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ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
Hey, look! It's a new page! I guess I'm getting used to writing this thing, so I'll keep going until someone tells me to stop. If you want to leave me any comments — this, I have to admit, is actually easier in Xanga... if you're a Xanga member — you can either e-mail or IM them to me and I'll post them in here as I get them.
Monday, Nov. 8, 2004
11:06 p.m.
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I'm writing this while taking a break from studying for the Psychology 101 make-up quiz I have to take tomorrow because the studying is getting pretty boring. As I read more and more of the textbook, though, I'm developing one of those things that usually passes for a revelation or an epiphany: psychology terms are 200% meaningless. It actually doesn't take any special training or learning to put together your own psych terms. All you do is take a basic root word (Latin or Greek if you want) and put "psycho-" in front of it to show that you're talking about psychology. So if you call something psychometric, that just means you're measuring it for a psychological purpose. If something is psychodynamic, it's something that moves or changes. If a psychologist thinks you like hanging out with friends, then you're psychosocial. Which, of course, leads to the obvious one: if you actually can do this kind of thing for a living, you're coming up with psychobabble and are pretty psychoboring. Getting that last paragraph out was actually the entire reason why I wanted to write this now. One of my suitemates has a humorous guide to college hanging outside his door, in which it makes fun of either psychology or sociology (I forget which) for taking something basic and turning it into a huge conglomeration of 20-letter words. I'll copy it down and post it here some time. Aside from ranting about my homework, I spent the rest of today trying to be productive and actually kind of succeeded. I woke up early, sent out next week's story ideas for the paper and some other e-mail, and just made it to class on time. Class today was a bit odd because I still feel like I've been gone for about three years instead of five days. When Dan and Jeremy were studying up here last night, I felt like I was remembering their existence for the first time since the Middle Ages. But it should pass, especially as I see more people and go to more classes. I spent my lunch break today in the Observer office working on a style guide/policy manual that we want to get out by January. After software engineering, I came back here to write some e-mail (mainly Observer related) and work on one of possibly three news stories I'm writing for Friday's issue. After a solitary dinner at Fribley around 6:30, I spent a good two hours working on my databases project, went down to Veale to go running (3.25 miles at 6.3 mph — I still have a lot of improving to do), and then did the PSCL 101 thing for about a half an hour. Make-ups aren't until tomorrow at 4 p.m., so I might give up for the night, send some more Observer e-mail (I'm trying to communicate more with my staff. Can you tell?) and then go to bed. |
Random Stuff #2
Tuesday, Nov. 9, 2004, 1:53 p.m.
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Those of you who are paying attention may recognize this as an outgrowth of something I mentioned in yesterday's entry about psychology or sociology. Things Hanging on Walls or Doors in My Suite. Suppose you have observed that children cry when they fall down. You should write: “Methodological observation of the sociometrical behavior tendencies of prematurated isolates indicates that a causal relationship exists between groundward tropism and lachrimatory, or ‘crying,’ behavior forms.” If you can keep this up for 50 or 60 pages, you will get a large government grant. Jeremy's very political door includes "survey" results from The New York Times: 40 percent of parents who dislike 30 percent of their children prefer George W. Bush. 60 percent of households that fly flags think America can do no wrong 26 percent of the time. Brian, an ex-Housing staff member, has a sheet of paper that says what he's currently up to: The friendly neighborhood A.E. is... taking pictures of Spiderman (working). My whiteboard currently contains this message left by Brian some weeks ago: EECS 214 = The Life. The life... it is not being made easy. |
Wednesday, Nov. 10, 2004
12:12 a.m.
