ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
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Friday, September 30, 2005
11:38 a.m.
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OK, I am telling everyone out there who reads this to go right now and download Google Earth. Once doing so, you have my personal guarantee that you will never do any useful work at your computer again, and the Google servers will go into overload and crash horribly because of all the people who are trying to access their satellite data. For the uninitiated, Google Earth expands on the wonderfulness that is Google Maps and gives you a satellite representation of the entire planet, plus meta-information like roads and landmarks and geographic features for the U.S., selected other countries, and various international cities. With the keyboard controls, you can zoom in and out, pan in the four usual directions, or tilt the view anywhere between looking straight down and looking straight horizontal so you can see hills and mountains. The net result is, with some practice, you can fly around like you're in an airplane, moving along the route you take to work, exploring the gorges of the Grand Canyon, going up the giant hill on Negley Avenue, etc., etc. It should be illegal to make a software program this cool and give it away for free.
A side effect of using the flying part too much, however, is that when you then view normal webpages, your brain will interpret them as flat planes of text that you're hovering over and looking at through your browser window at a slight angle. And instead of scrolling you'll expect to be moving your own vantage point further down in the (stationary) text rather than moving the text up.
In other news, we're coming up on a rather busy weekend here at Apartment Four. A nice KGB member with a car that's actually useful volunteered to drive me out to Monroeville tomorrow to pick up my futon, so I will probably end up spending the rest of the weekend putting it together, figuring out the six things that I did wrong, taking it apart again, re-assembling it, losing the last available and vitally important screw, running out to buy another one at the hardware store, discovering that the particular kind I need isn't available to the general public, and so on. Barring at least some of these mishaps, though, I should finally have something in my sitting room to sit on besides one of those collapsable camp chairs you get at K-Mart for $8.95. Since I've lived here now for almost seven weeks, I suppose it's about time.
This afternoon I'm going to the LTI picnic, and then out to a sushi restaurant with KGB, but the rest of the weekend that's not used in tangling with my new furniture will probably feature a sea of homework, reading assignments, and research work that I should have done last night and this morning instead of playing around with three-dimensional arial views of every place I've ever lived.
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Saturday, October 1, 2005
7:44 p.m.
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It's Saturday night, and I'll be posting this entry immediately after writing it, so I guess it would fit in if I called it "Weekend Update."
As the fact that I was posting on a Friday morning indicates, I wasn't in the mood much for work yesterday. Something horrible screwed up my sleep schedule either Wednesday or Thursday night, causing me to not fall asleep until past 2 a.m. and therefore not want to wake up until after 10:00, so I ended up spending the part of Friday morning I was awake for flying around in Google Earth as per my last post. At 3:00 I roused myself sufficiently to bike down to Schenley Park for the LTI's annual picnic. Aaron and Nimish were already throwing a frisbee back and forth, so I joined them in that. Eventually one of the professors and another student joined in, so we had a nice pentagon going until people started wandering away again in the direction of the snacks. Dinner was eventually served a bit before 5:00 — by then there were a lot more people — and they put out ice cream for dessert soon afterwards.
I was just finishing my slightly-raspberry-tinged chocolate when I discovered it was 6:20, making me late for another food appointment: KGB's event this week was a trip to a sushi restaurant in Shadyside, and we were supposed to be at the UC by 6 p.m. (In the quirkiness of this particular organization, this would be expressed as "1800" in e-mail and as "18" in speech.) I managed to get there before they left, at least, and we all walked to a place called Sushi Too on Walnut Street. Someone had made the reservation for 30, so they'd given us an entire upper room with short tables and chairs with no legs, and the fact that there were only 14 of us seemed to annoy the waitresses. The total bill, two and a half hours later, including tip surpassed $400, so they shouldn't have had too much to complain about. Since I'd just eaten a full meal at the picnic, I confined myself to an order of vegetarian rolls served with a virtually unlimited supply of green tea for a total of $6 including tip.
Today I was awake and out of bed before 8:00 due to Alisa's invitation to go shopping down in the Strip District. The area is home to a number of specialty food stores and Saturday mornings are the big business times, during which both sides of Penn Avenue for about five blocks looks roughly like and is as crowded as the West Side Market. My new favorite store is the Pennsylvania Macaroni Company, which is like Heinen's crossed with the West Side Market deli shops. They carry enough basic groceries at decent prices for me to almost do my regular shopping there, and their lunchmeats are actually cheaper than Giant Eagle's.
I got back home around 11:00, and around noon Pat from KGB came by for the Great Futon-Transporting Excursion, during which it was confirmed that my car is just stupid — we fit both the disassembled frame and the futon's mattress into Pat's unassuming-looking Ford Taurus. Pat also helped me carry the stuff up to my apartment, and then I spent a rather frustrating hour or so putting the futon together and coaxing the mattress to stop trying to knock over my kitchen chair and sit nicely on top of its frame. But now the whole thing — minus a hook, which didn't seem to do too much in the first place, that no longer fits because I put either the back or the bottom on upside-down — is all together and is rather nicely occupying an otherwise blank wall in my sitting room. Weekend guests, do your worst!
