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ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
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Thursday, May 4, 2006
12:51 a.m.
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I was very inefficient today. After waking up at 12:30 (yikes!) and missing the second day of 11-761 presentations, I went to campus around 1:30 and did MEMT work until I decided around 3:30 that I needed lunch. So it was off to Sree's to get food and then up to the Tartan office to eat it. I meant to work from there on NLP lab stuff for the next several hours, but between getting distracted, returning overdue books at the public library, and discovering that the given code for the second module didn't compile, I really didn't make too much progress. I eventually gave it up and switched to Grammar Formalisms, but got stuck again pretty quickly. Then I had to get more food. I say, planning would be much more straightforward if I didn't get hungry every four or five hours. Spending so much money to eat on campus is really getting annoying, and coming home to eat has been failing recently because I haven't had time to go properly grocery shopping in weeks and weeks. Some other random thoughts: Two people in the last week have asked me what my professional and career goals are, and I've had to answer twice that I have no clue. This is probably not good, since I'm here seeking an advanced degree in a rather specific field. It's the old journalism-vs.-CS debate: I do find the language-related things I'm learning at the LTI interesting, but for the most part the MEMT project is not a linguistics project, and working on the code at my computer is certainly not an exhilarating work environment. Newspaper work I still find fascinating, even though I've done my share of complaining about 16-hour stretches in the office and writers who never seem to learn anything. There, at least, the work is dynamic and there are scads of interesting people around. When I find myself considering applying to the LTI Ph.D. program in order to keep working at The Tartan beyond next year, I have to accuse myself of ignoring my true inclinations and trying to live some kind of impossible double life. Why can't I find something interesting and computer science-y that comes with the work conditions that I find at the newspaper? One of the reasons I got so little done today was because I went to see the 10:00 showing of "Amélie" in McConomy. It was the fourth time I've seen it in the theatres (previously at the Cedar-Lee, in Montreal, and at Strosacker), and the who-knows-how-many-th time I've seen it overall since I own the DVD. It's still one of my favorite movies. As I was watching it tonight, though, something sneaky at the back of my mind kept identifying with the main character. This may not be the place to write about such things, but I diagnose this as a symptom of me actually getting a bit afraid because I'm almost 23 years old and have never had a relationship. "If you let this chance pass," says the "Glass Man" M. Dufayel to Amélie, "your heart will become as dry and breakable as my skeleton." I found the sharpness of the word sec very affecting. Maybe that's enough for tonight. I have a lot to get done tomorrow. |
Saturday, May 6, 2006
1:12 a.m.
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The last two days have been gobs of fun, and for the most part I no longer fear dying of work overload before the summer starts. Yesterday I slept in again, went grocery shopping, and worked on my NLP lab stuff from home until about halfway through the afternoon; then I went to my office and listened to Matt McKee's radio show while doing more work. Chris Jackson (too many people here with the same names!) was collecting people for fun outings for the evening, so I made sure to be in the cluster from around 6 p.m. At 8:30 we walked down to Squirrel Hill for ice cream at Coldstone — I gave a thought to our wonderful La Gelateria at Cedar-Fairmount — which got me back to the cluster a bit after 10:00. I probably would have gone to half-price, too, except it was Fuddle. Home at 11:15: the earliest I've been home in at least three weeks, I'd say. This morning I was on time to the 11 a.m. GALE meeting, but immediately afterwards came home again to eat lunch, work on NLP lab, and bake cookies for the KGB barbecue. The cookies and I took the bus back to campus at 4:40 for my 5:00 meeting with Alon, which went quite nicely. He asked me how much academic work I had left in the semester besides Grammar Formalisms, and I answered "Just NLP lab, which I'll be finishing tonight, I guess." I emphasized the word "tonight" slightly and made a bit of a face; my plan was to devote the time up until 7:00 to finishing the modules before running off to KGB, then coming back in time to submit whatever incomplete work I had by the midnight deadline. My advisor hadn't seemed to bother so much about the Language & Stats project that was controlling my life during the dry run last week, so I was really surprised, after I did my NLP lab face-pulling, when he asked "Oh, do you need an extension for that?" and pretty much told me I could have up to a week to turn everything in. Timely intervention, I should say; based on how much work I was able to get done yesterday and today, I should have no trouble turning in a decent assignment by Thursday-ish. So at 