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ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
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Monday, July 17, 2006
8:20 p.m.
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More lying: I did take a notebook backpacking with me this weekend, but the trip was so short and the amount of stuff I had time to write is so small that I don't think I'll be creating anything on my Trips page as a result. Instead I'll try to condense things down to fit in a normal entry and hope that's good enough. Brewer, Rebecca, Cornell, Alex ("Volki"), and I met in the cluster at 4:30 Friday — it was a short day of work for me because I'd spent part of the morning packing stuff and getting ready to leave. We loaded up Volki's car and actually left campus at 5:00, and then it took us forever to get out of Pittsburgh in Friday afternoon rush-hour traffic. We were supposed to take Route 51; the only place I could remember seeing that on a sign was at that smashed-up crazy intersection south of the West End Bridge, so we headed that way. At 5:30 we were still on Carson Street just past Station Square, and even after that Route 51 was pretty slow going until we had cleared most of the suburbs. We got to Quebec Run Wild Area ("Is that [Quebec Run] Wild Area or [Quebec] Run Wild Area?" Rebecca asked) in Fayette County around 7:00 and started hiking in at 7:20. The park, part of Forbes State Forest, actually touches the border with West Virginia. Reached a suggested camping area 2¼ miles in sometime before dark. I was interested to see the difference between the way I've gone camping with Ben, Erin, and Susannah and the way things would work with Brewer and CMU people. A lot the same, actually, except Brewer seems to have optimized his gear to weigh as little as possible. (He was plentifully teased for this all weekend.) This included things like manufacturing his own alcohol stove out of a beer can and buying, by mail order from Scotland, a jacket that can be stuffed into a little bag about the size of your fist. I guess I go camping in metric: it kept surprising me when Brewer would talk about a 3000-cubic-inch pack or say that he drank a quart and a half of water. Dirty dish cleanup and water boiling was a bit less strict than I'm used to, but people here thankfully aren't addicted to throwing random foods together in one pot. I should say something about what we ate, I think, because when I was planning my own lunch food last week I went back and read the page I put together for the Smoky Mountains trip last May and couldn't find anything helpful with regard to meals. So — Friday night we had rice, beans, and cheese wrapped up in tortillas, followed by tea and hot chocobit of woodlate. Saturday's breakfast was Cream of Wheat, which I find much inferior to oatmeal packets, and more tea. For lunch I had three peanut butter sandwiches on good break with a few granola bars on the side. Summer sausage, pepperoni, and cheese were popular among the other four. Dinner was instant mashed potatoes and a really sweet (i.e. sugary) Indian rice pudding dessert that I've forgotten the name of. Saturday's hike was a nine-mile loop mostly among stream valleys, with the trail ranging from annoyingly rocky to wet and muddy. Many of the broader flat areas were covered in bright green ferns perhaps 16 inches high, and we passed big clumps of flowering rhotodendrons a lot too. The Quebec Run area is kind of like a playground: there are only 22 miles of trails, fairly densely packed according to the map, with blazes compusively placed on almost every other tree and bridges over most of the streams. We still didn't see many people, though; only a few groups near some of the parking areas. It rained Friday night and part of Saturday morning, so the worst trouble was getting through mud spots and places where water was running down the trail. Also getting showered with water from overhanging trees when walking behind Cornell, who had the tallest pack and preferred not to duck. Conversation tended to follow Brewer around, which made a nice mix between talking, listening, and thinking depending on how far away I was from him. Volki neglected to bring a spoon, so Cornell, Rebecca, and I jokingly tried to whittle him one on Friday night; Rebecca and I tried again Saturday night and Sunday morning as we refined our technique, and I brought home with me a sort of troughed eating utensil that I made from a fragrant bit of wood that had been split in half. We also tried our hands at playing cards on Saturday, using a rock for a table — after dark Brewer and I provided light with our headlamps, and I had to borrow his bug hat to keep half the moths in the county from flapping around my face. Sunday's hike, out of the woods and back to the car, was lengthened by taking a bit of a roundabout route that caused us to go up a number of steep hills; when we finally made it to the parking lot we vetoed the idea of an additional two miles on another trail in favor of going home. We found a much nicer way back into the city, turning off Route 51 onto Route 837 near where Ross and I did our mammoth trip several weeks ago, and then crossing a bridge into Swissvale and ending up on Braddock Avenue. Volki dropped me off at my apartment at 4:00, and I managed to go an even 48 hours without using a computer by taking a shower before checking my e-mail. |
Monday, July 17, 2006
11:04 p.m.
