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ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
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Wednesday, January 11, 2006
11:26 p.m.
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With all the stuff I wanted to mention in yesterday's recap o' fun, I completely neglected to say that Windows XP is making a fresh attempt at annoying the crap out of me. Half of the programs that originally came with my computer, which began life as a Windows 98 box, no longer work under XP. Something is also tragicallly wrong with Adobe Reader and Microsoft Word. And, to top it all off, the CWRU site license I used to install the OS in the first place has had the official hex put on it by Microsoft, so now I can't use Windows Update because my system somehow doesn't qualify as "genuine." Unfortunately for Mr. Gates, Microsoft picked the worst possible time to mess with me, because I go to Linux Central University and am developing a marked preference for that operating system as time goes by. My computer already spends about 80 percent of its time in Debian — as soon as I can figure out how to make it talk to my printer and allow non-root users to write to my Windows 98 drive, I'll probably switch over completely. Hm... I note suddenly that this journal is getting subsumed by CS talk, which is perhaps not ideal. I'll try to contain myself. The opposite of computer science is probably physical activity, which always makes me think of going outside, so I guess I can talk about the weather instead. Ever since I wrote that sentence or two a few days ago about how much like spring it felt, Pittsburgh has been in the middle of a tropical heat wave. Today it was 55° (actually 58° if you belive Intellicast, but that's probably way out at the airport). More of the same for tomorrow and Friday, but with sun instead of rain like we had today. Cleveland is supposed to be almost as warm — and you know something is screwed up with the world when it can break 50° in Cleveland in January. I still remember the times during my sophomore year when I had to walk 20 minutes to my 9:30 a.m. class in 4° weather. Here's another non-CS tidbit: I had a really really odd dream just before I woke up this morning. It was a dream within a dream, which is a situation I can't recall happening to me too frequently, but I suppose it was caused by the ineffectiveness of me setting an 8:00 alarm. I usually wake up momentarily, turn it off, and go back to bed, and the following light sleep is pretty productive dream-time. This one began with my dad forcing some random boy to chase a horse around an arena and shoot it repeatedly — my little sister, a dedicated horse-lover to an insane level, was sitting on a large box in the middle of the arena refusing to watch, screaming, crying, and generally begging my dad to stop the torture. Thus ended the embedded dream, because in the next scene I was relating the previous occurrence to a "real-life" Katie and asking her if that's really how she would have reacted. Then that part ended and I woke up in my apartment in Pittsburgh with Katie 120 miles away. |
Random Stuff #24
Friday, January 13, 2006, 12:03 p.m.
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Greek to Me Today's Friday the 13th, so for your edification and enjoyment I'll take a look at the wonderful word "triskaidekaphobia," which just provided an amusing insight a few minutes ago. I think most people will recognize it as one of the usual "fear of" words, like "claustrophobia" or "arachnophobia" — that, plus the fact that it came from the Greeks, who really had a thing against the number 13, was all I ever knew about the word until this morning. Some other phobia words are pretty literal Greek translations: "xenophobia" (fear of strangers) is built from the Greek for "other," I think it is. But I guess I had never stopped to pick apart "triskaidekaphobia," much less learn its spelling, until I saw it in the newspaper today and immediately noticed the following chunks: tri — three Put them together, and you get "fear of three and ten," or in other words "fear of the number 13." This does manage to leave out the proper categorization of that s near the beginning of the word, but I suspect that either "tris" is a variant form of "tri" or that it was inserted for ease of pronunciation. The cool new part for me is the realization that "kai" is in there. My Greek knowledge is minimal to start with, coming almost entirely from those weekly quizzes on Latin, Greek, and Old English roots we used to have in high school English, but a few summers ago I worked at an e-book company where my job was to format the source code for a couple of Biblical Greek textbooks. I guess I picked up a few mew words from doing that. One of my other favorites is the connection between Akron, in Summit County, and "akros," the word for "top." |
Saturday, January 14, 2006
1:32 p.m.