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Sunday, October 2, 2005
10:26 p.m.
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A sequence of events roughly similar to what happened last Tuesday night has resulted in me declaring cricket to be the Sport of the Day. Or maybe of the Week — it depends on how long I have to wait for this to happen a third time. Today I was once again running in the fitness room at the UC, and there was once again some sort of organized sport going on on the field below the window. This one I recognized pretty quickly as cricket, and decided to amuse myself by watching it and seeing, based on what I already know about the game, if I could figure out how it works. Turns out I wasn't able to actually synthesize any of the game's rules and was only able to develop a primitive intuition that no one ever gets bowled or run out unless they're really slow. Wikipedia was able to furnish most of the rules, format, and position names, so hopefully the next time I read one of my British books that devotes an entire chapter to the retelling of a cricket match I'll be able to follow along and make some sense of it.
Other than that, today was pretty useless. I meant to do a whole lot of work starting right after church, stopping only for necessary food breaks, but this was foiled almost right from the start by me not being ready in time for 10:00 mass and having to settle for the one at noon. That meant I didn't get home to eat lunch until 1:45, and it was past 2:30 by the time I was ready to start working. I wrote out my Grammars & Lexicons homework (I might start calling that class just "G&L" from now on), washed the dirty dishes that were starting to take over the kitchen again, and then went to campus to go running. When I got back it was time for dinner, followed by a miniscule amount of further work on the G&L assignment before I got bored and wandered back to my computer — black hole of productivity that it is — and frittering away more than two hours of being about to get started on some research work.
I think the problem is that I don't find my research work exciting. At all. The project has been underway for a year already, so everything I'm looking at is someone else's code, someone else's idea, and the fact that there's no documentation and very few instructions is someone else's fault. I can finally compile and run my own copy of the whole mess, so my advisor has specified some modifications he wants me to start making. Unfortunately, these aren't really interesting modifications, and he hasn't given me any sort of an idea of when he wants them done by, so I can't even force myself to work on them by treating them as a formal class assignment with a fixed due date. I tried setting arbitrary goals for myself last week and the week before, but it doesn't work because I know they're fake and nothing will happen if I don't meet them on time. Even the knowledge that I'm costing the project like half a gazillion dollars a month in tuition and stipend payments can't rouse me into much action.
What I'm hoping for this week is one of two scenarios. First off, I think I'll try putting myself on a more rigid schedule; the same indifference that's affecting my work has also allowed me to not bother showing up on campus until my 1:30 class and, as we saw on Friday, not going at all on non-class days. If I can get myself into "the office" around 10:00, let's say, maybe I can work until 12:30 and treat myself to a lunch out somewhere, then come back and work again after class from 3:00 until 5:00. That at least will remove the temptation of having my home computer around to waste time on. Otherwise, we will have to recourse to the second scenario, which is that my advisor finds out how little I've done this week, gets upset, and that turns out to be enough to shock me into action, so to speak. It would definitely not be good to be getting into trouble after four weeks on the job.
So I guess I'll see how it goes. I really hope something starts to change this week, because my motivation has been at zero long enough now to get me slightly worried. Sorry if I've bored you with my Marvin-like rambling, by the way: this entry is getting longer than I was aiming for, but I think I needed to get this stuff out somewhere just for my own sanity. And to provide a valid excuse for not doing anything useful in the past half-hour!
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Tuesday, October 4, 2005
11:05 p.m.
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There are several serious things — like my meeting with my advisor yesterday, the difficulty I'm having in getting a story assignment for The Tartan this week, or the pure antagonism that is Java — but I think I'm going to put them all off a bit in favor of a more light-hearted discussion of one of the peculiarities of the Carnegie Mellon campus.
It seems that CMU has given rise to a mutant breed of little red go-carts, sort of like the things CWRU Printing Services, Security, and the snow-clearing people use. Except the ones here, instead of quietly running off of battery power like the ones at Case, are fueled with a mixture of gasoline and malevolence, causing them to shoot round obstacles and into crowds of pedestrians at alarmingly high rates of speed. I've been nearly run down more than once just walking between Newell-Simon Hall and the UC — one even came flying at me up the ramp behind the Old Student Center this afternoon when I was walking back from the post office and prompted me to write this in the first place. So, "Doc wants to know" who is driving these things and what they're used for. They don't seem to be clearly marked with the name of any official organization, and I definitely saw one a few weeks ago stopped behind the UC while the driver (who looked like a student to me) had a conversation with two girls who had been walking by. Not that I would mind fast go-carts being available for general hire: they'd be a nice way to get around once the snow makes it harder to bike to campus, and it would be addictively enjoyable to watch all the slow people flee in terror (and actually get out of my way) as I come zooming down the colonnade in front of Purnell.
