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ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
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Wednesday, April 5, 2006
11:14 p.m.
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I keep coming up with complete paragraphs or thoughts that I want to include in my journal posts, but then when I finally have a chance to write something I forget what I wanted to say. I guess I'll see what I can come up with. One thing that does stick in my mind is that yesterday was not my day for computing. The MEMT algorithm is behaving badly, and I can't completely figure out why — but I wasn't even able to look at a line of code or one example sentence because I spent the whole day, outside of classes, on the same wretched assignment for Language & Stats that was due Monday. I hate hidden Markov models now. After puttering about with the homework at my desk during the afternoon, I grabbed dinner at the O after the Tartan ed staff meeting and went to finish up the assignment in the newspaper office. Then the wireless was being quirky, the assignment still took forever, and the three different ways I tried to install OpenCCG for my Grammar Formalisms project all failed. Ended up missing the 1:30 a.m. shuttle, so I walked home. Random question, but how does one tell the difference between actually making friends and having one's presence merely tolerated? I sometimes feel that I end up in the second category in certain situations, but perhaps I'm still new enough here to feel insecure when I shouldn't. This is the kind of stuff I end up thinking about if I get a half-hour walk to myself late at night. Anyway, falling asleep last night took some time, even after reading Henry James in bed for 40 minutes, but I didn't do too badly in getting up for my 10:30 class today. I tried working on the MEMT stuff after lunch and discovered some definite weirdness, but I still don't see why it would make things go as screwy as they are right now. (Sorry I'm being so vague about the stuff — I'd have to spend several paragraphs explaining it in order for anything more detailed to make sense, and people probably don't care that much.) I adjourned to the completely empty atrium at 3:00, and by 4 I had succeeded in getting OpenCCG to install on my AFS space. Then it was off to CFA at 5:30 for some grad student awards ceremony thing. I wasn't going for the prizes, of course, but the keynote speaker was Jorge Cham, the guy who draws "Piled Higher and Deeper." The talk was fun, though in the beginning it came across as slightly forced stand-up comedy. It ended just in time for me to run to trivia practice, where I sat for an hour and a half like a dumb brick except for an incorrect guess of "H.G. Wells" on one question and the contribution of "French Guyana" to a bonus. I'm seriously thinking of giving up the trivia stuff aside from helping out at high-school tournaments. I already surrendered my spot at nationals this weekend to Shweta because I have so much work to do, and it's not like I would have contributed more than 10 points to the rest of the team that's going. Home to do laundry after practice, and then I got trapped in Wikipedia for almost two hours. Did you know there's an actual town in Quebec called Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha!? I found it linked off of the page for the exclamation mark when I was reading about typographical symbols. |
Friday, April 7, 2006
12:53 a.m.
