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ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
A Live Journal mirror of this site can be found here, so now you can leave me your comments even if you aren't a Live Journal member!
Sunday, November 20, 2005
11:55 a.m.
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I expect, when I come across my last post from the comfort of future days — defined as those in which my Linux system is functional and well-behaved — I'll end up laughing in amusement at the teenage-style angst pervading the entry. "I didn't even know how to install a simple package right, and it felt like the end of the world!" I'll scoff in disgust. Or at least I hope I will. Today I learned how to mount a drive somewhat successfully: my Windows XP drive shows up as read-only (and even that only by root), and my Windows 98 partition is only writable by root, but I can at least listen to my audio files. This is actually being typed in pico since I haven't gotten the emacs install to work yet, so I'm living in constant fear that I'm going to press Ctrl-E or something and crash the program like I did in my office last week. A good weekend, otherwise. KGB's Friday event was a small scavenger hunt with two teams of four, plus the judges. It had the usual array of zany items, some of which led to rlambert and me checking out all of Hunt's six copies of a play called "Rossum's Universal Robots," our entire team performing a (very short) excerpt of it in its original Czech, and also handing in a print-out of the source code for Live Journal. It's written in Perl, by the way; around 190,000 lines covering both sides of 36 pages of two-point font in nine columns. After the hunt, some of us decided to go down to Oakland for half-price food at one of the restaurants. While we were trying to find a place whose kitchen wasn't about to close, someone in front of us randomly turned around and called my name — it was Kristin LaBuz, in town with Pavan for the weekend! It turns out she's also given in to being a journalism nerd: she's joined the staff of an online newspaper for all of the Philadelphia universities. Kristin and Pavan ended up going out looking for a bar, and rlambert, Keith, and I ended up at India Garden, the really really loud place that we'd gone to after the game night in September. After some lovely leftovers for lunch (hee hee) yesterday, I decided to make a shopping expedition northward in search of some gloves, a cookbook, and perhaps a new winter coat. My goal was Northway Mall (Borders) and North Hills Village Mall (Kohl's), one on either side of Ross Park Mall about half an hour away. Pittsburgh, it seems, doesn't go in much for an even distrubution of commerce: they'd rather center it in giant Chapel-Hill-style suburban mega-strips that require five-lane roads and exit ramps. Three malls on the same road within two miles of each other is a bit much to may way of thinking. I eventually returned home with the gloves and cookbook, but didn't quite feel like spending the money on a new coat when there's nothing structurally wrong with the one I've got. I broke in the cookbook by making banana muffins, then set off with them for a cooking party at rlambert's house that she'd invited me to Friday. The point of the exercise was to find a way to cook goat with the ingredients she had on-hand, but we eventually came up short and I was dispatched to the Squirrel Hill Giant Eagle to get some odds and ends we needed for a recipe that Ross made up for us. It came out quite nicely, actually: a curry cassarole-ish thing with potatoes and onions all globbed together in plain yogurt. The appetizer was bruchetta and tuna casserole, served with pots and pots of tea, and the meal was followed by Dessert 1 (my muffins) and Dessert 2 (pound cake with strawberries and ice cream). The whole filled in nicely with amusing conversation. |
Monday, November 21, 2005
11:57 p.m.
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I saw something on the Cut tonight that can only be described as cute. I was walking from the library to the UC (to go running, because it had actually been 11 days since I'd done any physical activity), and up in front of me a boyfried and girlfriend were just meeting up. The guy hugged the girl — one of those circular whirling things, almost like in a movie or a swing dance, but not so forceful — took the girl's backpack, put it on himself, and then the two of them walked holding hands into the UC. They even went in through the same compartment of the revolving door. The overall scene was completed by the fact that they were almost exactly the same height. Yeah... every now and then I wouldn't mind having someone I could do that to.... |
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
12:34 a.m.
