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ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
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Saturday, February 4, 2006
2:11 a.m.
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Tonight I completed the... interesting activity of auctioning myself off to the highest bidder. That's not how I intended to spend the evening — I went to the KGB Useless Person Auction with the intent to watch, not participate, but then everyone else was signing up to be sold and Rebecca said that nothing really bad happens. The rules prohibit you from doing anything against your moral, academic, financial, etc. obligations, so it's nicer than Rent-A-Senior day at THS. The money goes to KGB for building a booth at Spring Carnival, and the people who get bought are only under contract to the buyer for six hours of whatever by the end of the semester. I therefore added myself to the list of commodities, and in due time — after 3½ hours — was called forward. I gave a quick description of what I was good at, and the bidding commenced at $10. In the end, it was apparently my pie-baking and French-speaking skills that settled the price at $35, which is a bit more than I was expecting for myself. Most of the auction was definitely worth skipping; if I had been done near the beginning instead of second to last, I might have considered leaving early. A major factor in setting price turned out to be the amount of clothing the person being sold was willing to take off. A group of six guys put their money together on one of the girls to the tune of $600, and even a guy passed more than $100 as a result of two warring factions, one of which kept requiring him to take off his shirt, and the other of which made him put it back on again. This sort of dress-down peep-show chicanery got really old after a while. On a completely unrelated note, I've noticed that people are starting to discuss the important matters of spring break and living arrangements for next year. I don't think I get a spring break, so anything longer than a long weekend is probably ruled out for me, but the second point is definitely valid. Where do I want to live next year? Should I try for somewhere closer to campus? With people? In a different neighborhood? I would like very much to have some stability in living arrangements, since I've spent the last four years boxing up my life at nine- and three-month intervals and unboxing it somewhere else. This is especially important now that I'm "living for real" and have such things as furniture, kitchen supplies, and my record collection that would have to be dealt with as well. Still, I guess I won't rule out moving if a really good situation presents itself, but so far it hasn't. |
Monday, February 6, 2006
7:16 p.m.
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Whatever charges I might level at my newspaper "career," I certainly can't make the argument that it's not exciting. I interviewed students the week after Sept. 11, 2001. I remember being in the Observer office on a certain Wednesday night in March 2003, listening to NPR news with the rest of the production staff as reports of the U.S. invasion of Iraq came in. In October of 2004 I sat a few chairs away from a few New York Times reporters in the media room for the vice-presidential debate, interviewed people from Congress, and wrote up an article for the paper the next afternoon. I scoured Thwing the morning after the presidential election to finish a front-page story on it before leaving for a newspaper convention. If you want real breaking-news we're-on-it feel, though, you should produce a paper the day your city's team wins the Super Bowl and the town erupts in riots all around you. The WRCT broadcast signals coming from the basement of the UC apparently interfere with TV reception on Channel 4, so the best we could do in the Tartan office was drag the TV out into the hallway and borrow a cable hook-up from the AB office next door. Then someone set up an elaborate system of mirrors to reflect the screen image into our office so the layout staff could see what was going on from their computers. The staff members from around Pittsburgh ended up sitting on the hallway floor next to the TV when they weren't working. Christine and I, hidden by choice in the relative calm of the Copy Cave, got score updates by pulling up the blinds whenever we heard shouting. Needless to say the pages came very slowly. We expected, no matter who won the game, that there would be rioting around the city, so we dispatched the world's supply of photographers to Oakland, Carson Street, and various places on campus. The craziness began almost immediately after Pittsburgh won, 21-10. We opened several of the windows along the third-floor hallway; you could hear people cheering and car horns honking from all over the place. Police cars drove down the street. A red glow on the bricks of Morewood Gardens broadcast the signal that a couch had been set on fire in the middle of the street. Reports came in, via cell phone and word of mouth, that people were setting off fireworks on Beeler Street and that a car had been tipped over and set on fire in Oakland. Half of the senior editors went out to have a look for themselves. Around 11:15 the copy was in a good enough state that I could slip out for a few minutes as well, so Evan and I skipped down Forbes to scout out the scene. "Hear that?" Evan asked me as we came out of the UC. A sound like Jacobs Field in 1997 came clearly from the west. "That's Pitt." Relative quiet near the CMU campus, though — mostly car horns and groups of people wearing Steelers jerseys and shouting "Whooooo!" to everything that moved. Oakland could only be described as insane. Around Bigelow Boulevard we started noticing trash cans and newspaper kiosks that had been knocked over and ripped apart. Some signs missing, and sections of temporary fencing pushed over. Just under the walkway over Forbes stood a line of mounted police officers, and from there the street was solid people. Something wet fell on us from an awning. A few firecrackers were tossed against the sides of buildings. Someone later told us that the awning on the Subway had been ripped down and burnt. Still, things were pretty well-behaved while I was there. Evan ran off to grab more pictures, and I had just reached the Sennott Square building on Bouquet Street (with difficulty) when I suddenly found myself among a group of students chanting "Cleveland sucks!" I wasn't exactly worried that I'd give myself away by my accent, but it would have taken me about five minutes to make it to the next block, so I turned around and headed back. In the office, Shawn, the assistant news editor, wrote up a quick blurb for the front page to run underneath a four-column photo. A sports writer pumped out an article on the game that finally came in around 2:30 a.m. News and SciTech eventually went to thirds. Photographers filtered in and downloaded their images. A bit after 5:00 I escaped to my office in Newell-Simon to make tea, which sustained me until Brad and Tiff told me I could leave at 6:49 a.m. And the end result? A bit less than three hours of sleep for me, 5000 papers with last night's news in them for the campus, and a spectacular web-only photo slideshow online for you at www.thetartan.org! |
Tuesday, February 7, 2006
10:17 p.m.