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I just got back from a double feature of obscure '30s movies in McConomy, and I'm kind of fumbling for words. This is entirely due to the force of the second movie, but I'll get to that in a minute. I was the first one to get into the auditorium, but by the time the lights went down there were a decent number of people given the presentation. (I still remember being one of six people who showed up for "The Big Sleep" at Strosacker my freshman or sophomore year.) The showing started off with "Man's Castle," from 1933, and due either to the print quality, sound recording method, or the actors' speaking styles, I missed about 70 percent of the dialogue from the first 10 minutes. It got more intelligible after that. From the modern perspective, I suppose most of the film, made at the height of the Depression and set in a Hooverville, provides more than anything else an interesting perspective of gender roles. In pretty much any domestic scene, the woman is making dinner, doing laundry, ironing, hanging drapes, etc., and is subject to the commands, orders, rudeness, etc. of the man — yet she still loves him anyway and calls him a "free man." Since it was still a product of the early '30s, though, it ends happily with the two of them sticking together. The AB folks must have run two reels together, because the second offering started immediately after the conclusion of the first. If you want an overdose of powerful cinema, you should watch "No Greater Glory" (1934) — if you can find it — on a large screen. It also doubles as a strong social comment on war, from right about the time things were getting touchy in Europe. The movie itself is about two rival gangs of boys, kind of like the one in "The Destructors," who have their hearts set on an all-out war over a vacant lot. The strange thing is that they're all excited over the great battle and kick away several opportunities to avoid it; they also don't seem to care that they don't actually hate each other. ("He's the enemy!" —"Yeah, but he likes you, and so do we.") Beyond that, I find it difficult to describe the movie exactly, except to say that I got totally wrapped up in it. When it was over, I was surprised to discover that only me and one other guy were left in McConomy, and I came out shaking like it was cold outside. After I tried getting my heart rate under control again, I started thinking about how amazing it is that a group of people who got together for a while and were part of some project 73 years ago can send me, at least temporarily, into an emotionally undefined state. (The movie came out in March 1934; I subtract part of a year for editing and such.) The kids from the movie are now either all dead or doddering about in their upper 80s, but for several weeks, perhaps, they were all out at Columbia Pictures filming Frank Borzage's new film, and tonight I saw it and acted all shell-shocked for 15 mintues because of it. I bet they had all sorts of fun making it: there were like 30 boys in it, and the studio couldn't have kept them busy all the time. Interestingly enough, IMDB informs me that the 13-year-old kid — born in Akron, of all places! — who played the captain/general of the Paul Street Boys died in World War II just two days short of his 24th birthday. |
Friday, April 7, 2006
3:59 p.m.
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After being rainy and grey this morning, today turned into a wonderful spring day complete with sun and soft breezes. I've taken my laptop outside again — ostensibly to work on my Grammar Formalisms project, but in actuality to write a journal post. I seem to have the choice between camping out near the Fence or CFA, where I'm surrounded by frisbee players who find it necessary to replace all occurrences of the word "stuff" in their conversation with something similar in sounds but profane in meaning, or setting up home base on one of the stone benches outside of the UC, which always seem to be the designated Campus Outdoor Smoking Zone. Well, the air may be worse in the second position, but the wireless is better. I found out this week that I now have a permanent commitment on my calendar at 11 a.m. on Fridays — Alon said I have to start going to the large GALE project meetings held at that time at the Craig Street office. This isn't entirely a bad thing, since now I'll actually get to see what the other machine translation groups are working on, but now my sleeping in abilities are restricted to three days a week, including Saturdays, and I find more and more excuses to buy lunch on campus during the week. I've spent $18 on food in Newell-Simon since Monday, which is probably good neither for my health nor my budget. If I have time to go grocery shopping tomorrow I'll see if I can do better next week. This afternoon, as part of the ongoing Graduate Student Appreciation Week, the LTI faculty served ice cream to the students outside of the director's office. The director himself, wearing a chef's hat with the LTI logo on it, handed me a dish of chocolate ice cream, and then a line-up of other professors gave out the toppings. A much better idea, I'd say, than the Pennsylvania state legislature's proclamation officially marking the week. Apparently some group of grad student representatives was lobbying states across the nation to recognize graduate and professional students, which sure sounds like a waste of government bureaucracy to me. I didn't realize until at the GALE meeting this morning, actually, that next weekend is Easter already. (That means this weekend is Palm Sunday, so I may try to get up extra-early and go to the 10 a.m. mass at St. Paul's before The Tartan claims the rest of my day. I've been really slacking on the church stuff for the past two years, and it's annoying me.) I've read enough of my old journal posts recently to remember that last year's Easter was spent in my dorm room working on a networks assignment. This year I'll try to escape Pittsburgh right after the GALE business on Good Friday and spend the weekend properly at home... and you can bet I'll not be trying any silliness on the PA Turnpike this time around. |
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
12:44 a.m.
