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ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
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Sunday, March 5, 2006
9:56 p.m.
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Is there anyone out there who could give me a crash course in recording audio under Debian? Nothing I try from microphone or line in works; I can play an audio file on my computer and re-record it in KRec, but I can't do the same thing for a streaming RealAudio file and I have no clue why not. Aren't they both being played through the soundcard, so that setting KRec::In to soundcard_out should get either one? And even line in as well, since that's also played back through the speakers? Aside from annoyances like the above — and the fact that I still haven't navigated the confusing array of PPDs and CUPS and whatnot to be able to print to my inkjet from Linux, or that I can't seem to find a program that will play DVDs — I think I'd be all set to almost completely abandon running in Windows. I briefly booted into that operating system this week so I could watch a DVD, and then my other productivity was killed by programs crashing all over the place or not exiting cleanly when I tried to close them. People who like big band and other assorted music from the '30s should listen online to Malcolm Laycock's show on the BBC for this week before it gets replaced next Sunday. It's quite good. In more normal news, I took advantage of a Tartan-free Sunday to go to the 6 p.m. mass at St. Paul's Cathedral, followed by an attempt at running in the UC. I say "attempt" because it seems like I've regressed quite a bit by not training in three months. I had to trash-talk myself to make even 23 minutes, and now I'm a bit upset with myself for not being able to run three miles at a reduced pace without dying when in the fall I could do four in 31 minutes. By executive order, all-out Nerds of Plexiglass is being re-activated effective immediately: that means physical activity four or (preferably) five times a week. |
Monday, March 6, 2006
9:32 p.m.
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Leave it to me to ruin the first normal Monday morning I've had all semester. I was in bed at 12:30 last night, with my alarm dutifully set for 8:15, and I even managed to be awake at the appropriate time. I turned my alarm off and was on the point of getting out of bed when suddenly I was asleep and having a longish dream on a subject that I can't even remember now. When I saw the clock again I had four minutes until I needed to leave for class. Oops. Well, I've done it before — up and out, with no food, no orange juice, and no perusal of the morning paper, and only my bike to fly down the street. It's a good thing it wasn't raining. It was an annoying start to a kind of annoying day. I think I'm starting to get sick: my throat has been hurting all day, except for when I'm drinking tea, and I've felt all old and weak since the beginning of Language & Stats this morning. I hope this isn't what it feels like to be 50, but I guess there's no way to preserve the exact feeling while I age for another 28 years. But getting old — though an interesting subject and perhaps the one thing I'm deep-down afraid of — is probably a topic for a separate post. The best thing of the day was my decision to go to the KGB meeting at 4:30. Not that the meeting was overly exciting or interesting, but it meant I was in the room when Carolyn proposed a trip to Taste of India and offered to pay for me with her DineX. (Thank you!) Taste of India is another one of those on-campus food places: CMU has no dining halls, so there are random eateries scattered about in various places. This one is tucked away inside of Resnick, which I think I've walked through once when looking for a newspaper rack. We ate with a sizable group of KGB people that sort of made the meal like sitting at one of the long tables in Fribley. With dinner elegantly disposed of, I hied me hence to the cluster and tried to work on my 712 project for a while. Gave up and went home when I felt like falling asleep around 8:00. I have to mention what should be the big news of the day, which is that I have ordered a laptop. It's an IBM T43, a bit larger than the X series that Chris recommended, but the price is more along the lines of what I can afford. I was excited all weekend by the mere prospect of even being able to order it, but there's something about reading through extended warranty descriptions and purchaser's agreements that takes the fun out of doing almost anything. A more interesting task is going to be coming up with a name for the thing, as per established custom. When I installed Debian on my destop machine, I decided to call it Edison and name future computers after other people or things connected with the early phonograph industry. Though I suppose that just by using Edison as a pivot point I could just as easily switch to inventors, physicists, 19th-century Americans, people from Ohio, people of Swedish ancestry, or people whose first names are Thomas. |
Tuesday, March 7, 2006
11:44 p.m.
