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ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
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Tuesday, May 30, 2006
8:12 p.m.
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It's been a pretty varied weekend, so I suppose this post will be long and somewhat scatterbrained. I'll try to keep things sorted by paragraph, at least. After the 32-mile walk, Sunday was definitely a day of rest. I woke up at 10:30, with some "feeling" in my left hip, but my feet didn't hurt anymore. Not like I was testing this with a lot of activity: I don't think I left my apartment until 4 or 5 p.m., and that was only to go to the grocery store. Pittsburgh unleashed an 87° day (why do I always forget the Linux key sequence to type the degree sign every time I need it?) on us, so when I noticed my apartment hovering around 84 at 10:30 p.m. I decided going out for a walk would be nice. The mile and a half to campus, plus one more wandering around Flagstaff and Schenley, was enough to make me want to take the CMU shuttle home. Woke up yesterday (Monday) feeling just fine — this is coming after Saturday evening, when I felt like I was 85 and could barely move, and had developed an acute understanding of why it's difficult for my grandma to walk down her driveway and get the mail. I love having a quick bounceback time; I really hope it doesn't degrade too much as I get older. I think if I would have known, when we were in Burgettstown, how great I'd be feeling 36 hours later, I would have pushed with Eight to finish off those last seven miles. Oh well; although I do suppose that, with us stumbling round in the dark five miles from anywhere, the number of possible ways to non-triflingly hurt ourselves would have been quite high. I roused myself in time to go to the KGB meeting at 5:30, on the Doherty steps, which immediately merged into a Memorial Day picnic on the grass under the tree there. (The thermostat in the big blue room was set to 90, so we all preferred the shade there over anything else.) Afterwards I was supposed to go over to Rebecca's for games — I'd kind of been wanting to play Settlers — but then it was discovered that Ross hadn't seen "The Triplets of Belleville" either, and that Akiva and Lea wanted to show it to us. (Lea said, the first time we ever met, that I looked like the bicycle-riding character.) So instead Ross was dispatched on his bike to rent the movie, and I stopped by the Squirrel Hill Giant Eagle for some lemonade. I highly recommend seeing this movie, by the way. Not quite French, not quite English, it contains no actual dialogue so I guess they decided to leave the incidental voices untranslated. They did produce an English version of the main song, but it's sung with a French accent! The soundtrack is built to please: I've been listening to the bits of I could find online all afternoon and am seriously considering spending $16 to actually buy it from a store. After the movie, Lea introduced me to the excellent Language Log, a collection of daily posts (I'm avoiding a certain "b" word here) by linguists at Penn. The very first post I read was about language technologies, so I felt all cool for knowing what it was talking about. I can already see that reading this site will only increase my undecidedness about what the heck kind of a career I want for myself. This is something I've been starting to think about again and will probably get no further towards a resolution than I have in the last three years. (I may write this out formally at some point and post it, especially if people ask me to.) One last news tidbit is that I suddenly developed the urge to go to Michigan this evening after reading Chris's post about her "REU" ( = summer internship research CS-thingy at another university) in Holland. I'm recalling racing down a 450-foot sand dune at top speed with my sister, clunking all over Windmill Island in souvenir wooden shoes, driving to "Mount Headbald," walking out to the lighthouse at the end of the pier in Grand Haven, and so many other things from all our family vacations to that part of Michigan. The last one was a sort of re-visit to Holland and Grand Haven in 1997, but our best documented trip — one I can still remember parts of without the videotape — is from August of 1990. Seems to me that it's about time to go back again... |
Random Stuff #29
Wednesday, May 31, 2006, 9:50 p.m.
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Right after I posted about our 1997 Holland trip last night, I remembered that it was during the time when I had a "vacation journal" for taking notes about our trips. It looks a lot like my handwritten journal or this online one, only in sloppier handwriting and with smaller entries a few times a day (especially during car rides). So I have the distinct pleasure to present a highlights reel of our family vacation nine years ago, which — in a wonderfully obscure reference that I challenge anyone to identify — I think I will call C'est Pour des Sabots Acheter August 4 — We got to Holland at 2:30 and checked in to the Holiday Inn. After waiting 30 minutes to rest, we went to the Dutch Village. We got there 2 hours before closing time, so we just had enough time. We got wooden shoes at the Factory and went to eat at Arby's. Then we came back here and went swimming. Now, we're up here eating a snack. I found the Indians-Tigers game on 600-something AM Radio. August 5 — Today we woke up at 9:30. We ate breakfast at Denny's. Then we went to Windmill Island, where we saw a 230-year-old windmill broght from the Netherlands in 1964. We had a fight over where to eat lunch; ended by Dad when he took us to Burger King on the way to Lake Michigan. It was cold! The air was only 72° and the lake 66°. Worse — the undertow from the 15-mph wind caused a red flag — which means "No Swimming"! August 6 — Today we woke up at 9:00. Dad and Mom said we had to take showers. [...] We got to Grand Haven at 12:00 and went mini-golfing at Chinook Pier. I tied with Dad (51). Then we got ice cream and played at the old playground. Then we drove to the Grand Haven state park and went swimming at a different beach. The water was only 54°, but we had fun. Dad blew up the big 5' raft and I went all the way out and touched the Swim Area buoy. Then I rode the waves back in a few times. [...] We ate at 8:30 at Russ's, and headed to see the Musical Fountain. The music was from movies mostly from the 60's & 70's, but the fountain was cool. |
Thursday, June 1, 2006
4:44 p.m.