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This week has not been an ideal one for establishing a regular sleep schedule, or for eliminating any sleep debt that I still might be carrying, but I guess I'll survive OK. A third day of Tetrinet on Thursday night — I finally won two games! — merged into half-price at Fuel and Fuddle around 10:45. It was really warm again, so I rode my bike down to Oakland and left it in one of the racks at Pitt. I met up with Tom, Chrisamaphone, and Wes outside of the restaurant, and after we ate I walked back to the house with them. (Not sure if it has a name, like the Den did last year, and I don't want to give out someone else's address online without prior permission.) Riding down the Negley Avenue hill at 1 a.m. felt almost like a free-fall, and I had to start squeezing the brakes really hard about halfway down in order to stop at the bottom since I miscalculated the timing of the light at Fifth Avenue. To bed just before 2:00. My plan was to get up early yesterday and go to a lecture by Eugene Charniak (of parsing fame) down at Pitt, but I ignored my alarm again and didn't manage to wake up until 20 minutes before it was set to start. Instead, I sat around my apartment working until I decided to go in to campus at 4:00. Outside it was 65°. In January. I walked to school in a T-shirt and jeans. In January. (Today of course it's 35°, with a wind chill of 20° and snow on the way.) I stayed at work until 6-something, won another game of Tetrinet, and then came home to dinner. Wes's geek movie marathon began in Wean at midnight, so around 11:35 I peeled myself away from the computer and went back to campus. It was raining quite heavily, and bus service between midnight and 5 a.m. isn't that great, so I took the car. The first movie was "Hackers," a 1995 specimen of "quality-with-a-k" cinema featuring some wretched dialogue, ridiculous clothing, and massive scenes of over-the-top computer graphics that, I suppose, were meant to look all exciting and technological. The silly computer screens (death by graphics and colors and sound effects) and slow typing speeds of the characters were also much derided among our audience. Thus an entertaining time: this must be one of those movies that you watch to make fun of, like the second new "Star Wars." Around 2:45 "Hackers" was followed by "Enemy of the State," which has aged extraordinarily well. I had never seen it before, and only kind of remembered hearing about it coming out, so as we watched I formed the opinion that it dated from around 2002. It wasn't until this morning, when I looked it up on IMDB, that I discovered it was actually made in 1998, years before terrorist attacks, security, and secret spying on U.S. citizens became part of the daily news. I see very few movies in general, so I got all excited when I was able to recognize that the same actor who had played the editor in "All The President's Men" in the late '70s was also playing a small role as the senator from New York here in "Enemy of the State." If anyone has access to a copy of "All The President's Men," by the way, I'd love to see it again. The last time (and only time) I saw it was in high school journalism class, and I've been thinking of re-visiting it now that I know more about what's what in the news business. I would also award major major points to anyone who can track down a copy of "Konrad," a horribly obscure movie from the '80s, about a factory that turns out perfect kids, that I saw in fourth grade. |
Sunday, January 15, 2006
3:06 p.m.
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Number of complete strangers who have asked me if I'm British: 5. This is happening so frequently that I'm starting to wonder what the results would be if I went to some public place and purposefully used a decent British accent. It could turn into something fun to do on a free evening: first a British movie and maybe some BBC News at home to get the atmosphere and the intonation patterns right, and then a trip out to a restaurant, store, or just a crowded bus shelter to experiment on the unsuspecting public. A similar thing I've thought about doing before, just for fun, would be to go somewhere where I wouldn't be recognized and affect a non-English foreign accent. It probably wouldn't even have to be that accurate to get by most people, since I don't suppose a lot of linguists get side jobs as waitresses or check-out clerks. Maximal effect (i.e. maximal talking) would probably be best achieved in a group of two or three, so if anyone is interested in forming a Committee to Confound National Origins in Public, let me know. In other news, the geek movie marathon continued sporadically throughout yesterday, eventually turning into a more active "Let's Hang Out in Wean 4625" sort of thing late in the evening. I showed up a bit after 9 p.m. with two plates of chocolate chip cookies, and then we slogged our way with much difficulty through the first 40 minutes or so of "Battle Royale II." It's a Japanese film (the original title is all sorts of fun to pronounce!) that now qualifies as one of the most bizarre things I've ever seen. It made no sense from a pragmatic point of view, the only object of the movie seeming to be to kill off as many of the characters as possible without regard to when or why, and the mostly shouted or screamed dialogue wasn't very helpful in terms of showing what Japanese sounds like. After we gave up on the movie, we played a bit of impromptu charades before stampeding down to Oakland for half-price (my third time this week) and infesting Joe Mama's to a tune of 13 people and India Garden with probably another 10. A giant plate of spaghetti for $4.50 is an excellent way to end a week. |
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
7:56 p.m.