7:00 I went off to meet people in the UC for the barbecue, feeling all sorts of wonderful and non-pressured. We traipsed down in two large groups to a playground in Schenley Park, where my 20 cookies disappeared in about as many seconds. Alisa brought her super-friendly cat, who wound himself around my ankles and knees when I squatted down and made me miss my Dusty. I played hearts with Dan, Devin, and Ivan, losing horribly, but then Em made us all hamburgers and I went to climb around on the playground a bit. When it was all over and most people had left, I volunteered to carry some stuff back to the KGB office on campus. It was thus, crossing Flagstaff Hill, that Brewer, Evan, csjackso, Alan C., and I noticed an extremely bright light (like the kind you usually see on top of stadiums and so on) attempting to blind us from somewhere in Oakland. Alan and I had seen it at various times in the past, but none of the others had; furthermore, Alan said that Pitt plays all of its sporting games at either Heinz Field or in their own indoor arena, so we were all at a loss to know what the thing actually was. The most straightforward solution, which was quickly proposed, was to wander in the light's direction until we found out. Chris was running off to do something else, but we met up with Ross outside of Wean, and after we dumped the things we were carrying in the UC the new five of us set off westward down Forbes. This was a few minutes before 11:00, and we discovered by the time we got to Craig Street that the light had been switched off. We'd gotten a decent localization of it before — to the right of the Cathedral of Learning but to the left of a blinking-red-light radio tower — so we continued on. Alan thought he saw something behind a church on Fifth Avenue on the far side of the Cathedral, so we adjusted our path northward through an increasingly sloped network of streets that I guess was part of the Pitt campus. This city is an absolute photographer's holiday, and we came across numerous examples of interesting archtecture before we ended up (I think) running into the back end of the hospital and coming face-to-face with Pitt's gigunderous indoor arena. The radio tower was quite near us now, and we started looking for a high vantage point on the slope heading north into the Hill District. We settled for going up the steps along the side of the area, finally emerging onto a huge concrete patio thing behind the building, over which towered... two stadium-style light poles apparently pointed down at the patio and the building itself! Pitt's arena is built on the site of their former outdoor stadium, and we came to the consensus that they'd left the lights in for some reason or other. Though why they'd turn them on to shine at nothing still remains beyond our comprehension. Mission accomplished, though, so we skipped (yes, skipped) our way down the hill back to Forbes, and so on to the back part of campus. We reached the cluster around midnight, and Ross and I re-departed for our apartments a bit later. Came home just before 1:00 after having walked approximately 6½ miles since 7 p.m. |
Saturday, May 6, 2006
11:25 p.m.
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Hm... no work today, although that was probably not the best idea I've ever had. Felt nice, though. I let myself sleep in until after noon (I must really need catching up; that's like the third day in a row I've done that!), then got up and had some breakfast. Then I updated my photo album with stuff from the roll of pictures I got back last week. Kind of disappointing to realize that I don't have any pictures of CMU people as yet except for the ones I took last Sunday at The Tartan — and none of those will have me in them. I must take steps to remedy this, especially if I end up gone after last year. I took my old albums off the shelf and found that I had no documented evidence of my Case friends until April of my sophomore year. I also have been spending time clicking through my old journal posts. The KGB method of distinguishing people by Andrew ID is making more and more sense: there are too many name collisions for me to go on mentioning first names in vacuo and expecting everyone to understand. At CMU I know three Matts and one Matthew (not even including mrwright and mkehrt, the preferred versions of whose first names I couldn't even guess), a pair of Dans, two Evans, a matching set of Marshall R.s, three Chrises plus a Christine, and now even two Rebeccas. I happened to mention the Andrew ID method of disambiguation to Matt McKee in the office once, and he was rather shocked to hear about something he called "so dehumanizing." It works just fine for me, and I'm nerdy enough to even enjoy it. After I pried myself away from my computer, I spent from 4:00 until a bit after 8 in at The Tartan, variously doing work on the commencement issue and talking newspaper stuff with Brad and Marshall. I didn't even realize how late it was getting until I checked the clock; the sun is staying up so late now that I'm a little bit off at using it to estimate time. After I got home I cleaned up my living room a bit and went through some paperwork that's been piling up on my table. Still a long way to go until my apartment is reasonably clean again, but full attention will have to wait until sometime after this Thursday. |
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
2:50 p.m.
