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ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
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Saturday, August 12, 2006
12:42 p.m.
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And we're back. I will probably end up adding a place for Montreal on my Trips page, once I have the time to write out a long and detailed entry on the last five days, but I guess I could give some quick results here to show that I'm alive and had a pretty good time. The 17- or 18-hour bus rides weren't all that bad, although the buses were crowded and sleeping conditions weren't all that great. I forgot, though, how easily I can occupy myself by reading the road signs as they pass. Going up, we were routed through Philadelphia and New York before hitting Montreal; coming back, we stopped at New York, Mount Laurel (N.J.), Philadelphia, Harrisburg, Monroeville, and finally Pittsburgh. Our driver from Philadelphia homeward didn't seem to be too knowledgeable: first she passed the turnpike exit on I-83 south of Harrisburg and didn't realize it for 10 miles, and then in Pittsburgh she drove to where the Greyhound station used to be and was kind of confused until someone at the front of the bus directed her to the new location. I'm sure I'll write more about the trip back later on, but that's a start. Montreal itself was very nice to see in the summer — and in tourist season. There's a whole mess of stuff to do along the Esplanade du Vieux-Port, for one thing, that I never even noticed on previous trips. I feel like I was more in tune to the English-speaking subcurrents this time, since Rebecca and I spoke English to each other and to mrwright's family, who are all anglophone. I've always tried to be as francophone as possible in Montreal — including pronouncing all the street and place names in French, even in an English context — but I guess spending time in English mode with English Montrealers showed me that real people aren't necessarily so elitist. I also found I needed to apply a few corrections to my French pronunciations: the "s" in "René Lévesque" is apparently silent (silly pre-18th-century spellings...) and "Sainte Cathérine" in fact does not have an accent aigu — it's just plain old "Sainte Catherine," which I find much more difficult to say. On the plus side, linguistically, I find I have preserved my ability to use French in at least semi-scripted situations, like ordering lunch in a restaurant or checking in to the hostel, and I think I had less English spoken to me than on my two previous trips. No chance to practice real conversation, though, so that test will have to wait a few weeks until classes start. I ran out of Canadian stamps and Canadian money to buy more with after dispatching six postcards on Wednesday. I have more blank cards with me, though, so the remaining requests will just be served from the United States and mailed by Monday morning. |
Monday, August 14, 2006
11:30 p.m.
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Yay for a fun weekend to round out my vacation! Of course, this means that the remaining postcards didn't get written and sent, that my laundry remains unwashed, and that the grocery shopping remains undone, but that's OK. Saturday night was Rebecca's going-away party, which had the adjunct goal of eating all her leftover food. There were perhaps 15 people there, so after I while I suggested playing Psychiatrist. The last time I really played was at Vicky's 18th birthday party (oh high school), so it was long overdue. We discovered a horrible flaw almost instantly: playing Psychiatrist with CMU SCS logic nerds is way different than playing with suburban teenagers due to the CS nerds' invariable tendancy to approach everything as a mathematical puzzle. Eventually we developed a few modifications that made things run smoother — sorry I'm being so vague about actual description, but you can't really play Psychiatrist unless there's at least one person in the group who doesn't know how it works, and I don't want to spoil any possible future games with you all. After a few rounds we switched to Never Have I Ever (or the 10 Fingers game) until I decided to go home around... 5 a.m. I later heard that whoever was left went to breakfast at Pamela's in the morning. Vicki had called Saturday afternoon and wanted to get together for Settlers or something on Sunday, and I volunteered to round up another person or two and drive out to Monroeville between 12 and 12:30. It was thus that an Alisa running on two hours' sleep and I appeared at Vicki's high-class apartment yesterday around 45 minutes after noon. Seriously, with all the amenities at this apartment complex, Vicki's place is like living in Veale — the three of us played two rounds of Settlers on a table next to the pool, running inside every now and then to visit the water cooler. We also sat around Vicki's living room and played with her super-cool cat. It got kind of evening-ish, so we called in a take-out order to a Chinese/Japanese place nearby and had dinner too. At 8:00 it was back to the city, and I went directly to a dessert party in Sherbrooke to celebrate Lea's birthday. She was turning 20; I started feeling kind of ancient until it was discovered that I was actually only third oldest, thanks to the presence of Abe and Brian. We had cake, pie, and brownies, then watched a few episodes of "Look Around You" off of the Internet. Work today in due course, which wasn't so bad. It seems our MEMT code is not what's holding up a gigantic demo that IBM wants to give on Thursday, and I got n-gram order information successfully returned from the suffix array by the time I went home. The big news, though, is that during my meeting with Alon he asked if I wanted to go to the NIST MT workshop in September. Very much so; I've been waiting for months to do something more grad-student-like than sit at my desk and meet with my advisor. Alon said he would take care of the registration details, so it looks like I'll have something quite interesting to do during the second week of classes. Sites du Jour. I always seem to come across wonderfully random stuff in my wanders across cyberspace; maybe I should start posting some of them. In the last few days, I've learned that people objected to an engraved plaque affixed to Pioneer 10 and 11 and found that the French version of the "Animaniacs" theme is about 95 percent unintelligible and 100 percent weird. |
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
10:05 p.m.
