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ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
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Tuesday, December 13, 2005
11:05 p.m.
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The '90s are taking their revenge, and I for one am quite happy about it. This is coming from my incredibly addictive habit of wasting time by browsing the Internet, thereby allowing me to sink to record lows in usefulness but discover all sort of wonderful tidbits that kind of make up for it. This evening I began by trying to find a downloadable version of Sim City 2000, since my family's install CD is back in Ohio and I had a random urge to play the game. Instead, though, I found something even better: Word Rescue and Math Rescue, two games my sister and I were absolutely hooked on when we were little. Chris somehow got them from her second-grade teacher on regular 3½-inch floppy disks, which were immediately turned over to our dad since our computer at home at the time (an IBM XT like the one in my Live Journal icon) could only handle the 5¼-inch floppy disks that were actually floppy. Our dad took the disks to work with him and made 5¼-inch copies of the games so we could install them. I believe the XT finally died around 1996, and after that we lost both track of both sets of disks, so until I downloaded them tonight it had probably been about eight or nine years since I'd played the games. Of course they run a bit faster now on a Pentium 4. It's odd how random things like sound effects or splash screens can stick around in your memory for so long — as soon as I started Math Rescue everything was instantly familiar, and I even remembered which screens you had to press the space bar on in order to get them to go away. After I had fun with that, I was again wandering aimlessly through cyperspace and came across the Best News of the Day: Warner Brothers is finally putting "Animaniacs" out on DVD! I have been waiting for this for years. Actually, I was thinking about it this weekend when I was looking through the ads in the Sunday paper. What unfeeling executive in charge of things, I was wondering, sees fit to make DVDs of shows that are still running, or even the first season of "Fraggle Rock," and to leave "Animaniacs" to rot in the studio vault for more than a decade? Well, no more. The website I read said that the tentative release date for the first "Animaniacs" re-issue is July 25, 2006 — anyone who's planning ahead for my birthday should take careful note of this. Finally, I feel compelled to add, before I go back to sliming gruzzles, that this is the beginning of the 20th page in my HTML journal. Be afraid. |
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
11:00 p.m.
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Got back about an hour ago from a cool night at the restaurants in Squirrel Hill courtesy of KGB. I guess the weekly event was moved to Wednesday because of finals on Friday evening. They wanted people to drive, so I caught the 4:45 shuttle home from the LTI in order to have plenty of time to get the car out and take it back to campus with me at 6:00. Everyone who was supposed to be coming was on time, so we left in packages from the UC shortly thereafter. I spent the longest finding a place to park, of course, looking down the side streets for a free spot along the curb instead of paying for a meter right on Murray. We ate at Pacific Ring, a pretty nice Asian restaurant, in a room that had been reserved for the whole group of us. I ordered a sort of combination plate with pork, duck, and chicken over rice that took some ingenuity to eat: all the duck and pork pieces were laced with little bones that were almost impossible to extract without resorting to fine cutlery or chewing the bits apart in your mouth. A new person I met at dinner was someone called Alex, another of the extraordinarily large group of people at CMU from the Washington D.C. area, and also an element in the subset of them who attended Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology ("T.J."). (T.J. is, from what I can gather, a super-magnet kamikaze school++ that has a habit of dumping cartloads of kids into the CS program here.) Alex seemed to know his stuff, whether we were talking about stick-shift cars, computer hardware, or theatre lighting — this coupled with the usual preponderence of tech-savvy people in KGB made me feel like I didn't really contribute anything useful to the discussion during dinner. Most people were in favor of adding dessert to the meal, and had started picking things out of the menu, when a clump of waiters appeared and began to pass round the checks. Thus shooed prematurely off the premises, six of us decided to head just down the street to a place called (if I remember right) Guliffy's. I decided to make tonight my official end-of-semester dinner party, so I ordered a piece of cheesecake; it was quite good, and at $3.99 it was the cheapest thing on the dessert menu. Total fund depletion for the evening ran to $16, which I guess is pretty decent for a full meal out in good company. Tomorrow begins the studying for my one and only final, which is set for Friday at 1 p.m. As time goes by I get lazier and lazier about studying for things properly in advance, with the result that I may stress myself out a bit more than necessary even though there really hasn't been a difference in my grades. At the end of my third semester at Case, I remember devoting nine hours in a single day to re-teaching myself circuits before that class's final exam; tomorrow the closest I'll come is probably working through Alon's sample NLP final, reading over my class notes, and printing off some of the slides if I'm missing anything. |
Thursday, December 15, 2005
10:43 p.m.