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Here begins Week One of workdeath. I realized (anew) this week that the end of the semester is freakishly close. Including this one, there are only four weeks left, into which I need to cram three Tartans, a little more than two NLP lab programming assignments, a three-person Language & Stats group project and associated presentation, a Language & Stats "midterm," a categorial grammar for getting word order right in French questions (and associated presentation), and who knows how much MEMT work before another test run that's coming up at the end of the month. At least I don't think I have any finals! Hm... I forget what I did on Friday night. I know I spent a few hours in the Tartan office reading old papers out of the archive room for fun, and ended up skipping the KGB event in favor of going home to get dinner. That's right — I went back to the cluster around 10:30 to get work done, but something had gone wrong with the /etc/passwd file so no one could log in. Instead some of us went down to the third floor of Wean to look at the free stuff in the hallway, and then Rebecca and I played foosball in the grad CS lounge. I went to Rebecca's lobster party on Saturday. I hadn't planned on going, first because I thought I was going to be at nationals for trivia club and then because I decided to spend the whole weekend working, but then she asked me about it Friday afternoon in the atrium, and I said I'd go because it sounded like fun. The premise was to fight the lobsters against each other and cook them as the lost — an amusing idea, except that the things wouldn't do anything but sit in the tank looking at each other lethargically. (Actually, at least one of them died before we could do anything with it!) It was my first time eating lobster, and I have to admit that I'm not too eager for the privilege to be repeated. First of all, it apparently gets served to you whole, which is rather a daunting spectacle in bright red and eyeballs. From there, standard operating procedure is to rip off the claws, crack them open in the middle, and extricate the meat from both ends as you try not to look at the liquid (water?) that's pouring out of the thing onto your plate. Then you somehow hack off the abdomen and fillet the tail (Alisa did this for me because I was looking clueless), which leaves you with a hunk of meat and a fine view of the contents of the lobster's body cavity. And, after all the trouble, I don't think the taste is anything special, or even overly noticable for that matter: I'd get along just fine with some Lake Erie walleye or perch. After we cleaned up the kitchen a bit, Rebecca and Wes brought out a tin of chocolate toffee things, and we had tea and talked until I decided I should probably go home a bit before 2:00. |
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
4:41 p.m.
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Class ended 40 minutes early today, it's 72 degrees outside, and I found a patio deck-thing behind Baker that's quiet, smoke-free, and has good wireless. (The only other person back here is some guy who's been having a cell phone conversation in German for like an hour.) When the wind is just right you can smell the flowers that are starting to bloom next to the stone bench I'm on. |
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
6:45 p.m.
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One of my goals for yesterday was to wander about in the park a bit, but this was thwarted multiple times and I eventually gave up. First it was because of the Tartan ed staff meeting at 5:00, which fell right in the middle of some little-kid-style excursions Chris was planning for the late afternoon. After dinner I was working in the Tartan office, with IRC open, and it seemed like people who were interested in going Schenleying (I feel kind of dirty for making up this verb and consequently weirding language, but there it is) were coming back to the cluster after half-price. So I nipped over to Wean a bit after midnight, only to find myself foiled again: those people who hadn't been eaten by Starcraft were being swallowed up in homework. I gave up at 1:00 and went home for the night. In acting thus I ended up skipping a good journalism opportunity. There was a car accident involving a pedestrian on Forbes just on the edge of campus, and people who were still in the office after I'd left went out to investigate. At home, my phone rang around 1:30; it was Evan asking if we could get an article through copy and have it published on the website by morning. I meant to be awake by 8:30 to do it, but I ended up spending an additional two hours in and out of consciousness and logical-thought mode before I was able to at last get out of bed. By then, this was already edited and displayed on The Tartan's home page. I went to the LTI for the day, where I found e-mails later this afternoon about another article needing editing. An unfortunate conclusion, and now I really feel bad for the driver of the car. The net effect is that I feel like I suddenly work on a big daily, which is kind of interesting. There has yet been no official e-mail from the university administration, and the two updates that appeared on the Post-Gazette's website were meagre in the extreme, so The Tartan really is breaking the news on this story. I hope the rest of the campus realizes it: with everything going on, a number of staffers didn't get much sleep last night. |
Saturday, April 15, 2006
12:41 a.m.