So now we'll get to the serious stuff. Meeting with advisor yesterday: good stuff. It looks like I wrote Sunday's post just in time, because within a day of bemoaning the fact that I need a real deadline to work with I got one. Some of the people at the San Francisco meeting want to start interfacing with our system within a few weeks, so that's how long I have to stabilize the code and get it ready to do something with real data instead of the one bit of test stuff I've been using so far. Yesterday I spent four hours working on project stuff, and put in another solid two this afternoon, so now I don't feel so bad.
Which leads to a second bit of serious stuff: the annoyance of Java. This one is for Mark, since his hatred of that particular language is well-documented. Part of the reason why I was able to work for four hours yesterday is that it was taking forever to accomplish the simplest of things. Here's what I wanted to do: ask the user for an arbitrarily long list of numbers, then find out the total and normalize them so that the sum is 1. A few extra debugging lines to make sure it's computing properly wouldn't be a bad idea for now, either. This is the kind of thing I can put together in C++ in about a minute and a half — not even worth mentioning. Ah, but in Java, my friends — I am not making this up — it took me an hour and 10 minutes to produce the following:
//Set up buffered reader for the console:
BufferedReader b = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in));
//Get number of engines:
System.out.print("\nHow many translations? ");
int numEngines = Integer.valueOf(b.readLine()).intValue();
//Get their confidence scores:
double confScores[] = new double[numEngines];
double confSum = 0.0;
for(int i = 1; i <= confScores.length; i++) {
System.out.print("\nScore for translation " + i + "? ");
confScores[i-1] = Double.valueOf(b.readLine()).doubleValue();
confSum += confScores[i-1];
}
//Normalize the scores:
System.out.print("\nThe sum of scores is " + confSum + ". Normalizing...");
for(int i = 0; i < confScores.length; i++) {
confScores[i] = confScores[i] / confSum;
System.out.print("\nScore " + i + " normalized to " + confScores[i]);
}
The chief culprit in all this is the supreme silliness of the Double.valueOf().doubleValue() syntax, which is certifiably the ugliest thing I've seen since I looked at some Perl code a few weeks ago. It took me about a half an hour of shaking my fist at my monitor and making exasperated gasping sounds to track down why, when I entered "3" for the number of translations, the program evaluated this for voter intent and found that I really meant to say 51. It's because, if you write something clear and obvious like int numEngines = System.in.read(); your poor unsuspecting integer gets loaded with the ASCII value of the next single character from the input stream. And I say, if something this simple is this complicated, what's in store for me when I need to work with more complex things like nested classes and threads and sockets??
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Thursday, October 6, 2005
12:14 a.m.
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Just got back from seeing "An American in Paris" at McConomy — which is like Strosacker, only they show movies usually five nights a week and they only cost $1 with a student ID — and I wanted to post a bit about it before going to bed for the night. "An American in Paris" is a Gene Kelly movie from 1951, coming immediately before "Singin' in the Rain," a Gene Kelly movie from 1952.
The plot of both movies goes something like this. Gene Kelly is in love with Girl A, who performs an initial dance with him in a manner somewhere between coquetteish and reluctant, and eventually Girl A comes to love Gene Kelly as well. Then there is Girl B, who also loves Gene Kelly, but since Gene Kelly does not love Girl B we don't really care about her too much. Person or Situation X threatens to keep Gene Kelly and Girl A apart, but fortunately everyone takes a 16-minute dance break, X goes away, and Gene Kelly and Girl A live happily ever after as far as we can tell.
I'm write something like this because I want this to be a funny post, not because I want to demonstrate that the plot has any fatal flaws in it. "Singin' in the Rain" is actually one of my favorite movies, and I own the soundtrack. "An American in Paris," after tonight's viewing, does fall a little short, though. The characters aren't as well developed, the story line seems more like a quick excuse to tie the songs and dances together, and there are definitely some parts of the 16-minute dance break that I might not like my kids to see, if I had any. The camerawork, on the other hand, is something I wouldn't have expected to be coming out of 1951, and the bright colors in the sets are so arranged that you feel like going into visual seizures. These two things combined almost make the film a forerunner to something like "Moulin Rouge," at least in cinematographic aspects. Touch up the print and the sound a bit, and you'd have a pretty modern-looking film on your hands.
Certainly worth $1 and two hours of time on a Wednesday night in any case, but in the end probably not one that I'll add to the list of movies I really like. Tomorrow's offering in McConomy is a French movie from the same decade called "M. Hulot's Holiday" in English, so if I can spare the time to see it I might end up with another media-themed entry.