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That's it — I'm getting to the point where I've definitely had enough of this semester. I'd been complaining before about how much crap I had to do within such a short space of time, but now I'm finding that dragging it out for days and days is perhaps even worse! I mentioned that Alon gave me an extension for the NLP lab modules; joining them on the list of stuff due Friday is now the Grammar Formalisms code and paper. I gave my presentation yesterday, fourth in a marathon series of four people giving talks that day. We started at 3:00, and they were each only supposed to be 20 minutes or so, but it was quite close to 5 before I assumed the stage. Going last with a weak presentation was actually not a bad thing; everyone was probably already bored sick and therefore happy to see something simple and quick. I didn't even have to give a demo of the parser, which is good because I still have a decent amount of work to do on it before Friday. And the wretched paper to write. Other updates... Sunday was the copy party (i.e. party for Tartan copy editors), which I was late to because of another day of massive oversleeping. Once we were all there, Arthur gave us a surprise rendition of Gilbert and Sullivan's "Modern Major-General" song in a version that he'd re-written to "I am the very model copy manager emeritus" — absolutely wonderful, both in humor value and witty lyrics. The first four lines, for example: I am a very model copy manager emeritus Yesterday had some more Tartanness in the form of the end-of-semester gala at the Union Grill. Once again, the copy staff seemed to clump together and separate off from the rest of the party, but this time conversation was a lot easier because the music wasn't so loud. I also had a chance to talk to Danielle, the Dossier editor, a bit; she told me about a 30-day road trip she and some friends had taken by bus a few summers ago. Apparently you can get a month-long unlimited pass from Greyhound at a decent price. It sounded like all sorts of fun, and perhaps something to try if I ever get 30 days off consecutively. (Not likely to happen in the forseeable future, though.) I don't think I ever mentioned here that I woke up last Thursday morning to find that the handle in my shower that controls whether the water comes out of the faucet at the bottom or the shower head up top no longer had any effect. The lever to plug the drain was similarly incapacitated, so I couldn't even take a little-kid-style bath. In the end I had to lay down in the bathtub and stick my head under the faucet, which is a whole lot harder that it used to be when I was 12. I had to keep flipping over onto my stomach in order to get parts of my head wet. Had my apartment, and especially the bathroom, been in good clean shape, I would have called the landlord forthwith and gotten him over to fix the problem before my next shower. Owing, however, to how busy I've been for the past several weeks, I was afraid of having the landlord and/or plumbers here when they'd be mucking about in the dirt and stray hairs in a bathroom I hadn't cleaned in approximately forever. It was yesterday — after a third round of faucet head-ducking — that I finally took some time to clean and then called the landlord. He came over this morning, took the handle apart, and after running out three times to retrieve or purchase various tools, concluded that the part he actually needs to complete the job is currently out of stock and won't be in until some time next week. My twisted spine and insufficiently-washed hair are dreaming of the locker room showers in the UC; if I can start getting up before noon I may see about trying them out. |
Thursday, May 11, 2006
11:31 p.m.
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Today it rained in buckets from the time I woke up until after 8 p.m. I looked on Intellicast this morning to check the Pittsburgh weather forecast and was confronted with 10 consecutive rain icons all the way down the side of the page. Then I moved on to the radar map and found a sort of hurricane-looking thing centered a bit north of Lansing that was rotating ominously counterclockwise and throwing its tentacles into five states. I thus decided that taking a bus to campus was the right decision, but came out of my apartment just in time to see the 12:52 go down the street before I could cross the intersection and race it to the stop at Centre. The next bus was scheduled for 1:07, so I figured I could walk to campus and get there at about the same time. Yes, it was raining rather heavily, but I'm the sort of person who would rather get moving straight away under my own steam than hang around doing nothing for 15 minutes. So I arrived at my desk quite properly wetted from the knee down. It was a short day: my advisor put any real project work on hold until Monday, and then I got sick of my classwork and caught the 5:15 shuttle back home. The alleyway behind my house had about as much water on it as your average Slip 'n' Slide, except along the edges, where it had more. I had to be home by 6:00 because Kathi (yay Case people!) was coming to visit and spend the night — she has a job interview in one of the suburbs tomorrow morning and wanted to not wake up at 6 a.m. She got here a bit before 6, and once the rain calmed down we drove back to campus and wandered around a bit. Kathi wants to get an early start in the morning, which is fine by me, so I will be going to bed (shortly) at my earliest time in at least three weeks. I just hope I can fall asleep; normally if I try to go to bed too soon I spend hours and hours flopping around awake in bed. Tomorrow is the due date for all of my outstanding academic work: the code and paper for 722 (this on top of that presentation I gave Tuesday), and then the last of the NLP lab modules. Currently complete: zero out of three. It's probably not good for me to say this, but I'm really beyond caring and just don't feel like working on any of this stuff any longer. It's a little bit annoying doing this in grad school, since I have a feeling they definitely expect a higher level of commitment from the students, and also it's not like I'm Anonymous Face No. 32 in a class of 85 kids with a professor I'll never see again — my advisor is the NLP lab instructor and also one of the professors for 722, and the LTI is certainly small enough that most of the teaching professors know most of the students. Oh well; I'll see what I can do by 5 p.m. tomorrow and then drive a stake through the heart of this semester and have a good weekend. |
Thursday, May 11, 2006
11:57 p.m.
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I keep forgetting to post about this— Is anyone who's going to be here over the summer interested in a sort of [Weekday] Night Dinner Club? The idea is that we would rotate having everyone else over for dinner on [weekday] nights, with the host doing the main-dish cooking and the guests bringing small things to fill out the menu, which could possibly be announced in advance to make sure everything fits together and four people aren't all bringing salad and breadsticks. With four to six people involved, which I kind of feel is an ideal number, we'd each have to host only two or three times. Respond in some form if interested, and include your preferred day of the week if you have one. |
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
11:24 a.m.