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I see that I've shocked everyone into inaction on yesterday's post: Sonnie called tonight right after I got home and said it was weird that I actually showed human emotions. I guess I need to work on projecting myself as something other than a non-entity when it comes to that sort of thing before I get doomed to a permanent robotic status. But I don't want to get sidetracked on relationship stuff again because I'll probably only confuse a lot of people and/or write something I'll regret later on. I was actually planning on spending this post coincidentally describing another set of human emotions, specifically those that result from hearing live orchestral music. I saw a poster in Wean yesterday for a concert being given today at 8:00 by the Carnegie Mellon Philharmonic in Carnegie Music Hall, and it mentioned that it was free with a CMU ID. I met with my advisor today at 5:00, seemed to be getting enough done by his standards to satisfactorily retire for the week, hacked away for a bit on my Grammars & Lexicons project, and then decided that I would finish up the day with a bit of good music. The programme wasn't long: "Overture to 'The Merry Wives of Windsor'" by someone called Otto Nicolai, intermission, and then the Symphony No. 2 in E minor by Rachmaninoff. Both pieces started with an unbelievably gentle oh-gosh-don't-break-it note by the strings. The overture started out with high violins and sounded like it should be used as the opening of a good thoughtful movie — something introspective like "Good Will Hunting" or "The Emperor's Club," I thought. David Effron, the guest conductor for the evening, was all sorts of fun to watch; he seemed to have the entire violin section connected by invisible string to his left shoulder. He would swing his arms around on the platform, lean forward, rotate sideways, stretch his hand way off towards the violins, wiggle his fingers violently, and then suddenly sweep his whole left side around to point at the right side of the orchestra. The violins, responding to this invigorating hocus-pocus, bent forward, applied their bows, swung their instruments back and forth, and poured out a solid wall of sound to keep up with the conductor's gyrations. Great fun! Rachmaninoff's Symphony No. 2, which he could have surnamed "Multiple Personalities," started out with impossibly low bass notes and immediately made me think of cold winter nights in St. Petersburg. The first movement might fit in well at a sort of scary Halloween concert. Not that that image sticks around for too long, though: this piece has got some of everything in it! Jazzy syncopations show up in the second movement, the third is completely dominated by a really beautiful theme that I've heard as a song before but can't place, and in the fourth movement there are definitely two or three places where you could overlay the beginning of "Ain't Misbehavin'" and fit it in perfectly. It was during the climax of the third movement, when the exact phrase I was anticipating showed up right when I expected, that I decided that the symphony was going on the short list of my favorites. During the fourth I caught myself almost laughing right in the concert hall at the amazing twists the thing was taking; that's when I decided on the "Multiple Personalities" name. A wonderful way to go into Thanksgiving break. I want to be out of my apartment by 10 or 11 a.m. tomorrow so I get home before the traffic gets too bad in the afternoon. Then I'll be in Twinsburg until at least Saturday and possibly until Sunday, depending on what people are up to and how much G&L work I'm able to squeeze in while I'm there. Twinsburg or Case people should leave me e-mails, comments, or phone calls at my old home number if you want to do something. I'll also try to post once or twice from home to keep everyone else updated on what I'm up to. |
Random Stuff #21
Thursday, November 24, 2005, 1:38 p.m.
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I'm alive and well, reporting from home here in Twinsburg... and having a great time looking through my mom's 1979 vintage Betty Crocker cookbook! Metrics in the Kitchen |
Friday, November 25, 2005
3:10 p.m.
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I guess I'd forgotten that being at home is sort of a mixed bag at times. I got here on Wednesday afternoon, and then my sister came home from Akron in the evening, so we had all six of us in the house again for the first time since like the summer. Within about five minutes my sister and I were laughing at private jokes and being all around zany, and then I stayed up late with my brother to play with dominoes on the kitchen floor. We were having a contest to see who could get one to fly the farthest off of the step down into the family room, but we ended up tying and then giving up after neither one of us could do any better. Yesterday we all went through the snow to my aunt and uncle's house in Medina for a three-family Thanksgiving on my mom's side of the family. (Our usual plan of either us going to my dad's sister's house or them coming here was somehow cancelled this year.) My grandparents should have been there too, but my grandpa didn't feel up to it and they were both worried a bit about the weather. We saw a few cars on the way down that had spun off of I-271, but by then it wasn't actually snowing any more and was probably more frigid than anything else. When we got back, around 10:00 last night, it was only 11° outside. So both of those days were all sorts of fun, but right before we left my aunt's house everyone started in their usual chorus of how tired they were, how fat they felt, etc., and that's continued for most of today. And then Mom, Dad, Chris, and Katie decided to go out shopping several times today, which didn't help too much either. I can never understand this urge to wake up at 5 a.m., stand in line outside before the stores open, and then spend half the day getting elbowed and pushed by the crazies, fighting over the best sales, and topping it all off by waiting 45 minutes to check out. Chris and I did go up to Heinen's this afternoon, partly to say hi to people and partly to get things we can't find elsewhere. I need to go back to the deli before I leave on Sunday because the Giant Eagle deli meat in Pittsburgh is quite wretched most of the time. At Heinen's I got almost three pounds of apples so I can make a pie either tonight or tomorrow — it's going to be my first one, and I'd rather do it here, where I've got access to my mom and her arsenal of cooking utensils, than at my apartment where I've hardly got anything at all to work with. I'll be sure to post about how it comes out. That's pretty much the news of today. Since my room here is about 80% cleaned out I really don't have a lot to do besides read and work on the scarf I'm knitting. I did manage to do about a half an hour of work on my grammar-writing project so far, but I don't think I'm up to doing much more just now. |
Sunday, November 27, 2005
4:43 p.m.