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This week we are learning Perl, after my advisor decided last week that what the MEMT system really needs is to have a good chunk of its C++ ripped out, rewritten, and moved into a new component in that language. I haven't really had to touch Perl since EECS 343, except for a few simple reg ex replacement scrips that read from standard in and write to standard out, so I wasn't quite sure how painful the re-learning process would be when I started it Tuesday. It hasn't been that annoying, actually. When I was learning the stuff — not too thoroughly — the first time, I had almost no working knowledge of UNIX systems. Now that I've been turning into a Linux nerd all year, a whole lot of concepts from the llama book ("Learning Perl") make more sense. That's not to say that the language isn't really screwy sometimes. I write pretty non-dense Perl, comparatively speaking, but I have still had to dream up bizarre things like next if (/^;/);that look like a three-year-old stole my computer for a few minutes and started bashing his fist on the keyboard. It is pretty slick (as Mr. Hrbek would say) to be able to compress so many different actions into one line, but I'm afraid some time next year I'll have to come back to this code and will spend 45 minutes with a pen and a piece of paper trying to figure out what I meant by ($string2[$string1[$i]{"i2"}]{"pos"} & $CONJ) and why I put it into a giant if condition. In news from the home front, I have discovered that whoever designed my apartment must have had a total obsession with conserving heat during the winter and cared not a drop for how to get rid of it during the summer — I can think of no other way for my rooms to be breaking the Second Law of Thermodynamics as they currently are. Even with the temperature outside below 80° last night, the temperature inside continued to rise from about 85 to 88 until I finally decided to seal off the bedroom and just work on controlling the main room. By running the window air conditioner I got that down to 75 in about an hour and a half (good), but then woke up around 3 a.m. to find that it had collected enough heat from the netherworld to return to 83 or 84 (weird). I expect the Nobel Prize committees to be arriving before the week is out. |
Saturday, June 3, 2006
10:49 p.m.
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I guess yesterday was a good day. The 11 a.m. GALE meeting wasn't as awful as usual and actually contained some generally interesting material. One of the SMT guys was talking about the difficulty of working with 1 billion words of English weblog text that had been collected from various places online. Even building a language model from weblogs isn't so straightforward, since people are constantly misspelling words and using wacky Internet slang abbreviations. (I never thought about the first part before, but it's very true that in reading my own old entries I find a shocking number of errors. And I'm a stinkin' copy editor!) For the second part, I'd love to see a system built on a language model that allowed smileys to appear in the output translations — just think of feeding it some unreadable string of Arabic and getting back the result "The prime minister today in London announced that the British government would still support the U.S.-led action in Iraq :-)" I chugged my journal archives through my word-frequency counter again after I noticed that the completion of Page 25 (ending with the entry of May 28, for you people who read this through Live Journal) gave me a total of just over 170,000 words since October 24, 2004. I'm thinking that it might be fun to refine the text cleaning script a bit, build a language model from the data, and write a little program that generates sentences based on the trigram probabilities. I'd also be interested to see how much punctuation I use, and confirm that I am indeed addicted to long dashes. Today featured more fabulous adventures in biking. Ross asked me if I wanted to go with him to Kraynick's bike shop in Garfield — that's the place on Penn Avenue I bought my blinking red light from in the fall — so I met him at his house at 11:30 and we walked over together. I say, I hope I'm not going to develop some irrational fear of bike shops, but every time I go into one I feel like an absolute idiot. You could make a very effective secret code out of the lingo seasoned bikers throw back and forth at each other as they're making repairs, and into this world of elitism walks ignorant old me, whose bike maintenance knowledge ends with putting air in the tires and spraying Liquid Wrench on the chain every now and then, who just learned how to change an innertube last year, and who only knows the two types of tire valves as "normal" and "weird." Personal discomfort aside, I managed to find a proper-sized road bike that the owner was offering to sell for $25 because it "needs a lot of work" and is "a good project bike," and one of the other guys working in the shop offered to let me look at a bike he's trying to sell himself for $75. This guy gave me a few particulars about it, which I parroted back to Ross on our way home and thus deciphered that the bike is probably not of some strange mutation where the revolutions of the pedals and back wheel are directly connected. Grocery shopping in the afternoon, and then an evening of games at Dan's house. I am becoming more and more decided that, if I do end up in the Ph.D. program at the LTI and spending an additional three to five years in Pittsburgh, I will definitely be looking for a new apartment. Everyone else's places are much nicer than mine in terms of location, internal space, and even cost. We played Citadels at Dan's, then walked over to Qdoba for food and a game of Blokus. If any of you other expatriate Clevelanders come across a Qdoba in your current cities, you can eat there with the fullest satisfaction that it's almost exactly like Chipotle — right down to the order of the questions they ask you in line. The menu is slightly larger and more expensive, but in the end you can come away with a foil-wrapped burrito that simulates the old experience quite well. |
Sunday, June 4, 2006
11:11 p.m.