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Avid readers of this journal were almost treated to a 4 a.m. post last night (this morning), as I was having another one of those endless nights of sleeplessness that I get from time to time. As usual, I think it may have been brought on by trying to go to bed too early. Based on how sick I was feeling, I was in bed by 11:00 and done reading at midnight — I guess that's too soon to end the day after waking up at 10:11 a.m. At 2 a.m. I resigned myself to the fact that various parts of my body were going to alternate turning into red-hot heat sources and being cold, and at 3:00 I gave up on my bed entirely and moved out to the couch. At 4 I was still too awake to actually fall asleep, but too tired to feel like doing anything productive; instead of typing a journal post I made myself some warm milk and a bowl of cereal and stared at the floor for 15 minutes. I think I eventually fell asleep some time after 5:00. Wild nights notwithstanding, I'm feeling better today than I did yesterday. Slightly less productive, though. The evening has been spent on a last-minute homework assignment, due tomorrow, that Prof. Rosenfeld dished out in 761 yesterday. Someone had a question about two different methods of trigram mutual information calculations, and since he didn't know the answer he told us to run the computations ourselves on a large corpus. It's not a terribly difficult assignment, but it's keeping me from doing anything else useful tonight — it's also taking forever (53 minutes so far) to run on one of the Andrew UNIX servers. I need to get a lot out of this week, work-wise, before I go home on Friday for the weekend, and so far my progress has been rather disappointing. The disquieting fear of an end-of-semester crunch is starting to assert itself in my brain, and we know from last fall that that is not a good thing. Request: Is anyone interested in joining Carolyn and me on a team for CMU Puzzlestorm? I believe we can take up to two more people. This thing is unfortunately the day after CTFWS, but I missed the Microsoft puzzle thing in the fall and kind of want to do this one. The website even says it doesn't require any special CS or math knowledge! |
Thursday, March 9, 2006
1:33 p.m.
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It is definitely midterms week at CMU, and even though I don't have any (yet) I'm still getting caught up in the general craziness of the eighth week of the semester. That 761 program that I was running before bed on Tuesday night wasn't finished before class yesterday morning, so I spent the early part of the afternoon re-writing it to be more efficient and working out the resulting bugs before adjourning to a well-deserved lunch in the atrium at 2:00. The thing still took until 5:15 to run, so I ended up e-mailing my answers to the TA and throwing a paper copy in his mailbox just in case. It was the first class document I've ever LaTeXed. There are various things about the LaTeX system I don't like, but I figured it might be a useful skill to have in case I have to write a paper or thesis at some point. And it's true that, once I figured out how to overpower some of the stupid default settings, the resulting page was pretty nice-looking. I went to the Tartan office after trivia practice last night to get some work done — sometimes it helps to be around people when I'm working, which is why I can actually get more accomplished in the cluster than I can at home. Some other people were there too for the night, so it was a pretty good mix of work and conversation. I gave up on writing Lisp a few minutes before midnight in order to see the 12:00 showing of "Casablanca" in McConomy. I was only the second person to come into the auditorium, but then several chatty groups of annoying people barged in and sat directly behind me. It soon became clear that these people's lack of sobriety was perhaps only equaled by their lack of historical knowledge. Aside from the fact that they seemed to have filled their Nalgenes with beer, and that they had a penchant for making loud boorish remarks during the film, they at one point expressed the belief that the movie (taking place after the German occupation of Paris and actually referencing December 1941 in one part) was made in the late '30s. I left rather quickly at the end of the showing. I have finally worked out when I'm going home this weekend. I'll be leaving here tomorrow around lunchtime and driving to Akron to visit my sister for the afternoon. Then it's home Friday night and Saturday to work out my taxes, get a haircut, and go to a dentist appointment. I have a definite visit to Case worked out on Sunday, but I'd be able to come up Saturday night as well if anything interesting is gonig on. (Chipotle! Let's go to Chipotle!) Then back to Pittsburgh late Sunday night in order to show up at my desk as usual for the coming week. |
Monday, March 13, 2006
5:12 p.m.
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It's here! |
Monday, March 13, 2006
10:10 p.m.