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So I thought I was done with the semester on Friday. I managed to finish the 722 project and my paper during the afternoon, and then I came home to hack away at NLP lab. Around 8:00, suffering from a headache and a severe case of frustration, I put together what I had and sent an e-mail to Alon explaining that it wasn't working right. Then I went off to jgrafton's dessert party at Roselawn 7, and after that over to the Underground in Morewood with Rebecca and some other people for a night of board games. Came home around 2:15 a.m. to find a response in my in-box: "Why don't you try to work on this a bit longer and get things to work correctly? There is really no reason for you not to get an A in this lab." I now have until Thursday to fix my horrifying Lisp code and resubmit it, when I was really hoping to forget about the whole thing as quickly as possible. In happier news, people here are suddenly showing a strong inclination to do fun stuff. After dessert and games on Friday, I drove to campus on Saturday evening for Geek Eat, the KGB's semesterly large-group outing to a restaurant. The grey morning had turned into a fine evening, so most people decided a walk down to Pacific Ring in Squirrel Hill would be nicer than driving. I accordingly left my car in the campus garage and joined a knot of people trapsing down Forbes. At the restaurant, I composed myself a nice meal of green tea, wanton soup, and chicken lo mein for only $9.50 plus tip. Afterwards, Rebecca suggested games again, so a total of six of us ended up back at her house to play a few rounds of hearts and a long game of Citadels. Someone wanted to go home at that point — a visiting former student, it appeared, called Betsy — and Misha volunteered to take her home, but in the end the rest of us decided we wouldn't be adverse to a bit of a walk either. So we all collected our shoes and jackets and set out, eventually ending up at a really nice-looking apartment building at Centre and Dithridge. On the way back, since we were walking pretty close to campus, I diverged from the rest of the group to get my car and bring it to Rebecca's. I didn't realize it was 1:30 a.m. until I got my ticket stamped in the parking garage — I'd been thinking it was probably getting close to midnight. After we all got back people wanted to play Risk, so around 2:00 we started a game... which eventually ended around 6:45 when Misha finally wiped me and rlambert off the map. By then, of course, the sun was up and cars were out on the streets again. I came home and slept until noon, when I forced myself out of bed in order to avoid getting on the weird schedule that happened the last time I stayed up all night. Called home for Mothers' Day on Sunday — my mom had been expecting I'd forget, which I guess made the weekly call that much nicer for her, but got me wondering what sort of person she thinks I am to not remember important dates. Then it was off to The Tartan to work on the commencement issue, but there wasn't too much going on there. I stayed anyway until 7:00 so I could go directly to Philip's cooking party Welch (another dorm infiltrated!). Stuff was still being cooked in Roselawn 7, so I went over there to help out, and then that became the de facto location after more people arrived. At some point, while I was washing some of the dishes in the kitchen, almost everyone else must have run off together, because I came round the corner into the dining room to find the house almost empty. Brewer and Philip were still there, though, so we got into an interesting conversation about computer science and language technologies, and from there into a comparison of the CS programs at Case and CMU. Home and to bed at 1 a.m. This week is my transition week from academic craziness to summer stability (I hope). My goal is by next Monday to have in place a regular weekly schedule for LTI work, fun adventures, triathlon training, and some other personal projects I want to work on. |
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
10:55 p.m.
