Greg’s Journal Archives
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ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.

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Tuesday, June 20, 2006
3:02 p.m.

I am suddenly loaded down with MEMT work, since yesterday afternoon Alon decided he didn't like the way I'd implemented artificial alignments in the new matcher wrapper. The solution, as he sees it, is to run 40 gazillion tests using different alignment strategies, and then to see which one is the most accurate on some set of hand-aligned (i.e. by me) sentences. We are also revisiting the issue of phrase detection: keeping minimal noun phrases together gives the best scores, but it also takes on the order of five times longer than chunking phrases as consecutive alignments. (Is this making any sense to anyone but me? I could explain my project more in a Random Stuff entry if people would like it.) Work in general yesterday brought into focus the fact that Alon uses a very hands-off-the-code style of advising, which is not necessarily shared by the other professors. I've been sending e-mail back and forth for several days with Stephan Vogel, in the SMT group, culminating yesterday with him preparing for me a whole new set of code and object files that he had personally tested in a copy of our system. Then Aaron was apparently having trouble with something in the EBMT project, because Ralf Brown, his advisor, came down and sat with him in the lab for more than an hour so they could fix the bug together. I don't think my advisor has looked at a line of MEMT code since I've been here. Like most things in life, though, this is neither entirely good nor entirely bad. On the one hand, it means he can think cleanly in terms of algorithms instead of being concerned with all the code implementing things the way we do them now — I probably would have put down the matcher wrapper job, for example, as being involving too much work, but it's going to save us almost 20 percent in system running time. It also forces me to have a good knowledge of exactly how the code is structured and how it makes the system work, since I often have to explain implementational details during our weekly meetings. On the other hand, though, Alon's hands-off style means I can't really ask him for troubleshooting help when things break, and I'm not entirely sure how much knowledge he has of C++ programming. I was trying to explain last week how some code I'd written needed to be reworked because it used getline and statically-allocated buffers instead of something more complicated with malloc and friends, and I wasn't sure how much sense I was making. Life is pretty quiet otherwise, except for a small rant I've been meaning to post about for a few days. On Sunday I went to the 6 p.m. mass at St. Paul's, a direct consequence of some people at the campfire on Friday talking about Christianity as a "communicable fatal disease" and saying that they were raised Christian but then "got better." I completely fail to understand the concept that, in order to be a decent academic or rational thinker, you have to swear off any form of organized religion. Is there some sort of fatal flaw with my brain's logic engine because I believe in God and — the horror! — am even a Catholic? I suppose it's the crazy people on national TV that make people draw that conclusion. I said I was Catholic; this does not mean I'm going to get married and have 43 kids with a submissive wife who lives in the kitchen all day, nor that I'm a bigoted moron who wants to discriminate against people who don't think the same way I do. Enough said.

Wednesday, June 21, 2006
9:13 p.m.

So, um, that last post made a larger hit than it deserved, to borrow a phrase from O. Henry. I believe it has broken the record for most comments received, thereby bringing up a good number of interesting questions, but I find in my reponses that I'm getting away from the actual topic of the post. It wasn't my intention to justify every aspect of the Catholic belief system or to convince people that it's the only correct one; I just wanted to say I disagreed with equating being a follower of any religion with being mentally deficient in some way. Interestingly enough, do you people often have long discussions on such topics electronically? I suppose I've had my share, but with something like this, and with mostly people whose personalities and modus operandis I don't know so well, I feel a bit lost without things like voice intonation or the ability to trade remarks back and forth quickly.) Another thing of mine that made a bigger splash than I'd expected was that Language Log post I appeared in a week and a half ago. Apparently it was picked up on Fark on June 14, and the archives there include it with the tagline "Farkers have clicked on the above link 12068 times." There are also 59 associated comments, a lot of which are along the lines of "Most boring article evar!" or "Who writes this stuff?" Ah, the suffering that language nerds must undergo among the general public. Along more conventional journal-posting lines, today I bought another sleeping bag from a guy selling old Explorers' Club stuff and then got it home on my bike by tying it to my backpack. I also engaged in an extremely rare event of mixing with pop culture. When I was going for the comics in today's paper I came across an article about a new cable show called "Kyle XY," in which a teenager of myserious and sci-fi-esque antecedents shows up one day without a single clue about being human. Spontaneously generated with no culture or human instincts, as it were, but with some kind of superhuman brainpower. Well, that sounded more interesting than "Who Wants to Marry a Gazillionaire and Redecorate His House and Vote the Other Contestants off the Island," and then the article mentioned that the pilot was available as a free download from iTunes. So I transferred the thing and watched it over dinner at my apartment. An interesting beginning, I must say. Probably the first thing I noticed is that this Kyle kid of theirs has eyes almost exactly the color of Data's from "Star Trek," which given the non-human qualities they seem to share is kind of apt. Then I started wondering about the average age of TV screenwriters and if they think real people actually say some of the things they make their characters say sometimes. (And a mom called Nicole? The oldest Nicole I know is probably 23.) All in all, though, it still might be interesting to follow the series a bit if I had cable, just to see what kind of a treatment the subject matter gets.