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This has been kind of an annoying week, but not devoid of productivity. Two out of the three NLP lab modules are so close to being finished and turned in, and I managed to find a pretty good group for the 761 project. This is offset by the fact that I accomplished almost nothing on Tuesday night because I got lost in the P.G. Wodehouse book I was reading, and ditto on Thursday night because it was easy to get distracted at the Tartan office. Some really random stuff to report. On Wednesday, I think it was, I was coming up the main staircase in Newell-Simon with an old Center for Machine Translation tech report in my hand when I espied the familiar slouching figure of Prof. Branicky at the top of the stairs. He saw me too, and we both kind of did a double-take sort of a thing before I caught up to him and he asked me if I was a student here now. I asked him if he was here for a talk, and he said that he's actually staying at CMU for a whole month as a visitor to someone in robotics. Makes sense: I seem to remember hearing that he was going on sabbatical this semester, and he always did bring a lot of robot stuff into our AI class. I wonder if Cornell or any of the other KGB folk who are robotically inclined are going to end up working with him; that would be pretty cool. Immediately after I left Prof. Branicky and ducked into the LTI library to return that tech report, I came face-to-face with Dan, my prospective student from the LTI open house. He said he's working on a project already, so I guess that getting-lost-in-Greenfield trip didn't scare him away from Pittsburgh and coming to CMU. Ah well. I spent today running from one thing to another. I was 10 minutes late to the GALE meeting at 11; then I went home for lunch and appeared at my desk around 1:00. MEMT work for a bit, and then at 3 it was off to the first meeting of Team Broadsheet Redesign for the paper. I got interested in something for the 761 project when I came back to my desk, until I was roused by Justin around 5:30 for a meeting upstairs with Alon. That didn't go so well. He had a lot of questions about the why the system is behaving the way it is, which I couldn't answer, and the meeting ended with him dumping a crapload of work on me — to be finished by our usual 4 p.m. meeting on Monday, if you please. My weekend plans as they were already didn't admit of any free time, really, so now I'm going to duck out of the high school trivia thing even earlier than I'd planned so I can do some MEMT work before Tartan copy editing and the eventual drive home. The day begins at 7:30 a.m. |
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
11:46 p.m.
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Sorry about the lack of posts recently — it's been busy. I dearly want to put my advisor on a cord and drag him around with me this week so he can see what he and his colleagues are putting me through. Today he decided I should meet with someone from another research group by Friday in order to find out more about the trigram language model we're using in the MEMT system — that's in addition to a conference call he wants me to sit in on tomorrow afternoon, another progress update meeting late Thursday, and the usual GALE meeting on Friday morning. The last time I had this much project work to do was the beginning of the semester, and it was fine then because classes hadn't really gotten difficult yet. But now they are, all right. Everything is due in two weeks, and I have no clue how I'm going to finish it all in time. I may have to forsake the Tartan office and find somewhere new to work; I spent seven hours there yesterday and accomplished about an hour and a half worth of serious work. I'm in the office now, actually, after making epsilon progress on my Grammar Formalisms project. All the undergrads are excited to the 10th power this week because it's time for something called Spring Carnival, which I guess is approximately like Springfest drunk and on steroids. I should emphasize the "drunk" part, apparently, based on the number of parties people are planning on going to. Case people who remember how difficult it was getting all classes cancelled in the afternoon of the vice-presidential debate will roil when I mention that there are no classes here for two days at the end of the week. The Tartan's going crazy with coverage, and people have been swarming around Morewood parking lot all week getting booths and things set up for the festivities beginning Thursday. I haven't had a chance to see any of it yet, though, with all the stuff I've been working on, and now Prof. Rosenfeld has jeopardized my enjoyment of the actual events by deciding that our Language & Stats exam is going to be next Monday. Very little else to report, now that I think about it. I promise that I'll start being social again, if it matters, as soon as I can. |
Thursday, April 20, 2006
3:23 p.m.