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Some days I feel like I could spend the entire day writing and still not have enough time to say everything. I'm getting a huge backlog of stuff to post about, I guess, but none of my ideas really fit my current mood. Today I spent the entire day in my apartment, going no further than the front porch this morning to pick up the paper. My original plan of going running and/or biking down to REI on the South Side, got cancelled because the weather was cold and icky all day. So instead I spent part of the day cleaning and most of the day at one of my computers. I wanted nothing more than to play some of my records and spend maybe two hours really listening to the music, but I discovered some time ago that my phonograph is starting to break. Something electrical is either not discharging or not charging or not grounded anymore, because as soon as I turn it on I get a nice hum from the speaker that's about as loud as the music. I don't feel qualified to open it up and poke around in its guts, and since it's at least 40 years old my guess is that it would cost more to have it repaired than it would to buy something new. Sigh... that's another thing I need to obtain. So instead I listened to some of the CDs I made of my 78s over the past few summers and transferred Volumes 4 and 5 to my laptop so I can listen to them at work. Then I spent some brainpower puzzling over the way to best tag the songs so I can use the search in iTunes to select various subsets. Having a quintillion playlists, I decided, won't scale; I want the subsets to stay current when I add new songs without having to click and drag a new item into however many lists it belongs in. The big problem is that you can only search and sort based on one positive feature: show me all the songs that have the single property X. Using playlists, having n features means I'd need 2n different lists to be able to separate out any subset of features. What iTunes desperately needs (I think) is the capacity to do simple boolean searches with AND, OR, and NOT. This doesn't seem to be listed under any of the menus or in any configurable option that I could find. |
Tuesday, June 6, 2006
6:25 p.m.
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If anyone's still interested, my gigantic write-up for last weekend's walking to West Virginia insanity is now online. As per the ongoing reorganization of my website, it lives underneath the barely-functional (for now) Trips page. The Cedar Point one may or may not appear, depending on how worthwhile I think it is to copy over the journal entry I made about it last May. |
Tuesday, June 6, 2006
10:05 p.m.
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I think I will supress my recounting of yesterday's trip out to look at the bike that Chris, the guy from Kraynick's, was selling in favor of something much more interesting and not so... chronological. (OK, I'll mention that the bike was too small, so I didn't buy it, and that Chris also let me try out a fixed-wheel bike that was slightly larger so I could get a feel for the difference. So I'm looking for a bike with a 56-cm frame. But that's all.) Otherwise, our story begins with a lot of people being bored today, I guess, because both Alan V. and Alisa had posted in their Live Journals that "respond with your name" meme where the poster gives his or her earliest memory of the commenter, says something nice about the person, asks him or her a question, etc. (This sentence would be so much easier with gender-neutral pronouns and linguistic subscripts!) I was kind of bored at work too, since I'd managed to write some code absolutely crawling with stupid errors that took me all day to debug, so I threw my name in for both journals and got back some really cool results. Among them was Alan's comment that I somehow seem like I was born outside of the U.S. — I take this as a compliment — and Alisa's apt question of "What do you miss most about Case that you wish you had here?" Well, there are some things I can rule out. I have a newspaper to work at that appreciates me and has great people to work with. Through The Tartan I feel pretty plugged in to the campus atmosphere and the things people are talking about, even if I still get the CS course numbers confused on a regular basis. I can bandy about names of buildings and streets and organizations and concepts here, although perhaps at the expense of certain Case names taking a bit longer to be fetched from memory. I have some friends to get into late-night or weekend zany adventures with, and I don't worry about sticking out. Pittsburgh's a nice place to run around in, and I hope this summer I'll get to discover more of it. I haven't spoken much French this year, but I'm signed up for a class in the fall. It occurs to me, though, that this year I have a new sort of separation between my social and academic worlds. There are no all-evening study sessions in Wade or the basement of Michelson; no walks down to the Quad for calc at 8:30; no 5:30 calls of "Fribley? Fribley?" down the hallway; no scribbling things on each other's notebooks or making covert weasel faces when the professor's not looking; no people wandering into my room and leaning against the bed if I leave the door open. In short, I think what I miss the most is having my friends a part of my everyday activities. My strongest friendships at Case were mostly started by sitting in freshman classes with the same set of people three or four days a week for 15 weeks. We started doing homework together, and when the problems got especially difficult or annoying our "study" time was just as likely to turn into a long conversation on the philosophy of education or a run down to the Mather Quad to play in the fountain. (Or Eric forgetting about the whiteboard and writing "PROGA" on the wall of Michelson by mistake!) Somehow the LTI hasn't created the community I was hoping it would. I mean, I had one group project with Justin this semester, and a few of us in the lab have talked about current homework a couple of times, but come 5 or 6 p.m. everyone is rushing home to their wives and kids or whatever and the day just ends. (For some reason I immediately think of contrasting this with my ENGR 131 open lab hours freshman year: 9 to 11 p.m.) I miss having instant dinner companions and people to sit next to during class. I miss lunch breaks on the couches in Nord and Jessica's interpretive dances of EECS 314. I miss — can I believe I'm saying this? — starting P2 homework with Susannah and Brian on Friday afternoons so we'd have a hope of finishing it by the following Wednesday. I suppose it's possible I'm idealizing the past here somewhat, but — as a quick answer to your question, Alisa — I certainly wouldn't mind joining the gang in 213 next semester. Or maybe it's 212 — I forget which. |
Wednesday, June 7, 2006
10:29 p.m.