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Yesterday's apple pie came out rather nicely, to tell the truth. Especially since the one of the ready-made pie crusts I bought had some roundness issues and I had to patch it with an extra glob of dough that was randomly rolled up with the rest of the crust. But aside from that, and the fact that the apples inside shrank in the oven and left a layer of empty space between the filling and the top crust, it's a fine specimen of American bakery. The most fun part of making it was a piece of advice from Sonnie's mom that I got via Sonnie on IM: you know it's cooled off enough from baking when you can pick up the pie plate "without needing a doctor afterwards"! Before I took over my mom's kitchen, I went with Chris and Liz to see the "Rent" movie that just came out this week. We went to an early matinée in Aurora, so it was only $5 a ticket — almost as good as a Film Society showing at Strosacker. I saw the musical "Rent" when it was in Cleveland a year or two ago, so I had some idea of what to expect. We got something a little bit different, though. For one thing, minor plot points make a little more sense when the characters aren't colored blobs you're squinting at from the top of the third balcony. I think they were able to make the story line a bit more complex in the film version: some of the songs were staged as flashbacks or as sequences of images rather than something happening contemporaneously with the main plot. Scenery and props are also a bit more... explicit... in a movie, so the different spaces (a restaurant, the various apartments, etc.) were much more defined. Other than that, some small changes I noticed included shortening some of the songs (a good idea!), removing the singing answering machine messages (a pity), and some anachronisms that didn't make sense with the year 1989-90 that the movie was supposed to be taking place in (an annoyance). Final recommendation, though: go to see it. It's good, and it seems to be playing at most theatres. Boredom, the fact that I was doing no work, and the thought of spending yet another night on a sleeping pad in my emptied-out bedroom led to me deciding to drive back to Pittsburgh around 9:30 last night. Of course, I've also not done any work here today either, and the only reason I've gone out of my apartment so far is to grab the Sunday paper from the front walk. I will have to force myself out to the store if I want to eat anything beyond a small dinner tonight, and a trip down to campus for running and/or G&L work also wouldn't be a bad idea. Tomorrow begins Week 14, the second-to-last week of regular classes before reading days and finals start. |
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
10:52 p.m.
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I was working on an entry last night, but then I got distracted looking up bus tickets to Toronto and forgot to finish it. And then most of what I'd written wasn't all that interesting anyway, so I just deleted it and am about to start over. It is, however, worth repeating that I talked to Brad after the news meeting yesterday and volunteed to be The Tartan's copy chief for the year beginning in January. He seemed to like the idea a lot and said he was "relieved" because no one else said they were interested yet. Copy chief is actually an appointed position by the executive editor, but since Brad's running unopposed in Thursday's elections I suppose it's pretty much decided that I've got a weekly responsibility at the paper. The only problem is that it production on Sundays may make it hard for me to slip away for a weekend, which is exactly what I may be wanting to do at the end of January in conjuction with those Greyhound tickets I was looking up. Yesterday's real excitement occurred right after I went to bed. After about five minutes, I noticed a pretty sharp pain in my stomach/abdomen area, which two Tums and a trip to the bathroom did nothing to help. When I tried to get up again, a few minutes later, I suddenly felt like I'd been sick for a week: uneasy stomach, feeling hot and cold at the same time, not quite sure if I could get up.... Fortunately these symptoms evolved after about a minute into the unequivocal command "Get to the toilet now!" — after expelling matter at both ends (you know what I'm trying to say!) I felt instantly better and was able to go to sleep normally. It ended up being a pretty scary 45 minutes, though, and remarkably random. While I was taking the bus to school today I was going over mentally the things I'd eaten up to last night, and finally decided to assign blame to either the greasy General Tso's chicken I had in Newell-Simon for dinner or the re-heated slice of my apple pie I had a bit before bedtime. The remaining pie is currently residing in my kitchen trash can, and I'm definitely planning to avoid the Asian stand in Newell-Simon for some time. The next two weeks are going to be annoyingly busy, it seems. At the weekly meeting with my advisor yesterday, I seemed to be detecting the first signs of annoyance that I haven't finished the job I was assigned in like September, so I've promised increased efforts and results in that direction for this week. There's also the G&L project (which is going along smoothly if not quickly), two large-ish homework assignments, and a news article I picked up for this week in spite of myself. Plus a crapload of extras like trivia practice, the Tartan elections, and a holiday band concert that sounded fun. We are hoping to survive until Dec. 8, when everything will be turned in and done except for research and finals. |
Thursday, December 1, 2005
9:56 p.m.