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The NLP final is worth 40 percent of my grade, and how long have I spent studying for it? An hour. And when is the test taking place? Tomorrow afternoon. So what terminal disease am I suffering from? That's right, it's procrastination! There wasn't much exciting going on today except for the snow and freezing rain, so I suppose I should take this time to clarify and add to a few things from yesterday' post. Starting with the fact that, when I woke up this morning, I suddenly remembered that the name of that dessert restaurant we went to had a "t" in it somewhere. Now I'm all confused over the correct number of "l"s and "f"s, so I'll have to resort to a regular expression and leave it as Gull?iff?ty's. Secondly, I see I forgot to mention an interesting idea that deserves further comment. We spent a lot of time at dinner talking about driving stick-shift cars. Alex drives one, and Leah's had some experience, but both Rebecca and I can only use automatics. (There was that one time when Susannah took me down to North Marginal to practice on her Civic for about an hour, but since it was like 9:00 at night on a straight, flat, and empty road, I don't count that as actual driving.) I raised the point last night that stick-shift people are always glowing about how superior that method of driving is, how simple it is to pick up, etc., but when you ask them to teach you they refuse to allow their cars to be (mis)handled by a bunch of novices. Alex's response, worth an automatic 10 points in my book, was "Actually, I do teach people." Unfortunately, he seems to have had some kind of near-disastrous incident with his clutch recently: something serious enough that he doesn't think his car can be used for teaching any more. So he proposed an interesting solution that just might be workable because of how old I am. You can rent a car, if you pay extra money, at 21, so Alex's idea was that a few of us who are interested in learning stick should pool our money together and rent a manual transmission car for a day; then he would be willing to teach us on that. Getting a car in-city for a day probably isn't that expensive, and it would be a much quicker solution than my current idea of buying a junk car and learning on it (at some nebulous point in the future when I'd have money for this), so it sounded all right at first. As I was riding the bus to campus this afternoon, though, I was able to conjure up several practical objections to it. Most important among them: sure, I can sign the papers and rent a car, but if I can't drive stick yet how am I going to get it home? Alex is just 18, so I couldn't list him as another renter and bring him along to the agency without a good deal more subterfuge than I'd be willing to go through with. Along the same lines, the one time I have rented a car before, they were quite strict about getting insurance confirmation and various other annoying things from everyone who was going to be allowed to drive the car during the time we had it. If I rented something by myself, and then got into an accident (which seems a bit more likely with a crowd of people who wouldn't be able to get started on hills properly) with someone else at the wheel, we'd really be for it when the rental people found out. And it would probably go on my record if I'd signed for the car. So I'm not quite sure if this car-renting business would be the best way to proceed, or if there are other answers out there that I haven't thought of yet. Comments/alternatives/offers, anyone? |
Sunday, December 18, 2005
3:24 p.m.
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Eventually I will learn that trips to rlambert's house result in all-night adventures, and I'll stop planning to get things done during the morning of the following day. Last night she hosted a vegetarian cooking party starting at 7 p.m. I wasn't quite sure what to bring, so I fell back upon the old vegetable soup recipe I used to make in middle school, except I substituted vegetable stock for the chicken broth that usually goes in it. Around 6:30 I set out from here with my two Giant Eagle bags, and arrived just before 7:00. There was some delay in getting most of the other people there, so cooking didn't actually start until a bit after 8. But then the feasting began: my soup was a sort of appetizer, then stuffed shells were brought out, followed by fudge, and by the time we finished with the cheese fondue we decided to skip the pound cake because no one could eat anything else. Just dealing with the leftovers and the dirty dishes took a sizable amount of time. I put together about a quart of soup, plus the remaining vegetables, and packed them into one of my bags to take home with me. Not that I went home just then or anything. Most people left at some reasonable time of the morning, but Cornell, Rebecca, and I went on talking for hours and hours — to the point that we were considering going out for breakfast when we noticed that the sun was getting close to coming up. Festivities concluded with an interesting game of Twister, on the cement floor of the basement, at 7 a.m., and then the idea of breakfast at Pamela's was scrapped in favor of actually getting some sleep. Cornell offered to drive me home when we both left at 7:45, which I appreciated a lot because I really didn't feel up to the half-hour walk at that point. My first thought, after picking up the Sunday paper and getting into my apartment, was just to stay awake for another seven hours, go to sleep around 3:00 this afternoon, sleep until 1 a.m.-ish, then stay awake from 1 a.m. Monday until 11:00 or so that night, thus beginning Tuesday back on schedule notwithstanding the loss of one "day." My plans for today, however, include going either running or swimming on campus, and the idea of passing out and/or drowning because I'd be doing physical activity after being awake for 27 hours didn't seem to make much sense. So I resorted to Plan B, which was to go to sleep right away (8 a.m.), wake up around noon, then go back to bed around midnight and start Monday as a normal day. This had the advantage of getting "back on track" a bit sooner, but it was rather hard to actually put it into practice. (I didn't actually make it out of bed until 1:00, and then I felt pretty out of it until 2:30 or so.) Now I'm feeling much better, but I guess I should get away from my computer and do something before the sun starts going down again! |
Monday, December 19, 2005
9:13 p.m.