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After somehow getting through yesterday, I went to bed at 11:45 last night. Early, but apparently not early enough: I ignored my alarm this morning and it was close on to noon before I was able to rip myself out of bed. Then I didn't make it to campus until 2:45. (The fact that I can do this, albeit at the expense of getting work done, is one of the good things about being a grad student.) This evening I finally washed dishes, went grocery shopping, and did some laundry, so my apartment is cleaner than it has been in days. Still a long way to go before people come over on Saturday, though. I think I'm going through another one of my music phases. These are usually characterized by short periods during which I really wish I hadn't stopped doing choir after eighth grade, and end when I realize that if I'd stayed with choir I probably wouldn't have gotten into French, programming, or journalism in high school. Some time last week, I was working on something or other in the Wean cluster when I heard some people behind me singing "Finite Simple Group." They sounded really good — really good to the point that I went home that night and looked up the lyrics so I could learn them. I found that I can do the song by myself, but I don't have a high enough range to sing along with the Klein Four recording in the correct octave. I have similar trouble with a lot of Billy Joel's stuff. I'm not sure why, but I've always considered him a tenor, so I looked up what a tenor range is supposed to be. According to Wikipedia, it's the octave below and the octave above middle C — I guess I'd make a better baritone. The online repository of all information confirms this: on Wikipedia's list of "Famous Baritones" I find Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby, and Frank Sinatra — all people whose songs I can deal with more comfortably. What often annoys me the most about singing is that it's a skill I could have developed but didn't, and now really don't have. (The history is somewhat sketched out in my entry of January 6, 2005 on this page.) This is actually the case about a lot of things; I know it's impossible for a single person to do everything well, but I often fall into the trap of expecting to miraculously find skill at whatever I pick up. Then there's the whole question of psychology: if someone tells you "I'm really rotten at drawing, but have a look at my sketchbook," aren't they secretly expecting you to say "Oh, no, these are really good!"? That is, there's a measurable part of me that writes self-defacing posts like this one in the misguided hope that someone will leave a comment saying that I should try out for the all-university choir. I once read an article in which a university professor applied the same thing to those angsty "my life sucks" away messages. But, as far as I know, I can count on one hand the number of people who have actually heard me sing in, say, the past two years, so the rational part of me can ignore the lack of comments and post the entry anyway! |
Thursday, February 9, 2006
11:07 p.m.
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Today is the infamous February 9 (I can still hear "Febuary ninth" in Po Yi's voice), a date on which everything used to happen when I was in middle and high school. Laughing gas, national math tests, two people's birthdays — all experienced on the same day in various years. Probably the only thing to beat it is August 14, which marks the day I got my pet hamster when I was little, the day of the Great Eastern Blackout, the day I moved into my apartment, and three people's birthdays. February 9 of this year was pretty boring, by contrast. This afternoon was the longest afternoon in the history of the universe. I tried to force myself to work at my desk for three hours, but everything I tried to pay attention to got boring after about 15 minutes. In the end, I had to resort to Wikipedia to last until 5:00 — so my 761 program may not be done, but I am now privy to the interesting fact that Omaha has more people than Pittsburgh. At 5:00 I ran off to the LTI student meeting, which included excellent food from Aladdin's, and then chugged over to the Tartan office to conduct a copy staff meeting at 7:30. I think that went pretty well, by the way, without me getting too didactic or boring. Next up I'm supposed to give style presentations to the staff writers for the whole paper. I forgot to mention that last night I went to see "Citizen Kane" in McConomy with Erich and Hannah. There were more people in attendance than I'd expected for such an old film, but I think we all found it somewhat lacking in technical presentation. Something kept going wrong with the audio that made it sound like it was being broadcast over an old metal loudspeaker at half-volume, and it had a particular habit of switching back and forth in the middle of great dramatic scenes or intense conversations in order to provide the greatest comedic effect. Then, at the end, they stopped the film before the final credits, so we were all treated to the sterotypical audio-slowing-down noise for a few seconds. About as much fun as you can have with $1. |
Friday, February 10, 2006
6:07 p.m.