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The campus is under construction. If I didn't get enough during the last four years, watching the people at Case rip up the sidewalk for new steps at the medical library, close Euclid for those fake brick crosswalks, shut down a whole street corner for the demolition of Baker, block off Adelbert because of the bridge, and completely flatten the stadium for the new North Side dorms (am I forgetting anything?) I get a second chance to see CMU get simultaneously built up and torn down in the same way. I arrived at the LTI yesterday to find that the garage-like building next to Newell-Simon had been magically reduced to a pile of bricks, that someone had gone "Bibbity-bobbity-boo" and tossed away everything but the steel frame of half of the planetary robotics building, and that some sort of a cyclone had torn some of the exterior off of the OSC. These are all jobs persuant to clearing away land for the new Gates Center for Computer Science, to be built on some of the ugliest and most uneven ground CMU has to offer, a construction project that will take from now until the beginning of 2009. That means, like the North Side dorms, I'll probably get all the annoyance without any of the benefit of the thing — right now, it means that the only way to get from Newell-Simon to the Cut is to either go along Forbes or up through Wean and Doherty. Then I went up to the Tartan office last night and found that we were in full possession of 100 feet of fun, a hideous blot on the landscape "donated" to us by rich old trusee Jill Kraus that arrived in pieces on Friday and has been under 24-hour security coverage ever since. The pole didn't look too bad from the ground, but it was a nasty shock seeing it from the third-floor windows of the UC. The students I know are almost universally against its installation, and the fact that the university has had to station a security guard next to it for several days should give them a pretty clear indication of the kind of welcome it's receiving. I can only hope that someone will succeed in pulling it down one night, or that it becomes such a continual target of pranks and hacks that the university administration pulls it down itself. Hm... I realize that last paragraph will probably only make marginal sense to anyone who's not at CMU, but if you IM me I'll try to explain. Or maybe I could do it in person: I have round-trip bus tickets to Cleveland for this weekend, and will be spending Friday and Saturday up at Case. Kathi and Ben are hosting a pre-graduation party on Friday night, and a number of us 2005 escapees are coming back to make sure our '06 friends find the way out too. It's sometimes hard to believe it's been a year already (as of yesterday, in fact) since I was lining up outside of Wickenden in a poorly-ironed cap and gown. I'm quite looking forward to the bus trip, which, even including the cost of the rapid in Cleveland, is only $14 more expensive than driving myself. I actually may not even have to pay the $1.50 for the return rapid fare; my parents are thinking about picking me up from Case on Sunday morning so we can go out to lunch, then driving me back to the Greyhound station in the evening to catch the bus back to Pittsburgh. |
Friday, May 19, 2006
12:57 a.m.
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Wow... I guess it's technically Friday. This week completely fails as a transition week — I meant to start going to bed around midnight starting Wednesday, but that hasn't come close to happening. I think I'm still stuck on a 2 a.m. schedule, and I can't seem to get out of bed in the morning before 11. (Probably because I owe myself hours and hours of sleep from the past four weeks!) No free time to clean my apartment or make any progress on my massive to-do list of errands, either. I did just spend nearly five hours at my computer finishing off the stupid chart parser assignment, and The Tartan's commencement special was supposed to be sent to the printers early this morning, so now I'm done for the semester, at least. Today, once I got to the LTI and got to work at my desk, was pretty productive. All the same, I'm really anxious to catch that 4:00 bus to Cleveland tomorrow and get out of here for a few days. Relations among certain of the KGB/CS crowd seem to be a bit strained suddenly because of a Situation (with a capital "S") that came out on people's Live Journals last night. I'm not at all sure how or if I fit into it, so aside from offering a willing ear to both side I'm not sure what I can do about it. And taking the Greyhound is always exciting. I think I'll be a CS nerd and take my laptop along with me — I'm not sure why I would actually need it, but it could at least give me something to do on the bus. My entries have been feeling very disjoint recently. I promise that somewhere I have the ability to string paragraphs together in a way that makes sense and flows well. It could be that I've been writing too much code recently, and spending all day in front of a screen coming up with things like (mapcar (lambda (x) (add-parse-tree-helper (find-entry-with-id x *chart*))) (entry-children chart-entry)) certainly isn't my idea of high-class composition. This is a good touching-off point for a long discussion of my awkward Tartan/LTI double life, but I think I'll save that for a time when it can have its own post, like that three-hour bus ride coming up in about 14 hours. I guess that's all — I still need to pack some stuff for the trip tonight or early tomorrow morning so I can leave straight from campus in the afternoon. Case people should find me in care of Ben and Kathi from about 8 p.m. tommorrow until Sunday morning, when my parents will probably insist on having their turn as well. I have no clue what my or anyone else's plans are aside from that, but I'm sure we can make something up. |
Sunday, May 21, 2006
10:59 p.m.