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I'm writing this from the computer cluster in the West Wing dorm before going running at the UC — I just ate some pizza around 9:00 and want to wait awhile before jiggling my stomach around too much. Dinner was so late because of the Tartan elections (I think I mentioned them last time), which started at 6:30 and are actually still going on. These people are quite insane: 15 positions need to be voted on, and before any decision can be made there has to be personal statements from the candidates, a questioning period for each, and then open debate... even for jobs that have people running unopposed because there's always the option of electing nobody! I was only eligible to vote for the first four, out of which only one involved multiple candidates, but even that lasted until 9:15. I guess I don't mean to bash their system, but it doesn't take much to turn 30 minutes of open debate per election into either massive over-analysis of the candidates' personalities or a boring repetition of points from the candidates' friends in favor of their best buddies. And the older members of the staff seemed to take it all quite seriously; the elections website has been up for weeks, and nominations were being accepted and declined the entire time. It's true that some people made excellent points during the debate tonight, but I'm coming from The Observer, where the elected editor-in-chief just appointed people to all the other positions based on the letters of intent that had been turned in, and where even letters of intent were more for entertainment than anything else — I wrote mine for copy editor with my left hand in French on a piece of toilet paper and handed it to Laura at one of the staff meetings. (My goodness, these sentences are long tonight!) On to the weather, then, that being one of the two most important topics that a Midwesterner will choose to discuss. It finally snowed for real (the kind that sticks to at least the grass) in Pittsburgh today — in fact it is still snowing (and sticking) right now. The Post-Gazette seemed to be making the claim that it had also snowed over Thanksgiving, but I wasn't around to see it and there definitely weren't any signs of it on Saturday night when I got back. Then on Monday it was 65. Yesterday and today it was in the 30s, where it ought to stay for a good long time if this city has any respect for the laws of climate. Since it's now 10:20, I think I'll head over to the UC to go running so I can come home, post this, and go to bed at a decent time. Tomorrow will be an insane day of work and article-writing, hopefully starting with me arriving on campus by 10:00 and working away on various things until KGB starts at 7 p.m. For once I would like to not have an article to finish when I wake up on Saturday morning, but I think achieving this is doubtful at best. |
Thursday, December 1, 2005
11:34 p.m.
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One thing more to note tonight: today is Dec. 1, so I now consider it officially acceptable to listen to Christmas music. Apparently I'm not the only one. I found myself inventing a big-band-style arrangement in my head of "Let it Snow" as I was walking back to my bike at Wean; then as I was biking across the Cut on my way home I passed a group of girls who were all singing "Walking in a Winter Wonderland." That didn't sound like an awful idea, so I had a go at it myself once I got away from the pedestrians on campus. The result, sprinkled liberally with mistakes and pauses for breathing, was comically like the dancing-master scene from "Le Bourgeois gentilhomme": "How does it start again? Oh yeah — Sleigh — got that note? — Sleigh bells ring — are you listening? — In the lane — make that a pure vowel, please — In the lane — snow is glistening. — A beautiful sight — we're happy tonight — Walking in a — winter wonderland." |
Sunday, December 4, 2005
2:46 p.m.