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Everything I intended to work on last night was pushed aside after mrwright told me a little about the MIT Mystery Hunt competition, in which his team got second place. The first puzzle I clicked on (they're under the "World Map" link) was this knotty little problem — after three or four hours of hacking away at it, I feel like the answer is so close, but I can still think of so many possibilities that I'm not sure how to proceed further. It's interesting to see the conflicts these kinds of things can set up internally: I do want to see if I can come up with the solution on my own, but it gets very frustrating to try idea after idea and not make any headway... or to make apparent headway for a bit before running into a mental wall... or to be totally unsure whether you're making real progress or getting more and more idiotic by the second. There are probably enormous numbers of physchological studies that could be conducted with logic puzzles. Otherwise, I've gotten through two days of my second semester at CMU, so I should probably write some about how they went and what I can be expecting for the next 15 weeks. Answer to this second part: lots of project work! We begin with Language & Statistics (11-761), which concludes with a group project on some area of statistical NLP and a presentation thereon. I think the thing to enjoy in this class is going to be the manner in which it's taught. Prof. Rosenfeld — everyone at the LTI seems to go by their first names, so this will probably default to "Roni" after a week or so — brought his laptop to lecture yesterday, but said he rarely plans to use it because he hates teaching with PowerPoint. Major points right there! He also wants to have a lot of class discussion, something that I've been socialized out of during the past four years. My other real class is Grammar Formalisms (11-722), taught by three professors and held in two different buildings on a non-standard Monday-Tuesday schedule. Afternoon classes were cancelled yesterday because of MLK Day, so we had our first meeting in Scaife Hall today. I think having three instructors is probably more bad than good if they're all going to be there at the same time. It was amusing today to watch them figure things out on the fly. Lori was giving the main stuff, but her computer didn't work, so Alon was running the slide show off of his, and both he and Alan Black were throwing in additional comments on the material when they felt it was appropriate. It's also amusing to note, on days like this, the interesting niche I seem to have occupied when it comes to general or "street-smart" knowledge about campus. Compare me to the undergrads, even freshmen, and I look absolutely clueless. I can name and locate only about half of the dorms, I know no professors or classes outside of the LTI, and I feel that the finer points of dealing with the network still remain largely in shadow. Among the LTI grad students, though, I seem to be at the relative high end of the scale. There is a guy in my lab, a first-year master's student like me, who had no clue that Andrew accounts existed until I told him about it the day of the Wean flood. Of the three first-years in the lab who are taking 722, I was the only one who knew how to get to Scaife Hall. I guess we will see what another semester has to bring. |
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
9:58 p.m.
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Whenever I post something relatively early the the evening, I have the urge to write again at my usual time before bed. Today I just feel like writing, so I think I'll give in to the urge and leave you guys with twice as much stuff to read during your early Wednesday classes or whatever. At the end of my last post, I see that I obliquely brushed the subject of where my first semester at CMU has gotten me, but I didn't fill it out as much as I'd like to, so I'll go ahead and discuss it in greater detail now. Well, I certainly shouldn't be able to complain academically. My grades for the fall were at their usual levels. I have a research post and an advisor who's happy with my progress so far. My "Black Friday" departmental review came back satisfactory. Some professors and studens will say "hi" to me in the hallway when we pass each other. It's true that there are some residual time-management difficulties left over from the beginning of the semester — back when I really had no clue whether I was at work or at school — and that I can often find fault with the effort I put into my academics, but I wouldn't say the LTI is to blame for that. I'm not sure whether I expected to know the other grad students better by now or not. Some of them are married and have families that they go home to at 5:00, but still I would have expected group study sessions or a research project that involved more than me, my advisor, and a staff programmer. So I've turned pretty clearly towards the undergrad community for my social life. I'm much more comfortable with that kind of college mindset than with the stereotypical "I spend 20 hours a day in the lab" or "Oh, there are undergrads here?" viewpoint that you can find in grad school. At Case the undergrads never had anything to do with the grad students, unless one of them happened to be your TA or you worked on research for a professor, so I know I came to CMU with the expectation that it would be difficult and strange for me to carry on with some of my old college activities. Thankfully, that is certainly not true. Within three weeks I was writing for the newspaper, in November I joined the copy staff, and today my appointment as 2006 copy manager of The Tartan was made official. I seem to have fit in tolerably well with the freshman crop of trivia club people, even though I wasn't even sure I ever wanted to play another tournament again. And then of course there's KGB: I'm saving the best for last here. Meeting the people connected to that organization and doing things with them has really made me feel like I'm doing the college thing all over again. The best way to describe my involvement is probably with an exponential curve. My object at the beginning of the semester was to meet people and get accepted into some kind of social group, but for the first several KGB events I felt like I was some kind of annoying appendix tacked on to a complete and functioning organ that didn't need it. Most of the discussions seemed beyond my comprehension, and I felt rather scab-like in trying to stick myself into them where I didn't belong. (In retrospect, feeling like that may have been partially due to the fact that I was coming into a new place, where I had absolutely zero background, immediately after leaving an environment where I was fully integrated and knew the culture. I guess I forgot what it was like to be a freshman.) Eventually, though, the curve's slope started increasing. I went to half-price with some people. Rebecca invited me to her goat-cooking party in November. People told me about Zephyr and IRC and Tetrinet. I can attempt to keep up a conversation on programming languages or Linux. There are even people who like to talk about language, accents, and speech patterns. I can walk into the Wean cluster without feeling like a parasitic invader. I estimate, in fact, that I know almost three times as many undergraduates as grad students, and that's definitely not the ratio I expected to end up with back in August. (The last paragraph, by the way, may be bordering a bit too much on teenage angst of the Xanga sort that is so much derided by good people everywhere. My apologies if it sounds immature. Sometimes I go off on tangents when I write that I post more for my own record than because I think people will actually want to read them. This is not the kind of entry I usually write, but when I do write them I can get easily carried away with dramaticism and over-analysis. From a more intelligent, anthropological perspective, I could probably replace it by just saying that the enculturation process is working, resulting in increased quality-of-life perception by the enculturee.) So, to wrap this monstrosity up, I'd say that my first five months in Pittsburgh have been a fun ride. (Five months and two days, actually, since I woke up one morning all on my own in my first apartment.) Not exactly what I was expecting when I checked the "will attend" box on my admissions letter and sent it in, but that's the part that makes life fun. To all the CMU people who read this, thanks a whole lot! |
Thursday, January 19, 2006
7:15 p.m.