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CMU is taking over Fuddle. Last night there were no less than 19 of the usual suspects there for half-price, including a group of eight that I was in. It was slightly quieter than normal, I thought, but I still can't wait for Joe Mama's to be open late again. Eating a giant hamburger before bedtime is also probably not the healthiest thing I could choose to do. Before heading down to Oakland to eat, Brewer, Akiva, and I went for a quick walk in Schenley. We talked a little about music having lyrics and not having them, and I mentioned that there were a few songs my mind phrased differently before it knew what the words were or even if there were any. (The two specific examples I was thinking of were "Hang On, Sloopy," played by every high school marching band at every game at every school in the state of Ohio, and "Marie," which must have been recorded totally instrumentally by someone other than Tommy Dorsey.) Alan V. introduced me to something called ITG, a synonym for DDR that apparently comes in both computer-game and video-arcade versions. I tried two songs off of Alan's laptop last night, and then today when I was in the cluster after the KGB meeting he invited me to play a three-song round in the Scotland Yard game room up in the UC. It is at times like this that I regret having never tried a DDR night in Alumni; my only previous experience with such things was one song in Susannah's suite junior year, which I think I was at least able to not fail based on whatever grading scheme was in use. Now I am fully reminded what horrible body control and coordination I have — not only do I fail, but even at Level 2 (of 10, it looks like) I can't step my way to anything beyond 2 percent. (I don't know exactly how the scores are computed, but a 2 percent on anything can hardly indicate any but the most abysmal of performances.) Not that I'm bitter, or even shocked, actually. I suspect I have at least average rhythm-related abilities inside my brain — I mean, I'm a big fan of swing music in part because I like the sophisticated arrangements — but I've also been aware for quite a while that I have way below average ability to translate what I know into body movements or other external representation. So the low scores aren't really that surprising, especially since I've really never played before. What I think is more interesting is the strategy that you might develop for reading the scrolling arrows. It's no good to watch the top of the screen and try to step on things as they arrive at the point where action is required, since that leaves you almost no time to get ready for the next line. So you create a short-term buffer of sorts by looking further down the screen and noticing the sequence of what's coming up. Now you know perhaps the next three steps (for the simple levels that I was doing, at least), but in order to keep the mental buffer full you have to forget about them and start reading for the next ones, leaving a side process running to carry out the buffered steps at the correct times. Sometimes this works extremely well, but more often than not I discover that the side process isn't smart enough to know which beat of the song will be the proper time for the next step from the buffer, and then I get unsynchronized and miss like five steps in a row. I have to laugh at the previous paragraph a bit because this arrow-reading, foot-stepping process is probably wonderfully simple for most people, but I analyze it as a sort of producers-consumers problem. I think that means that it warrants further Came home today, after all of this, at 8 p.m. to a 90° apartment, which effectively took away any desire I had to clean the kitchen or go running. Maybe tomorrow, although I do need to get out to Free Ride and start paying off my bike. |
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
10:12 p.m.
Me: I say, fine sirs, would you care for a cup of tea? I'm doing what I can, in fact. Wes is on board for the Let's Pretend to Be British outing (as soon as people get back to Pittsburgh), and I think by early next week I'll have to be making reservations for the trip to Montreal if I'm going there during my week off. Of course, if anyone wants to dump plane fare to London or Paris into my lap, I'd be happy to oblige. Super-multi-tasking at work today. My brain felt like it was context-switching as often as the CPU of the server I monopolized for most of the afternoon was. It felt really good, a bit after 4:00, to realize how many little things I'd gotten done and then to take a break to listen to BBC news and drink tea at my desk. I had my first IM conversation with my advisor today: he's in Sydney, Australia, all this week for the ACL conference, and now that Justin's gone I am here handling our contribution to next week's NIST MT evaluation all by myself. I'm kind of excited, actually, because it makes me feel like I'm actually doing something besides trying out a lot of new code that doesn't do anything helpful. But somehow I never quite pictured a professor using IM smileys and typing "ttyl." Left work just before 6:00 so I could eat dinner and go to Free Ride for a bit. Whoosh — I don't think I knew my hands could get so dirty. At Free Ride, the world is covered in a layer of bike grease; aside from having black hands, I came home looking like I'd dipped both knees into a vat of dark ink. Someone called Jake asked me to bolt something called a trueing stand to a heavy piece of wood he found. This involved extracting the old bolts from the stand (one of them was stuck), finding new bolts of the proper size, drilling two holes in the wood, countersinking the bolts, and then attaching the stand. Nice and manageable. Well, the wood piece in question looked like a piece of an old countertop and was about 5 cm thick, so once I measured out the place for the first hole I decided to start with a pilot hole. That very nearly evaporated the drill bit and/or caught the wood on fire. After a series of five pilots, in increasing diameter, I discovered that the next bit was too wide for the drill to grip properly and that, when it had barely touched the wood, it would come right out of the drill and get stuck in the hole. After an hour and a half I cleaned everything up and gave Jake a progress update. Then, since I wanted to come back here and wash a load of dishes before it got too late, we packaged up the wood and the new bolts for me or someone else to finish later. It was so hot inside the Free Ride building that going outside actually felt cool until I had to go into my apartment, where it was hot again. I say, this place must be bewitched by a ghost from the tropics. Last night, I ran the air conditioner in the main room for about 90 minutes before bedtime; that got the temperature in there down to just under 80. When I woke up this morning it had gone back up to 86. I spent the night before backpacking and the two nights since sleeping on the couch out there, so my bed is turning into storage space. I'm thinking, if my bank account can handle it and I have clean socks for another day, that I'll just spend all tomorrow evening in the air-conditioned cluster and maybe go with people to half-price again. |
Thursday, July 20, 2006
11:37 p.m.