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I see I neglected to mention in Tuesday's post that I skipped my first class in grad school this Monday. Normally I can make it to Language & Stats only a few minutes late on the morning after Tartan production, but this time around I must have woken up at 8:45, completely switched off my alarm, and gone to sleep again without remembering anything, because the first time I was aware of being awake was about 10:40. Oops. It was just yesterday that I finally got involved with any of the non-homework madness going on here this week. After like the 12th sunny day in a row, I decided I was going to force myself outside for at least an hour yesterday evening. I worked on MEMT stuff from the Tartan office until around 9:00, and then wandered over to Midway to see what was going on with KGB booth-building. This booth business deserves some explanation for non-CMU people. It doesn't seem so out of bounds that the frats and the larger organizations on campus all put together booths for Carnival — the same thing kind of happens for Springfest back at Case. The scale here, though, is a bit shocking: these booths are constructed by the students out of wood, painted, decorated, wired for electricity, have multiple floors, and measure something like 12 feet square. No wonder tuition is so high here; the amount of money spent on this activity annually must be enormous. When I got to the Morewood parking lot last night, I found perhaps 100 students running around with paint cans, sawing wood, lifting sections of walls into place, etc. Once I stopped staring in awe at the Taj Mahal palace thingy going up across from the KGB booth, I got put to work painting ceilings, sawing wood, and paneling walls until some sort of official people came round and said that quiet hours were starting. It was 11:00. I went off to my lab to work on some more homework 'n' such, but didn't really feel like concentrating on it. At 1 a.m. I was back on Midway doing touch-up paint jobs, eventually taking my leave around 2:30. Today the LTI is having a celebration for its 20th anniversary, so I pulled myself out of bed at 8:15 and appeared in Baker at 9 for a set of morning talks. There were just two, really: one by a British guy actually called Yorick, which I didn't understand too much of, and then one by Kevin Knight of AI textbook fame that I found much more accessible. They ended with a nice lunch at 11:45. All right, back to workdeath.... |
Thursday, April 20, 2006
3:41 p.m.
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Forgot to add this — Does anyone want to go to Carnival with me tomorrow night? I have a pack of eight advance-sale ride tickets that I probably won't use all of. |
Monday, April 24, 2006
11:11 p.m.
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Not dead yet. I should probably call my mom, actually, so she knows it. The last time I went two weeks without calling home she started leaving me IMs asking if I was still alive. Well, Carnival week is over, thank goodness. I got to do some of the fun stuff, though the weather and work kept me from doing as much as I would have liked. On Thursday evening all the media groups on campus had a sort of barbecue thing in Donner Ditch; I ate a hamburger and talked to Matt Campbell a lot before WRCT challenged The Tartan to a game of dodgeball. After that it was almost time for the comedian's show on Midway, so I went over there with a few Tartan people. We all had to find seats separately, though, because the tent they were conducting the proceedings in was really really crowded. The main act was a guy called Pablo Francisco, with warm-up jokes courtesy of someone called Jasper Redd, I think. I guess it wasn't a bad show, but not very suited to my tastes. The jokes that weren't about sex were all about racial stereotypes, and I really think humor can be more intelligent than that. After the show I wandered around Midway a bit looking at the booths. (Between the main page and the Pillbox articles, The Tartan has an enormous array of Carnival photos posted, by the way.) Didn't really feel like going through them for some reason. I think after that I went to the cluster for a while to do some work, and eventually I imagine I went home for the night. On Friday I had an interview to conduct and a news article to write. The interview was with Prof. Hartkopf in the School of Architecture, whose office is tucked away in that crazy skylight addition in Maggie Mo. If anyone's looking for an intelligent discussion with a knowledgeable person, I recommend immediately going to Margaret Morrison 415 and knocking on the glass-panelled cubicle door about two-thirds of the way down on the left. I came away from my interview with a summer reading