Random Stuff #31
Sunday, June 25, 2006, 12:15 a.m.
Updated Monday, June 26, 2006, 8:07 p.m.

At the risk of letting my life go undocumented for a few days, I think I'll present this anti-lyrics music thing that mrwright and jgrafton have dreamed up. (On the latter's recommendation, I now have some shiny new audio editing software to work with!) If you've already seen this thing before, you can guess that we're about to play... Name That Tune! I'm going to present to you 13 songs from my music collection — things of mine that are old favorites, at the top of my budding iTunes playlist, or orchestrations I happen to be obsessing over at the moment — and your job is to identify the title and, if you can, the performer. All the snippets come without recognizable English words, and I should warn you that not all of the selections even have lyrics anywhere in them. Visit this directory to download and play the songs, and then leave me an e-mail, IM, or Live Journal comment (here) with any identification guesses you might have. The game ends when people either get all 13 correct or I give up and decide to give out the answers. I'll incrementally update this post as results come in. Have fun! I say, the most difficult part in putting this game together was steering the correct course between easy stuff that would be identified instantly and songs that are so obscure that I give my personal 9941/100 percent guarantee that no one who reads this will ever know what they are. My hope, if anything, is that I've erred on the side of accessibility — I'm pretty confident that people will get at least seven of them, and even nine wouldn't be too surprising, but I'll be quite shocked if the remaining four get picked up. Identified So Far 2. "La Valse d'Amélie," by Yann Tiersen, from the "Amélie" soundtrack (by Sonnie). 3. "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant," by Billy Joel (by jgrafton). 4. The 18th variation from "Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini," composed by Rachmaninoff (by Mark and David). 5. "All I Ask of You," from "Phantom of the Opera," composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber (by n3nbb). 8. "In the Mood," by Glenn Miller and His Orchestra, 1939 (by Sonnie). 12. "Rhapsody in Blue," composed by George Gershwin (by CWRU Dan). 13. "Nice Work If You Can Get It," composed by George Gershwin, played by Harry Roy and His Orchestra, c. 1937 (by Yanna).

Random Stuff #32
Tuesday, June 27, 2006, 6:47 p.m.

It's been almost three full days since the "Name That Tune" game went up, and people have pretty much stopped guessing, so I suppose I should reveal the answers and get back to normal journaling. Here's what you heard and why: 1. "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face," from "My Fair Lady" — I guess this movie is no longer so popular; a pity, because it has a wonderful studio-orchestra soundtrack. The last minute and a half of this track, starting with the selection I gave and going to the end, is some of my favorite music from the whole movie. 2. "La Valse d'Amélie," by Yann Tiersen, from "Amélie" — I picked up this soundtrack in a giant HMV store when I was in Montreal in 2002. I have the sheet music for this particular song on my computer, but as you might guess it quickly goes beyond my piano playing abilities. 3. "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant," by Billy Joel — My introduction to Billy Joel was when I was quite small, since my parents had a few of his LPs and I knew how to work the record player. 4. The 18th variation from "Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini," composed by Rachmaninoff — Rachmaninoff was my great musical discovery of 2005, thanks to Mark's Victor Borge tape. A quick recap of the event is in my Feb. 4, 2005, entry on this page. 5. "All I Ask of You," from "Phantom of the Opera," composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber — I had a book of "Phantom" songs when I was taking piano lessons years and years ago. This wasn't one that I played, but after I saw the show on Broadway in 2003 I became more attached to it. It's also easier for me to sing than, say, "Music of the Night." 6. "Moses Supposes," from "Singin' in the Rain" — Another mostly forgotten musical movie, I guess. This is Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor tap dancing all over the diction coach's office about halfway through the film. The swing era wasn't too far gone in 1952, as you can tell from the audio. 7. "Take California," by Propellerheads — Wow, I thought some cluster raver would have gotten this; it sounds like it would appeal to a lot of dance-type people. The Propellerheads album "Decksandrumsandrockandroll" is completely unlike any other music I'm interested in, and I never would have come across it if it hadn't been played about twice a month during my freshman and sophomore years at The Observer. That was when I was news layout editor; I seem to have formed very strong associations between this song and getting work done late at night. 8. "In the Mood," by Glenn Miller and His Orchestra, 1939 — The most obvious swing song ever, this is the fourth track off the first swing CD I ever owned. I was almost going to pick "A String of Pearls," which comes with an interesting personal story, for this game instead, but then thought better of it. 9. "Moten Swing," by Glen Gray and the Casa Loma Orchestra — Glen Gray led an excellent swing band during the '30s, and in 1957 made a "great bands" compilation album. The second volume, where this nice rendition comes from, is in my own record collection. Other versions I've heard are nowhere near as fun. 10. "Marcheta," by Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra, 1940 — A sample from my 78-RPM record collection. It was probably the second-hardest song in the game, but since it's tied for the most-played song in my iTunes list I figured it should be included anyway. The digital transfer is one I made myself. 11. "Canadian Capers," by Harry Roy and His Orchestra, 1933 — This is the hardest one of the set. I first came across "Canadian Capers," originally a ragtime song, here (an offshoot of the really first-rate Dismuke's Virtual Talking Machine) and have amused myself with collecting various versions of it since. I have five of them on record, not to mention this Harry Roy example and a few more from online. 12. "Rhapsody in Blue," composed by George Gershwin — My departure from mainstream music began in 1998; a year later, the classical music station in Cleveland aired an archival broadcast of an all-Gershwin concert from the late '30s. In it, of course, was this composition. 13. "Nice Work If You Can Get It," composed by George Gershwin, played by Harry Roy and His Orchestra, c. 1937 — I've been obsessing over this arrangement ever since Malcolm Laycock played it on the BBC last Sunday; I've seriously probably listened to it three or four dozen times in the past eight days. I think this means I need to be on the lookout for Harry Roy stuff the next time I buy records or a CD.