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The first homework assignment for 761 has been posted, and for the first time in quite a while I'm actually want to do my homework! I was just thinking about writing a little program to analyze the contents of my online journal, which I currently estimate at over 800 KB of plain text or 125,000 words, and now it turns out that I can do the coding for course credit. And, of course, once the program is done I can run it on any data set I feel like. I think I'm going to really enjoy that class. When I wasn't spewing my mental guts into my keyboard on Tuesday night, I was able to make pretty decent headway through the textbook without checking the clock or the page count too frequently. I usually start out each semester with a new promise to actually do the assigned reading in all my classes, but this in general only lasts about two or three weeks before I realize I can get just about everything I need in lecture. This time around, though, the Language & Stats book is the only one I've got — its chances of actually getting used are consequently quite high, I hope. Alon (my advisor) decided that Justin and I should be at a big meeting that the GALE people are having tomorrow morning to get ready for a machine translation "dry run" happening next week. We'll be getting translations from a whole bunch of other systems, and then the MEMT output we produce is going on to be scored against all of theirs. I think, because it's being called a dry run, it doesn't actually count for anything, but after the tests I ran back in December came out so disappointing Alon wants us to make various improvements to the system before we get the new data. These past two weeks have seen me working on project stuff more than ever before (which admittedly wasn't all that much), and the three of us have been meeting up two or three times a week to check progress and go over results. This actually makes doing the work a lot more enjoyable: with an actual goal in mind I don't feel like I'm typewriter-monkeying around at my desk so much. Hopefully this is what the summer will be like. |
Saturday, January 21, 2006
3:45 p.m.
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I guess I'd better write now, because I don't know how much more free time I'll get this weekend. Let's see... shortly after I posted Thursday night I found out that the KGB event for the week was a potluck food-gathering, so I conceived the idea of bringing a pie. (I feel like I've been associated with that dessert form ever since that time a few weeks ago when I carted Jell-O pudding pies down to Chris and Wes.) I really didn't feel like peeling and cutting up half a dozen apples, so I rifled my cookbook and decided on blueberry instead. Now only someone as crazy as me would think to make a summer berry pie in the middle of January, which fact was immediately made clear when I ventured out to the store in search of ingredients. Rejecting the in-stock blueberries as too awful-looking, and the canned pie filling as too artificial, I settled for $10 of frozen fruit that ended up more like $10 of fruit mash by the time I dethawed it in my sink. Yesterday I had to go to a big meeting at the Craig Street office for all the MT dry run participants to figure out what the other CMU groups were doing. I didn't mind going since it let me feel like I was an actual part of some larger group that consists of more than me and my PuTTY terminal. It ended right around lunch time, so I just biked back home and did stuff from there for the rest of the afternoon. Alon, Justin, and I were meeting again at 5:00, so I went back to campus for that, then came home again to pick up the pie for the potluck. The potluck, in Doherty 1212, eventually resolved into several discrete clusters of gamers or laptop-watchers (I got in on a game of Settlers and actually did fairly well for once), spent a bit of time as wholly a laptop-fest, then morphed into a pseudo-cluster rave with all the lights off. I still have trouble with the whole dancing thing, even in informal settings, so that was my cue to leave. I ended up at the cluster in Wean, where a game of Unreal Tournament was underway; I defaulted to my 761 homework until I got bored enough to want to go home around 11:30. Some reading on my couch until 12:30-ish, and then off to bed. I've spent today jumping back and forth between cleaning my apartment, running language model tests that Alon wants finished this weekend, and editing copy for The Tartan. This is Week One of my tenure as copy manager, and that's what's going to be eating up my weekends for the rest of the year. I still have Friday and most of Saturday to myself, but on Sundays I get to be in the office from 11 a.m. until whenever the last page of thirds is finished — experience from last semester says this is anywhere between midnight and 3 a.m. Tomorrow I get to meet the rest of the staff as they come in for their three-hour shifts, although I do know most of the evening people from working the 9-to-midnight shift. It's definitely an interesting feeling to suddenly have a staff again. When I turned over my role as news editor at The Observer in the spring, I thought I was pretty much done with serious newspaper work; now this week I've been sending out e-mails, making phone calls, going to meetings, and editing as much content as I did at the height of my Observer career. |
Saturday, January 21, 2006
11:11 p.m.