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Back in Pittsburgh as of about half an hour ago after a pretty interesting weekend in Cleveland. I started by coming straight back to my apartment after the Friday GALE meeting instead of going to the LTI; then I caught a bus downtown to the Greyhound station. I guess the real Greyhound station is being renovated, so they're operating out of temporary-ish facilities in a giant parking lot underneath the 10th Street Bridge. I managed to arrive about 20 minutes before my 4 p.m. departure, so I ended up sitting around on a really hard metal-wire bench for a bit. Every time I take a bus trip I seem to be surrounded by people speaking other languages. My No. 1 goal this time was to avoid the sort of thing that happened on the first part of my Boston trip last year, when I ended up wedged in next to a large Spanish-speaking man for 10 hours. This time I ended up with a guy roughly my own age, and only that between Youngstown and Cleveland. Arrived a little late in Cleveland — around 7:40, I should think. I walked up to Tower City to grab a Red Line train and noticed a huge number of other people downtown. At first I was naïve enough to think that Cleveland was rebounding, but later I found out that both the Cavs and the Indians were playing in town that night. Kathi and Ben's party was already underway by the time I got there; Dan, Paul and Vicki had already arrived fron our group, and then Erin and Susannah came over a bit later on. It was the usual alcohol-fest, and consequently rather loud, but certainly not as bad as some others I've seen. I tried a few things — still not enough to feel any effect, as far as I know — most notably some really really tart cranberry wine that Paul had found in Virginia. Those of us spending the night went to bed on various air matresses and sleeping pads around 2:00. The one word on everyone's lips Saturday morning was "Chipotle," so after we got ourselves ready in the morning we proceeded at once to Coventry and got our required dose of burritos. It was kind of a hurried lunch since most of us were planning on going to the 1:30 showing of "The Da Vinci Code" at Tower City. I mainly wanted to see it because Audrey Tautou, the French actress from "Amélie" and "Un Long dimanche de fiançailles," is in it. The movie was pretty decent. A lot of excellent French, unfortunately marred by distracting subtitles, but some parts of the film seemed a bit contrived. There was, of course, the obigatory car chase and squadrons of speeding police cars; thankfully, though, they didn't insist on a heavy love interest between Audrey Tautou and Tom Hanks. After the movie we all decided to go back North Side and play frisbee outside of Leutner, but first we dropped Dan's stuff off at Eric and Co.'s apartment. We found it rather full up: Mark, his brother, his parents, and his aunt; Eric and his parents; and later Jessica and her parents and brother. There was much CS talk; Kathi and Vicki left after a bit to go home and take a nap, and Paul and I stayed until the whole great group of them decided to leave for dinner around 7:15. I was hoping to catch up with Nicole before they left, but she and her family were meeting the others directly at the restaurant after coming from the senior awards ceremony. People had been talking about another possible party Saturday night, but that thankfully got vetoed by those of us who weren't really up to it. Instead we fell to discussing the question of dinner. Right in the middle of the talk, Christine showed up with some jambalaya mix she wanted to get rid of, so between that and the leftovers we did quite well without having to buy anything new. Erin and Ben came in while we were playing cars, bringing with them the homemade Knights & Cities of Catan game Erin's making for Ben's birthday. With six or eight of us working, we finished its construction rather speedily, then sat down to play a game. There were several people new to Settlers entirely, so at the beginning I thought I would fossilize before it got around to being my turn again. Eventually it went faster, and it was starting to get really interesting when Ben's friend Mark won. To bed at 2:00 again, but this time with a headache... ...which persisted on into the morning and early afternoon. My parents were coming to kidnap me at 11:00; I woke up at that exact time and threw myself into the bathroom, expecting every moment to hear Ben's phone ringing and him announcing that my mom was waiting outside. It never happened; at 11:30 I called her and found out she was just turning onto the street. So I went home for a bit, and then to visit my sister at the greenhouse place where she works, then shoe shopping at Kohl's, then back home to collect my dad and brother, and finally out to eat at Applebee's in the middle of the afternoon. The service was mind-bogglingly quick; we must have been in and out in about 35 minutes. Then my parents took me downtown to the Greyhound station to catch my 5:45 bus. The bus was the New York route, so there were already 80 dozen people lined up in front of the door when I got there. Eventually they had to separate us into two lines and get a second bus, but even after that they left us standing around until 6:15. Our arrival into Pittsburgh, then, was more like 9:45 instead of 9:10. The last 71A I knew of was supposed to come by Forbes and 10th around 9:42, so I was starting to get worried that I was going to have to take a 61* to campus and then clunkily walk with my duffel bag, backpack, and camping pack (picked up from home) the mile and a half back to my apartment. A few minutes after 10:00, though, a 71D came by, so my walk was cut in half. |
Monday, May 22, 2006
10:34 p.m.