Wednesday, June 28, 2006
7:08 p.m.

I don't suppose I should try to cram everything I've done in the last week into a single entry — at least not a normal-sized one. So I'll just say that my impression is that I've been wasting a lot of time on my computer or reading books in my apartment. I got a hankering or a craving, you might say, for things British a few days ago, so I've re-read two Sarah Caudwells along with some other things. The weather has been kind of unsettled too: lots of mini-storms coming through last week, then ugly, grey, and rainy for a few days. My apartment is playing its temperature games again. On Friday I went to Aladdin's with Pat and Alan V., then Alan and I went back to the cluster and he taught me how to play Starcraft. On Sunday night a group of us went to the Underground to hear Brewer play a few songs as an opener for some sort of band. We are invaded this week by what Jordan calls "preekies" — participants in something called Pre-College. At first, I thought it was a program for admitted freshman, kind of like summer ACES at CWRU, but when I made some statement about the age of the kids I found I was in error. Pre-College, it seems, is just a fancy name for summer school for nerds: the creatures attacking us by the score are kids who have just finished their junior year of high school and are spending six weeks at CMU taking classes. Go figure. Of course there were about 60 of them at the Underground on Sunday, distinguishable from us by the fact that we had laptops and were clustered round the power outlet on the back wall. Today I decided to hang around campus a bit after work, so I'm actually writing this from Flagstaff Hill. (Certainly wasn't expecting wireless, but this bench I'm on just across from Baker Hall seems to be covered.) I popped into the cluster around 6:15 to see if people were interested in dinner, but the general strategy was that people are subsisting on odds and ends until it's time for half-price. I went in search of something small from the vending machine, and then set off in a quest to get "The Time Traveler's Wife," which I've wanted to read ever since I saw it in Borders a year or two ago. No luck at Hunt — their single copy was listed as being at the bindery — so I tramped over to the public library. Of their four copies, one is missing, one is "in transit," and two are checked out. I returned defeated. On the way back, it occurred to me that it's about time I crawled around Phipps a bit. The gate to a little side garden was standing open, so I took a detour and walked among the plants for a few minutes. The scene was something right out of Victorian England; all it lacked was a few people in bowler hats carrying walking sticks walking with girls in long dresses. Something I'd be all up for remedying, by the way, if I had the three necessary objects. Coming out of Phipps and around the top of Flagstaff, I was attracted to this little bench overlooking the hill (and the various groups of people sporting about thereon), the conservatory, the buildings in Oakland, and even — which I don't think I ever noticed before — the steep hills that must mark out the Monongahela valley. 'Tis a fine day.

Thursday, June 29, 2006
11:05 p.m.