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Here's something for you: if you want an interesting workout, try spending two and a half hours lifting bikes. That's what I did at Free Ride this evening. A girl called Max and I hung newly-donated bikes onto hooks about 10 feet off the ground, a pursuit at which my left arm is strangely better than my right. (I also discovered that it's easier to hang a bike by its back tire than its front.) The job had the nice side benefit of not letting me get as dirty as I usually do when I'm at Free Ride. Today begins Year Two of living in Pittsburgh, and 2006 will be the first year since 2000 that I haven't had to pack up all my crap and move it somewhere else. Creepy, isn't it? Yesterday I updated my "professional" website and my Andrew .plan file to say that I'm a second-year master's student. After a year at CMU, I suppose I still possess all the sentiments I wrote about in my entry of January 17 (after one semester) — perhaps even more so. Then, I estimated the number of undergrads of my acquaintence as exceeding the number of grad students by a ratio of three to one (there's an odd sentence structure for you!); if anything, the proportions are even more lopsided now. Every now and then something tings in my mind and says "You know, you should really get to know the people in your department, eh? Build up some professional relationships," but I feel OK with ignoring it most of the time. I felt perfectly at home discussing accents and speech patters with Chris and Matt at the dessert party on Sunday. I've been thinking more and more in recent months that I'd like to stay on for the Ph.D. program at the LTI, if I can get accepted and find a project. I've probably mentioned before that I don't feel like I've really done anything yet, and on top of that there are more classes I want to take, more time I want to spend with fun KGB people, and more editions of The Tartan I want to edit. My great dilemma in life is that I can never decide on one thing I want to do: I persist in the delusion that I can be a news reporter, copy editor, language technology researcher, half-price food addict, and general student-about-campus all at the same time, and now that I've found a situation that (more or less) lets me have a taste of all of these without making a final career or lifestyle decision, I feel inclined to stick with it for as long as I can. So we raise a glass of virtual champagne to the first year of living in real-life limbo, and hope that there are many more to follow. |
Thursday, August 17, 2006
4:32 p.m.
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Boring day at work today — IBM keeps connecting to the MEMT service and sending new CASes to translate, so I'm kind of afraid to try out new development work for fear of crashing the machine again. (There is precedent for this: perhaps six times now I've taken down our server just by running bad C++ code on it from an AFS partition.) The best I can do is work on my code and make sure it compiles. Instead, then:— I have two late nights in a row to report, and tonight will almost certainly make three. On Tuesday I went to the house where Chrisamaphone now lives to play Scruples with some people. It was kind of weird in that I feel like I know certain people from their Live Journals more than real life. It turns out I'm pretty bad at the game, but we all had great fun laughing at the 1986 edition's questions. (One of the best was something like: "Your teenage daughter is dating a person of a different race. Do you tell her to break it off?") Home a bit after 1:00. Yesterday, ambivalently faced with another planned half-price outing to Fuddle, I had the excellent idea to call Joe Mama's and see if they were open again for half, and it turns out they were! So I ignored the mess in my kitchen, zipped down to the cluster on my bike, and joined up with Tyler, jgrafton, cpride, and Omar for food. Came home with the impression that I need to stop stampeding into conversations and not say so much unless I have a good reason to contribute. Then I washed some dishes and talked with Nicole online until 2:00. And tonight is going to be an... interesting outing to see "Snakes on a Plane" at the Waterfront at 10:00. I haven't been to the Waterfront theatre yet, and I'm kind of unexcited about paying $9 for a movie, but I'm hoping that the group dynamics will make it a fun experience. A whole lot of KGB people are going, and expectations for the film are rather low, so I suspect that if the theatre's not too full there will be a certain amount of ex tempore ridicule going on. Something random: I've dreamed in English, French, and sign language before; after last night I guess I can add "speaking in a British accent" to the list. In this dream I had last night, I was trying to demonstrate a sort of outdoor science experiment, using something rather like backpacking stoves, and for some reason I decided to do the whole thing in a British accent. It sounded pretty good, as far as I can recall.... |
Friday, August 18, 2006
10:53 p.m.