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Half-price indeed last night — Fuddle, of course. I'm starting to not mind anymore, since it seems to be generally quieter there on weeknights over the summer that it used to be on weekends during the school year. I spent the first part of the evening in the cluster, as planned, and then went with Brewer and Tyler to throw a frisbee around on the Mall for a while. That was fun; it had been so long since I'd thrown a frisbee (since the LTI picnic in September, probably) that I'd forgotten whether it was more natural to throw left- or right-handed. (The answer is right.) Picked up the basics of a forehand flick, hammer throw, and some weird backhand frisbee-upside-down slicing thing that would take a paragraph to describe well in words. Got very little done today at work. People at ARL are asking a dozen questions a day and wanting results. We're doing a joint submission with them to NIST's MT '06 evaluation next week, and I sort of feel like we're not going to be ready for it. The time I should be spending running test combinations and getting Silja's true-caser to work has been going into working out UIMA bugs for the GALE IOD. Additionally, today I was beset by glitches in AFS and our main server machine that kept me from doing a few things. The AFS error is particularly frustrating: I have a 250-MB gzip file that unzips to 900 MB, and it's sitting on an AFS partition that has 2 GB free, yet I continually get messages saying "No space left on device" whenever I try to unzip the file. Why? Escaped shortly after 6:00 and sought interesting happenings in the cluster. Succeeded — went to dinner with Lea, Akiva, jcreed, and jcreed's Brazilian friend. People are beginning to intentionally spread the rumor/joke that I'm Canadian, much to my amusement. We went to eat at a nice deli in Squirrel Hill called Kazansky's (thank goodness for Google!), which is maybe two-thirds of the way down the hill on Murray. Excellent corned beef they have there, once you get over the initial shock of buying a meal that's not half-price or the trucks. Akiva, Lea, and jcreed kept reminding me of Ben, Erin, and Vicki at Case — maybe it's because they're good at playing off each other's joking and don't talk about computers so much? We did have some nice conversation on speech and accents on the bus ride over there. Very interesting people that I wish I could do things with more often. Walked back to campus after dinner and mucked around with screen capture programs in Windows. Taking a snapshot of a video file is much more complicated than it should be — and since the video is question was Windows Media format, I couldn't even throw it up to my AFS space and play it with something Linuxy. I was eventually directed by Abe to import the thing into Windows Movie Maker and take stills from there, after two screen capture programs I downloaded from the Internet, like the Print Screen key, rendered the Windows Media Player video window as a big black rectangle. The result of all this is a few 100x100-pixel images of me from 16 years ago, taken from some digitized home videos I have. Inspired by the excellence of jgrafton's high-school-era user icons, I decided to make something like that for myself and found that the videos were more interesting than any high-school pictures I have ready access to. |
Sunday, July 23, 2006
6:24 p.m.
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A lot to catch up on over the last few days... I had a minor heart attack Friday evening when I found that the MEMT's UIMA wrapper had suddenly broken itself and was quitting after one translation. This was about an hour after ARL sent me a big e-mail with a list of runs they wanted me to complete, so the timing was pretty awful. I had some notion of going home and eating dinner, but I ended up staying in the cluster until 7:30, when people were congregating for a movie night at Alan and Shawn's house, so I put a Ctrl-Alt-Backspace between me and my work and threw myself in with the party. Since my bike was on campus, I decided just to bike to Alan and Shawn's house in Stanton Heights while everyone else drove. When they say "Stanton Heights" they're not kidding: it's quite a nice hill they've got between that neighborhood and either northern East Liberty or southern Highland Park. And some nice-looking streets at the top, too, although they're rather isolated. We ordered some pizza (from a Pizza Hut in North Oakland, the closest one but still too far away for delivery) and first watched a compliation of Weird Al music videos from the '80s and '90s. I recognized a few of the songs, but missed almost all parody elements in the videos, having never seen any of the originals. The night's main feature was an interesting Russian movie called "Night Watch" — fun to watch in part because of all the subtle typographical effects in the subtitles. After the movie people were mostly interested in going home, so I biked back to my apartment around 12:15. Yesterday was the grand visit from my family... minus my sister Chris, whose soul won't be freed from the clutches of the Heinen's produce manager for another week yet. This