Continuation of fun times last night after I went back to the cluster around 8-something. I didn't feel much like doing work, so I was trying to waste time until half price browsing around on the Internet, but my stomach kept reminding me it hadn't had anything substantial since about 1:30. Eventually I hit upon the idea of distracting myself with Tetrinet, which proposal met with an enthusiastic response from a few other people in the cluster. Eventually mrwright joined from Massachusetts and whipped the crap out of the rest of us several games in a row, and that occupied me nicely until people started to talk about leaving for food. We had a party of 13, so we left a little early for Fuddle. I still don't entirely understand everyone's fascination with this place, but it could just be because their voices and ears work better in noisy crowds than mine. Fortunately, though, the Fuddle people whisked us off to the basement room, which was much quieter and less smoke-filled than the usual ground floor area. Brewer, Volki, and I got to talk about backpacking a bit, and the whole table had a round of a neat little game called "Eat Poop You Cat." In case I didn't mention it the one time we played at Joe Mama's, the game begins with a caption (i.e. a description of a picture) written at the top of a sheet of paper by the first player. The second person, upon receiving this sheet, must illustrate the caption with a drawing, then fold the paper so the original caption is no longer visible. The third person, getting the paper in turn, writes a caption for the picture and then covers the picture so that only the new caption shows. This continues round the table, with people alternatively illustrating or describing, until the paper reaches the first player again, at which point the sheet is unfolded and passed around again for everyone to laugh at. Last night we got from "The salmon of a doubt" (I have no clue either...) to "The Viking ship flees the oncoming storm" or something like that. More talk in the cluster after we got back; I finally decided I should be heading home around 1:30. Naturally, then, I was hurrying to campus a few minutes late for an 11:00 conference call Alon wanted me to dial in on, and then I settled down to a day of running various experiments until our meeting at 4:00. Last week's meeting went from about 4:20 until just before 6:00; today's ran from 4 until 6:30. This is actually a lot less painful that it might seem — I kind of like it when the three of us just chat for a bit, with Alon telling Justin and me about the latest language modeling techniques at Johns Hopkins or an idea he had for improving the way the MEMT assigns scores to partial hypotheses. It's much more satisfying intellectually than spending hours on end tweaking parameters and generating sets of four-digit numbers. I'm not feeling, in general, that I'm doing any sort of useful work or contributing to any kind of meaningful development, and after 10 months of fiddling around without clear positive results I'm getting kind of annoyed to see other students actually accomplishing things, writing papers, and going to conferences. It makes me wonder whether it's just bad luck on a diffcult project, or if I'm somehow wanting in intellect or ability — or ambition. But that should be the topic of its own post.

Monday, July 3, 2006
10:58 p.m.

Every day a new adventure... I should be writing a post about my weekend trip back home ("to my parents' house"?), but I don't think I'll be able to until I first dispose of a more current matter that's been pushed onto the stack, so to speak. Why is it that every time I go grocery shopping I'm driven out of my mind by a thousand and one little annoyances? Is it because I have lingering subconscious feelings of superiority from having worked in a grocery store for so many years? Do I know what I want and know where to find it more than most people? Maybe my walking speed is unnaturally fast? Whatever the reason, on almost every trip to the Shadyside Giant Eagle I rediscover how it's possible for people to become misanthropic and talk about blowing up the world. I am constantly hemmed in between mid-aisle displays of Cheez-Its and messy groups of people trying to decide whether they want to turn left or right (or stay vacuously rooted to the spot until the store closes and employees gently shepherd them towards the door), whether the husband or the wife is the one who pulls a product off the shelf, or whether they currently have within eyesight the same number of kids they brought into the store with them. Add a liberal dose of 95-year-olds hobbling along at about the pace of dehydrated molasses and a number of path-blocking shopping carts, and the experience will be complete. I guess I don't mean to sound so bitter — I just had a very trying time with the shopping this evening. My task was to bake a blueberry, peach, or cherry pie; I began the day envisioning myself strolling down to Whole Foods, selecting a quantity of excellent ripe summer berries, and then passing a fine evening cooking in my apartment with music playing. Not so. Whole Foods had not a blueberry in stock, and the peaches were too hard to possibly use for a few days yet. I escaped and went down the street to Giant Eagle, where the produce was no more plentiful and where the peaches were rotting. I was also beseiged by the general populace in the clueless and aggravating manner previously described. Not being a fan of canned pie filling, I eventually had to accept frozen blueberries before fleeing towards the exit... and once through the checkout line it occurred to me at once that I'd forgotten the pie crust. So I went back to my apartment to put away the stuff I'd already bought, then headed right back out again to remedy the omission. The last time I made a pie with frozen blueberries, I bought three bags and found I had too much; this time I only grabbed two. As you might expect in a world where culinary mishaps lurk in every cupboard, the blueberries were a juicy mess and filling came up painfully short in quantity. What I suppose I should do is remember what Prof. Schultz used to say about MIPS assembly and turn a bug into a feature. Therefore, if anyone out there is interested in obtaining a custom-made specimen of Greg's Patented "Oops"® Blueberry Mash Pie, infamous around the world wherever fine bakery products are out of stock, they should address a card to Dietary Disasters Test Kitchens, Apartment Four, Pittsburgh, PA. And remember, you're asking for it!

Monday, July 3, 2006
11:42 p.m.