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Hm... the last two days have been very up and down in terms of getting stuff done and being happy about it. Yesterday, my grand plan was to work until about 6:00, then eat a quick dinner at my desk before biking down to REI at the South Side Works to scope out prices for new bikes, get a new bike odometer, and generally wander around the store. After coming home I was going to go running and then call my mom. The weather was supposed to be clear and warm all day, so it seemed well-suited to the intended programme. So it will come as no surprise when I say that my plans were completely wrecked at the last minute. By 5:00 the sky started getting dark, and the radar map showed a thin line of storms forming north of here and beginning a sort of ant's march directly towards Pittsburgh. I waited until after 6:30 to eat dinner — I think, by the way, whoever it is that makes Lean Cuisines has finally learned that the things heat up faster and are more profitable to the company if all the meat is replaced with tomato sauce. Made it home a bit after 8, but by then it was too late to do anything but call my mom. The forecast for today predicted the same sort of evening shenanighans, so I spent the day working from home, set up a two-hour test of the the new system, and jumped on my bike a few minutes after 4:00. Traffic was starting to get heavy, but I made it across the Hot Metal Bridge and into the South Side without incident. REI was rather smaller than I'd expected, and the stuff generally more expensive, but I found a bike odometer a lot like my old one and then signed up at the cash register to become an REI member. (For $15 you get 8 percent off on full-priced purchases for the rest of your life, plus another ubiquitous free T-shirt.) I left the store at the fateful hour of 5 p.m. And now I must comment on city biking. To engage in that activity is to get yourself embroiled in the three-part war being eternally fought between the people in cars, who are oblivious and think the world revolves around them and their cell phones; the pedestrians, who would have undisputed reign over the sidewalk if they could keep their meandering dogs and double-wide baby strollers on a course approximating a straight line; and the trapped-in-the-middle bicyclists, who have neither the compactness of the second group nor the power of the first, and who really want nothing more than to get where they're going quickly even if it means breaking a few traffic laws. I didn't get even halfway home before I (only half-jokingly) came up with the idea of going back to REI for new brakes. More fun times when I went to install the odometer this evening. The old one that it's replacing was a birthday present in 1996, but I believe they sold for about $30 at the time. The new one I bought today for $18. I suspect that a portion of this difference comes from a cheapening of construction quality. The 1996 model, for example, is attached to the handlebar with a sort of C-shaped clasp (I don't know the proper name for it) whose two ends are secured to each other with a nut and a bolt — very durable. Today's version uses a thick rubber band (you might call it an O-ring) that you hook into a plastic tab at the top of the odometer, stretch round the handlebar, and hook into another tab on the bottom of the odometer. I am not expecting a failure of Challenger proportions, of course, but my guess is that in a very small number of years this band is going to dry out and break, and that will mean another trip to REI for me. |
Thursday, June 8, 2006
9:32 p.m.