time everyone was here to see the sights, since it seems one day in Pittsburgh is all the family vacation they're going to get this year. My mom wanted to ride the incline, so we drove down to Station Square (through the South Side) and started the day with lunch at Buca di Beppo's. It was a great time and an excellent meal. After lunch we walked over to the incline and rode it up to the top of Mount Washington, then came down again after walking a bit on Grandview Avenue and taking some pictures. My parents also wanted to see the Point, so we collected the car from the expensive Station Square lot and drove across the river. It started raining almost immediately, so we had to sit it out for a few minutes on whatever the road is bordering Point State Park. When it cleared up, we spent 45 minutes wandering around the park and inside the Fort Pitt blockhouse. My mom wanted to take a clipper ship cruise, but the rest of us didn't care so much; in the end, we got back in the car and drove back to my apartment to do birthday things. Mom and Dad had brought with them all the party stuff, including the best cake in the world (Heinen's chocolate with white whipped frosting) and a box of candles. I was a little bit apprehensive before opening presents — this year I gave them only one idea, and as a general rule the fewer concrete ideas I come up with the more random and not-really-desired things I get. This year, though, it worked out all right. I knew my parents would get me a silverware set after I mentioned last week that I had people over; this is quite nice because it saves me the horror and expense of buying one myself. Chris gave me a nice German book — Nicole especially should like this — so I can start learning another language and say "geprüft" correctly, and I also got two jars of Amish jam that will be perfect with tea and crumpets. Totally unexpected were two Ikea chairs to match the one I already have at my kitchen table, so now I have seating space for eight and table space for three or four. Mom kept talking about wanting to go to "cute shops," a reference I couldn't quite pin down to anything specific, so the best we could do was Squirrel Hill. (I say, is it any wonder that people who live in the city take the bus so much? Parking revenue alone must make up about 30 percent of the "income" column in Pittsburgh's budget.) We had a late dinner at Panera's, and after that most shops, cute or not, were already closed for the day. My parents wanted to get back before it was too late, so they went directly to the freeway from Squirrel Hill and I walked over to campus to see what was going on in the cluster. |
Monday, July 24, 2006
5:07 p.m.
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Today the eight-bit counter of my life flips to 0001 0111, which is only five less than the number of birthday e-mails and IMs I've received. I am seriously floored by this — I expected maybe a few notes from Case people, but I've been getting Facebook "has written on your wall" e-mails from CMU kids and old high school people all day. Such a simple thing, but it's making me feel really nice inside... and also kind of bad for not figuring out everyone else's birthdays and sending them messages too. For the benefit of everyone I'll skip the fossilizing-by-the-day talk that's common on these occasions and speak of things in the approved chronological order. Yesterday I slept in until almost 11:00 and then spent some time working around the previously-mentioned heart-attack-inducing MEMT problem. I remembered — in the shower Saturday morning, of all places — that I had written a little client in the fall to interface with the MEMT server; by yesterday afternoon I had tweaked it to read and write differently so I could use it for actual runs. When that was working, I biked off to campus to start work on the Tartan style guide, which I get to update and reissue for the fall, and then popped by Scotland Yard to play a game of ITG with Alan V. Somehow my brain has analyzed the game a bit since I played last: I was able to get a 41 percent on a Level 2 song and a 4 percent on a Level 3. This progress is encouraging. It was 4:30 when I left the UC, so I decided it was a good time for a bit of a bike ride. I biked what I expect will become my usual loop: down the Panther Hollow Trail to the Eliza Furnace, then across the Smithfield Street Bridge to the South Side Trail, which I took to its official end before turning around, crossing the river again at the Hot Metal Bridge, and going home from there. The sky started getting really dark on my way back up from the South Side, and by the time I was in Panther Hollow it was raining, so I had to take refuge in the CIC garage for about 10 minutes. I also stopped at the store so I could have bread to make a sandwich for dinner. At 7:30 I went back to the cluster for the habitual Sunday evening gaming. Not because I play UT or anything, but sometimes people start more interesting games or go to half-price afterwards. Wrong on both counts yesterday, in fact, which let me get a whole lot of work done and be home by 10:15. |
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
3:12 p.m.