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Random Stuff #17
Thursday, October 6, 2005, 10:39 a.m.
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It's Like a Chain Letter, But Without the Postcards
I've been sucked into this interesting and popular "meme," as they call them, by Cheryl; and since I've gotten three people to fill it out about me without penalty, I suppose I should finally pay up and fill it out about someone else. So here you go:
Leave your name and...
1. I'll respond with something random about you.
2. I'll tell you what song/movie reminds me of you.
3. I'll pick a flavor of jello to wrestle with you in.
4. I'll say something that only makes sense to you and me.
5. I'll tell you my first/clearest memory of you.
6. I'll tell you what animal you remind me of.
7. I'll ask you something that I've always wondered about you.
8. If I do this for you, you must post this on your journal.
You'll have to leave me a Live Journal comment by following the link at the top of this page (this works even for people who aren't Live Journal members, thank goodness), and I'll reply there as well. I'm taking the liberty (fun expression!) of making two minor adjustments to the rules. First off, you don't actually have to leave me your name: a Live Journal comment with "Pick me! Pick me!" in it, for example, gets across the same idea without spoiling your secret online identity, if you choose to protect it that way. And second, #8 is optional, so it's up to you whether you want to continue the exponential spread of this thing or not.
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Saturday, October 8, 2005
8:54 a.m.
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I think there's something else living in this apartment besides me. Last night I left a bag of trash on my kitchen floor; this morning when I went in to make some tea I found a small hole in the bottom of the bag and what looks like the remains of some blackberries I threw out a few days ago scattered across the kichen floor. I'm not sure what kind of uninvited animalian houseguest eats moldy fruit, but the presence of one does explain the random crumbs I've been seeing every now and then that I don't remember producing myself....
Quote of the Week!
According to the CDC, the "Bird Flu" is an infection caused by avian (bird) influenza (flu) viruses.
—E-mail from CWRU deputy provost Lynn Singer yesterday morning.
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Sunday, October 9, 2005
11:43 p.m.
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A large amount of this weekend was spent in food-related activities, which will undoubtedly make the next five or six days much more enjoyable when it comes to meal time. Yesterday morning I went with Ross and his housemate Tim to the Strip for breakfast out and then food shopping — we didn't get back until nearly 1:00. We ate, by the way, at a little waffles-and-pancakes diner-style place on 21st Street called Pamela's. The smell inside the place reminded me instantly of going out to breakfast with my family when I was younger. The layout, with straight lines, big windows, rows of small tables, a counter at the front, etc., also very strongly recalled something very American and family-style. And the food, it goes without saying, was a wonderful change from the bowl of cereal and two frozen waffles that I usually eat when I'm home at my apartment.
In the afternoon I baked banana bread, which process caused the dirtying of half of the kitchen utensils and dishware I own, but left my entire apartment smelling like fresh baked goods for the rest of the day.
Today I had a compulsion to make a really good dinner, so before I went to campus to go swimming I made a box of Jell-O chocolate pudding and divided it into filling six little pie crusts I'd gotten at the store last week. After swimming, I went to the store to get some other things, and around 5:45 I started work on the evening's magnum opus: one breaded pork chop, fried in olive oil and decked with rosemary and thyme, served with three of those B-size 4073 potatoes, boiled in water also containing some of the rosemary. The whole followed by the first of those little Jell-O pies topped with Cool Whip, and then later by a slice of banana bread just for fun.
Not quite up to the quality of the wonderful things the Suitemates used to come up with last year, perhaps, but certainly not a bad way to spend an evening. Only now my sink is piled high with dirty dishes again, including that rotary hand-beater that took so long to clean off after the banana bread.
I meant to try to spend four hours after dinner working on research stuff, but it ended up being almost exclusively devoted to chatting on IM. This was actually badly needed, because a big group of up to 10 of us are still planning to go on our annual fall break camping trip in two weeks — except now that we've all been scattered to various universities and real jobs it's a lot harder to get things organized — so when Paul IMed around 8:30 I didn't feel too bad about devoting the next two hours to discussing plans with him and Eric. Then Mark and I bantered back and forth amusing stories about the Middle Ages, with the result that I'm going to be paying a visit to Hunt tomorrow morning to track down a copy of this book.
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Random Stuff #18
Monday, October 10, 2005, 12:07 a.m.
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This fits more into the sort of Random Stuff entries I used to do before developing an interesting preference for quoting the backfiles of my written journal. I saw it on Mark's journal tonight and thought it sounded like fun. These are the results of typing "Greg needs" (including quotes) into Google and excerpting the relevant sentence of some of the results returned. My comments are in italics.
Google's Hierarchy of Needs
Greg Needs Your Help — Donate now!
Greg Needs a Friend — Sounds suspiciously like that landscape painter who used to be on PBS.