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Every day should begin with an interesting fact, like a news article that was either in Friday's or yesterday's (I forget which) Post-Gazette. Apparently some guy in England has invented and has started selling a device designed to drive teenagers away from storefronts and other areas where they hang around uninvited. It works by emitting an annoying noise at a carefully-selected high frequency: almost everyone under 20 can hear it and finds somewhere else to hang out, but the gradual hearing loss (especially in the high regions) that occurs as people age means that almost no one over 30 can hear the sound, so they just carry on as usual because they have no clue what's going on. This, I say, is freaky, and I'm not sure if I like the concept. It's a brilliant application of physiology, that's for sure, but there's something about it that seems a bit too unfair and a bit too psychological. (The same article also mentioned some other kid-dispersing techniques, including the use of a certain kind of blue lighting that highlights pimples on teenagers' faces so that they look worse. Combine the two and you could start to think about a hideous kind of under-21-only bug zapper.) Although it does make me curious about my own range of hearing.... At any rate, I've spent a fun weekend out with various people so far. On Friday KGB reserved two rooms in Porter Hall for a sort of organizational birthday party, and I ended up spending most of the time scribbling various things on the chalkboard with Car and two guys whose names I didn't catch. We played a really fun word game: You start with any old word, like "antique," and then each player has to write a new word at the end of the last one written, using at least the three most recent letters and writing a minimum of three more. From "antique" you could add "questionable" and then "blessing" and then "ingrate" and then "grateful" (so you've got "antiquestionablessingrateful" on the board so far) — this continues until everyone gets stuck or decides to quit and start over. We actually ended up stopping when Tom broke a bag of plastic cups, scattering them all over the floor and touching off a 15-minute cup-throwing fight that definitely made the most interesting sound effects I'd come across in a long time. Yesterday rlambert and I decided to go investigate a crêpe place on Filbert Street in Shadyside she had been to once before; we had lunch there a bit before 2:00. Good food, if only a bit expensive if you want anything sizable, but unfortunately the people working there all seemed to be American. That meant I had a slightly difficult time pronouncing "crêpe" and "Orangina" in a way that anyone could understand — I certainly couldn't say "craype" (with a long a) like most people do, so I kept the short e and just replaced the French r with an American one. This is what I get for studying French for eight years: I often find it impossible to butcher what I've learned to be the "correct" pronunications. After lunch it was off to the Tartan copy party at Greg Price's house in Oakland. Arthur said more than half the staff was missing, so I only met one person I didn't already know, but I think we all had a good time anyway. Arthur had even brought the dart guns from the copy cave, so we had several rounds of sniper-style shoot-outs in between board games, eating chips, etc. The party ended around 8:00, and I got home about 45 minutes later after a fairly lengthy walk. |
Monday, December 5, 2005
10:14 p.m.
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The last 24 hours have been so bizarre! They started out as usual, with me going to my copy shift a bit before 9:00. I thought I would take the car since it was pretty cold out and I hadn't driven it in eight days, plus I suspected it was going to be a really long night because a completely new design for Pillbox was being tried out for the first time. Shall we say that this was a bit of an understatement? There weren't actually any major problems, but at midnight we still had all of news thirds to go. Then Arthur said he wanted to see the 12:00 showing of the movie in McConomy, and since I'm going to have to be copy chief anyway next month I said that I would cover for him if he wanted to go. Tiffany, the new managing editor in training, read the pages after me so they still had two pairs of eyes go over them before they went back to layout. Serious work was interrupted by an announcement from Brad that the "champagne" was going to take place at 3 a.m. This is apparently a strong tradition among the people on the editorial staff: at the end of the last production night of the semester, they all come into the office, drink champagne, and talk about how much fun they've had in the semester. These kids take this thing amazingly seriously, and the group cohesion they've got going on is astounding. The lights were turned off, so that the only illumination came from the computer monitors and the two light tables (I kind of got to stay by default; I'm not actually on ed staff yet), the champagne was distributed, and then anyone who wanted to could give a little tribute speech pointing out certain people in the audience, how much respect the speaker had for them, how much fun it was working in the office with them, and so on. I believe this went on for over an hour, so in the end I raised my hand and said a few words myself. The champagne ended a few minutes before 4:30 a.m., at which point work resumed on the two news pages that were still in progress. J.T. said there wasn't any more copy, so I went back to my car and drove home, finally going to bed at 4:45. Net effect: this "morning" I slept until almost noon, ate something, took a shower, and arrived on campus by bike just in time for Grammars & Lexicons at 1:30. Lori was teaching again, but she said her planned lecture was derailed because "her slides were on AFS." This set off a class discussion on the current situation, which really confused me until I picked up on the fact that a water main broke in Wean this morning and caused a server room on the third floor to become rather flooded. The entire SCS network is down, and the water is completely shut off in six campus buildings. This meant I had almost nothing to do today, aside from some algorithms homework due Thursday. All my research stuff, plus the dreaded G&L grammar-writing project, is kept on the SCS network, and that's apparently going to be unreachable for some days. After class I went back to my lab with Mike, James, and Aaron, and since we're all in the same position the only thing we could do was pull out algorithms homework and start chugging away at various parts of it. It was rather enjoyable, actually, to talk about class stuff with other people and sort of feel like an undergraduate again. My advisor had cancelled our meeting and gone home even before class ended, so I went to the KGB meeting at 4:30 instead, and then to sit around in the Tartan office a bit until I decided what I wanted to do next. That ended up being going home instead of sticking around to eat and go swimming, after I realized I didn't have enough money to buy dinner on campus. Rest assured, by the way, that there are plenty of pictures circulating, mainly courtesy of KGB people, on the Wean disaster. I will either post copies of or links to the good ones here as soon as I sort through them. But I may force myself to do some more homework first. |
Tuesday, December 6, 2005
3:30 a.m.