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Yesterday turned out to be a very interesting day, mostly because of my overactive brain. KGB as usual at 5:30 — now that my advisor's out of town there's no danger of last-minute sniping or 4:00 meetings that last two hours — and then people started to talk about dinner plans. I was definitely interested in a good birthday dinner, but I think I would have picked something less expensive and more outdoors than the Union Grill, which is where I went with Lea, Akiva, Dave, Devon, and Rachel (called Jordan). The food was quite good, even though the meal ended kind of badly. When a few people ordered dessert, I asked for tea, thinking I could drink it nice and slowly while people ate their pie or whatever. Well, the tea (regular old Lipton) arrived late, just about when people were finishing dessert, and it cost $1.85; then everyone except Jordan ran off, leaving me slightly bewildered and abandoned with most of a cup of tea down at one end of the table. I drank it quickly and left as well. I remembered, on my way back to campus, that the book I'd requested at the public library had come in, so I reversed course and walked back to get it. In front of the art museum I crossed Dave and Lea, who decided to come with me, and so we all wandered about the first floor of the library for a half an hour until closing time. The book I got was "The Time Traveler's Wife," by Audrey Niffenegger, and the weather was so nice on my walk back to campus that I decided to stake out a spot on the Cut and start reading. I installed myself on a picnic table just in front of CFA around 8:20 and opened the cover. People who liked the sort of brain-breaking paradoxes in "All You Zombies," that story that I posted a link to some time ago, will probably also enjoy "The Time Traveler's Wife." Such an interesting premise, although I did find at least one mistake in the editing and one style point that annoys me. I came to myself momentarily when it got dark — long enough to open my laptop, check the time and my e-mail, and zmap the cluster — and then went in again for another 30 or 40 minutes. This is the kind of book that, at least at the beginning, sucks you up and makes you forget reality. (This used to happen to me a lot in middle and high school: I'd come home with a new book, go upstairs to read it kneeling on the floor at my bed, and get completely subsumed until my mom started calling me for dinner.) Last night, when I finally roused myself to the point that I remembered I should at some point go home, it was not immediately obvious to my mind that I was a real person with my own past, present, and future. I think, in fact, if you'd asked me what the date was, it would have taken me a minute to figure it out, birthday notwithstanding. Today I've been terribly lazy and distracted. I got up late after reading past 1 a.m. last night and have been floundering around my apartment trying to work, failing, but not quite getting up the motive force to go to campus and therefore not getting a whole lot accomplished. I keep thinking about running into instances of my past and future selves, and what I might say to a younger me and when and why. Reversing things a bit, I can imagine that, if we were to meet, my younger self might be able to tell me a thing or two — stuff about myself that I've forgotten or changed over the years. I know there must be some sort of a dividing line between my little-kid personality and the way I am now, but I'm not entirely sure where to draw it. Beginning of college, probably, or maybe junior-ish year of high school. It would be fun to check in with me in fourth grade: I certainly remember stuff that happened to me when I was that age, but I've lost the idea of what it was like to actually be nine and understand life on that level and not have the slightest clue about what I was going to turn into later on. Ah, yikes, what an interesting thought... |
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
9:21 p.m.
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From the point of view of work, I suppose yesterday is what you can only call a wash-out. Made very slow progress on everything and didn't even care. Around 5:30 I ate a quick dinner sort of thing and then waited until 6:30 to make an excursion to the Waterfront to purchase "Animaniacs, Volume 1," which was relased yesterday. It should be pointed out that the task of driving to the Waterfront, especially with the Homestead Grays Bridge all under construction, is enough to almost kill the fun of waiting months for this day and finally see it arrive: it took me 35 minutes of stop-and-go silliness to get to Target. I've said before what I think about Pittburgh's street system: where other cities have a traffic engineering department, Pittsburgh has an old janitor sitting in a broom closet. I cannot possibly imagine what person is zany enough to think that any motorist traveling on any street in this city shouldn't be able to drive more than 500 feet without hitting a stop sign or a red light. But I guess that's an argument for a separate post. The "Animaniacs" was duly purchased from Best Buy in the end, and I brought it back here to eat some more food and start poking through it. I still have not convinced Debian that it wants to play DVDs for me, so I had to use the Windows laptop plugged into my little external speaker system. Later on I went running, and then about 10 minutes after I got back Rebecca IMed and asked if I was up for doing anything. We ended up going to campus, taking over 4623, and watching the first three "Animaniacs" episodes (in order, so we don't lose our place). Then it was 1 a.m. and time to go home. I did a bit better today at work, but still didn't feel too great about it. What I think I really need is to find something interesting and actually get interested in it for a while. I've been thinking I want to write a better pre-processing script for my journal text, build a language model, and have a go at generating sentences, but this has almost nothing to do with what I should be working on so I haven't done it. I think one of the ways I differ from "straight-up" or "normal" CS people is that they're essentially hacking on things all the time, and I seem to get bored rather easily and haven't the appetite or aptitude for larger-scale tinkering. "What are you doing in grad school, then?" you might ask, and that's indeed a question I've often posed to myself — mostly on days like yesterday when I go running late at night and start to doubt my self-worth. (After I stopped pondering time travel, the philosophic question of the evening was "What have I got to contribute to this world, or what is my defining skill?" Answer unresolved.) Ah well; a week and a half until I get my vacation! |
Friday, July 28, 2006
6:43 p.m.
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I guess it's Friday again. Very little of interest to report this week. I spent 13 hours working yesterday (11 a.m. to midnight) in order to finish up the MEMT combinations for the MT '06 evaluation, so I suppose that should cancel out the lack of work on Tuesday. Next week I can finally move on to the stuff I've been forced to neglect for the past week and a half, which will be rather nice. Still feeling relatively lazy, though, even in writing this — I bet the problem is that I spend so very little time outside, especially when the sun's up. Wednesday night I went for a medium-length walk all around Shadyside, up and down those little one-way streets that cross Walnut, and found rows and rows of very lovely houses all hidden away, but that's not the same thing as going out during the early evening and running or spending a few hours in the park on a Saturday afternoon. I have the impression that I can actually feel my eyes getting worse every time I get up from a computer screen. |
Saturday, July 29, 2006
11:06 p.m.