OK — the pie is out of the oven and cooling on my counter, and thus except for being wrapped up out of my hands until it gets tasted tomorrow afternoon; now for a more conventional recap of the weekend trip "home." The impetus of going was to attend Aaron's usual Fourth of July cookout in Strongsville; since the school year is over it also meant I could spend some time with my family without having to worry about visiting several groups of friends at Case at the same time. I left work a little after 6:00 on Friday, and after the usual silliness with all the cars on the roads I got treated to an even worse spectacle. There's a biking group called Critical Mass that meets on the last Friday at the month at 5:30 in order to enjoy a bit of biking through the city — that's how this was described to me, at least. When I actually ran into them coming up Negley Avenue while I was on Ellsworth, any admiration or interest I ever had for the organization evaporated almost instantly. These are not smart city bikers who enjoy the experience of touring the neighborhoods before dinner on a Friday afternoon, these are disgruntled counter-culture bicycle activist car haters who relish going out of their way to snarl Friday afternoon traffic and get everyone mad at them. At least 50 people came up Negley from the direction of Fifth Avenue, taking up the entire northbound lane (and possibly the whole road), leisurely proceeding at about about 8 or 10 m.p.h., ignoring stoplights and traffic laws, and posting side guards to block vehicle traffic from making any progress in any direction. That, I say, is not the way to gain greater acceptance for the bicycle as a transportation alternative worthy of consideration; I will never ride with these people. Saturday was a day mostly devoted to taking care of my car: E-Check, license, registration, vacuuming, washing, cleaning out, etc. On Sunday my parents hauled me out to my grandparents' house before I could go to the party in Strongsville; my mom is always saying how they (the grandparents) never get to see me. The visit didn't go too badly. They asked what I was working on in school, of course, and to keep things simple I gave them a really stripped-down explanation of machine translation and said I was doing that, even though the MEMT system has nothing to do with the actual translation of text. Reached Aaron's house in due course a bit after 3:00 in the afternoon. I didn't think, prior to yesterday, that I was subject to the mad rush of friends getting married that's supposed to happen after you graduate from college. The friends of my sister's boyfriend, who are about my age or a year older, are all doing it, and my sister's been to at least two bridal showers this summer, but outside of Glenn and Zara, who I'm passingly acquainted with, I concluded that my circle was exempt from such things. It appears I was wrong. In increasing levels of friendship with me, Scott and Tara are engaged now, and there was a decent amount of conversation that implied future weddings between Aaron and Amber and between Erin and Ben. I felt kind of awkward amid this profusion of tidy domesticity, but eventually the discussion covered an enormous range of other topics — going from adult subjects like golf foursomes, imported alcohol, and financial planning to juvenile ones like Katie's efficiency rating as a Target cashier and Aaron's eating habits when left alone for several weeks. Sportive outings, group dinners, and various other collaborative pursuits were discussed as well. A number of people are still in Cleveland or at least spending the summer there; every time I go back to visit I wish I could be part of all the fun things they keep planning to do with each other, although my own life at CMU is decently full of weekend plans and random capers that I really can't complain of being bored. When the rush to leave came at 10:45, I decided to go as well and drive back to Pittsburgh that night. It was a fine drive — I had the radio on coming across the Cleveland suburbs, but after a while I turned it off and went for a good number of miles just listening to the sound of the car running beautifully on the smooth road. A few miles before the Pennsylvania border the traffic noticibly died down and it started to rain, so I got a nicely adventuresome 29 miles on the PA Turnpike with the road almost entirely to myself and bright lightning flashes going off distantly in the sky. Arrived back at my apartment right on schedule at 1:15 a.m.

Thursday, July 6, 2006
7:26 p.m.