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Yesterday's post was mainly dedicated to a chronological review of my weekend; I suppose, before too much time goes by, it would be a good idea to offer my comments thereon. I think I recognized, more than on previous trips, the growing body of evidence saying that Case is familiar, but it isn't home. Partly this is because of the number of physical changes to the campus over the last year — Paul and I were rather surpised to find a baseball field on the Clarke parking lot and tennis courts — but more importantly I think it's because there are fewer and fewer personal connections to hold me to the place. The talk for most of the weekend did not revolve around CWRU-related things, probably because most of us who have been gone for a year have had a chance to build fairly complete alternate lives. And now we're being joined in the post-Case world by Kathi, Eric, Mark, Jessica, and Nicole, who won't be in Cleveland for me to visit anymore. I have a feeling that the number of times I go back to Case after August will be somewhat reduced. I think I was going to add some notes about bus travel to yesterday's write-up, but then it got too long and I had to cut. There are two easy ways to get yourself an American-traveling-abroad experience without straying to far from your own home: one of them is to ride the CMU Shadyside shuttle in the evening, and the other is to take a trip by Greyhound. Fluency in Spanish almost seems like a prerequisite for the latter experience, and since I have not this skill, the foreign-language centers of my brain switch me instead into French mode. The realist painters of the 19th century probably would have loved to set up an easel in a Greyhound station; a study of the other travelers hanging around the waiting room, or a collection of random bits of conversation I ended up overhearing in line or on the bus, indicates that most bus passengers are either inner-city people who don't own cars, foreign people going to New York, or students hopping around between home, friends, and school. I guess that kind of makes sense, since bus travel is that perfect mix of cheap and inconvenient that repels most consumers, but I'd sure like to see more plain old families or whatever abandon their gas-guzzling SUVs and $3-a-gallon gasoline in favor of increasing the Amtrak or Greyhound operating revenue a bit. In front of me in line at Cleveland were a mother and her two kids, going to Youngstown, and it seemed quite incongrous to me that there should be six-year-olds on the bus. The other thing I want to write about is graduation. Both CWRU and CMU had their ceremonies yesterday, and I find I'm a bit surprised that I know a decent number of '06ers at both schools. The Case ones I already knew about; outside of my own class, I probably knew more people a year younger than me than in any other grade. The shocking part is actually the number of CMU seniors that have become friends or at least acquaintances, which is astronomically higher than the number of Case seniors I knew when I was a freshman there. So congratulations all around, kids, and be sure to stay in touch! |
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
1:13 p.m.
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WANTED: One road bike, new or used, with a proper-sized frame for someone my height. I don't mind putting some work into it if required. Address all responses, leads, or tips to this account in whatever means of communication is most germane to your current situation and personality. You can infer from the above that I return empty-handed from my trip yesterday with Ross to Free Ride (a whole lot like the Ohio City Bike Co-Op). For those unfamiliar with it, Free Ride is an organization that somehow collects old bikes, then offers mechanical help for people to come in, fix them, and buy them. The prices, since you're doing it all yourself, are quite cheap, and you can even "pay" in volunteer hours working at the co-op instead of money. I think I wrote about that time in like October I went to scope out the place and how much of a failure that was, but Ross went a week or two ago and got better results. Then he asked me if I wanted to go with him yesterday after work to start on the "Earn-A-Bike" process. Our first task was to select unclaimed bikes from a double-decker rack of them. They may have started out in two organized lines, but "pile" might actually be a better word for the bikes' current state because they had gotten all intermeshed and tangled up with each other. At the end of two hours, Ross and I had managed to disengage perhaps eight of them that looked the most promising, but they were all either too short, too tall, or (to me) too heavy. Ross selected the lightest just-right-sized mountain bike frame as his, and got to work on it right away. I hadn't seen anything that caught my eye, so I collected my own bike from the other side of the room and went home. I'll probably go back in a week to see if they've got anything new, but I'm kind of hoping I can make use of some other option. The need for a replacement, however, is becoming acute. Ever since I used a road bike for that triathlon last September, I've been painfully aware of how inadequate my current one is. It's a mountain bike that I've had since I was 12, fitted to the height specifications of my pre-growth-spurt self. Now that I'm 12 or 13 inches taller it's way too small for me. It's also way too heavy for racing or good road riding, which is about 95 percent of what I do now. On a tangentially related note, I've had two dreams in the past three nights about physical activity and/or exercise. I think I should take the hint, since I haven't been in training since midterms hit during the fall semester. We start with running this evening, I think. |
Thursday, May 25, 2006
8:19 p.m.
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Another entry in the "What Will We Think of Next?" collection. It's a story of ambulation without any 100-foot poles in it; the distance involved is much more than that. In short, we're walking to West Virginia. Yes, from here. This weekend. I just finished putting together the route maps, and we (Rebecca, Brewer, Dan, me, and whoever else is coming) plan to leave early Saturday morning, reach the western West Virginia border at some indeterminate point in the future, and then check ourselves into a sort of romantic getaway hotel lodge in the area for the night. Then we'll probably have to call someone for a ride, because if we manage to make it there I'm pretty sure we won't be in the mood for another 40-mile hike back the next day. Actually, I'm not at all convinced we'll even make it one way. The route passes through a number of small towns, and my prediction is that we'll end up stopping at an ice cream place or a little café on Main Street in one of those towns and requesting car service from there. But either way it will be fun to see how far we get and to look at the nice scenery once we're out of the city. One of my main goals this week has been to get my new shoes (bought Sunday when I was at home) broken in before we leave, so I've been walking to and from campus instead of taking my bike. Yesterday turned out to be a wonderful day of physical activity — more so than I was predicting, even. It began with the 1½-mile walk to campus, and then after dinner I stashed my backpack in the UC locker room and ran three miles. I had just re-collected my effects and popped into the cluster when Dan asked me if I'd be up for exploring in Frick. I'd only been to that park once, so I put my backpack down in my office and set out for Squirrel Hill around 9:15 with Dan and Ivan to meet Brewer. The four of us walked down Forbes until we got onto a dirt trail and skirted the edge of a large cemetary before ending up on the large trail in Frick where Ross and I went biking last fall. At the bottom of this we made a sharp right and went up another path, which eventually dumped us on Beechview Avenue not too far from Squirrel Hill. (I was sure glad Brewer had an idea of where we were; if I'd been alone I'd have gotten lost about 10 times over!) Around 11:30 we made it back to Forbes and Murray, and from there I had another 30-minute walk home. Total haul for the day was approximately eight miles walking and three running, so the shoes are doing very well. My legs, however, were slightly mad at me when I woke up this morning, but it was really nice to know that the muscles down there still exist and can do things. They had better get used to the idea.... |
Friday, May 26, 2006
11:21 p.m.