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I guess I should report on last night's movie since some people expressed interest in hearing about it. I drove my car to the Waterfront since people were worried about missing the last bus back, and I managed to get to the theatre, still ticketless, at 9:45. Everyone else had bought theirs online, for like $9 plus a $1 convenience charge, but I decided that I was ambivalent enough about seeing the thing that I'd just not see it if they didn't have tickets left right before the show. I win: I asked about a student discount and got in for $7.75. Then I saw Alan and Dave in the snack line, who told me that a whole bunch of people were in the theatre already. So I went in as well. It could be that I've just led a sheltered and pathetic life, but Theatre 12 at the Waterfront Loews is unquestionably the biggest movie room I've ever been in. I'd say the screen was more than 60 feet wide, and the seating was divided into sections almost like at a ball park. The ceiling was enormously high up, which let the rows of seats stretch back far enough to make an upper deck and a press box if the Loews people had wanted one. KGB had staked out three rows in a side section, about 18 seats overall, so I sat down in an unoccupied easychair sort of thing and waited for the movie to start. I noted that the entire audience looked to be composed of college students. The movie opens with spectacular shots of Hawaii, made even more striking by being projected on a 60-foot screen, but after that "Snakes on a Plane" boiled down to one word is "overblown." Overly dramatic shots of the plane flying through a thunderstorm and getting thrashed about, sudden musical crescendos timed to make you jump, and so so many snake bite setups that had me thinking "No, they're not actually going to do this, are they? I mean— Yep, they did." A few errors, like the tiny cockpit somehow being on both the plane's lower and upper levels, and, as someone or other pointed out, the characters are remarkably good at producing full-color sketches using nothing put a plain old No. 2 pencil. I expect it's going to turn into one of those movies that groups of high schoolers watch on a Friday night to laugh at and make fun of, rather like B horror movies from the '80s or the second new "Star Wars." Or perhaps it already is one of those. There was loud cheering in the theatre whenever any of the necessary ingredients (a plane, the snakes, Samuel L. Jackson) appeared on screen, a great round of applause when the snakes were finally set loose, and a general yelling out loud of the line that was added to the film expressly because of the Internet hype. I joined in on the first two and laughed a whole bunch. So, final recommendation: see it in a group for fun if you're feeling bored, but certainly not for any serious reason. You won't find a whole lot of plot or characterization to analyze. |
Saturday, August 19, 2006
8:33 p.m.
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Let's see... yesterday I tried running down to the Oakland farmers' market after work; that was a disappointment. Only five or so little stands set up, and no summer berries. I have been waiting all summer for the prices of blackberries, raspberries, cherries, and blueberries to go down — which I expect they should do, when the things are season — but it is now the middle of August and Giant Eagle still persists in selling six ounces of blackberries or raspberries, a pint of blueberries, or a pound of cherries for $3.99, and this, I say, is too much. Especially for the blackberries and raspberries. I guess it's quite possible that fruit in Pittsburgh is just more expensive than in Cleveland. After coming home and making some quick dinner, I spent almost the whole evening learning about PGP. I have a key now, if anyone cares. Today I slept in, went shopping, and then headed to the Tartan office to work on this year's style guide. While there, it starting raining a bit, and a few minutes later we had another great storm on our hands. Exactly the kind of storm, in fact, that trapped me in the Tartan office several weeks ago while it soaked my carpet and kitchen floor back home because I'd left the windows open. Same result this time, when I finally made it back around 7:00. I stopped in at the cluster on the way back home, incidentally, since zmap isn't working on the new FC3 Andrew UNIX servers, and saw edanaher with crazy-long hair. (I was just thinking about getting mine cut, actually, now that it's been more than five months since that awful salon experience back in March. And when it gets too long it parts itself in the middle automagically and leaves the front all stringy and weird looking.) At home I ate cereal for dinner; with my heat-death apartment again at 87° I wasn't really in the mood to use the stove or oven. Just when I was wondering what I was going to do tonight, the phone rang and it was my sister calling. She and her boyfriend were supposed to be backpacking in the Allegheny National Forest this weekend, but they kind of got rained out today and decided they didn't want to spend another night in the woods. So they are now headed here for the night. We may be heading to Joe Mama's or something for half-price; I don't suppose they'd mind some company if anyone reads this in time and is interested. |
Sunday, August 20, 2006
9:41 a.m.
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I woke up around 8:15 from one of the most symbolic dreams I've ever had. In it, I was admitted to a sort of hospice center in Canada on January 26, then suddenly woke up there on the morning of March 27 having been asleep or in a coma or something for two months. During the intervening time, however, I had (also?) been up and functional as a sort of junior member and friend of the hospice staff. I had learned new outdoor sporting activities, picked up three more foreign languages, and apparently become the darling of all the adults working at this center. Then the situation shifted a bit, and it wasn't actually me who had been awake through the two months; it was a separate copy of myself, and he along with all the other hospice workers were coming to a little office (where I already was) for a sort of staff picnic. I saw the group come up to the building through the window and saw me with them — except it was a seven- or eight-year-old me, dressed in a grey and brown zoot suit thing cut so loosely that only a gangster or a spoiled child could wear it. When they came into the building, I saw that Kid Me was carrying a Linux laptop. I smiled and said something to him in French, and his response was "Wow, your French is bad." Rebuffed, I followed him into the main room where all the adults were, and the kid started talking to one of them in a language that sounded like Greek. But then I saw him talking to someone else; their faces were quite close together, and the kid kept spitting into the adult's face as he (the kid) talked. The adult told him to stop, but the kid wouldn't. Then the kid was drinking a can of pop, burped loudly, and asked if I could do that. I said I wasn't really good at burping contests, and then one of the more laid-back or alternative adults — who'd been one of Kid Me's closer friends, it seems — burped really long and really loudly. A different adult, who was more serious, said "Well, there goes my sunshine," a remark that in context I interpreted to mean that he didn't think Kid Me was all that great anymore. So there's a moral of the story if I ever heard one. At first, I'm thinking that this other version of myself is pretty lucky (five languages, Linux laptop, outdoor athletics; all picked up in two months, etc.), but when I actually meet him he turns out to be a rude and unpolished little kid. And, compared with my own actual self, not everyone thinks the alternate version is better. I think I want to play with this dream a bit and turn it into a decent work of fiction. The plot and reason for existence, which I always find to be the two hardest facets of writing something, have already been given; from there I can handle characters and scenes without too much trouble, I think. |
Monday, August 21, 2006
11:33 p.m.