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Wow. Today has been one of the truly bizarre days of my existence, mainly due to the aftermath of the cooking party. Sunday existed in name only for me this week — and not even then for very long — since I did absolutely nothing productive and really can't recall how I spent the four and a half hours of it I was awake for. That's right, kids, I starting feeling really tired again almost immediately after posting my last entry and ended up asleep at 5:30. I was hoping I could sleep until something reasonable like 4 a.m., but it was actually only 11 when I started waking up. I tried fighting it for a bit, but eventually got up and started my Monday at 12:30 a.m. My "serious issues" journal here gives a fuller account of what it's like to start a day in the middle of the night, but I will say here that time makes a lot less sense when you've only got numbers on a clock to go by. Eventually I went to the LTI by the 10:12 bus and worked until 3:30, when I went out to the public library and then to the KGB meeting. Took the bus home again at 6:12 in order to have "dinner" (my fifth meal of the day, I think) at my apartment before fortifying myself with a third cup of tea to make it through the evening. Now that I've been awake for 21 straight hours again, I think I'll be heading off to bed very shortly and will be on a more normal schedule for tomorrow. I'm hoping to take advantage of the four-hour time shift I'll have remaining to go swimming at the UC when the pool opens at 7:00, since I have yet to resume a consistent program of physical activity. It's a good thing that I don't have any class to deal with this week! CMU's finals technically end tomorrow, although I've been academically finished with the semester since Friday afternoon. I do have to spend the entirety of this week on research stuff, and my advisor wants us to run some pretty important tests before Christmas, so I'm finding it convenient to treat it like a full-time job. Randomness! One of the other master's students in my lab has a cell phone that rings a lot. It's one of those fancy types that plays a song that doesn't sound like a series of electronic beeps. I have to laugh, though, every time I hear it: the song is "When You And I Were Young, Maggie," and I have it, sung very frighteningly by a countertenor, on a tape of phonograph cylinder recordings that I bought online. The year it was recorded: 1908. |
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
11:38 p.m.
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Sleep is good. Especially in massive Rip-Van-Winkle-like quantities (11½ hours) that I had last night. No swimming this morning, obviously, since I wasn't awake until 9:30 and didn't manage to get into the LTI until after noon. Work until after 5:00, when I went up to the UC to go running, though in this I was foiled by the massive of people clogging up all the treadmills in the fitness room. I decided to look into the Tartan office to see if anyone was still around, and ended up having a nice chat with Rob. At 6:10 all the treadmills were still in use, so I gave up and caught the 6:15 shuttle home. Some quick grocery shopping for dinner, including picking up a half-pound of corned beef from the deli. In general I've been completely turned off by Giant Eagle's lunchmeats, but I was just thinking about a nice corned beef sandwich a few days ago and it was on sale this week at the store. Expectations fully justified in the sandwich I made with mozzarella (sp?) cheese when I got home. The rest of this week is going to be excellent. Tomorrow Camellia, who's home in the suburbs here for Christmas break from BU, is meeting me for lunch at Lulu's on Craig Street. She's the first person to come into Pittsburgh to visit me, and I haven't seen any Case people since October, so this is a doubly exciting event. Triply exciting, then, is the fact that Sonnie is hitching a ride with Laura to spend Thursday here, although this will make doing any MEMT work that day a bit tricky. From what I gather (via Sonnie), Laura is planning to dump Sonnie off at my house and then spend the day hanging out with a boy she met on high school Jeopardy. (This could be the beginning of one of those awful jokes: "Two high schoolers, an undergrad, and a master's student walk into a bar.... And three of them were kicked out for being underage. Ha ha ha.") This evening I downloaded RealPlayer for Linux so I could listen to the latest edition of Malcolm Laycock's dance and big-band show on the BBC. At the end, he gave a list of upcoming events that sounded so amazingly British I feel the urge to practice saying them. Stuff like "On Thursday week, the 10-member James Miller Orchestra are playing in Bracknell." (The segment is about 52 minutes into the audio file, right before the final song, if anyone cares for a first-hand listening.) My chief annoyance is that I find it difficult to roll my "r"s in the context of real words with much consistency, though I think I'm getting better a few tries just tonight. (Yes, I am a self-confessed language nerd.) |
Thursday, December 22, 2005
11:41 p.m.