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I was walking down the colonnade outside of Purnell a few minutes ago when a random fact popped into my head: I looked at (and visited) Carnegie Mellon during my college search when I was in high school. This was immediately followed by the interesting question "What would have happened to me if I'd gone here instead of to Case?" The still more interesting answer: I would have ended up meeting a lot of the same people I know now. 'Tis true. I would have applied as a potential CS major — that much I had figured out by my senior year in high school — and almost certainly would have gotten involved very early on with The Tartan. KGB is approximately equal to CS majors anyway, so my eventual involvement in that organization could have also been predicted. This is one of those brain-breaking paradigm shifts that are fun to think about. In a certain sense, I can think of even the sophomores and juniors here as being "older" than me since they've been around so much longer than I have. Now I switch modes and imagine I did my undergrad at CMU, and realize that I'd be thinking of all of them (even mrwright, a computing god among men) as the young kids that don't remember such-and-such event that happened on campus in 2001. I wonder if I would still have gone to grad school, or perhaps have gotten scooped up instead for a high-class job at Apple or Google. Would I be compiling Gentoo on my own laptop by now? Would I have been involved in the Natrat scandal of 2004? Weird.... |
Monday, February 13, 2006
8:43 p.m.
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Quite a busy weekend this time around, so now I've got to do a small amount of catch-up. Let's see... my great endeavor this weekend was inviting people over to my apartment for the first time since moving here. The idea was a little dessert/tea/games party on Saturday afternoon, which gave me a darn good excuse to finally get this place of mine into some kind of reasonable order. I was a bit worried that no one would come after Fate — at least the part of it that gets filtered through the KGB exec — threw a "Get Board, Get Carded" event onto the calendar for Friday night, but Ross, Rebecca, Cornell, Dan, and Alisa still decided to traipse though the snow to my apartment on Saturday for a second helping of Citadels, spades, and something really strange called Fluxx. I think the party went quite well. I'd been a little nervous about chair space, having invited nine people, but only five showed up and almost everyone preferred to sit on the floor anyway. Around 10:30, Rebecca, Alisa, Dan, and I gave up on spades and went to half-price at Joe Mama's, and then I was in bed at a decent time after we got back. Copy ran much nicer at the paper this week. After last week's horror, the section editors had most of their stuff online by Saturday, and my staff did a nice job of getting through it all before layout started Sunday morning. I still ended up in the office until 3:25 a.m. (third-place finish out of four, now), but it was a much more relaxed night. The only annoying part was that Pillbox took tomorrow's date a bit too seriously and went all sex-obsessed for the week. The whole section. And broadsheet even got in on the action too by working sex, or at least love, into every other section but Sports. (The pinnacle of this insanity: an article in SciTech described a certain satellite with four spherical gyroscopes as "well-endowed.") I was getting pretty sick of the monotony after several hours of this, but apparently our website hits are off the chart this week and The Tartan is showing up near the top of the results list for various queries on Google News. So it's not all bad. Today I've been forced to devote more time than I'd like to that wretched domain of not-quite-math that QS used to call "sadistics." I'm beginning to wonder what sort of warped mind you'd have to possess in order to devote your entire professional career to studying probability and the various ways of using it to monkey with students' heads. My 11-761 homework, which was due today, still remains in various incomplete fragments, and I had to ask the TA if I could use one of my allotted late days once I realized this afternoon that I'd been doing part of it rather incorrectly. I have until tomorrow to plop the completed assignment in the TA's mailbox, but since I don't quite know how to finish it yet, I guess I'd better get back to work! |
Random Stuff #26
Wednesday, February 15, 2006, 6:54 p.m.
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In Rough Numbers Do people make mistakes when they have to reach that extra inch to the top row of the keyboard? Well, Alisa recently showed me a brochure for an apartment complex near here, which included the following under the heading "Uncommon History": The history of Shadyside Commons starts in 19103, when prominent Pittsburgh businessman John Bindley called on his architect brother.... Then, just yesterday, I found a similarly intriguing sentence in a feature story from the Petoskey News-Review: They married June 43, 1943, the same weekend Louise graduated from college. In addition to these slips that pass into type, as Reader's Digest used to say, there are amusing oral miscalculations as well. This one comes from CMU's own Jared Cohon, in a speech he made about diversity on Martin Luther King Day: We can do more than we have to attract minorities to grades 13 through 15. |
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
11:23 p.m.