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I've been sort of between moods all day — hanging around waiting for something to happen, but at the same time not really expecting anything to come up. I decided not to run down to the Tartan office and visit layout, and an attempt at venturing out half-price food failed about an hour ago due to lack of interest. So I've been in my apartment the entire day and at my computer for a good 90 percent of it. |
Tuesday, January 24, 2006
12:03 a.m.
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Pretend it's still Monday, even though the dateline on this will say Tuesday. I forgot to start writing before midnight. So... the story of yesterday? Ohgoshcopyediting! I got to The Tartan — after five months I still keep wanting to call it The Observer — at 11 a.m., as requested, and production was in full operation by about 11:30. Some problems with the intranet kept copy really slow for the first few hours. James brought Settlers of Catan with him when he came in after noon, and we had enough time to play a whole game without real interruption of work. By the afternoon things were moving faster. The Tartan's office is on the third floor of the UC, without direct access to windows, and with the indoor lights on it doesn't matter much anyway. That, combined with the fact that there's no clock in the "copy cave," led to me losing all track of time after a while. As soon as it got completely dark I felt like it was 9:30 or 10:00, even though it was barely 6. When one of the other staffers came in with a dripping umbrella, I looked up and asked "Oh, it's raining?" —"Yeah, it has been for a while." And then I thought of my poor bike rusting away in the rack outside the UC. At some indeterminate point in the future, we finished the last page of post-post-thirds (i.e. something we'd seen for the fifth time) and sent it back to layout to be corrected. I wandered out into the main room to find that it was 1:30 a.m. Evan asked me to stick around for a bit in case people had questions about their pages, so I didn't actually leave the office until 2:07. That's right, kids; 15 hours proofreading that little paper that shows up in waist-high stacks by the Wean elevators. You had better read one. It was still raining when I came outside, so I put my coat on over my backpack, wiped the seat of my bike with my gloves, and splashed through puddles all the way back to my apartment. Arrived quite wet about 10 minutes later. It may take me some time to get used to doing this every week. During the waking-up process this morning my dreams were infested with horrifying visions of copy editing. I'd see a page of copy with awful mistakes in it, wake up with this strong feeling that I hadn't finished my job yet, become conscious enough to understand that the page wasn't real, and then go back to sleep to start the cycle over again. This frightening spectre have happened upwards of three or four times before I finally got out of bed. |
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
6:36 p.m.
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What is it about dry-erase markers that make them impossible for professors to figure out? Prof. Rosenfeld was having trouble with the ones in Wean 4615 on Monday, so today he walked into Language and Stats with a new box of markers from the CS main office. He wanted to use a rather elaborate coloring scheme on the board, so within five minutes of starting lecture he's wandering around the front of the room with three uncapped markers in his hands, waving them tip-up all over the place while he talks, etc. And then he goes to write on the board with one and is annoyed (surprised?) to find that it doesn't work. Instead of putting its cap on and leaving the marker horizontal or tip-down for a bit, he throws it away and asks the TA to go back to the office and get a replacement of the same color. This is perhaps one of the reasons why tuition here is $30,000 a year. On a happier note, today we have snow for the first time since I came back from Christmas. It started out as a sort of rain–ice–snow mix yesterday evening and presumably switched over during the night. I think this is a good thing: I like snow better than rain, and having so many 50-degree days in January was starting to get just plain creepy. The change in weather does mean transportation is a bit more annoying, since biking is sort of ruled out, but I've only been making one trip to and from campus each day. Research work has been rather insane. Last week it was interesting and fun, because we were finally doing something amd making some progress, but this week it's just been annoying. I'm starting to feel like I want to run my head into a wall whenever Alon asks me to run another test. Yesterday evening I finally decided to escape my office and work from the cluster in Wean, figuring that I could skip dinner, be productive there for a bit, and collect people for a half-price run around 11:00. Success on all counts, plus mrwright showed me how to fix my desktop configuration on the cluster machines so it doesn't look so hideous anymore. Waiting for the workflows to run also provided a nice excuse for playing several games of Tetrinet.... Half-price with Dan, mrwright, and various other people at Joe Mama's afterwards — I can easily see that place turning into one of my favorite restaurants. It's a lot like what Rockne's would be if they served Italian food and good desserts, and after 11 p.m. a giant fish sandwich served with fries is only $3.74. Dan and I were heading home in the same direction, so I walked most of the way back with him and gave him, I'm afraid, a very poor description of language models and their application to machine translation. |
Thursday, January 26, 2006
11:55 p.m.