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Fun weekend. My sister and her boyfried arrived on schedule Saturday night, and we went down to half-price at Joe Mama's. Met up with some CMU people, so I got to introduce my sister Chris to Chris and Chris. (The other Chris wasn't back yet.) Another point in favor of disambiguation by Andrew IDs. We played several hilarious rounds of Eat Poop You Cat (like Telephone, but with alternating pictures and captions), one of which I think I need to scan and post here. Yesterday, Chris, John, and I ran around campus and Oakland taking pictures. It was an excellent day for it, so I'm expecting pretty decent results when I get the film developed. We ate lunch at Schenley Plaza — decent food, if slightly overpriced. Many more options than your run-of-the-mill hot dog stand. I was walking through the plaza, and that Pitt concrete mass just adjacent, on Friday when a guy walking the other way stopped me and asked if people liked the park. His opinion was that it was better off as a parking lot, making money for the city, instead of something the city had to pay money for to renovate. I said that I really didn't know anything about that, and after saying that one sentence the guy asked me if I was from Ireland. When I replied that I was just from the U.S., he said that I must be from Boston or something. Another round in the Guess Greg's Nationality Game completed, and a new country on the board with one point. Where is he from? We just don't know. Today is summed up by this, from the excellent jcreed: All the first-year kids today are out wearing "Class of 2010" shirts. This is deeply disturbing. 2010 is not a real year, it is the monolith spaceship star-baby future. I quite agree. Yesterday was freshman move-in day, so now the campus is busy again and completely stuffed with what I could almost call little kids wearing orange T-shirts with the above-mentioned year on the back. I mean, these guys were born in 1988 — if I made a Captain Planet reference or something, they would probably greet it with blank stares or whip out their cell phones and send a text message to the nearest infirmary saying that one of their patients had gotten loose. After giving a copy test at the Tartan office this evening, I ended up with a whole lot of other KGB people behind Resnik watching the new freshlings suffer the humiliating ritual of Playfair out on the football field. Brought back interesting memories of the week of August 18, 2001, like all 750 members of the CWRU class of 2005 ignoring the stoplight at Euclid and Adelbert and crossing Euclid Avenue (wider than Forbes) in one big clump en route to our own humiliating ritual of Playfair in Veale. (We let a police car through at one point, but otherwise sort of commandeered the intersection for two or three cycles of the light until we were all across.) |
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
2:14 p.m.
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This week I find that I'm suddenly reverting back to my "school" schedule of going to campus in the morning (well, around 11:00) and not coming back until quite late at night. Monday night, after Playfair and an attempt at finding something else to do, I left campus around 11 p.m.; yesterday, after a game of Starcraft, half-price, and assorted cluster silliness, it was more like 2:30 a.m. The only bad side effects in all of this is that I'm spending a shocking amount of money on food and that my household chores back at the apartment are getting very little attention. Yesterday after work I played my third game of Starcraft; I still really suck at it. Watching edanaher play the game, on the other hand, is an experience akin to standing over the shoulder of a fine concert pianist: he uses keyboard shortcuts so quickly that it almost looks like his left hand is typing normally in IM or something. After the game I hung around in the cluster (5207, since 5203 was still closed) for a while. We're starting to pick up a few new CS-type freshmen, the ones who forewent (weird word...) the parties on the frat quad to mess around on the Linux workstations. One of them in particular, who introduced himself as Matt and could easily pass as jgrafton's younger brother, seemed to be getting Brewer's respect for being less clueless than the typical new kid — and he said he was interested in cryptology. Half-price at Fuddle at the usual time. We were accompanied by Shawn, a friend of Alisa's, who told me about a good ASL book that I'm going to have to find and read now. I'm always excited to find people who like talking about language: I've mostly given up trying to understand some of Brewer's and mrwright's more technical CS discussion, but bring up Northern Cities Shift or PP attachment or language modeling and I find I have a lot to say. I also find I don't feel so much like a dunce, which brings up what I did after half-price. We were kind of hoping for a cluster rave, and were thus glad to find that the 5203 cluster had been opened up again in our absence, but soon the room echoes with outraged complaints when we found that the "upgraded" machines had smaller monitors with worse resolutions and that Gnome was no longer installed. So I got to learn a bit about window managers and desktop environments, and by poking around on the system and listening to what the others were saying I eventually figured out how to variously change mine or get X to crash. Volki tried to show me around Ion, which I didn't like too much, and then Brewer helped me fix a whole lot of things in KDE to make it a little bit easier to work with. Exclamations of shock on all sides when it came to light that I wasn't using bash, and then a barrage of rapid-fire responses when I naïvely asked why everyone hated KDE so much. (Answer: it's too graphical, and therefore too slow and too dependent on the use of the mouse.) Finished adjusting settings and learning about configuration files around 2:30 a.m., and then it was time to sleep. |
Thursday, August 24, 2006
7:45 p.m.