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Let's see... when last we met for something substantive, I was talking about going home for the weekend. It was a somewhat nomadic experience — I almost felt like a celebrity on tour, except there weren't any popping flashbulbs or pestering reporters asking me what I thought of my latest movie. I left Pittsburgh at 12:45 on Friday, bound for Akron to visit my sister and take her out to dinner. I also got to see her apartment and the stray cats that hang around her back porch. After dinner, I shuttled myself up Route 8 to go home for the night and see the rest of my family there. My little brother (well, maybe not so little; he'll be 15 next month) wanted to make a website, so I spent some time showing him basic HTML tags and how to look at what he was writing in a web browser. This may not be the correct method of proceeding for the general public, but the only word-processor style HTML editor our computer at home has is Microsoft Word, and I object to the ugly code it creates. Saturday was the day of errands, featuring me putting in appearances at the dentist's office and the barber shop. It was supposed to be the barber shop, at least, but I couldn't get in at the usual place because the barber's assistant was on vacation and he was all booked up by himself. My mom placed an emergency call to the salon-style place where just about the balance of my family goes, and they were able to make a spot for me in the afternoon. People who prefer straight-up haircuts, like me, don't belong in salons. The lady next to me, who was there for some kind of dye job, spewed her work troubles to the hairdresser in a whining manner that would have better fit a 16-year-old, and the guy cutting my hair decided to ignore everything I said I wanted at cut things in a totally different style that ended with applying some kind of hair wax. When I got home, the first thing I did was dunk my head in the laundry tub and get my mom to help put things back to normal. After some varigated silliness in the afternoon, I escaped up to Case to make my last stop on the tour. I got to spend a nice time with my old suitemates for parts of two days, and on Sunday morning I was booked for brunch at the Inn on Coventry with Erin, Ben, and Kathi. During brunch it came out that everyone's athletic goal for the year is to run a marathon on the towpath in October — I guess I'm going along with it too. I woke up this morning to find that a package had arrived for me at the LTI — I guess IBM is welcoming me home by sending my new laptop a bit ahead of schedule. I picked it up in the afternoon, then ran off to the Tartan office to unpack it and set it up somewhere more private. I decided to call it Nipper, after the dog leaning into the phonograph that's been part of Victor advertising for more than 100 years; it also fits in with its small size compared to Edison, my grand old desktop. The new guy comes with a few quirks: instead of shipping with a cartload of install CDs, for example, the owner's guide says the hard drive has a "hidden partition" containing a back-up copy of all the original software, and that the partition can be used to restore the system by hitting a certain key during the boot sequence. Besides needlessly eating up a fair chunk of disk space, this makes me a bit more nervous about mucking with the partition table to make the machine dual-boot — has anyone done this before on a computer like mine? A thunderstorm begins. I think I go to make tea and read P.G. Wodehouse. |
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
9:21 p.m.
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I guess I've been slacking on posting recently — I didn't even join the rest of the nerds in making Pi Day posts yesterday. But I did go to a fabulous pie party at Rebecca's house that involved 16 people and a succession of seven pies over the course of perhaps five hours. I was assigned to bake a spinach pie, which I'd never done before and which required the world's supply (two pounds) of the title ingredient. Also something interesting called phyllo dough, which is essentially pie crust disguising itself as tissue paper. I carted all the necessary materials over to Rebecca's, and Alan V. and I got it together and into the oven just in time for the first course of the night. We started with chicken pot pie, then the spinach, then a potato leek pie of Chris's; then Rebecca's shoo-fly pie, two cheesecakes, and an open-top peach pie with ice cream finished the evening. My No. 1 accomplishment today was getting ssh working on my computer, but that was only due to the helpful assistance of Ross last night and then of Car and someone else on #cslounge this evening, all of whom diagnosed the various problem that had me banging my head against the desk for the past two days. I forsee my laptop being much more useful if it can interface with the contents of my desktop as well: I can theoretically do anything anywhere now as long as there's wireless or an Ethernet connection. Will put this into practice as soon as I can, especially if the weather gets nice and I feel like going outside. I have scads of work to do this evening, but I am running off momentarily to a gaming party at Rebecca's that Dan is putting together. I guess I can make up for it by working all weekend or cutting back on sleep time or something. The Grammar Formalisms homework, due Tuesday, also looks quite time-consuming; Aaron and I spent an hour and a half this afternoon getting ourselves straightened out on part of the first problem, and there are a total of three. |
Thursday, March 16, 2006
7:15 p.m.
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I've been having the worst time doing productive work today! After coming back from a game of Citadels after 1 a.m. last night, I didn't even get out of bed until after 10 or to the LTI until after noon. I set off a 90-minute MEMT experiment, but instead of using that time to do my 722 homework (which is death squared) I got out my laptop and started messing around with those CD distros of Linux that don't actually install anything. I found that Knoppix recognized my Windows hard drive but not the built-in wireless card, and then that Kubuntu recognized the wireless but — you guessed it — not the hard drive. I may need to haul out the old SuSE CD that Paul made for me junior year and try that, unless anyone has any better ideas. In about 40 minutes I'm meeting with a prospective LTI student. Most of the current students — even us first-years — are serving as student contacts for people who got accepted and who will be visiting for the open house next week. Our main job until then is to establish contact by e-mail, answer any questions the admits may have, and set up meetings for them with faculty members during the open house days. The guy I'm hosting randomly decided to show up in Pittsburgh this week, so we thought we'd quit sending text to each other and meet face-to-face.... We're meeting out in the atrium at 8:00 for unspecified friendly outings. Afterwards there's fondue at the Alpha Complex (Rebecca et al.'s house — I have no clue how it got that name), which I may try to show up for, and then tomorrow is the end of the week already. I am extremely frightened. |
Friday, March 17, 2006
2:47 a.m.