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It appears my tussle with statistics yesterday and Monday has prompted at least a temporary burst of class-related productivity. I barely got the stats assignment in the TA's mailbox by 5:00 yesterday, which was the somewhat-arbitrary cutoff time I set for myself before having to take another late day, and then I was upset enough with myself for wasting the whole day on it that I came back to campus after dinner and spent two hours in the cluster working on this week's assignment. Today I took some time out of the evening for grocery shopping, but then went back to campus at 9:00 to do the Grammar Formalisms homework. Lori said it was tedious work — we have to build the LFG feature structure for a long passive sentence — so I took over an empty classroom with movable boards in Porter and allotted myself three hours to write everything out. Not all that tedious in the end: by 10:20 it was finished and I headed over to the cluster for another 45 minutes of stats work. In the fun department, I have to report that I have succeeded in infiltrating a CMU dorm. Boriss was having a games/movie party last night in the lobby of a place called Henderson House, so when I reached a good stopping point with stats I looked up Henderson on the campus map and rode my bike over there. Getting inside took some effort. The dorms are all on card access, of course, and the CMU directory doesn't give out students' campus phone numbers. My attempts at peering in the windows failed to discover anyone who looked familiar, so I followed a rather erratic path over campus trying various backup plans. Logging into Andrew and trying a finger command, trying to call Boriss' cell phone from various payphones and campus phones, a dash past the Tartan office to see if it was empty so I could use my phone card from there — eventually I ended up asking for help on #cslounge from back at the cluster in Wean. Also in the cluster was jgrafton, who was talking on IM to someone at Boriss' party, so he got them to prop the building's main door open for me with a bit of newspaper. My entry, about 30 minutes after I'd originally tried to get in, was thus secured. Henderson inside gives the impression of being in Alumni back at Case, with perhaps more wood paneling and less DDR. The building has the same long shape, and the large lobby has smaller rooms off of it for the kitchen, laundry room, etc. Our group of about 15 people was resident in the main part of lobby, just below the sight lines from the high windows on the ground floor, which explains why I didn't see anything when I looked in. A third of the space was given over to the usual laptop-fest attendant on all KGB doings; another third was used by a group of people watching "Futurama" episodes off DVDs; and the final section was occupied by Dan, Alisa, Carolyn, and me for a nice game of hearts. |
Thursday, February 16, 2006
7:24 p.m.
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I've just spent an interesting half-hour at my computer, during which time all the old doubts about a career in computer science have come back and the attractiveness of a life in journalism has once again asserted itself. Blame it on Arthur, who e-mailed me a link to a site all about copy editing. It contains a whole series of pages about how copy works at a "real" newspaper, complete with cool-sounding journalism jargon, and all sorts of talk about how the copy chief is the newspaper's last line of defense, etc. These kind of sites have a certain knack for making the life of a newspaperman seem wonderfully dynamic and exciting. And now I can minimize my broswer window, give a wistful sign, and want to be a professional copy editor all over again. This is the same week in which I realize, for the first time, that the number of hours I spend working on The Tartan each week equals or exceeds the number of hours I put into my research project. Now one of these pursuits pays my tuition and a generous monthly stipend for living expenses; the other brings in $15.45 a week before taxes, and it's probably not too difficult to figure out which is which. I find it kind of wrong of me to treat my work at the LTI so lightly — I don't really feel like I have the knowledge and interest in the domain that is expected of someone in my place. Do I actually want a career in machine translation? Am I attracted by the prospect of getting a Ph.D. and teaching this stuff? Or would I rather push around commas, argue over hyphenation of compound adjectives, and write "awk" in the margin of three dozen proofs each day? Someone hand me a red pen and an AP Stylebook. I guess, now that I think about it, that the underlying problem is that I know I'm a decent news reporter and a better copy editor, but I have never fully convinced myself that I'm any good at CS stuff. Sure, I can code up some C++ that does interesting things, and I feel reasonably comfortable at a UNIX shell, and I know a bit about language now, but I still lack a concrete method of feedback. I didn't get in here because I was a notable person in natural language processing; my advisor was chiefly impressed with my high GPA from Case. And he says he's happy with my work, but I don't feel like I've done much besides run a gazillion translation tests and change a few lines of code. This post is rapidly disintigrating. I think I need a long walk to campus. |
Friday, February 17, 2006
7:24 p.m.