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I seem to be continuing my trend of getting a winter cold every August. So far, at least, this one is relatively weak and only really affects me in the three hours after I wake up. I'm hoping continued consumption of orange juice and extra cups of tea will keep it that way. Yesterday was a completely lost day in terms of productivity. After staying out so late Tuesday, I was totally unable to get up in the morning at any reasonable time, and then I decided to just avoid my desk and stay in my apartment until I went to the Tartan office around 4:00. At 5 we had our first ed staff meeting of the year, followed by my first meeting as part of the editorial board. We will see how this goes: in a normal week I will now have Tartan things to do on five days out of seven, and starting this weekend I'll no longer exist outside of the newspaper office on production Sundays. I went back to the cluster around 10:00 last night, and after playing another game of Starcraft and messing around with window manager settings again, we had a cluster rave. Eight brought a large supply of glow sticks, so we all had fun making cool shapes in the air and playing with the light. There were three freshmen there; two of them looked kind of lost and awkward, probably exactly what I looked like this time last year. I must say that it's very nice to actually know people and be able to talk to them. At one point, some people from Cluster Services came into 5201, turned on the lights in there, and started working for a few seconds until they saw what was going on on the other side of the glass doors. Being, apparently, former or current students, they shut off the lights again on their side and did their work in the dark. They certainly work student hours, at least; this was happening some time between midnight and 1 a.m. After the rave we all went out and wandered round CFA for a bit. And tonight — in about 15 minutes, in fact, — I am going to the KGB orientation scavenger hunt: the event that was my introduction to the KGB last year. (You can find it under August 25, 2005, complete with a few annoying spelling mistakes, on this page in the backfile. One of the freshmen I wrote about was Eight, and the sophomores were edanaher and bohanlon.) I especially like this part near the end of the entry: You should all definitely expect more reports on KGB activities in the future, because they certainly sound like a fun group of people to do things with. Think of late-night editing at The Observer combined with natural freakiness of CS majors and you'll have the right idea. There are in fact a lot of things from last August that make for very interesting and humorous reading now. |
Friday, August 25, 2006
9:17 p.m.
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I keep forgetting to post this wonderful e-mail I got from my DSL provider last Saturday: Effective August 14, 2006, Verizon Online will stop charging the FUSF (Federal Universal Service Fund) recovery fee. [...] The impact of the FUSF fee is as follows: for customers of Verizon Online with service up to 768Kbps, the fee eliminated is $1.25 a month; for customers of Verizon Online with service up to 1.5 Mbps or 3Mbps, the fee eliminated is $2.83 a month [...]. Imagine my delight; I get an extra 13¢ a month now. If I save this up for just over three years, I can go to half-price an extra time. |
Saturday, August 26, 2006
9:25 p.m.