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Ah, a good day — and a good night last night, too. Alan was hosting movies at his house again, so I stopped work around 6:00 and headed up to the 5207 cluster where everyone else was gathering. (Our usual hangout, Wean 5203, is closed for upgrading or maintenance.) It looked like it was going to rain when Alan arrived at 7:30, so I accepted a place in mstephen's car and left my bike on campus. The pre-pizza fare this time was "Animaniacs," since I had thought to bring my DVD with me, which met with general favor and a good number of laughs. Someone thought the animation really "showed its age," but I guess I've got nothing more recent to compare it to. I've always thought, though, that current animated movies are filled with mostly horribly angular and blocky computer-generated shapes, and I much prefer the rounder and more detailed frames of the old Disney stuff. One thing that doesn't follow this trend, thankfully, is "The Incredibles," which was our first feature after the pizza arrived. It ended just before midnight, and then we were treated to "V for Vendetta," which is apparently not out on DVD yet but was brought by one of Alan's friends who works at Blockbuster. I hadn't seen it before, so it was a good time. We all agreed that the fight scene with V and the police officers in the disused Tube station was done very badly: gallons of really really fake-looking pinkish CG blood, plus wispy light-trail after-images from the daggers, didn't fit in with the rest of the movie at all. An interesting thing is that, in my typical "I ignore pop culture" fashion, I had no clue the leading actress was Natalie Portman until someone mentioned it about halfway through the film. I think it immediately changed my perception of her British accent. Before, I just assumed the actress was British, and of course I never would have questioned her speech as anything but authentic. I wasn't even listening to it closely, but if something had been said that sounded weird to me I'm sure I would have accepted it as correct and my own notions as faulty. As soon as I knew, though, that the actress was American and the accent therefore assumed, I think I was more on the lookout for things that sounded "wrong." This amuses me — aside from laughing at what you might call this paradigm shift, I have to semi-seriously ask myself what business I have setting myself up as an authority on British English. This morning, after going to bed at 2:45 a.m., I was just reaching that state of "I should really get up now" around 11:15 when Alisa called and asked if I could help drive the last of her stuff from her old apartment in Shadyside to her new one in Wilkinsburg. In half an hour I was ready to go, so we made the trip without incident and I got to have a look at her absolutely wonderful one-bedroom with front yard, porch, and back garden. A lady at the corner of the street was having a yard sale, so we stopped in there to look around. She was selling all sorts of old books for just 50¢ each, so I gave in to temptation and came home with four of them. The most interesting: a 150-year-old monster "Works of Lord Byron" with "Helen E. Doyle, Hancock, Delaware Co., N.Y., June 1856" inscribed on the flyleaf. (Hee hee — I have always wanted to use that word!) Alisa offered me lunch (thank you!), so we went to the excellent Square Café on Braddock Avenue a few blocks south of Forbes. Think chrome and low horizontal lines (like those old '50s and '60s cars) meets the modern colors of a snappy back-to-school ad, and that's a decent approximation of what the place looks like. Similar for the food: good pancakes and eggs on the breafast menu, but also a long list of specialty coffee drinks and impressive teas. The meal was quite nice, and after I drove Alisa home I came back here and started leafing through my books. I really should have gone to Free Ride, but it was already 3:00 when I got back and then I had this great big stack of books just daring me to be distracted. A short while later, Ross called because he was standing out front and wanted to show me his cool new bike that people at Iron City put together for him, so I was glad I stayed home. |
Monday, July 31, 2006
10:33 p.m.