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I guess I got a little carried away last night; I'm feeling much better today. I took my long walk to campus a bit after finishing the last post, singing Cole Porter songs the whole way except for when people walked by, and gravitated towards the cluster. I got my 761 program working, then started answering the written questions before people started amassing for half-price around 10:15. There was also talk of going wandering in Schenley Park — it was seriously 65 degrees yesterday — so in the end we did both. First half-price at Fuel & Fuddle, where I was faced with the ironic situation of having to turn the comversation to computers in order to take part in it, and then back to the cluster to collect people for a walk in the park. The exploring party turned out to be Tom, jgrafton, Mark, Brewer, and me, led by the more experienced wanderers through a network of trails that I didn't even know existed. I found a number of interesting places that require being photographed, plus more amazing views of the Pittsburgh skyline. It was also a fun opportunity to get to know people a bit better. Not always by the conversation, though; the environment was more conducive to noticing how people interacted with each other. One person breaking off from the main group and lagging a bit behind, for example, or another using our physical surroundings as springboards to relate a series of personal stories. In retrospect I think I may have talked too much and tried too often to stampede into the conversation. We must have been out just under two hours, and then Brewer, Tom, and I sat around on the corner of Margaret Morrison and Tech Street and talked for a bit longer. We broke up when it started raining, and it was 3:15 a.m. when I ended up getting home — feeling, as I said, about 600 times better than I had when I left. And tomorrow is SCS Day, apparently an annual event where all the nerds at CMU rejoice in their all-around coolness. I know several people singing and/or playing in the talent show, and an LTI faculty member has some works on display at the day's art exhibit. There's also a contest for the best photo from the events, so I think I may bring along my camera and use up the roll of film I've had in there since the New Year's camping trip. 'Twould give me a good excuse, too, to run off and photograph other interesting things in the vicinity. |
Saturday, February 18, 2006
11:28 p.m.
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Cleveland must be rubbing off on Pittsburgh: 65 degrees Thursday, 5 degrees now. Even when I went out shopping in the middle of the day today it was only 14. As previously mentioned, I return from the SCS Day talent show, which ranged from good to bad to really strange. I cooked myself a lovely dinner of pork chops, rice, and carrot sticks at my apartment, then drove to campus a bit after 6:00 in order to arrive at the UC a bit early in case the room was crowded. They had Rangos set up a lot like the Ballroom in Thwing with lots of eight-person circular tables, and people were milling about all over the place. I hadn't realized they were going to serve a full meal, but there were several long tables at the back covered in various foodstuffs. They didn't have any tea, so I tracked down a few cookies and some lemonade before finding a seat among the concentration of KGB people about two-thirds of the way back from the stage. The entire production, I'd say, was driven by KGB people. A number of them appeared in acts. The sound board was run by jgrafton. Familiar shapes kept swarming over the stage after each performance to set up the necessary equipment for the next one. I recognized far more people than I'd expected. I guess I should say something about the talents being presented. The show began with a robotic bagpiper, which was downright awful and sounded like broken machinery most of the time. Singing in various styles, perhaps most interestingly some Chinese opera stuff that had a really nice soundtrack. The vocals, though, were so bizarre that it was difficult not to laugh at some points. Also a boot-slapping dance by three people wearing knee-high rubber things that you might select for wading into streams in. After intermission, we heard from six KGBers singing a cappella to "Finite Simple Group" and some sort of Sherbrooke Halifax buccaneer song that people recognized and sang along with. I thought the a cappella group and a nice band called Bridget and the J Boys were probably the two best, as far as musical style goes, with a fun dance skit by five undergraduates leading the rest. Afterwards I followed a group of people over to the cluster, where I worked in a dilatory fashion on my 761 homework, but ended up coming home after about an hour when nothing interesting was going on. I will probably be thinking about bed soon, since 16 hours of copy editing await me in the morning. |
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
12:47 p.m.
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Nine months after my graduation, Case has finally discovered that I'm no longer a student there. This is good, because it means that I'll be taken off the d-list for their hideous new Case Daily e-mail newsletter, but it also means that ITS is going to take away my student-level network privileges starting Thursday. Not that I've used most of them, really, since May, but it was nice to know that I still had the ability to connect myself up with some VPN goodness and poke around on Find or CWRUbert if I really wanted to. After Thursday the most they'll let me have is an alumni e-mail account. (Those of you who still send mail to my old CWRU address, by the way, might want to contact me right quick if you don't know one of my newer e-mails yet.) Access to the server that hosts this website (if you read my hand-coded version of the journal, at least) beyond the next two days may be more undefined. I'm not sure if home.cwru falls under the purview of ITS or not — if I recall correctly, back when it provided the university's only webmail service, it was a separate student-run organization. I guess if you see me go for a week without updating, you should check my Live Journal site. I'll post information there if I have to move all of this stuff to a new server. Getting the Case e-mail made me realize that I'm still missing out on a portion of CMU culture. What would freshman and sophomore year have been like without the wonderful Friday nights in various people's dorm rooms, talking about the most recent math homework while waiting for a movie to download off the Case network? The location of any interesting content on the CMU network, if there is one outside of AFS space, is still unknown to me, and though I've heard people talk about various servers where things are stored, I don't know their full names and I probably don't have accounts on them anyway. Yikes! I should do some work or go to campus or something! |
Thursday, February 23, 2006
12:30 a.m.