Yay for Tuesdays that feel like Sundays and are correspondingly weekend-like. I slept in and caught the 12:40 Squirrel Hill bus to arrive at Rachael's Fourth of July party at the house they call Sherbrooke — though I don't believe the one here has the final "e" like the street in Montreal does — a bit before 1:00. I needn't have worried about coming two hours after the official start time: a number of the house occupants were just having breakfast. After that the food was plentiful and good. Rachael took charge of the grilling, someone called Crystal boiled the corn, and Lea, Jess, and I produced two huge trays of apple crisp. This is in addition to Ryan's watermelon and my pie, and possibly some other things that I'm forgetting or didn't get around to trying. Around 7:00, most of us decided to head downtown to watch fireworks at the Point. I suppose the number of people milling about downtown was less that it might have been if it wasn't raining, but there were still plenty of people. I found myself wondering why so many of them felt compelled to smoke so many cigarettes. We eventually found a home base on the north side of the fountain right at the Point. From there we passed the time by playing charades, causing passers-by to join in at irregular intervals — which would have been fine, except that the sort of person this activity appealed to was apparently the sort to yell rude and/or obscene guesses at us with no provocation or evidence. After more than an hour of acting out things like "exploding pancakes" and "my actions are not endorsed by KGB as an organization," it finally got dark and the fireworks began. The show lasted about 23 minutes, I should say, ending right around 10:00. Getting out of the park wasn't as bad as I thought it would be (the walkway under the bridge acts as a sort of funnel), and in a reasonable time the eight of us were standing at a bus stop on Fifth Avenue... where it quickly became apparent that we hadn't a hope of getting motorized transport home. Rachael and Crystal elected to wait it out, but the other six of us decided to just walk back to campus along Forbes. It was a good plan: the first bus that had even standing room on it was the one that came by campus as we were waiting in front of Hamburg for the escort, and that was about 90 minutes after fireworks had ended. Brewer, mkehrt, Grant, Abe, and Akiva all hopped on it to go to Squirrel Hill; when I eventually decided the escort wasn't running I finished the walk home. After an unproductive day at work, yesterday was quite nice too. I came home around 6:30 and went running before eating anything; it was a fine evening for being outside. Then some cereal and a trip to the grocery store before I decided to be social and head back to the cluster for a while — nominally to work, but then someone suggested a game of Starcraft and people started talking about half-price. I went with Alex and Philip to Mad Mex, which turned out to be all sorts of fun. We got seated at 10:30, but found out that nothing was half-off until 11:00. That wasn't enough to turn us away, and since none of us had been there more than once before, we all fell to intently studying the menu — to the point that we had to ask the waiter for "a few more minutes" twice. Now, if you're a waiter at a half-price place, and the guys at Table Three come in a half-hour before the discount starts, ask about the discount, and then send you away twice before ordering, what conclusion do you come to? Ours, as I suspected, concluded that we were angling for cheap food and left us alone until a minute past 11. That wasn't really our objective, but when we found out that we were in half-price time we put in a good-sized order. The tip, when we finished the meal just after midnight, was a good one. Reading Material: I was almost late for an 11 a.m. conference call today because someone in #cslounge posted a link to Issac Asimov's short story "The Last Question." Once you get past Asimov's slightly quirky comma use, the OCR looks pretty good. I only noticed one error in the whole text. The story is wonderful discussion material, too.

Thursday, July 6, 2006
8:22 p.m.

Hm... I have new Live Journal friends. I hope I'm not scaring you away with hideously long entries. Perhaps the reader from Albany, Calif., whose Live Journal apparently only exists in order to be friends with my own could provide some sort of introductory or identifying information? "'It is only fair,' said the judge." I don't mind that you're here, but I would like to know who you are and how you came across my page if I don't know you in real life.

Friday, July 7, 2006
8:05 p.m.

If people insist on posting links to stories that break my brain, I'll be sure to do my part and spread the insanity. So here is, courtesy of Chris Jackson, I believe, "All You Zombies" by Robert Heinlein. This electronic text, I'm afraid, is much inferior to the one I posted yesterday — OCR errors and formatting oddities all over the place — but the topic just as creepy. And fun.

Sunday, July 9, 2006
12:38 p.m.

Hm... I didn't know there was an actual family living in one of the houses behind mine. I've been watching from my window for the past few minutes, and it looks like there's a mom, a dad, and a little boy out doing yardwork. I see them carrying bags and buckets of things to the big trash bins they have on our little alleyway. Somehow this is an excellent scene. The last few days, since I've had an actual update, have been mixed excellent and not so excellent, I guess. This week at work was almost entirely wasted, and I felt pretty bad meeting with my advisor on Thursday as he went over the various things I was supposed to accomplish or look into and so many of my answers were "I actually haven't had a chance to do that yet..." We met again Friday afternoon to look over some sentences, and I promised to have a few changes made by Monday afternoon so we can look at them again and note the differences. I also discovered on Friday, as I was doing some C++ debugging and getting nowhere, that I was able to produce a version of the code that would compile, run, crash, and then bring down the whole server with it. This is probably not supposed to happen; I've never done it under Red Hat 7.1, but I believe I've done it once each now under Red Hat 9 and Fedora Core 3. When I was explaining the oddity to Cornell yesterday, he said I should look into the kernel to find out what's going on and then file a bug, but I imagine the first part is beyond my knowledge and skill to accomplish. In the non-work department, I'm getting a lot of practice biking up Wilkins Avenue to get to Rebecca's house. There was supposed to be games there on Friday night, but I was the only person to show up by 10:30, so Rebecca and I eventually just walked to campus and joined the people in the cluster for a few hours. She and Ross were planning on going to the Strip at 9:30 in the morning yesterday, so I got myself up at 8:45 and again biked to Rebecca's in order to be there when Ross arrived with his car. We ate breakfast at a place on Penn Avenue called DeLuca's, a noisy and busy quintessentially-American breakfast diner where I would love to set a few scenes of that novel I'm supposed to be writing. The only scenes being made there yesterday were by me, as I demonstrated a shocking inability to carry out the simple task of drinking out of my glass of water. At one point I tipped it a bit too far towards my mouth and spilled water on the lower part of my shirt and in my lap, making it look like I was an incontinent three-year-old who'd just had an accident. It was kind of an "Oops — ha ha!" moment, so I made use of my napkin and carried on. Until it happened again just a few minutes later. And, dang it, a third time just when we were working out the bill and I'd set my wallet in my lap for a minute. If, in later years, you hear of me suffering from some kind of neurological disease, you may point to this water-dumping episode as the start of it — I was certainly starting to wonder what was going on by the time we left the restaurant. I spent most of the rest of the day flopping around my apartment being bored before finally forcing myself out to the Waterworks around 5:30 to buy some things I needed. I should have also gone grocery shopping and running, or done some cleaning or work, but I somehow didn't feel like doing much of anything at all. When I happened to interject, into a conversation on vegetables in #cslounge that I wanted ice cream more, Rebecca said that she and Cornell were going to Rita's and asked me if I wanted to come along. So I was off again on my bike up Wilkins, and then we walked to Squirrel Hill. Rita's is one of the 75,000 ice cream shops on Forbes between Murray and Shady, catering, paraît-il, to those who like their soft-serve extra creamy. They certainly give you a lot of it for your $2.33 regular code, which was just fine with me. We ate our stuff on the stairs of the church at Forbes and Murray, then went over to campus to help Cornell load 20 cases of pop from his car into his robotics lab. Home and to bed around 12:30.