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The mice are back. |
Wednesday, December 7, 2005
1:08 a.m.
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That late night at The Tartan on Sunday has really screwed up my sleep schedule, as if you couldn't already tell from the timestamp of the last post. I wanted to go to bed last night (Monday night) by 1:30 or so and get up around 9:00, thereby making the transition back to my normal times of 12:30-ish and 8:00 in two days, but circadian rhythm would have it otherwise. At 2:00 I still couldn't fall asleep, so I got up went out to try to sleep on the couch. I was just getting past that certain point in the process where I lose a linear sense of time when I heard a plastic bag rustling on my food shelf. Instantly awake. 'Twas a mouse, of course, attempting to make a sneak attack on my loaf of bread. It ran down the shelf and somewhere into the fireplace before I could try to scoop it into a shopping bag, so the only thing to do was to get my copier box out again and load into it any food items whose packaging might be gnawable. The thought of another four weeks of baited traps that don't work and intermittent trips to the park to dispose of mice that get themselves caught only by sheer stupidity annoyed me enough to give up sleeping for the moment and mess around on my computer until I felt better. (I think this time we will invest in mouse poison or some similar substance. I am not willing to put my entire kitchen into a copier box until the middle of January.) Some time after 3:30 I eventually went to bed and fell asleep, but I naturally didn't get out of bed in the morning until quite a bit after my 9 a.m. alarm. So now it's almost 1:30 and I don't really feel tired yet. The SCS Facilities people are doing a fine job of getting things going again after yesterday's "emergency." The servers that were stored in the flooded ares are still offline, but the network and AFS drives were back up when I came in before class today. This is actually a tad disappointing; I have a perverse love of thunderstorms, blizzards, etc. that make people slow down a bit and realize we're not quite masters of the universe yet. The G&L project is due date is delayed at least until Friday, and if I can download a suitable version of Lisp to a local machine I could actually resume work on my grammar right away. I can also write code for my research work, but I'm not sure if everything's in place for me to compile or run it. Speaking of writing, actually... Extra! Extra! Read All About It! I need to tack an announcement on here to the effect that I have started a new Internet interface for my brain's inner workings. From now on, in addition to this day-to-day journal, you can keep up with my more serious musings at Se Répandre. (That's a French verb that can be used for "to spread out," "to spill," or [for information] "to get around," all of which express what I'm going to be doing there.) Rest assured there will be no diminishment of postings here: the new site is a way for me to give proper space to long entries on more abstract topics instead of making them compete with the concrete daily-life stuff that normally goes on this page. |
Thursday, December 8, 2005
7:54 p.m.