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It becomes apparent that biking to and from campus is a lot easier at off-peak times — like midnight. I stayed on campus today for 13½ hours in order to catch the 10 p.m. showing of "Strangers on a Train"; on my way home, out of the seven stoplights that the city of Pittsburgh, in its infinite wisdom, has placed in the 1.4-mile stretch of roadway between my house and campus, I only got caught at one. This may be a new world record: normally I tend to average around five red lights per trip. You can see from the above that my string of long and generally productive days is continuing. The only problem I'm finding with the scheme is that it leaves me no time to go grocery shopping, and then I'm forced to pay large amounts of money for food on campus. Yesterday I ate a sort-of lunch at home before running off; combined with some tea and free rice that was out in the LTI kitchen, it was enough to last until half-price at Fuddle a little after 10:30. Today I subsisted on some sandwiches during the afternoon (including some more LTI leftovers — this must be a lucky week) and then dinner at the O before the movie. That's $12 on food in just two days, and I'm only supposed to spend $60 a month on meals out. I find myself slightly more obsessed with cost than normal because I have decided, officially, that I want to buy a laptop. And to do so in the relatively near future, like by the end of March, which is quite a bit sooner than I'd originally intended. A few factors are going into this. One of them, of course, is that I would love to be able to work outside or from other random locations once the weather gets nicer. Then, with the prevailing conditions in the Tartan office, it's almost impossible to secure a computer during Sunday production unless you bring your own; sometimes this affects my ability to do online editing. And I'm getting dashed sick of feeling like a Mennonite in a world of technocrats. After talking with various people, it looks like the IBM T43 may be the winner of the Design Greg's New Hardware contest. It's slightly larger than I could have hoped, but half the world here has IBMs and seems to love them — and among the ThinkPads I've seen, the T43 actually is one of the more moderate-sized ones. More details in the weeks to come, I expect, but if you have anything to say in the realm of portable computing, say it pretty soon before I get carried away one night and actually place the order. |
Thursday, February 23, 2006
11:04 p.m.
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This morning I applied rm * one level too high and wiped out a few files, most notably that book I had been working on last month. Luckily I had an old version on my Windows partition that I was able to copy back over to Linux, but it's lacking the last few pages that introduced and defined a lot of the characters. This annoys me quite a lot, and probably means that I'll be even less inclined to start writing it again. The afternoon I spent in a sort of waiting game at my desk in Newell-Simon. Mostly waiting for the latest round of MEMT experiments to run, but then general impatience at how long it was taking to be 7:30, the time at which I was giving a presentation on copy editing to The Tartan's staff writers. At 6:00 I went up to the office, hoping to be distracted until it was time to set up in Breed Hall at 7. It's actually kind of pathetic how much I wanted to do this workshop. I had selected the important topics, found or made up example sentences, and produced the world's simplest PowerPoint presentation to display them. I even made some notes about what I wanted to say. James followed me down to Breed Hall a few minutes after 7:00, and then I spent the next 20 minutes setting everything up and making sure the slides displayed all right. And up until the minute of 7:30 the only people in the room were copy staff, plus Tiff and the pizza she ordered to entice the writers to come. A few minutes later, just as I was remarking that CMU time is five minutes behind the rest of the world, a flood of people came through the door and sat down. So we were off. I started off a bit shakily, and after about 30 seconds managed to substitute "Observer" for "Tartan" in a sentence about hyphens and had to stop and explain. After that it got better. There were even lots of questions at the end, so we were able to talk about all kinds of style points I hadn't included in my prepared stuff. J.T. told me I was a good and fluid speaker, something I hadn't realized, so I hold out hope that I didn't induce too many in the audience to go into comas. I brought my tape recorder along and recorded the whole thing, in order to type up nice minutes to send out to everyone who couldn't make it, so I may be able to empricially verify the first point. I remember a faculty member at the LTI saying, during our orientation talks in the fall, that a good professor should be able to give a 30-minute talk on his current work with almost no notice. I'm far from confident that I could do this, and especially survive a Q-and-A, with my MEMT stuff, but change the topic to news writing and you've apparently got yourself a deal. |
Saturday, February 25, 2006
9:03 p.m.