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I guess you guys are getting daily updates this week because I've had nothing else to do for the past few days. Tonight I spent perhaps two and a half hours browsing Wikipedia. It was kind of fun — I learned that Sammy Kaye was from Lakewood and that the word "Michigander" was coined by Abraham Lincoln when he was making fun of a guy called Lewis Cass, but I think I'd rather do something outside with people. Things have been deathly quiet on #cslounge and IM, though, so I've been unaware of anything that might be happening. On Saturday, at least, Ross and I (along with up to two other people, if anyone says they want to come) will be biking the Montour trail. Another icky day at work today; I am still getting very little done. One of our server machines had its OS upgraded by Facilities and came back online today. It turns out that the upgrade included a more recent version of gcc, which sends an electronic shock wave directly to some older C++ code we're linking to and causes it to spit out reams of error messages. I went to have a look at one of the offending lines and found all the comments were in German. I'm not even sure if I have all the makefiles and such to rebuild the libraries, even if I could track down what's wrong with them, so for now I'm leaving them as is and compiling on a different machine. Everyone take a deep breath and say "backwards compatability," please. In happier news, three cheers go out to the psychology deparment: I spent an hour this afternoon trying to learn Chinese and got paid $20 for it. It was part of a memory experiment I signed up for by responding to a post on misc.market a few days ago. Paying people for such things seems to be quite a trend here — maybe they don't have PSCL 101 students to be forced into such things like they do at Case. There, every student in intro psych has to spend seven hours either being in experiments or reading and reporting on journal articles from selected publications. I think I like this system better: a lot of the PSCL 101 stuff I did last year ended up being 20-page surveys, and my bike fund certainly won't complain about an extra $50 or so by the end of the summer. Lots of thoughts bubbling round in my head about summer, actually, most notably the fact that it's going to suddenly be August and I will have done nothing from my list of things to accomplish. For some reason, I have absolutely failed to get back on a normal schedule: even when I'm in bed by midnight I can't get my body to wake up before 9 or 9:30 a.m. It can't still be lingering effects from April and the end of the semester, can it? That stuff was over weeks ago. I think the actual problem is that I have no ability to fake myself out in the morning. I can't tell myself I "have" to be up at 7:30 when I know full well that I could shuffle into the LTI at noon and not miss much of anything. It just means staying later in the evenings, which, as I said, hasn't been much a problem in the last few days... This Just In! Not two minutes after I posted this entry, I got an IM from Rebecca asking about games tonight. I love the way the world can be sweetly accomodating and yet infinitely sardonic at the same time — five minutes before, I'd just put a load of clothes into the dryer. Now I'm clearing off my shower curtain rod and finding empty hangers. |
Saturday, June 10, 2006
7:30 p.m.
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Sixty. Nine. Miles. That's how far I biked today, setting a new one-day distance record for myself and coming home in a mass of pain. It's what I get, I suppose, for not keeping myself in any sort of training over the winter. When Ross and I went on a 24-mile ride back in the fall I remember thinking that our speeds were pretty well matched, but today I was lagging behind for almost the entire trip and generally felt like I was a slow weakling. Our goal, as I think I mentioned Thursday, was the Montour trail, which runs 47.5 miles in an arc around the outer suburbs from Coraopolis (northwest of here) to Clairton (southeast of here). In typical Pittsburgh fashion, they talk about it as a trail even though the whole thing isn't complete yet — there are several missing segments that you have to detour around by using regular roads. For once this is a good thing, because regular roads are made of hard asphalt that's easy and quiet to bike on; the trail is almost entirely that crushed limestone stuff that slows you down. We had some difficulty getting started, mostly caused by my as-yet-untested bike rack, which lacks any method of securing the bikes to it and was probably not designed with Ross' station wagon in mind. These problems we solved by creatively moving the straps and buying 50 feet of rope from a hardware store in Bloomfield. By the time we were ready to leave Pittsburgh it was 10:30; we started the trail in Coraopolis — possibly a perfectly lovely place, but pesky to pronounce with those two vowels running up against each other — right around 11:00. An annoying thing about the Montour trail is that its designers apparently thought every car in the county would like nothing more than to drive all over it: at every road crossing (and there are a lot!) the trail entrance is blocked by two vertical posts holding up a long horizontal metal bar stretched almost the entire way across. The only way to pass is to slow down significantly and edge around it, hoping your handlebars don't clip the post. The trail was continuous as far as a place called Hendersonville (28-ish miles), where we took to the roads and went up a series of winding hills. By then I was slowing down quite noticibly. For future trips, I would recommend taking the Library T line, on which bikes are allowed during off-peak hours, because it deposits you a very short distance from the Arrowhead trail in Peters Township. This is a lovely ride, a lot like the paved parts of the towpath in Cleveland, that takes you a few miles before the Montour branches off again. Just at the 40-mile mark we emerged into a little neighborhood in South Park, and from there the next eight miles to the end of the trail give you some more excellent road riding and interesting landscapes. Very industrial, a lot of them, but it's cool to see a perfectly geometrical black rail bridge spanning two green hills with a blue sky in the background. At mile 48.4 we hit Route 837, which eventually becomes Carson Street in the South Side, and took that all the way back to the city. We found ourselves inhaling the heavily polluted air of the Monongahela valley. Seriously, you feel like you're dying a bit every time you take a breath. The smell reminded me a lot of the time we drove through Ashland, Kentucky, where all the oil refineries are. If anyone who reads this ever wants to duplicate the trip, please please please if you ever want to enjoy the sport of biking again do Route 837 from east to west instead of the other way around. From our end, it started out mostly flat, but then the few miles before Kennywood turned into an enormously long hill, and going eastward you are pushing right into the face of the wind the whole time. I didn't think I was going to make it, and I decided that I hoped Pittsburgh would never have another windy day again. I didn't care if the meteorology people went 60 years without recording a single puff of air against their anemometer; I just wanted to make it down Route 837 without being blown backwards. Ross and I parted ways at mile 65, corresponding exactly to the south end of the Hot Metal Bridge — he to make the trek back to Coraopolis to retrieve the car and possibly (by choice) to see if he could bike 100 miles in a day, and me to push myself pitifully up the Panther Hollow trail and back to my apartment. At 20 minutes before 7 p.m. something that once resembled myself staggered up the stairs of my building, having covered 69.3 miles in 5 hours, 29 minutes, and 5 seconds of biking time. That's an average speed of just 12.6 m.p.h. — I think I have some work to do to get back in shape! |
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
11:16 p.m.