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I've been coming to the conclusion recently that this journal is not as interesting as it might be for all the time I spend writing in it. Today, for example, I could write about the KGB scavenger hunt on Thursday, which my group won, during which two other guys and I counted all the stairs in Wean, and at the end of which we got 250 points for turning in 74 images of buckminsterfullerene, but beyond that there might not be a whole lot to say. I could also spend some time describing a trip I took today with Alisa, Chris, and gwillen to an animal shelter way out on Camp Horne Road so Alisa could get a cat, after which I had a good time eating truck food with and talking to Chris and gwillen, but I suspect the minutae of our driving adventure in Swissvale due to traffic on 376 are probably not of general interest. (Though I will say that Alisa's little kitten is really cute and that it was kind of weird seeing another brown tabby with eyes the exact color as Dusty's used to be.) But these stories rather fall short of the interesting philosophical perspectives or random musings that other people post on their journals and then get 45 comments about. I don't want to bore everyone. So I examine the domestic trivialities of my life at home over the past week or so, and I arrive at the following ponderable question: Why is it that the same product varies so enormously in price over quite a small geographic area? Take, as Example No. 1, a 64-ounce carton of Tropicana orange juice (plus calcium and Vitamin D). Last Saturday I happened to visit both Giant Eagle and Whole Foods in the course of my grocery shopping, and as I recall Giant Eagle sells one of these things for $2.69 regular price, and sometimes two for $5 on sale. Barely a quarter mile away, though, the silly people at Whole Foods are selling the exact same thing for $3.69, as if merely being in close proximity with high-class organic all-natural Earth-friendly hippie fare makes ye olde orange juice better and more valuable. At the drug store today, just across two streets from the Giant Eagle, I saw again the same 64-ounce carton (plus calcium and Vitamin D) marked at $3.99. Intrigued by this bit of comparison shopping, I applied the method more generally this week and discovered that I could save $2 on laundry detergent by walking the tenth of a mile from Eckerd to Giant Eagle, and that I should on no account pay 69¢ a pound for non-organic bananas at Whole Foods when I can get them for 49¢ just down the block. I've done my share of Giant-Eagle-bashing in the past year (mostly because they're not Heinen's), but this time they come out on top. And I say, if the managers at other stores can't be bothered to poke round a bit and find out the proper prices of things, I'm perfectly content to let their stuff remain unsold. |
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
7:27 p.m.
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There will be the obligatory beginning-of-semester post either tonight or tomorrow, but I have a few other non-academic things I'd like to write about first. Played ITG with Alan V. again yesterday — someone had left a credit in the machine, so we ended up playing three rounds. I feel like I'm getting a bit better: I was able to not fail a Level 2 (got a D), get a 40 percent on a Level 3, and get at least a non-zero number on a Level 4. There was a third guy there, so I swapped out with him for one song of our free round and got to watch the two of them play it out. Alan's footsteps sound like fireworks going off on the Fourth of July, and I have no clue how anyone can read and process scrolling arrows that fast. It would be kind of interesting to plug in the letters of a given text and see what plain reading is like. When we were done, Alan gave me some sensible tips about gameplay and then invited me to see what the inside of Fairfax looks like. Answer: a hotel. A cool old one that kind of reminds me of the place I stayed at in Boston when I was visiting the science journalism program at BU. The best part is that they have this old freight elevator with manually-operated doors. You have to pull them open when the car arrived, and then shut the little metal cage behind you once you get in, which means you can actually see the floors moving by as you go up or down. This was especially fun since I had to take my bike up to the eighth floor. A large number of people were gathered in one of the apartments, so we went in and Alan introduced me to some of his friends. They were just about to watch another episode of "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" and invited us to join them. After the episode was finished we pulled out a game called Loaded Questions, which is very roughly Apples to Apples crossed with something like Scruples — the point is to ask everyone else a given question, and then have their written responses read aloud to you so you can guess who came up with each one. The actual fun, much like in Apples to Apples, is due to the fact that everyone is being totally random and zany in the replies. These people were all sorts of fun to play with, as I quickly discovered they were all pretty random and zany by nature and also fans of both horrible and wonderful puns. It's interesting, in retrospect, how little time had to pass for me to reveal or make known some of my essential quirks and bits of personality. We played for perhaps two hours; by the end, anyone in the room who I'd met for the first time would have known that I had something to do with CS, spoke French fluently, was interested in languages, knew some stuff about them, and had a thing for faking a British accent (tolerably well, I hope...). And none of this information actually came from a direct question or a voluntary accounting for myself. In fact, I think the only structured information exchange either way between me and the rest of them was going over everyone's names. I wonder how much I've synthesized about them. Adventures in everyday psychology, I guess. Today we had a Tartan ed staff meeting; these things always leave me in conflicting and unsettled emotions. I'm generally frustrated with how bureaucratic and business-major-esque everything is getting, and instead of vacuous pep talks I'd rather get down to the good stuff and talk about how to run a newspaper. Today, for example, we came up with 20 "organizational norms" forming a proposed code of conduct that's going to be written onto a big poster and tacked on the office wall. (Writing about it like this probably violates some point about respecting other people's ideas, but I'm feeling kind of annoyed just now.) There was also a long talk about training sessions, but instead of bringing up news style and journalism basics, the discussion was limited to ideas like delegating tasks, how to motivate staff members, giving constructive criticism, etc. I want to work at a newspaper, dang it, not a leadership development seminar. |
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
8:52 p.m.