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I almost wrote two or three more entries last night, on various topics, but I couldn't condense anything into a coherent post without being either incredibly boring or incredibly arcane. I was amusing myself by re-reading parts of my old written journal — that's the one I kept before I switched over to the online format almost exactly 15 months ago. This time of year must be well-suited to journal-keeping: I was able to find good entries for this week in every year but 2001. A few of them discussed Penn Bowl, the big trivia tournament in Philadelphia, and more than the tournament they showcase my budding love for public transportation and visiting new cities. The time period is also somewhat of importance in the scope of American history. Here's part of what I wrote about my trip via subway to Independence Hall, in January 2002: I paid $2 (!) to get on at 30th St., and got out a few minutes later at 8th. Then I followed signs to Independence Hall between 6th and 5th St. They had a metal blockade (like in front of roller coasters) set up in front of the Hall and around the park in front of it, so the only thing I could do was walk by. Then I went around back and walked through an old-style park until I got to 3rd St., then I decided just to keep going until I got to Penn's Landing on the Delaware River. Foiled in this attempt as tourism, I tried again the following year: We rode down to 5th St. and started to walk around behind Independence Hall. The metal barriers (two rows of them; see p. 386) were still up — I thought last year they had just kept the Hall closed left over from Sept. 11 — but there actually was a sign that said how to get in. [...] We ended up having to go into a little shed-building kind of like the place you rent clubs from for miniature golf. I thought it was like a ticket office, but when we got inside I saw that it was a security checkpoint! We had to take off our coats and put them through an X-ray detector, then do the same with everything in our pockets before walking through a metal detector like at the airport. Once we were deemed safe we were able to walk around inside the park. I thought it was kind of annoying (and a little sad) that a place all about independence and freedom is cordoned off like a police state. Hm... looking at all these old entries makes me want to study handwriting analysis, or at least objectively examine how mine has developed over the last six years. The early stuff (1999) is quite narrow and much sloppier than I remember it, for one thing, and my method of making a capital "I" evolved through no less than four distinct forms before finally settling into its current version around 2003. (I was going to describe them in words, but it's way too complicated to attempt without pictures.) What I would consider my best writing probably happened about a year and a half ago, although when I'm making an effort and don't have to write too much I can produce a current version that's a bit smaller and cleaner than what I was doing then. I think I will stop and go to bed now! |
Saturday, January 28, 2006
10:43 p.m.