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The last six days have been excellent; people have been finding things to do and inviting me to do them every day since Thursday, when I hung my partially-dry laundry all over the apartment and ran off to play games at Rebecca's. On Friday Dan had the excellent idea of walking down to Station Square to get fondue at the Melting Pot. The four of us — Dan, Devon, Rebecca, and me — had some absolutely wonderful dessert fondue before catching a bus downtown and heading back to Rebecca's for more games. On Saturday I went biking, with the results as given previously. I'm discovering, though, that my bounce-back time from serious physical activity is about 36 hours: by the morning of the day after the day after, I feel perfectly fine again. Late Saturday night Rebecca asked me if I wanted to go sailing the next day with the Explorers' Club; it seems they needed an extra person to drive. I said yes, even though it meant being at the UC turnaround by 10 a.m. when I was already kind of tired from biking. Turns out I needn't have worried: sailing is something you can do sitting down. We were a bit late leaving the UC for Moraine State Park about an hour north of here, so we missed a little opening lecture that some of the sailor people were giving. (I think it was some kind of Learn to Sail day; they had a whole programme of activities worked out once we were on the water.) Rebecca, a guy called Orie, and I ended up thrown onto a boat with three adults... two of whom who either had worked together previously or had a remarkable talent for speaking to each other in a disdainful way that make it look like they had. Sailing is fun, or at least sailing with people who know how to sail is fun. The first thing that happened, once we got underway, was that the guy called Ken, who seemed to be in charge, gave me a cord to hold and started saying incomprehensible things about starboard tacking and coming about and releasing the jib line and luffing the sails — Rebecca and I had to remind him that we'd missed the lecture and had never sailed before. After we made a few dozen figure eights between two buoys I got the hang of the basic maneuvers, and then it was time for lunch. Most of the Explorers group (me included) had neglected to bring any food along, so we drove out of the park and into the town of Portersville (this takes forever, on a few twisty windy roads where it's impossible to keep a constant speed) to buy things at the grocery store. By the time we finally got back and had eaten, it was 2:30 and the sailing people were starting to put their boats away for the day. Two of the guys said they'd stick around to take our group out again, so this time Rebecca and I got bundled into a boat under the captainage of "Ted," and off we went. Ted was much nicer about explaining everything carefully, and by the time he finished answering the questions we collectively asked him we had a pretty nice idea about basic sailing techniques and such. It was just 5:30 when we got back to campus, and Rebecca proposed another evening of games. I lost horribly at Scrabble, but an excellent highlight was something called Carcassonne (I keep wanting to say "Cornichons" or "Cacarole"), yet another fine German game that's made its way to the U.S. The workweek began anew yesterday, and I was plagued with code that crashed in stupid places for unknown reasons. After the KGB meeting at 5:30, a large group of us skipped over to Oakland to find dinner at various restaurants; we met up to eat our take-out in a little grassy amphitheatre place next to Pitt's Posvar Hall. The talk revolved mostly around video games, Star Wars, and some Japanese samurai movie, but in the end I think I was invited to be part of a very interesting project Lea and Alan are putting on — more about that later if it works out. Among those of us still hanging around after dinner there was a general indecisiveness about what to do next, nicely solved by mkehrt and Akiva suggesting a ramble through Schenley. This lasted until after 8:30, I should think, so when we got back to Wean I collected my bike and went home. And then today, after a much better day at work, we had more games. Carcassonne again, and then a game of hearts that turned extremely bizarre when I started winning right from the start against Brewer, Marty, and Dan. Came home at 10:15 in order to go grocery shopping before bed and found peaches at 99¢ a pound. Sorry about all the long entries recently. I have several topics mixing around in my head that should make nice concise posts, so I will try to get them partitioned out and written in the next few days. |
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
10:47 p.m.