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Are there any Japanese movies that actually make sense? I wrote about "Battle Royal II" back when KGB had the geek movie marathon at the beginning of the semester; movie night last night featured something called "Wild Zero" (IMDB genre: action/romance/comedy/horror/sci-fi/music). It was somewhat more coherent in terms of plot, but still managed to destroy any semblance of verisimilitude and left itself open to fun mockery. The KGB did not let it get away lightly. "Wild Zero" was actually the third movie of the night. We began with "The Call of Cthulhu," a 47-minute black-and-white silent film from... last year. People were also intent on mocking this one, which I found quite annoying as I was actually trying to watch it as a serious film. It is perhaps true that the movie's budget was smaller than my monthly stipend (the "ocean" looked like a few sheets of cloth being shaken back and forth), but overall they did a decent job of making the thing look properly old. The film had defects in it; the title cards used old spellings and an appropriate font; the samples of old handwriting were very elegant. What gave it away, actually was the fluidity of the camera work — somehow, just seeing how people moved, you could tell that you were looking at a modern film. After "Cthulhu" was something I wasn't interested in seeing, so I escaped with Dan, Ivan, and Devin to play two games of Settlers. We came back 10 minutes into the Japanese movie, and when that was over the event rather broke up. I followed a whole bunch of people back to the cluster, and eventually someone led an expedition to Roberts Hall to look at a wonderfully space-age-looking machine called an electron something epitaxy (as near as I can recall). Actually, from perusing Wikipedia, it may have been molecular beam epitaxy: the thing on that page looks like it's related to the beast we saw last night. After dumping backpacks in the cluster, we collected some other people to go look at random art in CFA, from which I returned around 3:30. Slept this morning, then, until 11:30, which was nice. I tried to do some copy editing in the afternoon, since my staff wasn't doing it, but got really annoyed with it after an hour. I think I diverge from the majority of the staff in my opinions on Pillbox writing — if we get six letters to the editor next week saying that our reporters sound like they're stuck in seventh grade language arts, the criticism will not be so unwarranted. Unfortunately, Pillbox being its own section of the paper seems to have resulted in the idée fixe that normal standards of news writing don't apply there and that the writers can do whatever they want. Around 4:00 this afternoon, when the sight of another rhetorical question would have made me jump out my second-floor window, I hopped on my bike and went down to the office. There, I looked at some pretty good SciTech content and was immensely amused by Brittany and Radha. Came home to dinner in a much better mood. |
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
7:03 p.m.
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It was a bad week at the paper this week. Online copy ran slowly the entire weekend, there were more disagreements about Pillbox style, the news editor was getting really frustrated over layout issues, and the text of one of the front-page stories mystically uncorrected itself during a late stage of roduction. All of which conspired to keep me in the office until 5:03 a.m. The only good thing about Sunday was that pages were coming into the copy cave so slowly that we were able to play a game of Settlers, and then I actually won it. Ah well. Three weeks off from The Tartan now, thanks to spring break and the ACP conference all the editors are going to starting tomorrow. I had to ride my bike to campus yesterday in order to make my 10:30 because I couldn't wake up before 10:00. The unfortunate side effect of doing this was that it snowed almost all afternoon and evening, and by the time I realized I'd left my bike foolishly tied up in front of Newell-Simon it was too late to make a difference. When I finally was ready to go home — at 11:00, after working on the LFG Assignment of Death almost all afternoon and evening — I really didn't feel like walking, so I brushed off the seat and handlebars as well as I could and told myself to refrain from slipping on the snow and dying. I shouldn't have worried: turns out that biking on about an inch of snow is a wonderful experience. Imagine gliding through silent streets on a noiseless cushion of untouched whiteness, leaving behind an interestingly-shaped snake trail. It takes a bit more power to maintain a constant speed, but not enough to really make a difference. And the lack of road-crunching sound is a nice contrast to biking on salt, which sounds like the surface noise on a phonograph cylinder. I tried to spend more time today on the LFG homework, but I was getting to the point of not caring anymore — especially when I had an urgent need to wash dishes, do laundry, go grocery shopping, and catch up on reading Live Journal (even though only two of these things actually got done). I seem to have changed quite a bit from even junior year, when I would stay up until 3 a.m. on Tuesday night working on the 343 homework due the following day; now I don't generally feel the need to put myself out over a few measley feature structures. This is probably not a good thing, especially with the huge number of projects I have coming up for the rest of the semester.... |
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
10:55 p.m.