list after Prof. Hartkopf started discussing books and authors that he thought I'd enjoy; in addition to that I got his views on Chinese history, U.S. economics, international policy, plant biology, an outline of his own life, a quick peek into a little side room where he keeps a lot of books, and an offer to look at some sort of plant exhibit he had. I spent a lot of Saturday, when I should have been studying for the 761 test, at The Tartan, but I slipped away for an hour and a half to hear the All-University Orchestra concert in CFA. They were playing "Rhapsody in Blue," which I don't believe I'd ever heard live before. They took it a bit fast, it seemed, but they gave it a nice treatment: I'd forgotten how much of a high-energy piece the first part of the work is. While they were playing I found my thoughts wandering along the lines of playing the piece for a class full of 10-year-olds, asking them to guess what sort of transportation inspired it, then playing it again to see how many of them change their minds when I suggest the correct answer (a train). Then copy editing yesterday — rather more annoying than usual since Carnival content pushed Pillbox to twice its usual number of pages. I am definitely losing the battle to convince the Pillbox staffers to write things that have a chance of resembling decent published prose rather than an IM conversation, and after six hours of reading the section I often want to either rip my eyes out or run for Pillbox editor myself so I can do something about the writing style. Then editorializing ran rampant in SciTech, a page got skipped, corrections weren't made, and now today's front page has an extremely embarrassing spelling error in the student government article. Only one more issue left, plus the commencement special edition, and then life gets a whole lot easier over summer break. |
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
12:21 a.m.
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OK. The new rule is that I'm not allowed to go four days without updating anymore. Otherwise I end up with giant entries that still manage to skip things I meant to write about. I see I completely forgot that I went and did Carnival rides with Carolyn, Gwendolyn, and Richard on Saturday right before the stuff closed. We rode a spinny dragon ride that left me feeling kind of sick for the rest of the night, but otherwise it was quite fun. I was happy to find out that I'm not the only one in my age group who's not really a fan of roller coasters. Yesterday's entry also glossed over the fact that Dan and I finally convinced some people to go walking in Schenley Park on Thursday night. Starcraft is still in firm possession of every mind in the cluster, it seems — if we didn't keep saying "Schenley? Schenley? Walking in Schenley?" every three seconds, everyone else defaulted to this weird ground state where they kept trying to get involved in Starcraft games... even after they'd expressed a preference for going outside. It would be nice if I could push myself back onto something approaching a normal sleep schedule, but I'm afraid this is going to be another lost cause of mine. I'm thinking I may have to plan an all-nighter sometime this week, possibly tomorrow night. One of the other students in 11-722 gave his final presentation today since he'll be out of town during the days scheduled for presentations, so I got a look at what I'm supposed to have done a week from today — it's not looking good for me right now. I code so slowly it's ridiculous. I scheduled my fall classes yesterday and today. Alon told me that I can get elective credit for a language class, so I'm tentatively signed up for 82-303 ("French Culture") in the modern languages department. I say "tentatively" because the class meets at 9 a.m., which would be the earliest I've had to start since the algorithms class times went all wacky my junior year. It's definitely way earlier than I'm used to being functional now, but I really want to do something in French again before I completely lose my grasp on the language. There are probably other things I meant to write about, but I can't come up with them right now. |
Random Stuff #28
Thursday, April 27, 2006, 1:33 a.m.
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A Question From the Audience This is one of those interesting things going around on Live Journal right now, in which you can request your friends to ask you five questions. The answers, of course, get posted to your own journal so the thing continues. So here goes, with questions by Dan: Suppose you could ask somebody one question and receive an honest, complete, and consequence-free answer. Who do you ask? What do you ask? What do you think they will answer? |
Sunday, April 30, 2006
2:08 a.m.
