows, because the adult doesn't seem to have one to speak of. |
Random Stuff #16
Tuesday, September 27, 2005, 11:56 p.m.
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It is absolutely mind-boggling how much you can jump from topic to topic on the Internet with such humorous results. Throw in some IMing, and you've got yourself a first-rate bonus post! Thus Spake Wikipedia One of the first things I did after writing the last post was to call up the Wikipedia article on soccer. It redirects to the "football" article, and way down under the "Duration" section you can find the following information, which proves, as I speculated, that the game is close enough to infinite for most practical purposes. A standard adult football match consists of two periods (known as halves) of 45 minutes each. There is usually a 15-minute break between halves, known as half time. The end of the match is known as full-time. If tied at the end of regulation time, in some competitions the game may go into extra time, which consists of two further 15-minute periods. But What if You Don't Speak French? Almost immediately afterwards, Mark IMed to set me straight on the game procedure, and he ended up making a reference to the FIFA rules. Now FIFA is an acronym for a group going under the outlandish bilingual entitlement of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association. As I pointed out, "Fédération Internationale de Football" is perfect French, and "Football Association" is nicely English, but putting them together is just... Canadian. It's also a perfect inspiration for a new T-shirt: "Agence Redundancy Agency." You're Not Much Better Off in English, Though I visited the CMU athletics page to see if that soccer game I saw mightn't have been just a scrimmage, but it's listed as a real match against a place called Allegheny. The highlight of the page, however, was a beautiful sentence that made me laugh out loud: The Carnegie Mellon football team surrenders their first shutout since the 2003 season with a 6-0 loss to Franklin & Marshall Saturday, September 24 at Sponaugle-Williamson Field. This is inspiring because, no matter what you find wrong with it, there's something else that you didn't see that is equally wrong. I was first attracted to it because of the name of the field made about as much sense as the Toledo Mud Hens, but see how much fun Mark had with it when I IMed it to him: They surrendered the shutout... The 2003 season had a 6-0 loss to Franklin & Marshall Saturday... September 24 will be held at Sponaugle-Williamson Field |
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