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Two rather creepy things today: The first is that I realized I'd gone almost 24 hours without saying anything... and it would have been at least 36 if my mom hadn't called while I was on campus and left a message on my answering machine asking me to call her back. We talked for the three minutes allowed by the Internet call-managing thing my parents have to sign off and answer the phone when someone's on AOL [shudder], and then while I was waiting for my mom to call again it occurred to me that hearing my own voice was kind of strange and I didn't know why. The answer presented itself a few seconds later. The really interesting part in all of this is that I hadn't even noticed I hadn't said a word to anyone all day — with my brain humming away non-stop and jumping from thought to thought, I was never conscious of not having anything to occupy myself with. The second thing is that tomorrow is June 15, which means summer (by university standards) is a month old and one-third over and I have accomplished nothing from my list of projects and such that I wanted to get done by August. This is actually nothing new, dating back to the summer of 1996 or 1997 when I first made myself a little checklist of things to do before school started, but every year I still have those "oh yikes!" moments when I realize it's happening all over again. This time around, I was supposed to be spending one night a week at the Tartan office doing things to get the copy department and the broadsheet redesign ready for next year, doing some kind of triathlon training three or four times a week, starting a [Weekday] Night Dinner Club with interested people, re-working my website, and resuming that long-neglected work of fiction, among other plans. I suppose it's a lot, but I promised myself to write out a weekly plan and stick to it — I never got any farther than deciding that Monday should be Tartan day and Wednesday should be dinner club night. Not a thing, of course, has been put into practice. I think I have gone running twice in recent memory. I say, the world can't be entirely stocked with people like me; if it were, things like the U.S. tax code would still exist only as a file called TaxIdea4.doc containing a placeholder table of contents and a yellow-highlighted line that says "Intro here!" Somehow, others are finding time to work on their personal coding projects, train for bike trips, cook wonderful meals, etc. I also came across a posting of Chris Jackson's in which he stated he rarely needs an alarm clock to be awake by 8 a.m. How do you people do that, and why can't I be one of you? |
Random Stuff #30
Wednesday, June 15, 2006, 10:22 p.m.
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Amusement by the column-inch in today's newspaper! Many times recently, when I have time to sit down with the paper at my kitchen table, I find myself so annoyed by the news that I desperately want to hurl my Post-Gazette against the wall and move to an alternate universe. Today, however, it's all laughs, as you can see from these items: He's up and expects to be discharged today These are the three decks above today's lead headline, "Roethlisberger ready to go home." For those of you in saner places than Pittsburgh, on Monday some careless guy called Ben got himself into a motorcycle accident without a helmet on, landing him in the hospital and also on the front page of the Post-Gazette for three straight days. I think it's pretty idiotic the way the whole city is carrying on as if the apocalypse is just rounding Mount Washington and heading straight for downtown, but I'm more amused than anything else that a quarterback's meal plan is leading off the news of the day. (Try recasting the headlines for your own self and see how stupid they sound: "He biked to and from campus today — His jaws weren't wired shut and he ate a chicken sandwich for dinner — The GALE MT group expects him to make the usual 11 a.m. meeting tomorrow.") In the B page, the editorial staff is weighing in on college grads going into job interviews: Once the candidate pool is narrowed and resumes scrutinized, the real background check begins. Recent news reports say face-to-face interviews come sometimes only after the employer has visited social networking sites like MySpace, Xanga and Facebook. Savvy recruiters are turning to Google and Yahoo! to find the things left off the resume. If you can ignore the sketchy grammar ("things" ... "it") and punctuation, this is funny because I don't expect there's anyone my age out there who didn't know this already. Doing an Internet search for something you want to know more about isn't exactly a revolutionary new concept, nor is the fact that stuff with your name on it might imply some sort of connection to you. Googling for my name, for example, turns up the facts that I go to school at CMU, play college bowl, have written a lot for two newspapers, got some awards in high school, was good at math, went to France, and competed in a triathlon — all things I'm likely to bring up in an interview anyway. Finally, you all should look at today's "Non Sequitur" cartoon and compare it to "Walking to the Sky"! |
Saturday, June 17, 2006
1:41 p.m.