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I seem to be in a writing mood right now — I just wrote up a post to the KGB b-board trying to sell some old CS books — so I might as well keep going and do the Fall 2006 academic post. Each of my classes has met once so far, and that's usually about the time when I form my first impressions for the upcoming semester. This fall I'm taking two main LTI classes and an elective, giving me a personal-high 57 units (= 19 credits in the normal system of counting) including my research work. We'll see how it goes. We begin with Software Engineering for Information Systems (11-791), which is the class I was looking forward to the least when I signed up for it. Dr. Nyberg isn't exactly Prof. Pod "Crazy Man" Gurski, thank goodness, but I understand he was surprised and shocked some time ago when he found out our MEMT project, being worked on almost exclusively by one person and sporadically by two, wasn't using a CVS or Bugzilla, so I was still kind of nervous. I don't think the class is going to be too bad, despite Dr. Nyberg's insistence on daily reading quizzes at the beginning of class. Our group projects, it seems, are going to be based in UIMA, so I'll finally get a good chance to actually develop with that framework rather than just use components and workflows that other people have already written. Otherwise it seems like the structure is going to be a whole lot like the hated EECS 398M, except that our projects are going to be done in groups of three or four instead of the whole class. That's my only class on Mondays and Wednesdays; on Tuesdays and Thursdays I start at the horrible hour of 9 a.m. with French Culture (82-303). This is the only non-LTI class I'll be taking for my master's degree, so Prof. Bonnie Youngs is so far the only faculty member I know at CMU outside my own department. I have been back and forth on the issue of whether 303 is the best French class for me to take. I mostly want something that will improve my conversation and get me working with French again, so the subject matter isn't of overwhelming importance, but from talking to a KGB guy called Tom a few weeks ago I got the impression that 303 wasn't very advanced and that the people taking it usually don't have that great a command of the language. Impressions that were confirmed this morning, by the way, by the professor speaking in English for a few minutes and then asking us to come up with some differences between a city and a nation. Though it seems like we're going to cover a decent amount of history material I've had before, there are still some components of the class that are quite new and interesting. I also found out that Richard's in the class, and the fact that I actually know someone is kind of nice. I will probably stick with it. In the afternoon I go to Language and Statistics II (11-762), which replaced Speech Recognition in my schedule after some influence by my advisor. True, studying empirical methods of natural language processing will be more helpful to work on my current project, but I found regular Language & Stats terribly boring and hard to follow whenever we talked about the stats rather than the language, which was about 70 percent of the time. Teaching 11-762, a completely new class, is Noah Smith, a just-hired faculty member right out of the Johns Hopkins Ph.D. program, so the stuff on the syllabus is incredibly modern. The big project is a literature review on a topic of our choice, which is supposed to be comprehensive and detailed enough for us to post it on our websites and have other researchers site it. That's certainly not something I would mind, and as a bonus it means I'll finally be forced to read some technical papers and know some things about this field I'm in — also not a bad idea for when I start Ph.D. program applications in a few months. So I currently feel like I'm buried in reading assignments, since it's still early enough in the semester for me to be deluding myself into thinking I'm actually going to do them all. I have a good amount of French due Thursday, plus about 40 pages suggested reading from 762, and that's not to mention all the MEMT work I haven't been doing this week because of the mad rush of getting ready for and attending classes. I should probably post this and then get back to work. |
Friday, September 1, 2006
10:52 a.m.
Oh, it's a long, long while Wow, this has been kind of a difficult week. I feel like I've been spending all my time on class and class-related activities and about five minutes a day on my research, but even among classwork stuff I'm having trouble getting things done. Yesterday, for example, will not figure among my better days. French homework due at 9 a.m. was unfinished the night before, but I went to half-price anyway and didn't get home until 1 a.m. Then I woke up at 8:25 thinking that my class started at 10:00 instead of 9:00, and wasted another five or 10 minutes in bed feeling all happy that I managed to wake up with so much time to spare before reality hit and I had to jump out of bed and fly down to campus on my bike at top speed. No time to finish off the last four homework questions, of course, and then when I got to class I found out there was another whole section of work to do that I hadn't even seen on the syllabus. My new goal, formed either Wednesday or yesterday, is to speak once in each of my classes each day. (I don't know so much how things work here, but old CWRU CS students will understand how much of a departure from the norm this is.) A goal which I promply failed at in Language & Stats yesterday afternoon. The lecture was mostly stuff I'd seen before — n-gram modelling leading into HMMs — but I felt so idiotic because I had a hard time following a good chunk of the material and wasn't able to answer any of the questions Noah asked. Tartan recruitment session at 5:00, and then my own copy department meeting at 7:30. No one interested in copy editing at the former, of course, though I did run into a CS freshman I'd seen before who turned out to be the mystery new guy in Roselawn 7. After my copy meeting, I slugged over to the cluster in the hope of getting work done, but I left after half an hour, came home, and went to bed with a horrible headache at 10:15. Slept for almost 11½ hours and felt a whole lot better — physically, at least — this morning. |
Saturday, September 2, 2006
1:58 p.m.