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Probably the only way I'll ever write a post on a Wedesday during the school year is if I do it just before I go to bed on Tuesday night, like I'm doing for this one. What I actually should be writing, though, is one of the three (possibly four) Observer articles I'm supposed to have done for tomorrow. But those take a bit more effort, even the one that I'm mostly crafting from a press release. I seem to be taking the easy way out of my work (avoiding it) more and more this semester. I did, at least, manage to get my PIN from Tekin and register for classes today. It's the last time I'll have to go through registration here, actually, and I have one absolutely free slot to take whatever I want! This is actually a first, I think, because even when I was taking non-EECS classes before they were always to fill some kind of requirement for either my CS degree or my French minor. Naturally, given this unparalleled luxury, I'm planning to take advantage of it for all it's worth, so I'm currently soliciting recommendations on a good class to take. I'm currently considering WLIT 388 (Translation), COSI 211 (Phonetics and Phonology) if it doesn't get cancelled again, American Sign Language, or photography. It's been quite a while since our late-night study sessions at Leutner and Wade, so I'd also be up for taking something with some of my cool friends before we all graduate and move on to harder work or real life. Anyway, let me know if you're taking something interesting and wouldn't mind some company, and I'll see what works out with my schedule. I also had a pretty cool interview this afternoon with Prof. Lamis in the political science department. It was for an Observer story we're running on Friday, which will tragically require me to pare down a 45-minute interview until its hacked and mangled corpse fits into about 600 words or so. It's currently sitting at 927, but I don't want to cut out any more because it's all pretty interesting stuff. Maybe they shouldn't let me do interview stories any more; the last one I did, with Prof. Fogarty in accounting, ended up defacing Page Three of The Observer to the tune of 1600 words. The other thing I discovered today was that I can make neat-looking HTML forms that do absolutely nothing. Mark let me borrow his "Web Publishing With HTML 4" book this evening, and within 10 minutes I found exactly what I wanted and had some good sample code to go off of. The result can be seen here, at least until I learn JSP or ASP and make something better where clicking the "Submit" button actually does something. Music of the Moment: Dvorak's "New World" Symphony No. 5... I think. I had a piece of music running through my head as I was walking around campus this afternoon. I thought it was from the "New World" symphony, but when I listened to it later on I couldn't find the part I was thinking of. It may, though, have had something to do with the fact that I was doing homework while the CD was playing. |
Thursday, Nov. 11, 2004
1:08 a.m.
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Maybe this whole writing late at night thing has something going for it. It's after 1:00, and I don't have the luxury of being able to sleep in tomorrow, but I still don't feel like going to bed. I just spent the last several minutes rinsing out about a dozen 20-ounce plastic pop bottles, so the topic of this post is going to be recycling. Those of you who know me well — and perhaps even those of you who don't — probably know that recycling is something I really care about. In places where I spend a lot of time (my suite, The Observer), I'm probably known as one of those thoroughly annoying people who's always harping on his favorite topic and ignoring everything else. At The Observer, where I was this morning, afternoon, evening, and night, I'm constantly reminding people not to throw white paper into the trash can and to put their empty bottles into a copier box lid that I've got on the couch. Hence the dozen bottles I was rinsing out earlier. And after months of this intensive training, in which I've become a perpetual nuisance to anyone around me, people are still throwing out paper and pop bottles and soup cans and glass jars! Guys, recycling is very easy. Do it. This campus is finally getting pretty well-stocked with recycling bins for most common things, so that the distance between you and the nearest recycling bin is probably on the same order as the distance between you and a trash can at any given moment. (At the Observer office, I might add, my copier box lid is actually closer to the production workstations than the nearest trash can.) All you have to do is take about a quarter of a second to figure out in which direction you should walk. I realize this isn't my usual sort of post, but it had to come out some time. I've been reading a lot of Bill Bryson's I'm A Stranger Here Myself, mostly right before going to bed, which describes rather pointedly and humorously the spectacular waste that this country produces in just about any domain of real life. Not your typical "Once upon a time" bedtime reading, but it's funny enough to make me laugh out loud at one in the morning. That's enough about that. It's too late to get worked up about stuff that apparently can't be fixed. As a concluding note, I just want to issue a general request to pick up a copy of The Observer on Friday. It came out better than I was expecting this week (relatively), and we were even able to include a brief about Yasser Arafat's death just a few hours after it was announced. Of course, it was to replace a brief that said he was still alive, but at least now our news won't be so stale on Friday morning. Also, find yourself a copy of the December issue of Cleveland magazine. Marina, my cool layout editor at The Observer, has a nice piece published in it about the U.S. Japanese interrment camps during World War II. |
Friday, Nov. 12, 2004
12:37 a.m.