Greg needs to go too — This is strangely apt... or at least it was in the winter of 1993. My only acting experience to date was as one of the Cratchitt children in my fifth-grade class production of "A Christmas Carol," in which my only solo line was "I want to go too!"
Greg needs to set up a more extensive experiment if he needs additional evidence. — Seems fair enough; I wouldn't dare go against the scientific method. What am I trying to hypothesize, again?
Greg needs to listen to his basic fisherman instincts — Message from inner self: Cast the line.... Cast it, I say!
Greg needs to be occupied and employed. — Check and check. Life is good that way in grad school.
Greg needs to bring us up to date on his recent work on AHBC — Don't try to give me any more work to do on the side! Three clubs, two classes, and one research project are quite enough for me right now, thank you.
Greg needs to spend time reading some of our ancient texts — Sure. Old books are cool!
Greg needs to kick Karen to the curb. — Might be a bit difficult: the only Karen I know is already 108 miles away, according to Google Maps.
Greg needs some lunch money. — Agreed! Groceries are much more expensive than they've any right to be.
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Monday, October 10, 2005
11:35 p.m.
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My plans for the day were perfunctorily aborted this morning about five minutes after breakfast. I was checking through everyone's away messages when I noticed Dan had posted a new link in his profile. Result: I have now discovered "Questionable Content," one of the trillion and one web comics available for the enjoyment of the nerdier (or stranger) side of the general public. I started reading way back at Episode 1, and didn't stop until I had to pry myself away from the screen once to make lunch and then to go to class at 1:20. More after dinner, concluding with Episode 465 just before 8:00 this evening for a total of two years worth of content. Mark saw the "Questionable Content" quote in my own away message sometime during the day, and it appears he spent a similar amount of time reading the strip today as well! Dan's response, also delivered over IM, was "YEAH!!!! The disease is spreading! Oops. I mean the joy. The joy is spreading!"
I guess I should go into some more detail here, in case any of you are wondering what a fairly normal kid like me is doing getting hard-core (at least for one day) into a web comic revolving mainly around indie music and sex humor. I have to say first that I don't find the more recent strips as funny as the earlier ones: the characters seem to have started acting differently and saying things that to me are way out of... well, character. The combined family history of the main cast is also montrously improbable, at least given the people that I've met in real life, and the recent sequence involving Marten's mom was the most far-fetched of everything.
All that being said, though, I still think it's a nice little strip. Its culture of post-college indie "hipsters" and ex-goths is quite fascinating, and I don't think it's out of line to say that there are some points of Marten's life and personality that sort of line up with mine. In the beginning of the strip, for example, he finds that there are two girls that kind of like him, and he has no clue what to do with the situation because of this whole awkward-with-relationships thing he's got going on — that much I can definitely identify with! Pintsize, his little android PC, looks a lot like Marvin in the new "Hitchhiker's Guide" movie, but without the chronic depression that detracts from his overall cuteness.
I suppose, having rambled on about comics for the last three paragraphs, I should just continue the trend and make it the theme of this entry. I've actually often wanted to draw a comic strip myself, but unfortunately my artistic talent in that line is extremely low. I did once produce an editorial cartoon that was published in my high school newspaper, but the rest of my attempts have just been either rough sketches or quick "one-offs" that wouldn't be part of a coherent series or anything — an example of the former would be the following specimen that I did quickly on the back of a sheet of paper a few weeks ago:
This is not a finished product, but I have a wretched time drawing people so I don't think I could make it too much better. I've actually got some more ideas in the same series as this one, so maybe if I get around to it I'll try to draw them and post them somewhere as well.
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Tuesday, October 11, 2005
9:53 p.m.
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The creepy moment of the day definitely just occurred about two minutes ago. I was browsing the Schools list on Live Journal to see if they knew about my high school yet, and it turns out they did, so I naturally added it to My Schools. But then they asked for my dates of attendance, and I had a split-second "oh yikes!" moment when I realized that the correct beginning year was 1997.... How the heck old am I?
Along similar lines, I'm still fighting the involuntary urge to enter 21 for my age when the treadmills in the UC ask for it. Always have to think for an instant before remembering to push the "2" button a second time.
But today was not a day for running; it was a day for swimming. And as Mark's excellent "1066 And All That" book says, this was a Good Thing. After a month of working on it, I think I'm finally starting to make some progress in swimming the right way. Today I started off with a swim of 400 meters (I think in this pool they're yards, actually) and managed to complete it at an average pace of 1:08 per 50 yards (= 9:04 for the whole thing, if it means anything to you). It was then followed by a 200 and then a 300, at slightly slower paces, to bring the total to the 900 yards I require of myself every time I go swimming. Breathing failures are still occurring at a steady rate of about one every 150 meters, but they're not as catastrophic as they used to be now that I'm learning to swim through them. The only complaint I have is that whoever's in charge of the CMU pool is launching a rather spiteful vendetta against warm-water swimmers by setting the thermostat to "bone-chillingly frigid" — at this rate I'll be able to cut a hole through the ice on Lake Erie in January and jump right in without noticing that my hands are turning purple.