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Another rule is that I'm not allowed to spend 90 minutes writing 11-KB posts, no matter how much more interesting they are than the work I'm supposed to be doing. After writing that novella-sized thing on Wednesday night, I tried doing some more 722 work for a while until I gave up a bit before 4 a.m. and decided I really didn't feel like biking all the way back home at that point. So I added my name to the list of people who have spent the night on the couch in the Tartan office. It was kind of a fun adventure, sleeping there in my clothes on the third floor of the UC, hearing people — even at that hour &mash; walking by the hallway and hoping it wasn't the cleaning staff coming in to sweep the office or something. Brad came in sometime around 9 a.m. and left the door open; a really strange noise either in the hallway or outside on the cut woke me up a bit afterwards. I was supposed to be at a 1 p.m. meeting on Friday, but my body decided otherwise. After going to bed at 2 a.m. Thursday night, I found it was actually 1:00 before I was able to wake up and get out of bed. After a shower, I didn't show up at my desk until after 2. MEMT stuff until 4:30, when I slipped out to go hear a lecture by a New York Times obituary writer. Most of the students who decided to attend were Tartan staffers, so I sat in the middle of a big clump of them. I felt a bit out of place at first — the event was somehow connected to the Humanities Scholars Program — but Margalit Fox, the speaker, had two degrees in linguistics and one in journalism, which was at least something closer that I could relate to. At one point, someone asked a question about The New York Times's style of using "Dr." versus "Mr." or "Ms.," and when the answer came back including the sentence "Sometimes the copy desk changes it and sometimes they don't," all the Tartan people turned around and looked right at me. Good fun! After it was over, I grabbed a New York Times from the box in Baker just to read the obituary page. Work on MEMT crap all yesterday evening, then, until I happened to find myself in the cluster around 12:30 and learned that some people were interested in taking the Fence. I figured I could let myself have two free hours in a whole stinking week, so I put aside my classifier for the 761 project and went out to join them. We just gave it a good coat of white paint; after that we all felt like going home and sleeping and finishing a second coat and some lettering another night. Work all day again this afternoon after I finally got some laundry done in the morning. Switching off between MEMT, 761, 722, and Tartan stuff. There is nothing I would love more than to puke my fried brain and rotting guts all over the remnants of this semester. In the past two days I have reached levels of frustration not seen since the wretched databases project of December 2004... and at least that time I was only balancing one project against studying for and taking a few final exams. This time around it's four projects and Tartan stuff all competing against each other, and I'm not enjoying it at all. This evening I wrote an e-mail to Lori, my 11-722 professor, asking if there's an open spot for me to give my presentation in that class next week instead of on Tuesday, because it's certainly not going to be ready by then! Toying with the idea of asking Alon for an extension on the NLP lab stuff as well. |
Tuesday, May 2, 2006
12:44 a.m.