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Three late nights in a row here; not a good idea. My alarm this morning went off at 8:00, but after late night #2 it was actually 9:37 before I was able to get out of bed. A very bad sign, especially since my first class was at 10:00. I got out of bed somehow, put on something to wear, skipped a shower, and passed through Fribley on my way to the quad. I was just a few minutes late, but instead of a regular databases lecture by Tekin we had our class TA talking about how to use ASP .NET. The explanation was kind of fractured, and he kept skipping over lots of slides and changing them before I had finished copying his code. He did say, at least, that they're going to be posted on the class website at some point. The net result (awful pun!) may be unfortunately that I have to scrap that nice web form I made this week and posted in Wednesday's entry, becuase the TA talked about writing code in C# and showed a webpage he had developed graphically somehow in an ASP editor-thing. Our textbook, though (which is what I was following earlier), uses plain old HTML forms and hints at JSP as a way to submit queries and get results. I'd normally assume that either way would work, but the name of our server is aspweb, so I'm thinking that maybe it only supports the ASP stuff. As you can easily see from the last paragraph, I have no clue what I'm doing. These are all simple things that most CS majors can probably do without thinking — and things they've done in their free time — which gives me more of a push for heading into journalism at grad school instead of computer science. Or for learning ESP and skipping the web forms and servers all together. (À la Tekin: "That is a joke. I am joking.") I did look up some grad schools this afternoon, at least, and Tekin told me on Tuesday that he would write me a letter of recommendation. The current plan is to apply to Carnegie-Mellon's Language Technologies Institute for computer science, Northwestern's Medill School for journalism, and possibly to Columbia for journalism as well. Marina said that she would put Columbia #1 for journalism programs, so that probably means I won't get in without real newsroom experience, which I don't have. (Karen said, though, that they would put my picture on the wall or something at The Observer if one of us actually made it in!) Tonight I spent an hour and a half revising and expanding a research/design document for part of our software engineering project. The writing was pretty disorganized; it took me that long to go through just three pages, and Prof. Podgursky wanted it turned in to him tonight so he could review it for tomorrow. I'll probably get it out tomorrow morning with a note that it's not in anywhere near final form yet. All in all, though, things are going not too badly this week. Just busy. I'm now seven modules behind in my psychology reading and I haven't looked at the lab for EECS 301 yet, even though we're supposed to have been working on it for two weeks already. For my next entry, I promise I'll stop complaining and write about something good. Quote of the Day: "Any more questions? We still have half an hour. [No response.] In this case, let us finish the movie." —Our EECS 341 TA, after closing down the PowerPoint presentation on his laptop and bringing up something more entertaining. |
Saturday, Nov. 13, 2004
6:14 p.m.
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Let's see... I promised something good for this time. How about this: my hair acutally does cool things if I treat it right. Now for the story of how this discovery came about. Yesterday morning, after another post-1 a.m. night, I (somehow) forced myself out of bed before 8:30 and took a shower. My first class wasn't until 10:30, so after my shower I just stayed in my room for an hour working on stuff, which meant that by the time I left for Fribley my was mostly dry. This, it turns out, is the key to treating it right. If it can dry before it gets blown apart by the wind, it's very nicely behaved for the next two days. If, on the other hand, the wind gets a chance to rip it apart right away, it looks like an untamed growth of thorns until I wash it again. Its good behavior was especially appreciated yesterday because I had to go to the Tau Beta Pi initiation ceremony to welcome 24 new members into the chapter. (It's not a fraternity, it's an engineering honor society. I'm not that crazy.) Probably no one was paying attention to my hair, but it made me feel quite good to put on my dress clothes and actually consider myself rather nice-looking for a change. And that's enough for me. That's also enough in talking about hair, which is supposed to be a subject guys typically avoid and don't really care about in general. More good things today: an IM from Laura woke me up at 10:00, which kept me from drastically oversleeping. She was at the Observer office waiting for me to join her in Operation Massive Clean-Out, Stage One. It ended up lasting from about 11:30 to about 2:30, in which time we cleaned off and moved our couches, straightened the layout area, took some old and scary posters off the walls, and arranged our little display case outside with our awards and some old papers. Around 2:30, Vicki and Dan came by on their way to the art museum. Laura said our cleaning could be done for the day, so I went along with them and then to Fribley for dessert and tea with Vicki afterwards at 4:00. We were talking about homework and class and such at Fribley, which reminded me that I have at least five major things to do in the next three weeks: a psychology paper, a 40-minute presentation and a paper (both with one other person) in my math class, the documentation for our software engineering project, my hulking huge databases project, and grad school applications and essays. A sense of impending doom and extremely late nights is setting in. |
Monday, Nov. 15, 2004
12:57 a.m.
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I woke up today at 11:20 a.m. Very scary. I need to stop going to bed after 1:00, even on weekends. I'm also apparently a sink of sexuality; that is, sexuality approaches zero in my vicinity. According to Jeremy, so are Brian and Nicole. (As opposed to Mark, Jessica, and Jeremy himself, who are by contrast sources of sexuality.) Must look into this — maybe I've just been nominated to the college verison of the axis of evil. |
Tuesday, Nov. 16, 2004
12:27 a.m.