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Ladies and gentlemen — will you please welcome back, for an unprecedented third appearance on our stage, the mice! |
Saturday, March 18, 2006
1:39 p.m.
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You might be wondering, eyeing the timestamp on my last post slightly askance, what I was doing blathering about mice at nearly 3 in the morning when I've got so much work to do this week. The answer, of course, is that my motivation stands at zero and that I'm secretly and irrationally hoping my 722 homework will do itself. The meeting with the prospective LTI student (Dan: yet another name collision!) went pretty well. He was up for dinner, so we walked vaguely Craig-Street-wards until he suggested the Union Grill. A nice place with decent food, but I had some trouble answering Dan's questions about the LTI and eating at the same time. The dinner didn't take too long, so I collected my bike from Newell-Simon and went off to the fondue party at Rebecca's. Alan V. and his camera were again in attendance, so my hideous visage is now haunting the Web from both the pie party and fondue night. After we'd disposed of the cheese and chocolate, we played an interesting variant of Twister that included calls like "Left hand on Dan" or "Right foot on someone else's elbow" in addition to the usual color specifications. Loads of fun, especially with five people on the board at once. That led to me coming home so late and to finding that one of my plastic traps, still under the food shelf but untouched since December, had a new tenant in residence. I took the trap out to a near-empty metal dumpster I found way down at the end of the street and gave the mouse an escape-proof home. Then I re-baited the trap and went to bed. That was Thursday night; my Mouse King status since then would probably make me the envy of every 10-year-old boy on the planet. In the past 36 hours my trap has collected no less than four mice by using a new secret weapon: feta cheese. It was left over from the pie party, and apparently is a sort of rodential siren call that brings them scurrying out of the wall in droves and into the clutches of my little plastic see-saw thing. Yesterday afternoon, while I was discovering the wonderful synttree package for LaTeX, I heard the sharp plastic click and the resulting futile scurrying noises that announce I've got a new visitor — that one ended up in the same dumpster as the first. About a half an hour later, as I was making beautiful syntax trees for my 722 homework, click again. I was getting worried about starting a mouse colony in someone else's trash, so that one I took down to the bit of open space next to the busway on Negley. This morning I woke up to scurrying noises again, but I haven't felt like going out to dispose of the mouse yet. It will be the sixth mouse I've removed from this apartment since November, and with documented evidence of at least two more having been in the building, I'm wondering if another word with the landlord might be in order. |
Sunday, March 19, 2006
11:07 p.m.
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A word with the landlord, in form of a message left on his answering machine, has been had, and I've trapped and removed my sixth mouse since Thursday. It's getting a little ridiculous — the next time I see Abby I'll have to ask her if she's having the same problem upstairs. Today, I'm happy to report, was a bit more productive than the past few days have been. I'm still avoiding the first two problems of the 722 homework, but four hours on campus this afternoon got the third one taken care of. I've discovered that a nice use of my laptop is to take it up to the eighth floor of Wean, where there's a couch and a big whiteboard, and use it to look up class slides for reference while I write things out on the board. Then I can type what I've written into a text file for eventual LaTeX formatting. (I've decided to learn the system by using it for all reasonable homeworks for the rest of the semester.) After a late dinner back at home, I appeared in the cluster around 9:15 — just as everyone else there was heading out for some campus exploring. I kept out of it since mkehrt happened to remark the group was already rather large, plus I wanted to work a bit on my chart parser for NLP lab. That went fairly well, with a few breaks, until I decided to leave at 10:45. I wonder how much worse my eyes are getting from staring at computer monitors all day. I remember being in Target down at the Waterfront a few weeks ago and thinking that the can't-see threshhold was shorter than it should be. I hope I don't have to start using my back-of-the-lecture-hall glasses for more general activities — I guess they're not awful as far as glasses go, but they make things look distorted as I turn my head wearing them. And they also accent a characteristic of my face that I prefer go unnoticed. Chris posted an interesting question about current relationships on her journal, which I answered in brief, but then felt kind of stupid for doing so. Dating is one of those topics I can never get a good handle on, or even write about properly without falling into massive over-analysis or despondent emo angst posts. (It occurs to me, incidentally, that this may be the first time I've used the word "emo" in print. Goes along nicely with the first time I used it in speech last weekend.) The chief cause for my null "dating history," to use Dan's term, is probably that I'm the world's most oblivious guy when it comes to picking up the "I wouldn't mind going out with you"-type signals, and even when I do think I've got one I'm too shy and awkward to do anything about it. That's enough on that for now, or else the integrity of this post will be severly damaged. Class tomorrow at 10:30! |
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
1:51 p.m.