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A slight bit of freaking out I experienced last night turned out to be pretty unwarranted — on top of everything else I have to take care of in the next week, I realized, around 7 p.m. last night, that I had yet to begin my Christmas shopping and had no clue what I should get for anyone in my family. Christmas shopping and I just don't get along. I still have horrid memories of me, two or three years ago, getting off work some time in the afternoon of Dec. 24th and spending the rest of the evening in a frenzied race to various stores in the middle of snow/rain that made driving at night a bit annoying. Last year, I didn't have a chance to wrap anything until after my family got home from the 10 p.m. Christmas Eve mass, so it was after midnight by the time I got to bed. So last night I got in my car and drove to the Waterworks, figuring I could find some things at the stores there. This is the part where I write "Insert giant rant about Christmas shopping here"; if I have time I'll post it on my serious issues journal instead. Suffice it to say that it was not a fun experience, and that I returned here at 9:00 empty-handed and extremely frustrated. Luckily, when the going gets tough, the tough call their parents. I caught mine just as they were getting ready for bed, and at the end of a half an hour we had worked out Christmas ideas for a number of people (including them). I felt a lot better after that. Sonnie's visit today also went quite well. She and Laura first went to pick up Andy (the boy Laura was coming to see) from his house, and then they all came over here for a bit. I was able to talk with them for most of the time while I waited for my research workflows to run. In a bizarre turn of events, we found out that Andy and I had actually met before, even though we'd both managed to forget each other's faces. He was the leading scorer at the CMU high school quiz bowl tournament that we hosted a week and a half ago, and we came to the conclusion that he must have handed me his team's buzzer on that occasion as well. Eventually Andy and Laura went off to tour the Cathedral of Learning down at Pitt, and Sonnie waited patiently for what seemed like six eternities while I compiled some research results and sent them off to my advisor. Then we caught the Squirrel Hill bus to have lunch at Aladdin's. After lunch we took another bus down to CMU, walked around campus a bit, then found an open computer cluster so I could do more work. This time, at least, I was able to log into a computer for Sonnie to use, so I hope the time wasn't completely wasted and boring. Around 5:45 I finally had everything I needed, so we walked up to Fifth Avenue to grab a bus heading homeward. I had several e-mails to send once we got back, but then I officially proclaimed myself done for the night. Sonnie's visit ended with both of us eating crackers on the floor of my apartment while we looked through old photo albums. Laura had to be home by 10:00, so she came over again around 7:45 to collect Sonnie for the drive back. |
Friday, December 23, 2005
3:49 p.m.
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I am finally getting out of here and going home — for a few days, at least! As soon as I pack up, eat more of the food I still have in my apartment, and wait for rush hour to be over, I'm driving back to Twinsburg; that will apparently be the staging area for last-minute camping preparations. Susannah is having a Boxing Day party on the 26th; she, Dan, and I are going food shopping for the trip on the 27th; Dan's spending that night at my house; and then somehow the three of us plus Kathi, Vicki, and Paul will be condensing into two cars and spending three nights in a cabin at Allegany State Park in New York. We come back to Cleveland on the 31st, just in time for a New Year's Eve party at Erin's apartment, and then I go back to Pittsburgh the next day in order to be at work (groan!) on January 2. (Various people have expressed the opinion that my advisor's being quite stingy on winter break allowance — at first I didn't think I would mind much, but it seems like everyone else has already been gone for a few days. I went to the LTI today around noon, and neither my advisor nor the staff member working on my project were there, so I left after about a half-hour.) Some other random thoughts to fill out this entry: I love it when two things that I thought were completely unrelated suddenly fit together in some way. As one example, you can revisit my entry of March 14, when I discovered a connection between Dorothy Sayers and P.G. Wodehouse. Chalk up today as another specimen. I was listening to an Artie Shaw record that contains the song "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man"; the words and tune of one of the lines ("Fish gotta swim, and birds gotta fly") are exactly those that appear in one of the verses of Tom Lehrer's "Pollution." The Artie Shaw recording wouldn't have actually been that ancient when Lehrer was performing, so I'd say the reference was meant. We also have a question of the day: Is it possible to be only numerically dyslexic? So many times I find myself swapping digits in numbers I see printed somewhere, but I never make mistakes with letters of a word. This is most importantly an issue when I'm doing MEMT work and have to kill processes on our UNIX server — my great fear is that I'm going to mistype a PID and terminate someone else's program by mistake. (Actually, I've already mistyped PIDs a few times, but the incorrect numbers thankfully didn't point to any process at all, so all I got was an error message.) Then, just now, I was momentarily baffled by a line in Sonnie's schedule for the spring, which appeared to saddle her with an unprecedented 2½-hour-long tennis class. Upon closer inspection, I found that the time I had first seen as "5:30" was actually "3:50." |
Monday, January 2, 2006
7:12 p.m.