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And now, before I forget it and get caught in Newspaper-land for the rest of the weekend, I present a wrap-up of the last few days. I couldn't leave my office yesterday until after 6:00, and then I went to the cluster and talked with people there for a while. Eventually Tom mentioned that people were going bowling, so I got in with that group a little bit after 9:30 and set out with them by bus. Our destination was Forward Lanes, about a half a block east on Forward Avenue from its intersection with Murray in Squirrel Hill. I don't know what I was expecting when we got in the door, but it certainly wasn't a narrow entryway with a flight of steps. (What I mainly want to know in all of this is who builds a bowling alley on the second floor of anything. And even if you do, who or what gets stuck being the first-floor tenant?) This particular alley was even smaller than that place on East 30th Street by CSU that some of us Case people went to a few years ago; I think I counted 18 lanes. There was a snack counter, which provided my small and expensive dinner of a hot dog and ginger ale, but there were only a few small countertop things behind the lanes for you to put your food on. The place was overrun with people waiting for lanes to become available, most of whom seemed to take up permanent positions on the other side of the same countertops, so I felt a little bit odd reaching for my food at various intervals with a crowd of people watching. We (Alex, Rachael, Alisa, and I) bowled three games in a nicely-relaxed manner. It's been five years now since I bowled regularly, so I didn't mind experimenting a bit. I bowled the first game and a half normally, then switched to a lighter ball and started trying to throw hooks. Normally this backfires spectacularly, but for some reason last night I could hit anything anywhere for six or seven frames running. The hook did start to fail at the beginning of the third game, though, and after trying a frame left-handed I went back to my usual straight balls until we stopped. Fun times. Alex, Rachael, and Alisa took a 61C back to campus afterwards; a 45-minute walk got me back to my apartment around 1:15 a.m. After last week's complete waste of a Saturday, I remembered to plan an escape from my apartment for this afternoon. It was 55 degrees outside today, so a nice biking trip was at once suggested. I thought I'd shoot downtown on Fifth Avenue, take the Eliza Furnace trail from the Point to the Panther Hollow Trail, and finish it by climbing up Neville Street and checking in at The Tartan to make sure they had enough copy. Note to all Pittsburgh bikers: do not attempt to get through Oakland on Fifth Avenue; you could probably walk faster. Even in the absence of vehicular traffic, I still wouldn't recommend that partcular route into downtown. If I thought before that Pittsburgh was a nicer city than Cleveland, it was only because I hadn't seen the rest of Fifth Avenue. I also still cannot understand this city's love affair with stoplights. Once downtown, I had a pretty difficult time actually locating the Eliza Furnace "Jail" trail. A promising sidewalk leading out of Point State Park ended up dead-ending under a freeway into a parking lot just inches from the Monongahela River. Eventually I decided to circle round the old courthouse and jail, which is when I saw a solitary sign that in the end led me to an access point beyond the Greyhound station. The trail is only about 2½ miles long, so I rode the length of it three times before going up Neville Street. The parking garage under the Corporate Sell-Out building (I don't know its real name) had an entrance there, so I had fun with biking up to the top of the garage and back down again before going back to campus by the roads. My goodness, why do I write so much? I think I'd better stop now before everyone who reads this goes into text overload. That's my job tomorrow. |
Monday, January 30, 2006
11:37 p.m.
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I have to laugh a bit about this. Classes at my high school must have recently entered the second semester; my little sister now has the same U.S. history teacher I did seven years ago. She might be in for an... interesting time. We never could figure out how he did his grading — our best guess was that it was based on the color of the folder or Trapper you used for the class. If I remember correctly, blue was an A, black was a B, and green and red were Cs or Ds. I also note one of Mr. Factor's many projects as being perhaps the first time I stayed up past 11:00 doing school work. In more current news, I spent 16 hours at The Tartan yesterday, getting out at 3:02 a.m. I wonder if layout and section editors are starting to hate me yet for being too picky about things. Michelle was already threatening to barbeque my brains because it took an hour to get a Pillbox third back to her. At some point in the late afternoon or evening, I noticed one of the layout people wearing a Westlake shirt, so I asked her if she was from Cleveland. Affirmative — and, in fact, after a few minutes I discovered I was talking to Marina's younger sister. (Marina was my layout editor at The Observer for two years.) There must be something strange going on between these two news organizations: Kristin, another Observerite, has a younger brother here at CMU who writes the football articles for The Tartan. After a series of Tartan meetings this evening, I stuck around campus until 8:00, when I walked down to Carnegie (Music) Hall to hear a chamber music concert. Matt had asked me during copy last week if I could buy him a ticket — they had them at the UC info desk, but for some reason the discounted price was only available to grad students. He recommended buying one for myself, too, since I said I wasn't very familiar with chamber music. The group performing was something called the Trio Johannes, and the fare, not surprisingly, was three Brahms trios. I've been attempting to write up some kind of coherent review for the programme, since I generally seem to do so whenever I go to a concert, but I'm having some difficulties phrasing what I want to say succinctly and accurately. The best I can do is to say that I noticed a definite difference between the early work (1865) and the late ones (1891 and 1886) that resulted in me prefering the later ones, but I can't codify exactly what it is. I'm finding that I may be turning into a bass junkie when I go to hear live music, which may be because so much of the other stuff I listen to was recorded 60 to 100 years ago when the range of frequencies you could capture on record was much smaller. There is something about cello pizzicato, for example, that sounds much more vibrant and full in person than it does on even a modern digital recording. But more about this in a separate post if people are actually interested in hearing me sound forth (ha ha) about music in greater detail. |
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
11:36 p.m.