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Wow... people are suddenly discovering me on Live Journal. I need only one more CMU reader to bring the ratio of audience members at Carnegie Mellon, Case, and elsewhere to 4 to 2 to 1. I may have to re-evaluate my writing perspective, or at least not feel bad about being more CMU-specific. I'm actually writing this from the atrium in Newell-Simon, in the middle of all the other KGB people who congregate here for daily lunch and laptop-fests — I decided it was about time my T43 made its début there as well. I was only able to adjourn for lunch, as they say in the good British books, because I've finally "completed" the 722 Homework of Death. I put "completed" in quotes because I know I ignored a few things in order to come up with a solution that at least doesn't look too bad; the grade I get on it may or may not reflect how good the answer actually is. All I can say is that I hope Lori likes grading it as much as I liked doing it — not a stinkin' bit. Typewriters are in their ascendency, or whatever it's called when a thing's power and influence are increasing. After an interesting dream, I woke up one day last week with a sudden urge to type something, so I got out the old manual typewriter I have and started working on a new short story in which — surprise! — a typewriter plays a primary role. Then, last night, I went up to the Tartan office to write out 722 on the whiteboard only to find that Marshall had rescued one of those giant-sized business electric typewriters from Hamburg Hall and installed it in the office. Those of us working there last night started a game of using it to write a story, with the fun constraint that each person is able to contribute only one word at a time. By end of day Sunday, when the office is flooded with staffers for production again, we expect to have a fair amount written. On an unrelated note, today is what I call the first day of spring. Many people had posts yesterday to that effect, but I dismiss them as attempted subversions, especially since it was today that I saw a robin sitting on the roof-ledge-thing outside my bathroom window. That was enough to get "When the Red Red Robin Comes Bob-Bob-Bobbin' Along" in my head when I walked out to the bus stop. I was thinking, though, that the usual equinox and solstice cutoffs occur at really rotten times for marking seasons: since when, for example, does winter wait until December 21? In Cleveland, at least, I might re-align these dates to November 15, April 15, June 15, and September 15. Pittsburgh probably roughly similar, although this has definitely been the mildest winter I've ever lived through. |
Thursday, March 23, 2006
1:51 p.m.
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"Where, oh where has my work ethic gone? Where, oh where can it be? With my class stuff cut short and the fun run long—" And I actually don't remember the last line. How embarrasing. Anyway, the fact is that I'm setting myself up for what people here like to call "workdeath," and the scary part is that I don't care too much. Probably the combination of spring break and Alon being away for three weeks has triggered my mind to believe that nothing urgent needs to get done before May-ish. Which is of course not true. I realized in the shower this morning that I'll have only three weeks each for the last two NLP lab modules; I've been working on the first one for at least that long, and it's still not finished. Then there's the matter of the 11-722 project, which is rather ill-defined right now, and the upcoming 11-761 project, which hasn't been defined at all. And I don't suppose Alon would be too thrilled if I don't have anything to show at our meeting next Monday, either. Interestingly enough, all of these terrors stacked up is still not motivation enough to sit at my desk for long periods of time and accomplish anything. I start to wonder if something is broken in my frontal lobe.... This journal hasn't been very specific recently, so I feel the urge to write about something concrete. The LTI open house started yesterday evening, and, as I think I mentioned before, I'm a student contact for it. That means all the prospective master's and Ph.D. students get to ask me questions about anything they can dream up, and I get three consecutive nights of free food. I met up with Dan, my "admit," again yesterday at the opening reception — he was already hunting down more professors to talk to. I introduced him to Aaron and Nimish, which touched off a discussion on machine translation that I was (mostly) able to keep up with and contribute to. Dan, who apparently has a background in cognitive lingustics, wanted to know what the success of the statistical MT approach says about the human soul — this was a point he seemed to raise in a few other conversations as well. I got left on the sidelines while he and Dave applied the question to phoneme segmentation, so I amused myself with noting that, with the exception of a few words like "processing" or "categorization," I have a more Canadian-sounding accent than Dave, who actually is Canadian. This reminds me that the Committee to Confound National Origins in Public should meet soon. How about Saturday? Anyone who feels like faking a British accent at a coffee shop or similarly public place is invited. |
Sunday, March 26, 2006
12:19 a.m.