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I keep forgetting to post about this: Late last week I was reading a whole bunch of Wikipedia articles on American English and its dialects, and I discovered some fun things. First, one of the things I've always considered to be a hallmark of a Cleveland accent is actually the first stage of a larger pattern called Northern Cities shift — it's where the vowel of "accent" or "pants" (IPA [æ]) turns into a dipthong that can only be typeset in an IPA font (smallcap "i" and schwa). Apparently the same thing happens in a whole line of places from Rochester to Chicago, and later stages of the shift end up modifying a total of five or six vowel sounds. Somehow I've managed to remove whatever trace of it I might have had in high school: even after a year of college I noticed that the vowel in "pants" or "and" for me suddenly became a very pure single-phoneme sound. What I haven't escaped is something called restricted Canadian raising, which finally explains why I always get momentarily confused when Nicole says certain words, and also why I disagreed with certain parts of a phonetic transcription of "standard American" I read once. In the form of Canadian raising common in parts of the U.S., the vowel of "fly" or "spy" (IPA [a] and smallcap "i") gets changed to IPA schwa and smallcap "i" in certain cases. That's why, for me, "rider" and "writer" don't sound the same — the second in raised. I suddenly noticed today that this is massively apparent in the way I say combinations like "high school" or "high chair." A new goal for myself, incidentally, is to learn to read IPA. The bits I included above I mainly had to copy from Wikipedia since I only recognize a few of the symbols. Not likely to be a terribly useful skill to have, since I work in machine translation and not speech, but it's got to make more sense than my partially-complete acquisition of shorthand and Morse code. |
Random Stuff #27
Wednesday, March 1, 2006, 7:06 p.m.
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I was trying to print something in the lab this afternoon, but when I went to pick up the printout I found only a page with a few lines of text in the bottom corner: The file that someone asked me to printIt sounded kind of poetic, with the odd line breaks and all, and vaguely rhythmic lines started forming in my head almost immediately. Unable to resist, I took one of my telephone pads to the table with me at dinner, and now have the honour to present the world with A Hardware Sonnet The file that someone just asked me to print, Neither the meter nor the rhyme scheme is exactly Petrarchian or English, but I think it's consistent. The fourth line strikes me as rather a cop-out, and I'm kind of against starting two consecutive lines with the same preposition, but the rhythm seems slightly better than the single other sonnet I've completed in my life. Since this is perhaps the first poem I've ever offered for public consumption, all feedback will be gratefully received either in e-mail, IM, or Live Journal comments. |
Saturday, March 4, 2006
1:57 p.m.
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Wow... I have not felt like doing anything productive this week. Thursday evening I went to the Kiltie Band's spring concert in Rangos — I actually knew a few people playing in it — and Car and Tom showed up to watch as well. Afterwards, we collected bohanlon and dfontain, and then bohanlon invited us to follow him back to the radio club's "shack" in Hamershlag. It's a pretty cool place, containing lots of old electronics equipment and a little sitting-room space with couches and a TV. Brian was pulling various shows off of the TiVo: first an episode of something called "The Colbert Report" that wasn't too interesting, then an episode of what I think was "Scrubs" that didn't seem worth the hype some people give it, and finally a piece of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" that I think we all enjoyed the most. Several lines made us laugh, like "I'll run a pattern-matching algorithm for the number three," which prompted Brian to look up "three" on Wikipedia and read us excerpts from the article. All this ended a bit before midnight. I promised myself that yesterday would be productive, but I didn't do much from home and I didn't go to campus until after 3:30. Once there, I at least put in two hours of work on my NLP lab project (learning Lisp all over again) and maybe a half-our on my Grammar Formalisms project before going to the KGB event at 7:00. This week it was "To Be A Kid Again," featuring Play-Doh, markers, crayons, fingerpaints, and Legos. I remembered the two stereotypical pictures I used to produce over and over again in kindergarten and elementary school, snared some markers, and drew a house and a school bus with my left hand. Around 10:30 a group of six of us left for half-price at Joe Mama's, which merged into a long game of a variant of Nomic on the eighth floor of Wean. We left the whiteboard up there with all our scribblings on it, which includes the famous integral monster and arbitrary object rotating around a fixed axis of evil drawings from freshman year. Since I didn't get home last night until 3:20 a.m., I figured I wouldn't be able to wake up in time for the 8 a.m. trivia tournament we're hosting (even now) in Porter Hall. I was right — I slept through my alarm and work up at 12:30, at which point I decided just to skip the trivia thing and spend the day catching up on various other pursuits. It's about time, for example, that I started the Nerds of Plexiglass regimen again. |
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