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Thursday, October 13, 2005
11:44 p.m.
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Time once again for the news of the day! Let's see... I spent way too long mucking around with Windows Update this evening. I've been running XP for almost two months now, and I don't think there's been one single time when I've been able to restart my computer the "correct" way (i.e. by going to Start > Turn Off Computer > Restart). Something always hangs in the process, and I end up reaching for the reset button on the tower. Not that I was hoping that Windows Update would fix the problem — what it actually did, though, was cause my computer to crash twice more and pollute my system tray and start menu with more pointless icons.
This may be the semester I actually start using Linux as my OS of choice. The CMU computing environment would definitely support it, most of my research work is done on a UNIX machine anyway, and I've got a nice copy of Debian all installed here and ready to go. I just need to make sure I've got everything I need to make it secure: since I've not really run Linux before I have no idea if I need a firewall, virus software, some extensive chmod-ing, etc. Then, once I figure out how to map my Windows drive, I'll be all set to push off this Windows silliness and go in for some long-term Linux usage.
Not much of note otherwise. I spent two hours today at a lecture I was covering for The Tartan, but I'm not sure how to work up an appropriate story about it. The guy who gave the talk is the U.S. lawyer for three of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, so his rambling — in a voice remarkably like Michael J. Fox's — was split mainly between his experiences going there, the hideous things our government is trying to do, and indignant rants about how innocent his clients are. I took along my mini tape recorder and taped the first 90 minutes (until the tape ran out), but it turns out the campus radio station was there with some digital equipment and a nice microphone, and the guy there said he could send me his version tomorrow. This means I'm going to be having a busy day of article writing, MEMT work, a meeting, and whatever classwork I can try to fit in.
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Saturday, October 15, 2005
3:17 p.m.
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Busy day yesterday, as expected, but to keep this entry short I'll skip most of it. The fun part was when I went back to campus after dinner to meet Sharon at the No Parking Players improv show in the basement of the UC. About five minutes into the show the fire alarm went off, so we were displaced outside for a bit until they let us come back in. The improv people did some things much better than the Case troupe — they wore odd costume, for example, and had some new games. The best was probably "Actor's Nightmare," in which one player reads the lines of a particular character from a play, and a second player, who has no clue what the scene is or what's coming next, has to improvise his as best he can. On the down side, though, the troupe didn't have anyone for music or sound effects — not even a CD player — so their "Hoedown" consisted of one person singing and everyone else repeating "Bum-didee-um-dum" over and over again in slightly different keys, and that didn't work well at all.
At the end, they announced that anyone who wanted to could meet upstairs at 10:00 to go to an improv show at Pitt. Sharon thought that sounded pretty cool, so we duly showed up in the "airport lounge" at the appointed time only to find out that a small dance of sorts had taken over that part of the building. We didn't recognize anyone else from the improv anywhere else on the first floor, so we ended up getting French fries from The O and eating them outside on something called the Kraus Campo (a giant sculpture that looks sort of like an artist's pallete, is about bench height, and is covered with numbers inside little squares like you see in a 15-puzzle, only these don't move). After we'd finished the fries, we took a spin on the fun pivoting benches outside of CFA; then I went back to my bike and Sharon went back to her dorm.
Today, after I finished my article for the week around noon, one of my missions was to get the car out and visit the Free Ride bike co-op because their website said they sell used bike racks. Google Maps led me to what looks like an old warehouse but actually is more like a chaotically-organized do-it-yourself home furnishings store once you get inside. Free Ride is tucked away at the other end of the building's loading area, in a spot that looks like a cross between the back room at Heinen's, someone's basement, and a cave. It was populated with five or six of what Erin would call bike hippies, industriously tinkering away in groups of one or two at a number of bicycles. Various other people were coming from somewhere and walking out of the cave, but they went right by me without asking if I needed anything or if I was lost. I peeped around some corners to see if I could find the bike racks and/or other accessories their website had advertised, but I was confronted with only endless rows of bikes that were just lined up everywhere. No one was taking the slightest notice of me, so I turned around again and walked back out. The committee to find a bike rack before next weekend reports failure.
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Sunday, October 16, 2005
9:26 p.m.