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The only reason you'll ever read a post from me on a Sunday, at least during the academic year, is if it happens just after midnight on a day that I'd still call logical Saturday. The Tartan resumes its regular schedule this week, so I won't be free to post again until after class on Monday afternoon. The LTI open house duties have been dispensed with, sometimes with amusing side-effects. Thursday night was a big dinner for all the current and admitted LTI students at the Church Brew Works — about what you'd get, predictably, if you snatched the Great Lakes Brewery off of West 25th Street in Cleveland and flung it into an old church on the east side of Pittsburgh. I brought my car to campus in the evening to help drive people over there; it was a pretty straightforward route, but I managed to pass the place before I realized it. I turned right at the next cross-street, at right again at the following one, with the intent of going round the block and coming back at the restaurant again. Unfortunately, as is so often the case around here, the block wasn't rectangular and I ended up lost. I took no chances and stopped at a gas station for directions. Yesterday we were supposed to break up into smaller groups of current and prospective students and go out for dinner again on the department's tab, so a lot of us first-years ended up grouping together into a party that went to Bangkok Balcony in Squirrel Hill. It turned out none of the prospectives were actually staying at the default hotel location: they'd all found friends or whatever in various parts of the city instead. I went with Emil in his car to drop off a kid with a New York accent called Matt at his friend's place in Greenfield, and since this involved a twisty-turny route with all sorts of intersections, we had no hope of getting back to familiar ground with at least one screw-up. In the end we managed a number more than that. We somehow lost Greenfield Avenue, but got onto Shady, made another wrong turn, got onto Beechview Avenue the wrong way, and ended up going to the Waterfront — all the while with prospective student Dan still in the backseat. Then we messed around in the Waterfront parking lots for a while looking for a place that would let us get out onto the main road going left again. That was about when Emil started mumbling things in French and the resulting navigational discussion switched to that language for a few minutes. We eventually escaped back to Squirrel Hill and so on to campus, where Emil dropped Dan and me. I sought the social life in the cluster, somewhat relieved that I could drop the serious grad student act and that people weren't going to be asking me about tenure anymore. The cluster was mostly empty, but I got to watch Cornell and Ivan vaporize pencil lead and other things with some large capacitors and an extension cord. Some additional people showed up later on, and after seeing a demonstration on why you never want to leave yourself logged into a public cluster machine, Ivan, Carolyn, Tyler, and I went exploring. Returned home around 3:15 a.m. with an annoying headache. Persistant headache again today, after waking up at noon, and a chain of thought related to that fact caused me to discover that the Tylenol my mom bought me as a freshman in 2001 expired in 2004. I wasn't actually planning on taking any, but I thought it might be convenient to have some around the house, so I ran out to the drug store and bought a new bottle. I will be seriously surprised and annoyed if I have 24 medicine-inducing incidents between now and September 2009, but now at least I have something on hand in case a visitor ever demands a Tylenol or two. I felt much better after making the 30-minute walk to campus around 8:30, and then I ended up joining Alisa and Jordan for the 10:00 showing of "Good Night, And Good Luck." (That comma annoys me, but it's part of the title so I leave it in.) A very interesting movie. It was shot all in black and white, with simple and elegant white titles — the font looked like Trebuchet or a thin Blue Highway — and the incorporation of some actual TV footage from the early '50s. Aside from giving me more fantasies about wanting to live through TV's golden age and a really interesting period of modern American history, seeing the journalistic story of Edward R. Murrow unfold makes me want to look up some of his actual broadcasts or transcripts, or at least read a good book about what went on then. I noticed a few things in the movie that looked like historical inaccuracies, but that's probably to be expected in most modern films. Wow... this entry is kind of long. Off to bed so I can be in the office at 11 a.m. tomorrow! |
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
12:04 a.m.
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Kind of a mixed week at The Tartan this time around. I woke up wonderfully on time, had a nice breakfast, biked to campus, and arrived in good shape at the office a little ahead of schedule. With, of course, Nipper in tow to edit online content without taking up one of the layout computers. Progress began badly, and for the first six hours or so I was worried that I was going to be in the office until 6 or 7 a.m. again. After dinner things picked up a bit, and by 1 a.m. we were back on track for a "normal" week of paying printers' late fees and getting me out of the office around 4:00. I had to complain about the Pillbox feature four times, but most of my strictures about the normal rules of journalism went unheeded. I spent some time yesterday — more than I should have, actually — formatting my old journal entries for conversion to PDF and eventual printing. The total ran to 200 pages, so I didn't read everything, but the parts I did look at were quite striking because of all the spelling and grammar errors I managed to smuggle in. Anyone who visits my archive is liable to come away with the impression that I'm a careless and sloppy writer, which I think I'm not, so I guess I'd better start checking things over before I post them from now on. Soooo much work to do this week, and I feel like I'm going to have a hard time getting any of it done. I've been in the Tartan office for the last six hours trying to code up the 761 homework, but I don't think the output reflects that many hours of work. This weekend is KGB's Capture the Flag With Stuff, CMU Puzzlestorm, and the beginning of Daylight Savings Time, so the prospects for the upcoming days aren't much more encouraging. |
Thursday, March 30, 2006
3:24 p.m.