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And we're back! I am in fact not dead yet, but reporting to you live from the computer desk in my apartment after being away long enough for my browser cache to be completely empty and to make typing feel a bit weird. I guess that means I should practice hitting the keys a bit by giving a sketch of what I've been up to for the past week and a half. In short, it was 10 days of Christmas, camping, and couches. I went home (to my parents' house, technically) last Friday night, and since my bedroom has been largely emptied by me and largely usurped since August by my little sister, I was installed on the pull-out couch downstairs. Waking up in the morning was definitely easier when I was sleeping next to three giant windows. On Christmas morning my brother woke me up at 8:00 by tapping me twice on the shoulder; I was out of bed in about three seconds. We eventually had to wake up Katie after 9:00, and then the presents began. My parents have this idée fixe that they have to spend the exact same amount of money on each of the four of us kids, no matter how much we ask for. The only idea I gave my parents for me was some more RAM for my aged computer (which I got), so everything else I opened was randomness to fill out the quota. (I've told my parents at least three years running that they should just save the money instead of worrying about getting me extra things because they feel like they have to, but this never seems to work.) It's a good thing my parents are fairly good guessers at what I'd like, so I got some excellent surprises. Chief among them is a little George Foreman grill, so my current culinary dreams are of corned beef paninis with mozzarella cheese. I also now have my own Scrabble (which I almost bought myself two weeks ago but didn't), a decent starter's sewing basket, and a few more accessories for my kitchen. In the afternoon we went to my aunt and uncle's house for Christmas with my mom's side of the family. I got to play with my cousin's kid, who is the cutest four-year-old boy around. His games of choice were flying around the basement with a Buzz Lightyear doll and pretending the stack of couch pillows was his fat stomach from eating too much pie. Christmas changed to camping almost immediately. Susannah had a Boxing Day party at her house on the evening of the 26th; the next day she and Dan drove up to Solon so the three of us could go food shopping for the trip; then Dan and Paul spent the night at my house so that six of us could condense into two cars and leave on the morning of the 28th. The rendez-vous point was at Kathi and Vicki's house, so Paul and Dan proceeded directly there in one car while I drove the other down to Susannah's to get her. After everything had been loaded and arranged, we had a relatively short trip to Allegany State Park in western New York, arriving at our cabin around 4 p.m. Wednesday, since we couldn't even check in until 3 p.m., was our sit-at-home day. Dan had discovered a wonderfully nerdy board game called RoboRally (what's the deal with all this internal capitalization, anyway?), which we happened to play first at his suggestion, that was so much fun that it took over the entire weekend. On Thursday we woke up late and spent most of the day on an eight-mile hike through the hills. Most of us walked without our winter coats on: it was warm enough to steadily sprinkle us with rain most of the time, but there was still snow in the woods. Susannah fell into one of the streams we had to cross and soaked halfway up to her right knee, so we swapped some clothing around and turned a thin hat into a dry sock. Lunch break on a fallen log about halfway through the excursion. I made the mistake of wearing really thin socks and came home with blistery red spots on the back of both feet that made walking in shoes rather painful. A hot chili dinner back at the cabin after dark, and then another game of RoboRally. The plan for Friday was to go cross-country skiing, since both Susannah and Vicki had brought theirs along. We accordingly forced ourselves out of bed at 8:30 and arrived at the park's ski rental hut around 11 a.m. Behind the counter, unfortunately, was "Sassy McDanger" (Susannah's name for him), who seemed to be more interested in taking his lunch break than helping his park make money. In response to our question of "How are the ski trails?" we got: "Icy. Very icy. In fact, dangerously so. I wouldn't go out." So we didn't. Instead we collected Kathi and Vicki's plastic sledding sheets from the cabin and took turns riding them down a large hill we found on the hike the day before. Lunch, after we got cold and bored, was clam chowder, and then we settled in for a long afternoon and evening of games: hearts, Trivial Pursuit, casina, golf, screwcard — and, of course, more RoboRally. We had to be out of the cabin by 11:00 on Saturday, so we got up early again and started packing things into cars. Made it by about 20 minutes and managed to get back to Kathi's apartment off Cedar-Fairmount at 2-something in the afternoon. After showers and such, I was dispatched with Kathi and Vicki to go liquor shopping for Erin's New Year's Eve party. I still don't understand why alcohol is so much of a pre-requisite for having a good time — most of what I've tried doesn't come anywhere close to tasting as good as, say, plain old cranberry juice, and it's about an order of magnitude more expensive too. The list of required drinks was enormous, and we had to check three different stores and wait in line for approximately four years before we were able to find them all. The party ended up having about a dozen people at it, most of them bent on getting drunk and then playing board games. Our attempt at Cranium devolved into something approaching a farce, during parts of which I felt like I wanted to either curl up into a cocoon or jump out of Erin's sixth-floor window. A comparatively calm game of So now it's 2006, and a Monday to boot. I thought I was supposed to go into the LTI today — my advisor, the research programmer, and I usually have a 4 p.m. meeting on Mondays — but I didn't drive back to Pittsburgh until this morning, and when I got to campus at the required time neither Alon nor Justin were there. While I was waiting for the bus I ended up talking to a guy who was at the stop with me. After a few sentences he asked me where I was from, and I said "Cleveland, Ohio." —"Cleveland, Ohio?" he said. "Nah, you have an accent. You sound like an Englishman or something. Where are you originally from?" This is the fourth completely random person who has told me I sound British, which either shows that people are thoroughly ignorant of what a British person actually sounds like or that I've lost the ability to hear how different my mutated phonemes are. I'll be the last person to debate that I don't sound like I'm from Ohio, but I think I'm still a long way from being John Cleese. |
Random Stuff #23
Tuesday, January 3, 2006, 8:24 p.m.