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I went to an American laundromat for the first time today — this sounds stranger than it should, since the only time I've ever actually gone to one before today was when I was in France five years ago. After today, I'm really glad I found an apartment with laundry on-site rather than having to truck everything over to this place once every two weeks. The reason is not the quality or quantity of the machines, both of which were more than adequate, but the expensiveness of using them. I needed to wash the camping sleeping bag I bought last month, which meant I had to use one of the front-loading large-capacity washing machines ($3) and buy powdered detergent for it (50¢). The sleeping bag fit into a regular dryer, at least, but even that was $1.50. For comparison, I can wash and dry a load of laundry here in the basement for $1.75.
And that's probably the only thing worth reporting today. The two mousetraps I set up yesterday to catch the non-rent-paying tenant I seem to have acquired last week failed to turn up anything this morning (time element overload!), so I guess I'll leave them in place in the kitchen again tonight and hope for better luck tomorrow.
I do want to throw in this tidbit from Friday's Post-Gazette. I know they've turned the Gulf War into a video game already, because I've seen my brother playing it, but this makes even less sense. Let's call it
Truth is Stranger Than Fiction... and Theatre!
ARLINGTON, Mass. (AP) — The infamous clubbing that ice skater Nancy Kerrigan took on the knee by an associate of Tonya Harding at the trials for the 1994 Olympics is now set to music. Author Elizabeth Searle, from Arlington, Mass., has co-written "Nancy and Tonya: The Opera," which is scheduled to be performed this spring at Tufts University.
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Monday, October 17, 2005
11:37 p.m.
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Very short entry tonight: I have a midterm tomorrow, homework due Wednesday, scads of research work to catch up on, and a weekend camping trip to get ready for and then go on starting Friday. Before I realized how much crap I had to do this week, though, I drew another comic strip and put together my very own Comics Page. It's rather basic so far, and I may change the hosting to my CMU space instead of my home.cwru account, but it's up and ready for the viewing....
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Tuesday, October 18, 2005
9:22 p.m.
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I am being slowly and relentlessly driven insane by my linguistics homework. (That's the stuff I mentioned in my last entry as being due tomorrow) After I skipped the first part for now, because I have no clue what to do, I had a go at the second while my laundry cycled through down in the basement. It begins innocently — even enjoyably — enough: here is a sentence and two possible syntax trees for it, followed by a series of homework questions that should determine which is correct. At first, this is great fun, because you look at the two trees and say "Well, obviously this one is the right one." Then you're presented with some evidence for each, after which you can scratch your head and say "Hey, that's pretty cool! I guess my intuition wasn't so rock-solid after all!" It makes you feel like you're learning something interesting. But then — ah, then — comes a list of other sentences, some with parse trees, and you have to figure out if each of these new sentences is supporting the first or second parse tree of the original.
Blank. Stare.
Well, you try what you can. Check the case markings on the nouns. (I forgot to mention this whole exercise is taking place with sentences in Icelandic.) Dig through class notes. Try to remember the point about all that raising-to-object stuff from a week ago. Synthesize an argument in support of the first parse tree. Realize you're not so sure of what you're doing, so re-formulate your thoughts... which turns them into a support for the second parse tree. Start over.
After about an hour of this, in between runs to the basement to feed more quarters into the dryer, I was getting to the point where I didn't really care which tree was right, or even if the sentence had one at all. The only thing that will make me go back to the craziness as soon as I post this is that the thing is worth a large number of points tomorrow afternoon, which I could use because my scores in this particular class haven't been as high as I'd like. Just keep counting down the days until the weekend!
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Thursday, October 20, 2005
10:22 a.m.
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A morning entry today because I'm expecting my third late night on campus this week, so I probably won't feel like updating once I get back. Then tomorrow afternoon I'm leaving for our usual fall break camping trip and won't be back until late on Sunday, probably.
So. Aside from minor outrages about my homework (previous post) it's actually been quite a productive week so far. My algorithms for NLP class had a midterm on Tuesday, so I ate dinner on campus Monday and spent most of the evening getting ready for it. I even found an empty room in Porter Hall and did the practice midterm on the chalkboard, just like I used to do at Case. Forgot how much I like writing on boards. Afterwards I went running at the UC before finally leaving campus some time after 9:00.
The real midterm Tuesday was a whole lot harder than the practice and covered some things I forgot to print out the slides for and look over. This seemed to be everyone's reaction, though, because not a single person left before time was up, even after Alon gave us an extra five minutes to work on the test. But it was a good day for research work, at least. I started right after the test and chugged merrily along until Justin came in at 4:30 to show me some of the stuff he'd been working on; for once I was actually upset about being interrupted because I was actually making some progress on writing a new client for our server.
Tuesday night = annoying Icelandic assignment, which I incidentally didn't go back to after posting last time. This made me spend all of Wednesday morning trapped in my apartment trying to finish it before class at 1:30, when I'd promised myself I would be out spending the morning photographing various things on campus that have caught my eye recently. Even more productive MEMT work after class yesterday: my client is finished and working, so now I can start incrementally modifying the server for the new communications protocol my advisor wants and upgrading the client to match. It's about time I got to this point — changing the communication was my original assignment from like three weeks ago! At any rate, I worked on that stuff until 6:30, then ran to the Tartan office to help transcribe old articles for the homecoming issue for a half-hour, then to trivia practice at 7:00, then running in the UC at 9:30. Home at about 10:30.