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That time machine people are always talking about inventing — I could definitely use it right about now. The last 24 hours haven't treated me too well. They started out so promising. Yesterday was the day of my long-awaited and long-kept-secret sneak attack on The Observer back at Case. The annual April Fools issue always comes out this week, so I thought I would drive to Cleveland in the afternoon and pop in on production for the evening. I got there in due course and walked into Thwing debating whether I should open the office door with a sprightly "Gooood morning!" or a more nonchalant "Somebody call for a copy editor." It was rendered moot by the fact that Laura noticed me coming about a half a second before I opened the door. Then it turned out that The Observer is not doing an April Fools edition this year because no one was motivated for it, so I only got to see a few hours of plain old Wednesday production. Even that wasn't too bad, though. Sonnie was glad to see me, and Rob showed me some nice improvements he's put through as production manager, but Laura didn't seem too excited about seeing any Ghosts of News Editors Past. Could just be my impression, though. Sonnie and I stood talking next to my car on Bellflower for a while, and it wasn't until 11:45 p.m. that I began the 2˝-hour drive back to Pittsburgh. And then a police officer pulled me over. I am not making this up. On the way into Ohio, I went through a long stretch of the PA Turnpike marked as a construction zone with reduced speed limits — 40 m.p.h. for a few miles — but nothing was going on there and the traffic I was with sped through the area at 65. So coming home at 1 a.m. I figured it wouldn't be out of line to do the same thing. Just on the Ohio side of the toolbooth the pavement got bad and the lanes narrowed, so I slowed down to 53. A car came up right behind me and gave the old tailgating treatment, but I ignored it. It wasn't until that other car pulled off at the tollboth that I saw it was a police car, and the instant I paid the $3 to get into Pennsylvania it came up behind me again and turned on the flashing lights. It was the usual scene, like you see in movies, I guess. The officer was just as impassive and humorless ("What's your driving record like?" —"Perfectly clean, as far as I know." —"As far as you know? Who would know better than you?"). I remembered Erin's $160 ticket from two years ago, and the fact that fines are usually doubled in work zones, and got really nervous. After going back to the cruiser to take care of the paperwork, the officer returned and gave me a citation under a part of the law that covers general turnpike traffic enforcement; I was writted up for ignoring "posted signs." If anyone ever again says the state of Pennsylvania is going bankruppt, my answer is going to be that the highway patrol must be hording it all. The amount of the violation was $30, but that was dwarfed by a long list of additional fees and surcharges that brought the total ticket to $106.50. The giving of this ticket was accompanied by a long explanation of each of its parts and the actions I could take next, during which a combination of being rather nervous and rather cold made me shake quite noticibly. I let the policeman pull back onto the road ahead of me, and then kept the needle right on the speed limit the rest of the way back. Got home around 2:45-ish and went off to bed. So now I guess I have to tell my parents about it. They didn't even know I was making the trip in the first place.... |
Saturday, April 1, 2006
12:43 a.m.
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Well, we're still surviving. I managed to fend off meeting with my advisor until Monday afternoon, by which time I should have my currently assigned task figured out, but there has been no real progress on my 761 homework, Grammar Formalisms projects, or the NLP lab projects. The 761 stuff in particular is annoying me — the text of the assignment notes happily that inconsitencies in subscript notation for training hidden Markov models dates back to the original paper explaining the training algorithm, so I guess it's no wonder that there's a bug in my program somewhere that I can't find. I will probably be taking a few late days on this if the solution doesn't occur to me in like the next hour I spend working on it. I was too wrapped up in that traffic ticket stuff yesterday to write much else. Yesterday was the first day of nice spring weather we've had so far, and Carnegie Mellon was taking full advantage of it. The Cut (I keep wanting to say "the quad," even though it's not called that) yesterday afternoon looked like the Champs de Mars around the Eiffel Tower: people playing maybe six different games of frisbee or soccer, sitting in small groups by the tennis courts reading books, clicking away on laptops in those little niches along the front of CFA. I joined them; I staked out a spot on the CFA steps and wrote yesterday's post from there. I was also in full view of two "hulking black obelisks" that mysteriously appeared on the Tomb-of-the-Unknown-Soldier-style concrete pedestals on either side of the building. These were seven-foot-tall cardboard installations, painted solid black and secured to a sort of weighted-down wooden frame made out of two-by-fours — but I can, um, neither confirm nor deny that I had any involvement in their construction. Today I stopped work around 5:30 to have dinner at Panera's down in Oakland, but the freeness of this meal was decreased when I discovered I'd brought along with me the gift card that had 17˘ on it instead of the one that had $20. I called in at the Tartan office for about a half an hour after eating, then joined the crowd in Wean 7500 at 7 p.m. for Capture the Flag With Stuff! Even with all the rules changes since last semester, I found it was a lot easier to pick up the strategy of the game after having played last semester. This was mainly achieved by remembering the sorts of things we did last time and making sure they were still legal. I wimped out and played defense for two games — patrolled the stifling hot Doherty B level for an hour and then had a few standoffs with people who kept infiltrating the fourth floor of Wean — before quitting early and coming home a bit after 11:00. I think in the fall I will force myself to play the offensive side, even if I have to scream "Alarm! Alarm!" for five minutes while people are trying to work in their labs and offices. And tomorrow I'm going back to Wean 7500 for Puzzlestorm starting at 9:30. (I couldn't get out of it at the last minute like I kind of tried doing on Wednesday.) I think it's still going to be lots of fun, and if I time things right I should have two hours back at my apartment tomorrow evening to do laundry and work on my 761 program before putting in an appearance at the post-CTFWS party at Ivan and Brewer's. |
Monday, April 3, 2006
8:20 p.m.