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I'm definitely not doing these as often as I used to, but I have a wonderful opportunity today. My sister Chris and I decided, 10 years ago today, to make a time capsule for ourselves to open at some enormously distant point in the future, that point being two days ago from our current point of view. So a Holiday Cookies container with a piece of paper saying "Do Not Open 'Till 2006" taped over the lid had been sitting in my closet until last week, when Chris and I opened the thing a bit early. (Dec. 27 was the last day we were both going to be home for the break, so we either had to cheat by a few days or wait until the summer or something.) The contents are even stupider than I remember them being, as you'll see from this note that I wrote when I was 12. I'm only censoring two lines for privacy reasons; all the rest is the exact stuff, right down to the questionable grammar!
I'm a little amazed that I didn't seem to spell any words wrong (although the second "t" in "station" looks like it began life as an "s"!), but at the same time I'm annoyed that I filled almost the entire thing with meaningless facts (like my siblings' names and ages) that I'd be certain to remember or be able to look up. The 10-year time period itself also turned out to be flawed: I guess we expected ourselves to be living in a different universe by now, but I can dig all sorts of stuff out of my closet that's older than 1996, and before we opened the capsule both Chris and I were able to remember some things that were in it. As a solution, I'm considering making a new one, at least for myself, that's a bit more comprehensive and stays unopened for a little bit longer in terms of time. I suppose it could be fun to check in with myself at the age of perhaps 42 or 47, especially since I have no clue what I might be up to by then.... |
Tuesday, January 3, 2006
11:16 p.m.
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Well, I definitely decided to repeat the time capsule experiment, and now I've spent the last two and a half hours — during which I was supposed to be productive on MEMT and other work — typing out part of a really long document that's going to form the centerpiece of the collection. I want something that will record my thoughts, recent past, and future expectations pretty comprehensively, so I'm making big sections for relationships, job and career, grad school, and so on that I'll fill in over the next few days or weeks. It's already onto its seventh page after just tonight. The "incubation time" is going to be 20 years (i.e. until I'm 42); by then I expect my life situation to be completely different from how it is now, so the capsule should have some meaning. Any ideas on what else I should put in it? I didn't have room to mention it in yesterday's massive catch-up entry, but there's another reason I've been thinking so much about the past recently. For Christmas my dad bought a FireWire card (as a sort of general gift to the family, I guess) so we can record all of our old 8 mm home videos onto the computer and burn them to DVDs. My dad's been playing with the new toy for almost a week straight, so he's got around six hours of stuff already transferred. That includes our 1990 summer vacation to Grand Haven, Michigan — 83 minutes of tape that I edited together and produced a full version of and a highlights reel for while I was home. Some of the tapes we had seen before, last year when I was home, including the wonderful 1992-vintage segment of my two-and-a-half-year-old (hyphens galore!) little sister going down the slide in our kiddie pool that I wrote about last January. As I was editing the Grand Haven stuff and getting really familiar with it, I started to note a certain confusion in what I remember. When looking at a certain scene of us playing on the beach, for example, am I remembering it because I've already gone through the tape four times looking for a place to cut? Or is the episode familiar because I saw the tape last year and am remembering that? Or do I actually remember being on the beach when I was seven? A combination of all three, it seems, but I'm afraid that the tape's version is taking over. The only non-tape thing I can come up with from the beach is collecting cigarette butts in a plastic pail, and I'm not even sure if that was the same trip. |
Wednesday, January 4, 2006
6:20 p.m.