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This post is coming to you through the goodness of Alicia, our G&L TA, who has postposed the due date of the grammar project to Monday at 4 p.m., which means I don't have to spend all night and most of tomorrow working on it. Of course, I probably should anyway, so it gets done, but now my life won't depend on it at least. This is especially good because I've been reading the archives at "Piled Higher and Deeper," a grad school comic strip that I've found to be most amusing! I suppose that makes four webcomics I follow now, in addition to that little thing I draw myself once a week. Today is a day of free food. There were two trays of rice 'n' such left in the LTI kitchen early this afternoon, the LTI holiday TG (= TGIF = party with food) was at 5:00 in the Newell-Simon atrium, and then The Tartan is renting out the whole of the Union Grill tonight at 10:30 for a staff gala. The TG this afternoon was quite enjoyable, by the way, in contrast to the last one that consisted uniquely of scattered tables of crackers and cheese. Today's included enough Mexican food to make a full dinner, and a lot of other first-year students were there to talk to. During the conversation I became painfully aware that I know far and away more undergrads than grad students — even grad students in my own program. I guess I'm not fully integrated into the grad student community or something — Nimish, Emil, and Ben seem to have gone bar-hopping with other LTI people on a fairly regular basis, for example, but I haven't been included on those e-mails. On the positive side of being in with the undergrads, I at least know where things are on campus, which is more than I can say for most everyone else around here. The algorithms final is scheduled for Margaret Morrison 103, and our professor (who's been at this school for 15 years!) didn't even seem to be too sure about that building's location. He promised to head over there and scope out the scene for us before test time so that we would know how to find it. This is not quite on par with making a trip to the North Pole in the 1800s, but he seemed to give out that impression. Moving on to something more random, as I was biking back here after the TG, I saw a car in front of me on Forbes Avenue with license plate "CQD MGY" — that's the distress call the Titanic sent while it was sinking. At the time (1912), "CQD" was the established call of distress; the "SOS" that was also famously used that night was just coming into use, and wasn't sent out of the Titanic's wireless room until either the captain or the senior wireless operator suggested trying it. "MGY" was the Titanic's identifying code or call signal. (I know all this relatively useless stuff because we studied the Titanic in... seventh grade, I believe it was, and then I got interested and read several other books about it. This was before the movie came out and all.) On that note, I guess I'm done. |
Random Stuff #22
Thursday, December 8, 2005, 8:44 p.m.
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Sonnie's journal has a fun "year in review" entry where she copied the first line from the first post of each month in 2005, which I saw and decided to replicate here as a "Random Stuff" entry. It actually wasn't all that interesting when I saw the results, so I think I'll replace that post with something different but still along the same lines. I present to you instead the headlines and leads of the articles I wrote for The Tartan this semester. I was going to add that the full text is probably still available from the paper's website, but the search results don't seem to go back any further than this week. In The News Sept. 19, 2005: Displaced students settle in — Three weeks after Hurricane Katrina forced the closing of several universities in and around the city of New Orleans, displaced students from those institutions have resumed their studies elsewhere, including here at Carnegie Mellon. |
Saturday, December 10, 2005
6:37 p.m.
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A few things to catch up on, I guess, those being the Tartan gala on Thursday and the high school trivia tournament that the CMU trivia team ran today. As I think I mentioned last time, the paper reserved the Union Grill (a lovely name for a restaurant) on Craig Street beginning at 10:30 p.m.; I decided to take the 10:09 bus to Fifth and Craig, which should have gotten me to the restaurant around 10:20. The 48-hour snow forecast, with a giant blob centered around Pittsburgh, decided to alter these plans a bit, however. The snow started in earnest after 7, and by 10:00 the city had been transformed to winter mode, with not a car on the roads moving at above 20 miles per hour, so the bus was naturally a bit late to begin with. Then it stopped to pick someone up at Centre and Craig and had some difficulty in getting going again. (There's a slight hill on Centre just there, and of course nothing had been plowed yet.) It took the driver about three minutes of reving the engine and turning the steering wheel back and forth before the bus decided to stop making pathetic fish-tail motions and get moving again. As a consequence, I arrived at the Union Grill almost exactly at 10:30. The gala itself was definitely more for the senior staff, who have spent the past year working with each other in close quarters, than the new guys like me. There was much picture-taking, a slide show of candid shots from the office, and Brad gave a little speech that was so out of a movie that I started to wonder if he could possibly be serious. Matt, Arthur, Christine, and I clumped into a little copy knot that had some trouble mingling with the rest of the crowd, but that may have been partly because successful mingling and conversation was rather thwarted by the volume of the music. Yesterday rlambert asked me if I was interested in seeing the No Parking Players (improv group) show in the UC, so I met her there when it started at 8:00. There were some other KGB people in attendance, who went off after the performance in search of food; we ended up heading to the Wean cluster by default to see what was going on there. Apparently it's a pretty big hangout for general geekery, even on Friday nights. Alisa and I played a game of Internet Scrabble before I decided I should probably be heading home a bit after midnight. Mainly because I had to be in Doherty this morning at 8 a.m. for Mellon Bowl III, a high school trivia tournament that the CMU quiz bowl team was hosting. I love running high school tournaments: they always seem less competitive and more relaxed than the college ones I've been to. Plus the questions are easy enough for me to not sound like a moron when I read packets or talk to the kids. (Shweta and I played a round against each other when we had nothing else to do; we each managed a pretty decent team score.) It was even better because Solon and Kenston were there — they always send teams to the Case tournaments, and some of their players know me fairly well as a moderator and apparently like the way I read. I also found out that the CMU team provides amazingly well for its own during these all-day events. Breakfast stuff was brought in for both the high schoolers and all of us, and at lunch there was pizza for the people running the tournament. The final round ended close to 5:00, which got me back here just in time for some dinner. |
Sunday, December 11, 2005
8:19 p.m.