Random Stuff #33
Monday, July 10, 2006, 11:21 p.m.

This is why it's sometimes a bad idea for me to be bored: In Opposition to the College of Cardinals? "I wonder where the Seventh Presbyterian Church is," said Cornell Saturday night as we climbed the steps of the Sixth Presbyterian Church in Squirrel Hill to eat our ice cream. "Is it like Connect the Dots?" It is indeed, and the picture might look something like this: Google Maps has addresses for multiple Presbyterian churches numbered from one through seven before eight seems to be completely avoided. I can also find addresses for a Ninth, Tenth, and Twelfth Presbyterian Church (all in Philadelphia, hotbed of counting that it seems to be). I also find evidence for defunct or non-address-resolvable churches numbered 11, 13, 14, 15, and 16 — beyond this I haven't tried exploring. A Question of Majority Rather unrelatedly, I found myself thinking today about the phrase "major city." Newspapers like to say things like "Cleveland was recently ranked the poorest major city in the U.S." or "Pittsburgh is one of few major American cities to have two hometown banks," but the notion of what separates important places from little grey dots on the map is never quite clear. I suspect the classification has a regional flavor to it, so I ask all of you the question: What do you consider to be the major American cities? How many even are there? If you have a few minutes to answer, concoct a list of them and somehow cause it to be transmitted to me. Also include where you're originally from. After a few days, I'll tabulate the results (including mine) and we'll see what the average consensus is.

Monday, July 10, 2006
11:45 p.m.

And now for something completely different... My usual hocus-pocus of getting up in the morning (alarm goes off, press snooze, fall asleep; repeat until sufficiently horrified) at least has the nice side effect of giving me a number of medium-length dreams that are easy to remember when I actually do get out of bed. Last week I recall that French was in many of them, which is always an enjoyable experience, but last night's (or this morning's, I suppose) took a rather different direction. In it, I met a new person somehow connected to KGB, and we went running and swimming through a sort of jungle world that was somehow indoors, and then rafting down a series of waterfalls and chutes that was clearly outside. Well, that's not too unusual — my brain has certainly come up with weirder premises — but for some reason this particular dream was very... satisfying. Throughout the whole there was an odd sense that this new guy had some kind of unusual or unearthly ability and that he was giving me part of it — or at least letting me have a look into "his world," I guess. The exact feeling is kind of difficult to describe. All I know is that I felt primed to do something physical all day: after cleaning my apartment a bit this evening I went out and ran 4.6 miles, and I felt like I could have kept going forever.

Wednesday, July 12, 2006
12:13 a.m.