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So... this is going to be a crazy week. I realized today, as I was coming home from dinner, the Olin lab, KSL, and the Observer office around 11:30 p.m., that this is the 13th week of classes for the semester. If you're afraid of the number 13, you at least have one good reason to be: previous years have shown that this is the absolute worst week every semester. This time — my seventh 13th week, at least, so there's only one more to go — it's going to be due to the sheer amount of stuff that has to get done rather than something like four tests and three homework assignments. Just for fun, and because it's late, I want to go to bed, and I need to do this anyway, here's a list of what I have to (or at least really should) finish by the end of each day. Tuesday:
That's all I can think of right now, but it's quite probable that I'm missing something. Or several somethings. As of last week, I was hoping to be able to spare some time Friday night to go see "Enchanted April" at the Play House, but then I also have the Tau Beta Pi banquet on Saturday and a pre-Thanksgiving dinner at the House on Sunday, so it's looking like I'll need every spare moment during the weekend to get everything finished for next Monday! [Groan...] |
Tuesday, Nov. 23, 2004
2:09 p.m.
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Did you ever have one of those days where life seems to have a permanent grudge against you that you can't get out of? Today is one of those days for me. I woke up for my 10 a.m. quiz at 9:56. That's right, 9:56. Having studied only part of the material for about 20 minutes the night before. I was late to class, of course, but somehow managed to fake my way through the quiz without running over the time limit and turn it in. Then we spent the rest of the class going over the answers, and it turns out that I got about half of them wrong anyway. In retrospect, I may have had a better chance studying more and convincing Tekin to give me a make-up instead of running off to Glennan like a crazed lunatic without breakfast or a shower. After class, I took a shower, ate some yogurt, and then started the number theory homework that was due yesterday that I — of course — didn't have a chance to do. It was only one problem, but in part (b) we were supposed to compute 2^36,801 mod 294,409. That was annoying but not impossible: it ended up taking something like 20 steps of repeated squaring and adding those together. Part (c), however, asked for the same thing with numbers literally 500 times as large. My answer to that question (what I actually wrote and am planning to turn in for credit tomorrow) included the follows: "Am I missing something here, like an easier way to compute this?" So the next logical step in my afternoon was to go to Prof. Singer's office and see if he would accept my assignment late, and also to ask him if he'd be interested in writing me letters of recommedation for grad school. He wasn't in his office. While I was on the quad, I decided to stop by the Jennings lab so I could print out my DPR and turn in my application to graduate. Most of the Windows computers in the lab were in use, so I grabbed a UNIX box instead, figuring that a web browser and the capability to print were all I needed. False. The brower kept getting a Javascript error from www.cwru.edu and crashing. When I transfered to a Windows machine and successfully sent my DPR to the lab printer, I discovered that both printers were out of paper and some grad student was printing out reams and reams of stuff by re-using the backs of other people's old printouts. I left and headed over to Nord to try things there. I have never been in Nord at a time when the lab is not busy; today I ended up on one of the Macintoshes along the back wall. I was able (again) to send to the printer OK, but the printer was jammed! The lab attendant fixed it right away only to have it jam again on the next sheet. To put the lid on it, both crumpled printouts ended up belonging to a really annoying girl waiting in line in front of me who was arguing loudly with her mom on a cell phone. When I finally was able to get a printed copy of my DPR, my first move (instead of running off to Sears to turn it in) was to head back to my Macintosh and write up this post via e-mail so that you all could share my annoyance in case you don't have enough of your own this week. In conclusion, I would only like to say this: if I get too many more days/weeks/semesters like this one, they're going to have to haul me out of this place feet-first and in a body bag! For the Record: I did manage to write my psychology paper the night before it was due, finshing at exactly 2:27 a.m. Title: "Different Perspectives on the Effect of Violence in the Media." Length: six pages, plus references. References: four; one fewer than the minimum number required by the assignment, but oh well. |
Wednesday, Nov. 24, 2004
1:32 p.m.