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My clock tells me that it's only dinner time, but for some reason it feels much later. I have the distinct impression of having fallen out of reality for a really long time. The alternate universe in which I've been immersing myself is, of course, that of my computer — that desktop black hole that has an astounding ability to suck in large blocks of time that wander near it. I started out doing some MEMT work. I didn't wake up today, dispite my 8:00 alarm, until something like 10:30, so I figured it would be easiest if I just worked from home for the day after I ate "breakfast" and took a shower. That continued on and off until about 4:30, when I spent some time perusing Live Journal and deciding that I should really write that novel I keep planning. (Nicole, your site is entirely responsible for this, I'll have you know.) So I opened up the file containing the three pages I've written so far, but kept getting stuck on how to continue. I have a rough idea of the plot, the ending scene is almost entirely worked out, and I know what set of characters I need. The problem this time is actually with the setting: I kind of want to set the book in Cleveland, perhaps even at Case, but then I'm not sure how much detail I should make up or change and how much I should keep from real life. I also discovered, to my dismay, that the ending scene I'd come up with so perfectly wouldn't be possible with the first-person narrator I'd started with. That's when I stopped and made myself dinner. I find it very annoying that writing should be so difficult for me. I have no trouble in putting words together to form nice sentences. I can take the resulting sentences and arrange them topically in paragraphs. I can figure out in what order to place the paragraphs to make a coherent essay or news story. But for some reason I am completely unable to compose a creative work longer than two pages without hitting the self-destruct button — if someone ever decided to publish "The Collected Works of Greg Hanneman" they could market it as a brochure. By the time I was done eating dinner I realized I didn't have enough time to go running at the UC before it closed at 7:00, unless I wanted to forego the usual one-hour wait period after eating and run the risk of spewing chicken nuggets all over the treadmill. So it was back to the computer, where I read my old journal archives and checked my e-mail a few times. I just surfaced from doing that a few minutes ago to the discovery that I haven't been out of my apartment all day. A trip down to the grocery store, at the least, seems indicated, or maybe even a 30-minute walk all the way to campus in order to work on something in a place where I won't be so distracted. |
Thursday, January 5, 2006
11:33 p.m.
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It occurs to me that I may need to continue on into the Ph.D. program here in order to stick around long enough to get a handle on the CMU computing environment. I continually feel like a dunce, as I bug people I know with what turn out to be idiotic questions, even though I've been supposedly studying the subject for four and a half years. Yesterday's Hero of the Day, along those lines, is rlambert, who introduced me to IRC (= Internet Relay Chat, je crois) nine minutes after I put up an away message asking about a certain chat room that turned out to be on it. Today I poked my virtual head in there again and noticed that everyone was changing screen names without logging out and back in again. So I asked how they were doing it, and bohanlon (another KGB person) was nice enough to give me an answer and also point out an IRC client that's easier to work with than Gaim. After we got my question out of the way, the conversation in the room moved into a comparative discussion of BSD, which I've never used, and two things I couldn't even identify. I guess what I'm trying to express, in a pretty roundabout way, is that the people here — even the non-CS majors — are so far above me in terms of plain ol' computer knowledge that it often makes me feel quite pathetic. Did people at CWRU go in for this kind of stuff and did I just never realize it? Or is this just the expected difference between a mediocre CS student at a decent CS school (me at Case) and first-rate ones at the best computer science program in the nation (these guys CMU)? I suppose I'll come up to speed eventually... but in the meantime I'm offering a round of thank yous to anyone who I've nagged about various trivialities so far, and an extra helping of apologies for those that are probably still coming! |
Saturday, January 7, 2006
2:43 p.m.
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"When #cslounge shifts away from talk about computers," quoth rlambert, "it's usually pretty entertaining." This has definitely been confirmed after last night! Finding myself with nothing better to do around 8:00 on a Friday night, I logged in and started following the conversation. Much easier this time: Gopi posted a link to a BBC News article about the 2004 Turner Prize, which got us going on modern art for a while, and then somehow four of us started a fairly long conversation in French. (I don't have the chat logs, but I think someone used a French word or two, and then I answered it with a whole sentence. And off we went.) The best part of the evening, though, was when Chrisamaphone jokingly ordered mrwright (read "Mr. Wright") to get back into the kitchen and make her a pie. This was supposed to be meant as a joke, but I wrote back saying that I had just made some Jell-O chocolate pudding pies, and that I could bring her one of those she really wanted one. This was agreed to, probably causing much comment about random new people on IRC that can't tell the difference between jokes and serious requests. I prefer the explanation that I get bored easily, had nothing else to do that night, had six mini-pies that would take me a week to eat by myself, and generally don't turn down requests when I can be of service. That's how I ended up taking a 30-minute walk down to rlambert's shortly after midnight carrying a copier box lid filled with pudding pies and Cool Whip. The dessert was enthusiastically received, and I finally got to properly meet Chris and Wes in addition to seeing Cornell and Rebecca again for the first time in some weeks. The house was sucked into the usual late-night time vortex, and it was 10 minutes before 5 a.m. when I actually made it back here and went to sleep. Woke up, after sleeping for seven hours, with a headache today at 12:45. I place the blame, naturally, on the weather, which has decided to give us one of those horridly dark Cleveland-esque days where the sky is a solid grey color and the amount of daylight is cut in half by the clouds. Could be a good day to play some swing records and work on the massive list of cleaning projects that need to be carried out at my apartment. |
Sunday, January 8, 2006
8:37 p.m.