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It was hot enough yesterday afternoon that I was able to convince myself to go swimming in the UC for the first time in who knows how many months. I managed 750 yards, but my arms were a little sore today. As I came out of the locker room I noticed it was raining rather... a lot outside, with a heavy dose of thunder and lightning, so I went up to the Tartan office to work on the style guide while it was storming. From the windows on the third floor I could see a group of people playing football on the Cut right through it all; when they ran on the grass the splashes of water came about up to their knees. I'd forgotten to check the radar map before I left home, so when things cleared up and I made it back to my apartment I found wet spots in the carpet underneath both bedroom windows. Back to the cluster in time for the usual gaming at 7:30. Not too many people showed up, so instead of Starcraft or whatever was supposed to be scheduled we played Tetrinet. It appears Jordan and Tyler get even more excited over this game than I do: we played for around two hours before the rest of us kind of wanted to quit. Then half-price at India Garden at 10:30 in a group of nine. I think it was the first time I'd been there since the fall semester; they seem to have redecorated the walls and reprinted the menus. Still loud TVs playing Indian music videos, but not quite as unbearable as I remember finding it before. Home and to bed around 12:30. I am again falling into the trap of spending huge amounts of money on eating out. Today after KGB I went with Lea, Akiva, Jordan, and Dave to an Asian-ish noodles place I've already forgotten the name of. (It's on the left side of Atwood, just past the cross-street leading towards the big concrete-building plaza thing at Pitt.) Ivan joined us shortly afterwards. During dinner, people started listing the classes they're taking this fall; I keep finding more and more interesting ones that I can't possibly sign up for because they have nothing to do with my degree. Lea had mentioned a book-binding class once before, and now she's enrolled in calligraphy as well. I think I get two electives, but one of them was used on my research project last fall and the second is going to be French this coming semester — everything else has to be an LTI class. Chris's post to Live Journal this evening turned into poison for my productivity, as I spent an hour and a half monkeying around with silly math rather than doing the MEMT work I should have been spending time on. The plaything involved is that old function that maps an integer (a natural number, I suppose) to the number of letters (or characters) in its name. That's to say f(17) = 9 because "seventeen" has nine letters in it. I got interested in drawing the finite state diagram for as many values as possible, simplifying it by creating equivalence classes for numbers above nine. (Under this scheme, 17 and 41 are in the same class because they're both above nine and f(17) = f(41) = 9.) The diagram ends up looking like a tree, with 4 at the root and all the pointers reversed; with the equivalence classes it's actually not that complicated. It took me until 123, for example, to find a number at depth six: 123 -> 24 -> 11 -> 6 -> 3 -> 5 -> 4. Also a number of neat patterns and patterns within patterns. Finished "The Time Traveler's Wife" on Saturday night. A sort of unsatisfactory ending, but I can imagine the author wanting it that way to fit in with the rest of the book. I'm a bit surprised to say I don't think I found the prose all that remarkable, but the premise was totally fascinating and the execution good — one of those things I found myself reading for hours at a time because I wanted to find out what happens next. So now I need something else to take along on the bus to Montreal next week. I have James Joyce's "Ulysses" that I picked up at the yard sale on Saturday, but I'm kind of afraid that's too heavy a work for a boring bus ride. Any suggestions out there? |
Thursday, August 3, 2006
12:15 a.m.
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Thus ends July; welcome to August, which has so far announced its presence with a pair of 91-degree days. My apartment has responded as usual, but I think I'm getting used to it. I can now live perfectly comfortably at 82 degrees, and can sleep at 86 or 87 as long as a fan is blowing over the bed. Last night, though, faced with a 91-degree bedroom, I moved out to the couch, turned on the air conditioner window unit, and was able to bring the living room down to 80 in time for bed. Before that I spent three hours at Free Ride working on my bike — I found a much nicer way to get there from campus that avoids all the four-lane roads with heavy traffic. The only difficult part is getting across Penn Avenue at Lexington. After consulation with Johnny, one of the volunteers, I started the evening by degreasing (ugly word in print, that) my chain and scrubbing off all the rust with steel wool. I wore through two balls of the stuff, by which I mean I completely shredded them into metal shavings by repeated rubbing. Later on I dropped a wrench on the floor, and when I picked it up the ends were covered in little filings sticking straight out like in those magnet experiments you do in elementary school. I also managed to get them all over my hands and in and around my fingernails, some of which still remain after repeated hand-washing and a shower this morning. When the chain was cleaned up, I fell to fixing up and adjusting the rear shifter; a guy called Will helped me figure out what was wrong with it. When he asked me if I needed help I thought he looked kind of familiar and almost asked him if he went to CMU; today I crossed him on the Newell-Simon bridge and proved my conjecture correct anyway. I needed to get work done tonight, so around 6:00 I went round to the cluster and started working on my code from there. (Sometimes the slight distraction of other people is enough to keep me happy and working for hours on end.) Tyler eventually proposed dinner, so he, cpride, Kelly, and I went to Lulu's around 7:45. Incidental discussion about computer science at the table turned into the study of what disciplines are related to what other ones, which led to all of us going up the the eighth floor of Wean and drawing out a relatedness graph of all the majors at CMU on the big whiteboards there. (If you think CS is based on math, philosophy, and psychology, for example, you draw each of those subjects as nodes and put edges linking CS to the other three. Repeat until you run out of majors.) Tyler has digital photos of our final results, which I will post if I get a copy. Kelly also got us interested in drawing graphs for various social groups and clubs on campus, and that led into the discussion of various "web of shame" projects in which nodes representing people who have kissed (or had sex...) are connected by edges. This had the unexpected side effect of giving me something interesting to think about in terms of my own position, and also strengthened my impression that I'm just now starting to pick out the more fine-grained social structures within the KGB/CS community here. As a somewhat disconnected grad student, I don't think I've much thought about the sort of core "Three Musketeers"-style groups that Susannah, Brian, and I formed during our early years at Case. A certain nostalgia for being in a place where I really know people followed. And I suppose I ought to say, for completeness, that our discussions of social relationships got us into the realm of online purity tests, and then all four of us went back to the cluster to try a particular one for which various other people's scores were known. I predictably received one of the highest scores known within KGB. All in all, a very interesting and fun evening... |
Thursday, August 3, 2006
9:42 p.m.