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Ugh, today was a rather wretched day. Woke up more than two hours late, with my legs hurting worse than yesterday, and therefore didn't have time to go grocery shopping before my 11 a.m. meeting on Craig Street. I think each time I go to one of these, they get more and more useless. They usually last about an hour and a half: about 85 minutes of the SMT group getting itself together and talking about its own work, and then (at the end, naturally) five minutes of perfunctory statements from the other three projects. I would love to send an e-mail to the SMT professor and suggest that, if he and his students need to hash out the minutae of phrase tables and Stanford segmentation once a week, they should feel free to do it without inviting the rest of the machine translation people to sit around and look bored. An interesting side note on all of this is that my advisor only recently started asking me to go to all of these meetings, and now I notice that he hasn't been coming himself anymore. I sort of feel like a pawn that's been captured en passant. I eventually did get to my desk, a bit after 12:30, and spent the next two hours agonizingly spinning in circles over some new code I had to write — the basis of which, simply enough, was just a triply-nested for loop. I probably should have had the thing done in 30 minutes. Right when I was finished and ready to test, the UNIX troubles began and it started taking forever to get back the results of even simple commands like less or top. I'm not sure if it was a network problem or what, but it was kind of maddening to work when tab-complete might take 45 seconds to return the unique answer. When I did manage to get the MEMT system launched, it hit a Java error almost right away in a file that I haven't modified in days. In the middle of all this silliness, I had to run up to the Hub and pay the balance of my bill for the academic year. The amount left: 1¢. This is what happens when you divide $30,000 into nine stipend payments and forget about the rounding error. Technically the LTI (or the GALE project, or ultimately the Department of Defense) owes the Hub a penny, but since the bill was due today I didn't feel like pressing them for it; I went and made a cash payment myself, and they gave a receipt for the amount. Still, though, this doesn't beat the time that Case sent me a phone bill for 9¢, which I had to pay by writing a check and buying a 34¢ stamp to mail it to their P.O. box. I caught the 6:45 shuttle home, walking out to the Morewood stop in the rain because I apparently left my umbrella in Cleveland last weekend. This evening I've been trying to get ready for tomorrow's walking trip. Five copies of the maps are printed out, stapled together, and marked graphically with the route in yellow highlighter. Some food to take along in my backpack has been purchased. The banana bread for our 6 a.m. breakfast has been baked and is now cooling on my countertop. I made a long-long-overdue trip to Wal-Mart for shampoo, potting soil, and some other things, but found their supply of umbrellas meagre in the extreme and came home without one. Can't wait to get out of here for the weekend. I hope it doesn't rain. |
Sunday, May 28, 2006
11:54 a.m.
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The Committee to Walk to West Virigina reports failure. Brewer, Rebecca, Eight, Dan, and I left Rebecca's house at 7:11 a.m. yesterday, and dragged ourselves dirty and limping into Burgettstown, PA, about 12½ hours later. At that point we had walked about 32 miles and were still seven from the border, but after taking up residence on the sidewalk outside of a pizza shop for an urgently-needed rest and food break, we found we were quite unable to continue walking for any reasonable distance. So we called it quits, even though Eight was frighteningly enthusiastic about going on and I was starting to come round to his point of view, and Tomczak came to pick us up outside of an ice cream shop down the road. I think I will type up a more detailed result of the adventure and make it part of the Trips page I'm working on for my reconstructed website — probably today, in fact, since I really don't feel like doing anything too active. I'll post the link as soon as it's working. For those who can't wait that long or have short attention spans, the quick version is that I was doing reasonably well until the 25th mile (at which point I changed my status to "condition deteriorating"), the countryside is getting ruined by the never-ending construction of gigunderous houses, I can only think of three French words that have the letter "k" in them, walking along the side of banked or angled roads is horrifically uncomfortable after a few dozen miles, and people behave rather strangely sometimes when they're driving their cars. |
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