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Whoosh, I have done almost nothing this weekend! My computer continues to be a sink of productivity; even after my headache went away yesterday evening, I blame it as the ultimate cause for why I didn't leave my apartment all day. Still, I did manage to do some reading: "Rossum's Universal Robots," on loan from Cornell, and a few short stories that I hadn't been back to in a long time. I also started work on writing a new version of that novel I mentioned in Wednesday's entry, one that (I hope) takes care of those narration difficulties I was griping about. It's back to being two pages long, of course, but I anticipate better progress now that I've got things a bit more figured out. Today I made myself pancakes for breakfast, then went on a bit of a shopping expedition to the Waterworks. The chief aim in doing this was to buy a new pair of swimming goggles — mine have somehow disappeared in the six weeks since I've been swimming last. Having successfully purchased a new pair and arrived back here before the pool in the UC closed, I hopped on my bike and went down to campus. I don't know what the temperature was this afternoon around 2:00, but it sure felt like spring out there. Not that it was even overly warm, though it wasn't icy or snowing, but there was a certain smell in the air that I usually don't notice at this time of year. Trying to swim again after six weeks off was a bit more difficult than I'd hoped, and in the end I think I only made 650 or 700 meters before stopping. (I always lose count after so many laps!) Felt good coming home, though, especially since I've been really sporadic on the training recently. For this past week, however, I blame that on the hordes of people who have suddenly decided to launch a coordinated attack against the treadmills and bikes in the UC and keep me from using them. It must be everyone's New Year's resolution to lose 20 pounds or whatever. As a last note, I'll add quickly that I had to hang around in the UC for a bit this afternoon to let my hair dry after swimming, so you should all be on the look-out for a new comic tomorrow. Regular Monday night updates should be resumed starting with this week. |
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
11:13 p.m.
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I love it — every day a new adventure with the crowd here. It almost feels like being back at Case, which is a high compliment to all you KGB/#cslounge people out there. Last night I came home from my 4 p.m. meeting with Alon a little after 7:15. He wanted to look at some translated sentences from our last round of experiments, so we set up in one of the conference rooms with his laptop and a projector and started working through them. I think we'd made it through five sentences in the first two hours, which is when I started expecting him to call it quits for the day, but I guess he had other ideas. "Let's just look at one or two more," he said; and, after we did that, "Let's review what our options are from here." We were released at a few minutes to 7:00, and then I immediately jumped onto my bike and flew home for the quickest dinner I could come up with. (Quick, first because I was really really hungry, and then because when I got to my computer I found an IM from Rebecca saying it was game night down at her house.) After dinner I was off straight away, and I even took the car to save time. After some lovely Earl Grey tea and a game called Citadels, it was decided to head to India Garden for half-price. After some... interesting navigation of the one-way streets in Oakland, Rebecca, Dan, Alisa, Chrisamaphone, and I finally arrived in one piece at the restaurant, where we were met by Cornell and later by someone called Misha. I was really excited when we walked in to note that they had finally decided to turn the music down for once; I think I was able hear people talk for the first time ever in that place. It was around midnight when we finished eating, so it was back to Rebecca's for more games. CWRU Dan will be happy to note that I have succeeded in introducing the CMU crowd to the excellence of Pit, although even with seven of us playing it seemed to fall short of the total insanity we used to achieve in Glaser 330. Until the last game, that is, when CMU Dan pulled Jeremy's trick of collecting one of everything instead of nine of a kind. After we all recovered we moved on to Apples to Apples, and then I announced my departure at 2:15-ish. Today I spent all afternoon bashing my head against my computer monitor in trying to figure out a particularly pernicious runtime Java error. By the time I did get it figured out and decided to go home for dinner, it was too late to head over to Hunt and scan that comic I promised for yesterday. (Tomorrow, I hope.) This evening, I happened to be in #cslounge when the call to play Tetrinet went out, so now I have yet another Internet addiction and time-wasting method to add to my arsenal. This one may take some actual practice, though. I'm not too bad at Tetris when I play by myself, but I now discover that I lack the reflexes and multi-tasking abilities to keep up in a competitive attack-and-defend version involving up to six players. I also have a comparatively slow typing speed, so the inter-game conversation tends to zip by me while I'm fumbling at the keyboard. (And what normal person can play Tetrinet and chat without any spelling errors at the same time? These people are hard-core! Either that or they're all homomorphic androids directly wired to the Internet....) I guess I should be going off to bed. Lots of work awaits in the morning! |
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