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Well, for better or worse the 11-761 project is turned in (as of about 40 minutes ago) and out of the way — the only thing we have left to do for it is give a 10-minute presentation to the class tomorrow. I've been so wrapped up in it that I don't even know if I ever wrote about it properly in here; we had to write a classification program to tell real broadcast news articles from fake ones that were generated by a trigram language model. (That means that it picks the next word based on the last two, so it would know, for example, that "the big dog" is a lot more likely in English than "the big quickly.") Of course, any old person can tell the difference almost immediately because the fake sentences go nowhere semantically. Our program was getting them right 71 percent of the time on the little test set we had. So that's that. Today I went and sought amnesty, or asylum, or refuge, or whatever you want to call it from Lori. That is, I asked her if it might be possible for me to move my 11-722 presentation to one of the classes next week instead of, um, tomorrow. She said it was, actually, so now I have a slight reprieve that should be long enough for me to accomplish something in the way of progress before the due date. I think I must go out for a late-night walk some time this week, or even pack a sandwich for dinner and eat it out on the Cut. The chunk of code I spent all of tonight writing was actually driving me close to hysterics. I've been spending my life at a desk recently, eating all my meals in front of the computer and not even having the time to buy orange juice for the mornings. Yesterday (I still call it Sunday, even though this is dated Tuesday) was a little bit of a change due to Tartan craziness, and since it was our last issue of the year Tiff brought in some snacks and cake for the morning hours. The goal was to finish the paper by 2:30 a.m. so we could start the traditional ed staff champagne at 3:00, and I was surprised to see that we only ran over until 3:15. I wrote about the champagne before, in my entry of December 5, back when I was still a random aged journalism addict who'd spent all of four weeks on copy staff. The event last night was fundamentally unchanged — perhaps more like a goodbye party, though, since a number of seniors are actually graduating and leaving at the end of this semester. Evan, Brad, and Tiff gave out certificates to the ed staff with fun things on them; I believe mine gives me the honor of "resident human encyclopedia," which I quite enjoy. The order of the speeches was kind of set by Evan, who went around the room and pointed at people to see if they wanted to talk. I said a little bit about how I feel completely absorbed into this organization after being such a weird outsider just four months ago, ending with something like "I'll be back in the fall — this is way too much fun to give up." Champagne ended around 4:45, so I packed up my stuff and headed home. Went to sleep rather quickly, so I wonder if the alcohol had something to do with it. I felt a little bit warm standing around drinking it in the office, but I suppose that could have been equally due to the fact that like 30 of us were crowded in there with the door closed for an hour and a half. |
Wednesday, May 3, 2006
2:04 a.m.
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Another late-night post. I'm seriously going to come back to all of these in a year, see only the dates on the posts, and form the impression that everything in April and May 2006 happened a day after it actually did. So, I say, future self: today is still Tuesday. Tuesday of the second-to-last week of death, if it makes any difference. Today I've been experiences a somewhat false feeling of relief now that the 761 project and the MEMT dry run are both finished. It's true that this does cut in half the number of major think I'm currently working on, but the remaining two have had almost no attention since I started working on the first two, so there's actually quite a bit of effort that still needs to be expended between now and May 12 if I don't want to fail this semester. And I'm sure Alon will come up with some new MEMT work that will disrupt all my current plans and keep me hanging round my desk at 1 a.m. Overall, though, I feel a bit better off than I did yesterday — well enough, even, to go eat dinner at Panera's in Squirrel Hill with Kristen, Marshall, and Justin after the Tartan ed staff meeting. One interesting piece of news from that meeting, actually: I was appointed to The Tartan's editorial board for the next year. I had given up expecting it a while ago, so when Evan said he was going to appoint two new people I only paid about half attention to him and left the remaining half on glancing through the copy of this week's issue that was going around the room for criticisms. Then I caught the words "...and Greg Hanneman, if he accepts." I rather haltingly said I would, conditional on the fact that I might not be able to make some of the meetings if my advisor keeps 5 p.m. as his preferred get-together time. I should probably look at my schedule for next fall to make sure I won't be in a class, either. After dinner I came back to the office to work, but ended up getting mostly distracted for the first two hours by a number of interesting discussions about how we can make the paper run more smoothly. Between 10 and 11 things quieted down a lot and I was able to make some nice progress on the 11-722 project. If I haven't mentioned that one before, it involves writing a categorial grammar to correctly parse questions in French and reject ones that are ungrammatical. The point is to satisfactorily deal with all the pronouns and clitics, like Marc l'a-t-il donné à Nicole? ("Did Marc give it to Nicole?") or Y pourrais-je en trouver un? ("Could I find one of them there?"). I'm actually not sure I'll make it to things that complicated by the due date; today's progress milestone is that I'm finally able to parse a present-tense declaritive-word-order question with a transitive verb, or the same thing with the subject and verb inverted. |
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