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Not a bad day at work yesterday. Justin and I spent some time just talking about the MEMT system and various things we need or want to accomplish, which was quite nice to do on a Friday afternoon instead of staring at my screen for hours on end. I stayed at my desk until 7:00 playing Click Drag Type, and then it was time to head up to the Morewood bus stop for a planned campfire in Frick Park. In getting ready for this outing, I'd assumed we were essentially going to be a small group of stealth-campfirers spending half the night in the woods. I was completely incorrect, but it was more fun with our large group and I guess fires in the park aren't quite so rare as I would have expected. By the time we all got off the bus at Forbes and Braddock, I counted 14 of us in a long file on the sidewalk walking back into Frick. Dan and I had a bit of trouble finding the appointed fire spot — we'd both only been there once, during that late-night ramble through the woods some weeks ago — but eventually we came across it and set up camp. After wood-collecting, about half the group went back into civilization in search of a convenience store to buy food at; the rest of us watched Volki get the fire going. The area is apparently a big high-school drinking hangout. It certainly has a lived-in look, with spraypaint on the trees, half-burnt beer cans scattered around the brush, and some nice carved-out logs to sit on around the fire pit. After we'd been there a while, another group arrived with cigarettes and what looked like 48 cans of beer. They set up a bit away from us. The talk was relaxed and enjoyable, covering the usual hard-core nerd subjects like programming languages but also more general-knowledge things like quoting "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." I found out that mkhert also had thought I was Canadian for some time, bringing the True North Strong and Free to within two points of England in the Name Greg's Country of Origin game. This is definitely fun and something to be encouraged, although the way it's going I have no need to actively work at it. It's true there are some times when I definitely notice this weird accent I've given myself, and a few times when I'm stressing it on purpose, but in most normal conversations it must be coming out when I'm not paying any attention. I really want to go to Canada sometime and try it out up there. I think I agree with Dan that a campfire outing would have worked better either earlier or later in the season, when there aren't as many bugs and the weather is a little cooler at night. I suppose it was the mosquitoes, mainly, that resulted in our rather sudden departure at a comparatively early hour. I was hoping the whole group would merge into some other activity, but we didn't even all take the bus back, and then those who did were getting off at various stops. I was deposited back on campus at 10:30 with two bags of trash and someone's leftover Fritos. Home by 11, and thence to Wikipedia, reading, and bed. Documented Evidence. Alan V. has a number of fine photos posted of last night's adventures. I turned out surprisingly normal-looking in almost all of them, which is a pleasant rarity for me. The one of all of us roasting crescent rolls, although it's missing five people, is especially nice. |
Sunday, June 18, 2006
10:37 p.m.
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Yay weekend, except for more 90° heat. Yesterday I escaped my apartment in the evening to go read on campus, and then I poked my head into the cluster to see if anything was going on there. Mostly Starcraft, but after a few minutes I got a zephyr from Rebecca saying I should go to her house to play Citadels. Dan was there, which was excellent because it was his last day in Pittsburgh before flying off to career and fame and fortune at Google in California. (And so it begins: too many fine people are leaving here right after I've gotten to know them decently well.) After Citadels, Misha wanted to show us the West End Overlook, so Cornell drove everyone up to my apartment (I biked), I collected my camera, and then the five of us set off westward in my (larger) car. The overlook is on the next hill west of Mount Washington. It's a little bit lower in height, but the viewing angle gives you a nice panorama of downtown, both rivers, and a good distance back up the Ohio as well. Discovered that my light meter needed a new battery, so I made up some exposure times and took a few pictures. Further reflection today indicates that I may have overexposed them all, but we'll see when I finish the roll and send it in to get developed. Also discovered that my Pittsburgh driving skills leave a bit to be desired — I didn't feel like I did such a proficient job of navigating the turns and merges around Route 51. It must have been after 1 a.m. by the time we were on our way back, but Misha proposed getting some food, so after a quick stop at Rebecca's to pick up another person (someone called John), we were on our way to Eat'n Park in Squirrel Hill. The place, I believe, is open all night, and you certainly wouldn't conclude from the number of people there that this is a bad business idea: the restaurant was quite full. Rebecca pointed out where it said on the menu that free baby food was available, so she ordered some. At the end, we were rung up at the register by a uniformed policeman. It was a few minutes to 3 a.m. when I got home, so I send Ross an IM saying that he shouldn't count on me for the 7:45 REI garage sale rendez-vous. I woke up around 10:30 and biked down there at the more reasonable time of 1:45 — though of course by then there wasn't much left worth looking at. I decided I might as well explore a bit before heading back. A straight shot down Carson Street towards Station Square turned into a really awful idea about about two blocks, when I got caught behind a bus in Birmingham Bridge traffic, so I reversed course and stumbled upon a trail right along the river that turned into a beautiful ride to the Smithfield Street Bridge. Across to downtown from there, and then a nice fast ride out on the Eliza Furnace trail to head home the usual way through Panther Hollow. Tonight I played Tetrinet with Chris (in Michigan), jgrafton (in California), and Tom (in Texas) on mrwright's server (who knows where). Even after all these years the Internet still makes me laugh sometimes. There needs to be more and frequent Tetrinetting this summer. Somewhat relatedly, but not very, I came across a plan file today that included a line specifying the last computer the user had logged into and when. At first I was all amazed that someone had rigged it to do that, but then I realized that I know exactly how it was done and I could do it too. (Sorry for the Agatha Christie italics...) Finding hidden competency is an uplifting thing, even in such a trivial matter. |
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