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Taking a break from the infamous grammar-writing project to type up a post for my journal instead. The rule is that I'm not allowed to go to sleep tonight until it's finished, so I may be here a while. Although, if I'm going to have a really late night, this is probably the time to have it — I was out having enough fun last night to completely ruin my "normal" sleep schedule again, and now that classes are over there isn't any particular time I need to be on campus. My last post, I see, didn't give any hint of what I was going to do last night, probably because I didn't know myself until somewhat later on. I was catching up on reading Friday's paper — which had presumably been delivered to my front steps on time, but then got partially covered by snow so that I didn't actually find it until Saturday — by going through the comics when I saw that "It's A Wonderful Life" was supposed to be on TV at 8:00. I hadn't seen that movie in several years, so I decided I could probably spare the three hours required to tune in on Channel 11. (The film itself, according to IMDB, is only 130 minutes long, but naturally the networks need to inflate the time with as many commercial breaks as human life can possibly tolerate before going completely round the twist. I did at least manage to get a lot of good knitting done while the incessant holiday ads were playing.) The movie ended at 11:00. I can only guess that rlambert was making use of a secret sort of ESP, because the moment I sat down at my computer afterwards she sent me an IM asking if I wanted to help make a pie at her house at midnight. Its rare that I turn down an apple pie, and rarer still a fun adventure with friends, so I aborted any grammar-writing plans I had for the rest of the night and walked over to rlambert's at 11:30. Dan and Chris arrived a bit after I got there, and then the culinary arts began. Dan and Chris sliced the apples, Rebecca (= rlambert; I guess she goes by both) made "Thing One" (the sugar-cinnamon filling), and I made "Thing Two" (the butter topping). By the time the pie was baked and eaten, etc., it was quite late: I eventually left around 4:30 a.m., saw a Post-Gazette delivery guy putting papers into one of those coin-operated boxes on my walk back here, reached my apartment at exactly 5:00, and went to bed at 5:02. I tried to set my alarm for noon today, but it was actually 1:00 before I got out of bed and went to see about "breakfast." More snow this afternoon; I had to brush five or six inches off my car when I decided to go to Wal-Mart, but that included the amount left from Thursday night. The Wal-Mart trip was my first real Pittsburgh winter driving experience. I have yet to see a snowplow, so the condition of the streets seems largely determined by the number of cars that have driven on them. People were going impossibly slowly on the straight, flat, and clear parts of the roads and then tailgating me like mad to go faster on the hills and sharp turns still covered in snow, but I duly arrived back here without incident. |
Monday, December 12, 2005
11:22 p.m.
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It's suddenly finals week here at CMU, and everyone, including me, is getting in on the fun! I worked on my grammar last night until 2:30 a.m., but even that was a stretch. I had to pull out the emergency Propellerheads CD at 1:20 to keep me from giving up right then and going to bed. Somehow I talked myself into setting the alarm for 8:00 and putting it farther away from my bed, but it still didn't work: it was really 10:00 before I was able to get up. That left enough time for just a shower and breakfast before I had to go catch the bus to campus. Someone had been advertising some interesting free books on misc.market yesterday, so I had to go meet the guy at the UC in order to pick up the two I'd claimed. I'm now the proud owner of "The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin" and "Walden." Finishing the grammar project took the rest of the afternoon, right up until the 4 p.m. deadline. Oddly enough, Alicia wanted a paper submission only — nothing e-mailed or otherwise electronic — so I spent at least 90 minutes getting things into proper shape to print out and package together. When I produce a document I have to go all out: fancy cover pages, a font and layout scheme, divider pages between the sections, and so on. By the time it was finished it ran to 74 pages of actual stuff, making it the longest written work I've ever produced, and that's not even including the extra pages I threw in to break up the sections nicely. I was on campus later this evening in order to get this week's comic ready, so I stopped in at the E&S library for free study-break food and a chance to get started on Ben Franklin. On the very first page I found an excellent quote: Were it offered to my choice, I should have no objection to a repetition of the same life from its beginning, only asking the advantages authors have in a second edition to correct some faults of the first. [...] Since such a repetition is not to be expected, the next thing most like living one's life over again seems to be a recollection of that life, and to make that recollection as durable as possible by putting it down in writing. |
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