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I'm happy to report that the last 23 hours or so have been much better than the 24 hours preceding them! Just one afternoon/evening of work on my databases project more, and then it's time to go home for a few days. After leaving Nord, turning in my application, and eating a quick lunch in Bag-It, I found an empty room in Sears and ran through my part of the number theory presentation twice. Result: I could do it without looking at my notes by the time I was done. Then I had dinner with Sonnie and some of her friends up in Leutner, which was quite nice. I haven't seen Sonnie very much recently because of how busy we both are, but hopefully that can change next semester when my class schedule is a bit more ordered and all the grad school junk is (hopefully!) out of the way. After dinner, I went to the USG meeting to cover it for The Observer, which actually also turned out to be a good thing because some important stuff happened during the first half. The second half was more fluff stuff — and a little bit too long for my taste — but eventually someone had the common sense to move to adjourn and someone else had the common sense to second the motion. (It actually took several motions, seconds, and votes to end the meeting because everything that was still open for discussion had to individually go through the process of being tabled. Ain't parliamentary procedure fun!) Back here, I worked on my knitting for a bit, talked with Jessica and Nicole, and took care of the finishing touches on the software engineering homework. This was liberally sprinkled with time-wasting until I eventually went to bed around 1:00. Today I woke up at 9:30, skipped psychology, and had a nice breakfast in Fribley with the Plain Dealer, which is something I used to do every day (by waking up in time) but haven't done much at all this semester. Number theory started at 11:30, and Remington and I gave our presentation as planned. It was, I think, fairly well received because it was easy to follow, even if we might have left out stuff that Prof. Singer wanted us to cover. The length (40 minutes) was perfect. Lunch at Fribley with Erin and Zara rounded out what I've done so far today. Have a good Thanksgiving (break), everyone! Be a Beta Tester! As soon as I get around to writing the index page this afternoon, my databases project will be accessible from this link. If you get bored between now and Dec. 9, I'd appreciate any feedback you have or any bugs/quirks you can find in any part of it. |
Friday, Nov. 26, 2004
11:59 p.m.
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As I hinted on Wednesday, I'm actually at home right now. I ended up not feeling like doing any work on my databases project (or anything else) on Wednesday afternoon, mainly because it was raining when I left Fribley after lunch and I didn't have my umbrella. I had to go back up to my room to drop off my stuff anyway, and after that I really didn't feel like trekking back to the quad in the rain when everyone else was already going home or had even left. So I put together a quick HTML index or main entry page for my project, saved it locally because I couldn't FTP it up to the server, and then packed up to go home. Now it is a fundamental Rule of Life that whenever you have 20 packages to take to your car parked outside, it will be raining and you will get wet. Not having enough stamina to combat the laws of the universe by moving the car closer to the door of my building, I put on my coat and started the process of shuttling my laundry, backpack, camera, and four bags of recyclables from my room to my car, and then finally left a little bit after 3:00. I had an overdue book from the Cleveland Public Library with me, so I thought I would just freeway it back to Twinsburg via I-480 and drop off the book at the library at the center of town, since the library's essentially between the freeway and my house. That lead directly to Mistake #1: taking the freeways home on the day before Thanksgiving. The total trip, which is usually only about 40 minutes on a good day, took about twice that long. The on-ramp from Chester to the Inner Belt was at a complete stand-still, the Inner Belt itself hit a top speed of about 20 mph, I-77 managed a pretty steady 35 once we got out of inner Cleveland, and the craziness that is I-480 ran between 35 and 45 most of the way. I only broke 55 mph once, and that was on the little connecter freeway between 480 and 271. In the end, it took so long to get to Oakwood that I eventually decided to give up there and skip the library all together. My aunt, uncle, and cousin from Cincinnati — along with my grandma from Brecksville — all came over to our house about 2:00 on Thanksgiving day. My aunt and uncle brought their two dogs with them, so we had to keep the cat in the basement all day. They stayed until after 11:30 at night before heading back to my grandma's house, where they were all staying. Today my dad and I drove my gar down to the Goodyear repair place because it had been making a new noise the last few times I had driven it. Generally, my opinion is that "Goodyear" — at least this Twinsburg Goodyear — is really just secret code for "theiving pirates," but it was my dad's idea and he came with me, which made it a lot better than usual. When I go by myself I always feel like they're taking advantage of my complete lack of knowledge on car parts and overcharing me by hundreds of dollars because I can't call them on it. (The last time I was there, they wanted to charge $600 to fix my back struts and mounts. Dad and Mr. Oliver looked at the car and fixed the problem in about an hour one evening with a $22 part.) This time, it turns out that the back brakes are bad ("The thingies just fell off of them when we put the car on the rack and took off the doodads," quoth the repairman) and the bearings need to be replaced, so they had to keep the car overnight in order to work on it tomorrow. This is putting into jeopardy my plans to wake up, shower, and eat in order to get back to campus as early as possible to work on that wretched databases project. I also still need to finish up my application to the South Bend Tribune for a summer position, which is due Wednesday and still needs me to write a finalized cover letter, tweak my resume, and select a few clips to include. (If anyone as any input about clips, please let me know!) But on the whole the "weekend" has been very nice! |
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