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Today has been an off day: no work, really, and I only partially succeeded in taking care of things around my apartment. I don't think I even woke up until after 10:00, but that was partially a conscious choice because I haven't been getting quite enough sleep lately. In getting up so late I missed a trip Rebecca was organizing downtown to help convince the Allegheny County Board of Elections to not buy Diebold electronic voting machines, which I think was successful; that would have required being at the Morewood bus stop at 7:45, and I just couldn't do it after the past two weeks. Went to campus at 12:45, by foot. I think I'm going to try to give up taking the bus. I've got my bike, for one thing, and also two perfectly functional appendages sticking out of my hip that I can move back and forth. Desulatory work until class at 3:00, then Tartan editorial staff meeting at 5:00, and then it was off to Schenley Park for ice skating with the LTI. It was the first time I've gone this year, so things started out a bit shaky until I remembered how to hold my balance. I'm getting a bit better at spin-stopping (instead of crashing into a wall), but I still can't skate backwards. I left the skating rink a bit before 9:00 and saw the most amazing views of the city from Overlook Road in the park. I got home just in time for President Bush's State of the Union address. 'Twas quite disappointing, as I expected. He seemed to spend the first half of it attacking the abstract notion of "isolationism," which doesn't exactly seem to be a philosophy adopted by his critics, instead of giving clear and specific rebuttals to the complaints people are actually putting against him. He did touch on domestic spying, saying that what he's doing is absolutely necessary and that he won't stop it, but I felt any argument of his was negated by the fact that, in a long bit about how important freedom is, he asserted that democracies must be based on "the rule of law" — exactly what he's ignoring in the spying nonsense. Two "initiatives" he proposed in the second half of the speech, however, seem like good ideas if the government can actually put them into practice. In the one of them, Bush wants to significantly raise funding for research being conducted in the physical sciences; the other is a program to explore clean and alternative energy sources to reduce our dependence on oil. The Democratic response to the speech, delivered by the governor of Virginia, was even less specific and sounded really fake and insincere. It only seemed to disparage everything the current administration has ever done — not that it's not deserving of being disparaged, mind you — and repeat over and over again that there's "a better way" without really saying what that way was or how the Democrats would go about implementing it. I think the best we can hope for in the next three years is a sort of stalemate: the president and his crazies bring up an endless succession of rotten ideas that either just get through Congress on party lines or are defeated because some of the Republicans are beginning to remember what common sense is. I should apologize for being so overtly political. Most of the politics-based writing I've had to read manages to devolve into a series of red-faced arguments and few facts, and that's certainly not the point of this journal. Instead I'll close with another comment about music. Can it possibly be good singing practice to hold out consonants instead of the vowels? I'm currently listening to Martha Tilton repeat over and over again "And the angels sinnnnnnnnnng," and it certainly doesn't sound right. |
Random Stuff #25
Wednesday, February 1, 2006, 7:05 p.m.
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The "I"s Have It Some time ago (Jan. 19) I wrote a little note about my Language & Stats homework, which was to analyze word frequency counts from large texts, and I mentioned that I wanted to apply the experiment to the text of my online journal. I finished the assignment days ago and started collecting all my journal posts into plain text files, and now I proudly present the 10 words (in order) that I use the most! I should note that this actually only based on the 20 pages of posts (through Jan. 10) that are in my archives, and that that's a total of 127,041 words.
The prevalence of function words (determiners, prepositions, conjunctions, etc.) is pretty much to be expected in any excerpt of English; the interesting part here is that "I" and "my" have such enormous frequencies. It's of course due to the fact that this is a personal journal, in which I blather on almost incessantly about various tidbits and trivialities of my daily life. You can tell it's my life being discussed because of the top two proper nouns: "French" (208th place overall) and "Observer" (220th). If you want to have more fun with this, the top 500 words are posted online here. But what about vocabulary size? In 127,041 words of running text ("tokens," according to my 11-761 book), I managed to use 10,141 distinct forms ("types") that you might find in a dictionary. This is, again according to my textbook, a really small number. In 71,370 words of "Tom Sawyer", it says, there are 8018 word types, and the book called that number "quite small." In a corpus of newspaper articles of the same size there are more than 11,000 types, at that point in my text I had a measly 7038. Programming details for those who want them. It's really quite basic. The core of the thing is in C++, but a shell script I wrote to handle things first passes the incoming text to a Perl script to clean it up a bit. The Perl makes sure that things like "In end up getting counted as in, for example, but that also manages to remove the distiction between a.m. (time marker) and am (verb). Extended ASCII things like é or ½ like to break my C++, so the incoming text needs to be free of those before being sent to Perl. (Basically, anything that doesn't display right in less will crash the program if you don't take it out.) Not a prime piece of coding, certainly, but it does a reasonable job. CMU people can find the source code 'n' such in my public directory; everyone else can feel free to ask me for a copy. |
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