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I just spent like an hour writing an e-mail to the Tartan editorial staff about how I think the quality of our writing needs work, and I'm sufficiently apprehensive about the result to switch gears and write about the weekend for a bit. Maybe by the time I'm done here I'll have a response in my in-box. Puzzlestorm on Saturday was loads of fun. Car, Carolyn, Greg (Z.), and I met up in Wean a bit before the opening meeting began at 9:30, and shortly afterwards we'd established ourselves with food, scratch paper, laptops, and the first puzzle in Wean 4623. It would be incorrect to say that the day consisted of 20 logic puzzles, because they definitely weren't like those grid things you do in elementary school, but they definitely involved a creative application of logic several times over in order to get to any solution. An example: One of the puzzles was called "A Grilling and Meaty Treasure Hunt," and listed eight rows of mathematical equations. If you solved all the stuff out, you got eight pairs of sets of numbers. If you then interpreted the numbers as longitude and latitude coordinates, you found that these were the locations of various places in the Carribean. Applying the pirate theme that ran through the entire competition, it was possible to use the Internet to find that all the locations were places that had been sacked by a certain Captain Henry Morgan and his crew. That was as far as our team got, but we missed the solution by two steps — this Captain Morgan apparently led a crew of buccaneers, and the fact that "buccaneers" was the right answer was supposed to be confirmed by the fact that some substring of that word is the name of something you can use to grill meat on. Picture that, times 20. We had our frustrating moments, but also our fun ones. At one point, we threw Carolyn a sheet of paper covered with a confused array of digits and dots. Half jokingly, she looked at it and said "I'm gonna play sudoku with these numbers! — Wait... you actually can play sudoku with these numbers...." And that proved to be the correct way to find the answer. At the end of the day we were in seventh place out of 37 scoring teams, having had the satisfaction of being the sole occupant of third place for a bit of time during the early afternoon. The fun ended a bit after 7:00, and then I went home for a bit. I ended up making the weekly call home to the parents. My dad answered the phone, thankfully, so explaining my run-in with the Pennsylvania State Police was a lot easier than it would have been with my mom on the other end. I think my dad was more amused than anything else, which was definitely a relief for me. I can still remember the day in fifth grade I came home in tears because I'd been given a lunch detention for forgetting to do my homework. After the usual hour on the phone, I escaped down to Brewer's for the post-CTFWS party. Dan was there, and he saved the night by bringing a pile of games from Rebecca's house, which rescued me from standing in the corner drinking ginger ale and watching groups of people ignore me. We played a few rounds of straight-up Jenga before someone got the idea that it would be more fun if we used our noses instead of our hands — the general opinion was that my face in particular was eminently suited to this new method. After a round of Nose Jenga we moved on to feet, during which time I discovered I've got about twice as much toe control in my left foot as in my right, and after that we decided that a switch to Citadels would be a good idea. Home around 1:15, which really meant 2:15 because of the time switch. Waking up for The Tartan at 11 a.m. yesterday was difficult, and I was 15 minutes late. It wasn't a long night (3:16 a.m.), but it was an extremely frustrating one. The later it gets, the less restraint people have about saying bluntly what's bothering them, so by midnight I'm pretty sure we in the copy cave managed to offend SciTech and Sports; then I had to sit with the April Fools editors for an hour to finish off that section before I could go home. This morning, my eyes kept refusing to focus in Language & Stats, and my notes from the class are about as scribbly as my writing on the copy proofs.
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