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How and why do I write so much? Last night I finally resurrected my old written journal (800 pages in those half-sized spiral notebooks, covering from May 1999 until just before I switched to online in October 2004) and decided to start putting some things in there instead of in these posts. That means that now would be a good time for people to give me suggestions about what they want to keep reading and what they'd rather have me save for the privacy of my own desk drawer. Hopefully the size of the public posts will decrease a bit if I can find the right balance. At any rate, this may be my last entry for quite a while — my vacation is starting tomorrow afternoon, and I plan to make good use of it. First up is a camping trip with Case people at West Branch State Park in Ohio: Paul, Kathi, and Vicki are coming to pick me up right from campus, and then that one car with all of us eastern people will head to the campground to meet whoever else is coming. Kathi and Vicki, last I heard, were interested in doing boating stuff, so I may have... interesting adventures to relate once we get back. (I don't know if this online journal started early enough for me to have written about the time Dan and I shared a jet ski at Mosquito Lake, but I'm not too anxious to repeat the experiment.) I would kind of like to go swimming, though, and get some sun into my pale nerd skin. We should be back from camping by Sunday night, but Monday Rebecca and I are leaving for Montreal, where we will hopefully meet up with mrwright and run wild and francophone through the city for a few days. (I'm not too sure about getting along as easily there as I have in the past. Dan came into the LTI two days ago to show his dad around, and we tried speaking in French for a bit; I have really lost a lot of conversation skills.) Tuesday through Thursday will be the tourism days, and then we get back on a Greyhound Thursday night and get back to Pittsburgh Friday afternoon. And Don't Forget: People who want fun multilingual postcards should send me their addresses (or indication of desire) and languages of choice by Monday noon-ish. |
Sunday, August 6, 2006
3:36 p.m.
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I'm back from camping, a little bit earlier than I expected today since we packed up everything and left the campground by about 10:00. The adventure began Friday, when I was supposed to wake up at 5:30 and be at work by 7 or 7:30 in order to make up for leaving in the middle of the afternoon. Ha ha, very funny — I was on the point of getting out of bed at 6:30 and again at 7:30, but didn't actually succeed until after 8:30, and then the usual morning stuff plus finishing packing kept me away from my desk until 11:00. So it was a very short day, since the eastern carpool was coming to get me around 2:00. They were thankfully more than an hour late, due to traffic, but even then I kept them waiting about 10 minutes while I finished up a totally unexpected MEMT combination that ARL called up and asked for around noon. Eventually we arrived at West Branch with supplies and some food for dinner. There were only six of us (me, Paul, Kathi, Vicki, Kathi's boyfriend Kyle, and Bret) for the first night, since the others elected to come in Saturday morning. After we ate hot dogs and smores, we sat around and talked for a while. At one point, Bret, who was sitting on the other side of the picnic table, said something like "Hey, check out that kid in the camper over there," and at the same time I became aware of rhythmic thumping noises coming from the indicated site. We all turned around and looked, and saw — no, not that, although the guy did have his shirt off — someone roughly our own age hopping up and down in place with his eyes fixed on something in front of him. The motions were pretty identifiable; he was playing DDR. With much commenting on different people's definition of "roughing it," we all had a pretty good laugh. I tend to get up rather early when I'm camping, but Saturday we had no choice as the entire campground was ripped from the cradle of sleep by a horrible screaming kid at 7:30. I couldn't tell whether the voice was a boy's or a girl's, or even what age it was, but it did nothing but howl and scream "I don't want to!" at full volume for about five minutes. After that we were all awake and wishing fur duct tape. After Ben, Erin, Amber, and Ben's friend Mark arrived in various cars, we had pancakes for breakfast and decided what to do for the day. We split into two groups; Kathi, Vicki, Kyle, Paul, Bret, and I all drove across the lake to the marina to see about renting a boat, while the others got out Mark's GPS unit and went geocaching. Everyone else in my group wanted to go water skiing, but the only remaining boat cost $300 for the day and we certainly didn't want to pay that much. Instead we went to the beach and played frisbee in the water. The afternoon was nice and lazy. We played a few games of Fluxx, and then I fell asleep in Erin's hammock for a while and watched some of the others play a game called Munchkin that lasted approximately half a century until it was time to make dinner. Susannah stopped by for the meal, but then went home again because she was feeling sick. After vegetable chili, corn bread, and apple cake, there was much talking and hilarity for the rest of the night, including trying to answer the question "What do you want to be when you're older" in one word. (Amber: "Can I use some hyphens and say 'carried-in-a-litter'?") We also got to laugh over old professors and TAs. Tonight I have to go copy edit at The Tartan for the "Beyond Orientation" book we're putting together with A Phi O, and then I have the morning to get ready for Montreal. The bus to New York leaves from the Greyhound statio at 1:15, and by 6:30 Tuesday morning I should be walking down the rue Ste.-Cathérine and speaking French. |
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