I have a bike at Free Ride — or will have one, as soon as I can pay it off with a number of dollars d and a number of volunteer hours working there h that satisfy the equation d + 5h = 100. This is good news, since I was kind of getting to the point of giving up on the bike search for this summer. The frame is slightly smaller than I would have liked, but it's in quite good condition and the bike doesn't need too much work. The only somewhat annoying part is that if I don't show up at the co-op for two weeks, they can give the bike to someone else, so my timing in signing up right before a busy week and then a weekend backpacking trip is not exactly the greatest. Oh well; I'll have to go into the co-op next week and remind them that I still exist. I also have vacation time, officially scheduled and cleared with my advisor for the week of August 7. Now the question is: What should I do with it? My first thought was to go to Montreal — I've never been there in the summer and I have an urgent desire to speak French — but getting there looks like it would require either a pair of 17-hour bus rides or a place to stay overnight in New York each way. I was hoping to simplify things by driving to Toronto, spending some time there visiting Susannah, and then continuing by bus or train, but I don't think she'll be back in time. The underlying problem in all of my planning is that traveling is so wretchedly expensive. I'd really like to go somewhere, but I don't have much money, so flying and expensive hotels are almost certainly out of the question. I'm OK with driving my car six-ish hours each way somewhere, but I don't want to subject it to the stress test of a week-long road trip or anything. I wouldn't object to anything involving CMU or Case company if the Toronto visit doesn't work out. So, given those constraints, any ideas out there?

Thursday, July 13, 2006
11:03 p.m.

This is probably going to be my last entry for a few days, since I'm spending the weekend backpacking somewhere down in the Laurels. I think that's where they are, at least; Brewer found us a 20-mile loop down in Fayette County, quite close to the West Virginia border, and that's where we're heading tomorrow afternoon. Besides work and going to Free Ride, this week has been pretty much devoted to trip-related activities or trip-related–related activities. My big activity was giving a dinner party yesterday for those of us who are going — that's Brewer, Rebecca, Cornell, and avolkovi in addition to me — and I feel like I spent the two evenings before getting ready for it. It's actually quite fun to plan out a meal and go round to the stores to collect the various ingredients, but not quite as fun cleaning the apartment to the point that company can be admitted without dying of shock on contact. Dinner was risotto (another word I can only pronounce with a French accent, having learned it first in that language) made in vegetable broth and served with a mix of boiled beans, peas, carrots, and celery. (Note to future chefs: black beans take forever to cook. I had soaked them for more than eight hours ahead of time, and I still had to boil them for just over an hour.) French bread on the side, and then Jell-O pudding pies with whipped cream and strawberries for dessert. I was thinking about making up a salad or something to complete the three-course meal design, but ended up running out of time and deciding that might be overkill. The meal was, after all, eaten with plastic silverware out of mismatched dishes and with two of us sitting on the couch because I don't have enough chairs. Afterwards we played Blokus and went over backpacking stuff until people decided to leave around 11:00. Work this week is suddenly "interesting." After Justin left last week or the week before, responsibility for the code he'd been working on seems to have fallen jointly on me and a staff member called Eric. (What's with all the repeat names around here, anyway?) I understand the MEMT system, but not that much about UIMA, and Eric of course knows UIMA and not the MEMT. The code in question is the interface between the two — it seems to be kind of a mess and not working right, and our job is to get it running as soon as possible so we can set up a demo with a whole slew of other research places and show it off to a project manager at DARPA. Today I went in to the LTI at 9:00 and didn't leave until 6:45, and it actually felt kind of shorter than a normal day because there was so much to do. Many other things I want to write about still, but I want to keep this relatively short. I'm taking a notebook with me tomorrow, so when I get back I should be able to put together a neat chronology like the one I made last year for our Smoky Mountains trip.

Friday, July 14, 2006
3:47 p.m.

On voit bien que j'ai menti en disant hier que je n'écrirais plus pendant quelques jours. Ce matin j'ai constaté que nous sommes le 14 juillet, et en vue de ce fait j'ai l'honneur de vous présenter mon premier "post" français. (L'année dernière, au 1er juillet, j'ai tapé en anglais avec l'orthographie britannique à cause de Canada Day.) Je crois que j'ai failli posté en français dans mon journal écrit il y a quatre ans — je me souviens que je pensais à faire l'expérience un jour quand je marchais à Leutner après une classe de français. Mais en fin de compte je ne l'ai pas fait. Or, la chose la plus difficile, c'est de taper tous les codes HTML pour les accents; tout le texte est infeste des "&"! Je me demande combien de personnes arriveront à lire cela — mrwright, bien sûr, et probablement Rebecca aussi. Si les francophones peuvent me signaller mes fautes de grammaire et de vocabulaire (puisque je sais qu'il y en a, bien que je lise et relise mes compositions), je serais très reconnaissant. Je suis en train de passer la journée entière en travaillant avec Eric pour résoudre les problèmes du code de Justin dont nous sommes les héritiers. C'est encore la situation que j'ai expliqué hier, ce qui m'oblige à laisser à côté tous mes autres projets. Ça ne me gène pas beaucoup, en fait; j'aime bien avoir quelque chose de nouveau à faire de temps en temps. Hop, je pars à 16h30 pour notre weekend de randonnée. Cette fois je ne mens pas!