The next item on the agenda is to get ready for Round Three of the annual fall break camping trip. This year, since part of our group has left Cleveland and been scattered to Indiana, Pittsburgh, Washington D.C., upstate New York, and Toronto, we've settled on meeting up in the center of all those places at a campground just north of Franklin, PA, which is somewhat on a line between here and Erie. We should have gone half a week earlier, though: the past three days have had beautiful weather for this time of year, but now the forecast is calling for rain from tomorrow until next Thursday with temperatures no higher than 50°. You can probably expect a full report on our flooded-out adventures when I come back!
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Monday, October 24, 2005
11:26 a.m.
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I return from my weekend adventures a bit wet, perhaps, but certainly not as flooded-out as I was expecting. This is unfortunately not due to a last-minute desire on the part of the weather to be a bit nicer to us, but instead because of the awesomeness (such a high-school word, but there it is) of Kathi and Vicki's parents, who gave us their screen tent to take along. We set it up over the picnic table at the campsite, so cooking and eating was all done in a fairly dry environment — which is good, because it rained almost the entire time.
I was a bit late in getting things ready to go on Friday, so I unfortunately had to leave Pittsburgh during the height of rush hour, at exactly 5 p.m., and it ended up taking me half an hour to get from here to I-279 downtown. The rest of the drive, during a constant rain, varied between supremely aggravating and rather harrowing. For the first part, imagine moving out of the passing lane at 70 m.p.h. because you're being heavily tailgated, then having the car(s) pass you, move over into your lane, and suddenly find a compulsion to go 55. The second part came in after the freeway portion of the drive was over and the setting had switched to hilly country roads, and can best be approximated by the scenes in "Psycho" where the lady is driving in the rain shortly before arriving at the Bates Motel.
I'll skip the detailed description of how I actually found Two-Mile Run County Park, except for noting that when you're trying, on a dark and rainy night six miles from the nearest town, to find a place whose various entrances aren't marked in any way, you too might find the need to turn around in three people's driveways and stop at two random houses to ask directions. I eventually arrived some time after 7:45 to find Dan, Susannah, and Paul already in residence outside of a bathhouse right along the campground's entrance road. A shipment of Eric and Grammer twins arrived around 8:30, and then Ben and Erin completed the party some time past 10:00, I think. Paul was the only one to arrive before the sun went down; he had been hoping to get there before dinner had been cleaned up, but instead found himself hanging around for more than two and a half hours before the food even showed up.
Our plan for Saturday was supposed to be biking, but in view of the steady rain we modified this to finding something to do in Franklin. Eric got directions from the camp office to an antique music museum that sounded interesting, so we went there first. It had the usual stuff — phonographs, player pianos, calliopes, and music boxes — that Eric, Dan, and I found pretty interesting but that the others weren't really impressed by. (For the rest of the night, they referred to it variously as the "harpsicord museum" or the "harmonica museum.") Not five minutes into our visit I made the embarassing mistake of betraying that phonographs are one of my special subjects. After the tour guide gave us an extraordinarily condensed (and somewhat incorrect) history of the phonograph industry, Dan asked her where Edison made his equipment. She said she didn't know, and that was when I chose to blurt out "Orange, New Jersey, I think," in a rather flat tone of voice that started everyone else laughing. I apologized for usurping control of the tour and kept my mouth shut after that.
It wasn't raining Sunday morning, and I was thinking about suggesting a short ride to justify carting all of our bikes on the trip with us, but the general feeling was that an early start to getting back home was in order. We ate breakfast, tore down all our stuff, made a final effort to eat the masses of food remaining, and got into various cars and drove off in various directions around 11:30. The leaves on the hillsides were looking much nicer during the day than they had at night, so I stayed on back roads for an extra 20 miles before hooking up with the freeway at Slippery Rock.
From the way I write this it may sound like I had a wretched weekend, but that's definitely not the case. I guess I just naturally revert to a chronological telling of the things that stick out in my mind, and those are usually of the tangible or event-based variety. This trip, though, ended up being way more about seeing friends and catching up than getting in some outdoor activity, and that's probably what we all needed and wanted most. Most of us who aren't in Cleveland anymore seem to have had some trouble getting used to our new lives, so I'd bet this weekend was a happy bit of vacation all around. Just getting together with everyone and doing something familiar made it seem like we were all back in junior year again. There was some talk about organizing more trips for this year and making the fall break thing an annual event — I know I would find some way to get myself to northern Ontario in January if they were all going to be there!
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