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Feeling much better physically and mentally today. I have no class on Fridays still, so I was able to put in some good hours on research work and actually feel like I was being useful. Then, at the KGB's "Hello Jell-O" event, I spent like an hour talking about speech and language with jcreed and writing all over the chalkboard in Porter A18A. These are all excellent things. The real cure, though, was Jess's "hippie party" at Sherbrooke at 9:00 — she and Wes were nice enough to mention it to me at half-price on Wednesday, and then going to it really saved my week. I understood it to be a sort of cross between a youth-group summer camp, Tuesday night knitting at Bethany's suite, and Jeremy's poetry reading of two years ago, so I came prepared with a book of stories by O. Henry. Turns out the focus was on music, which led almost immediately to a good discovery. I got a ride from campus with Alan, Brewer, and someone else whose name I've forgotten, and as we were driving that "Barrett's Privateers" song from SCS Day came on Alan's CD player. Instant sing-along. I didn't know any of the verses, but the repeated lines were pretty easy to pick up and I found myself joining in. Then came "Finite Simple Group," which I do know pretty well all the way through, and I was really surprised to find myself singing at full volume. (Or, at least, what passes in my voice for full volume. I find I don't carry well in crowds for some reason, though if I'm the only one talking I can project to a large room.) The party activities consisted of Brewer playing guitar and the rest of us singing along. I didn't know a good number of the songs, of course, but the ones that were familiar I chipped in on. We covered everything from "Let It Be" to "The Cat Came Back." It's difficult to explain how... nice it felt to let go a bit and sing. This is a strange thing coming from me, having built up for several years a sort of reputation as a person — I refer to my entry of January 6, 2005, often enough that I should just rename it the Singing Post — "who doesn't or can't or won't sing." I guess last night some deep part of my subconscious finally realized that I don't necessarily have that image at CMU, and the results were on the whole quite positive. I mean, I didn't send anyone fleeing out into the streets, and the neighborhood dogs didn't cluster under the window and start howling, so I guess my voice isn't too awful. Some extra loudness would help, assuming I'm hitting the notes correctly: if I don't have myself or someone else to cue off of, I tend to get lost and wander around the scale a bit, and that's not so helpful for times when other people are singing harmony. So I guess the take-home lesson is that I need to stop being so me-ish and just go with things once in a while. |
Tuesday, September 5, 2006
10:50 p.m.
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I'm writing this a few blocks from the White House, but before I start talking about this NIST workshop trip, I should probably go back and review the rest of the long weekend. Lots of fun stuff from the last three days! On Saturday night I went to a dinner and movie party at Alisa's. It was just her, Bev, Sean, and me, so it felt like a real grown-up adult gathering. We feasted upon wonderful pasta and tomato something-or-other with cheese, corn, garlic bread, chocolate cake, and crêpes before watching a pretty funny movie called "Who Is Cletis Tout?" We were interrupted halfway through "The Fifth Element," which led into a long conversation on weird dreams, after which I started feeling tired and went home. Sunday was (mostly) a day of homework, something I'm still not used to again yet, so I eventually had to escape and work from the cluster for a while. Chrisamaphone came in a little before half-price speaking in a British accent — practicing for our eventual fake-accent outing, I dare say — so it only made sense for me to join her. I think gwillen and mkehrt were kind of creeped out by the whole thing, but we got cpride and Gustavo in on the fun for a while. Chris's accent sounds mostly very natural, and I discovered mine still needs some work. (We kept it going all the way through half-price at Joe Mama's, so I was in British mode for just under two hours.) It was the first time I tried to use the accent for real human-to-human conversation and not just for the odd sentence or quoted phrase. Some trouble with word choice, such as things like "movie" and the stereotypical teen filler "like" that don't sound very correct in a British voice and will probably give me away as a masquerading American. Also some pronunciation issues, mostly with the letter "r": I feel like I have the most trouble with the word "very," so I may have to replace it wholesale with "quite." On the whole, though, I think it was an excellent practice and mostly effective. As we were leaving, Omar said he hadn't realized I was English. We were supposed to make a second attempt at the Walking to West Virigina trip on Monday, but it was really poorly planned and we ended up not going. So I was briefly awake at 6 a.m., but then went back to bed and slept until almost noon. Then it was off to play racquetball with Vicki at her apartment complex in Monroeville. It's very annoying that it takes me a full half-hour to drive out there, but it was great to see her again and play a few games. Finished with a quick swim in the outdoor pool and then a return to campus just in time for the KGB meeting at 4:30. During the meeting, it was moved and passed that exec had to conduct the whole thing in fake British accents, which set off half of the KGB into doing the same. A dinner excursion to Squirrel Hill afterward turned into ice cream at Rita's because most of the other places were either crowded or closed. And then there was banner making. Alan wanted help with a banner for Friday's underground tour, so I reported to the cluster at 9:00 to assist in its production. We didn't actually get started in earnest until after 10:30, but by then we had the help of mstephen, Jordan, and another freshman called Matt. This one is a musician and musical theatre actor, paraît-il, who's also interested in swing and Sherlock Holmes. Good stuff. The group conversation was wonderfully varied, with people making musical and literary references left and right that were amazingly almost always picked up on by at least one other person. Tracing and painting the banner took until about 2:00, at which point there was an interval of almost an hour to return supplies, take care of other stuff, and wait for the paint to dry. Around 3 we packed up and drove, minus Matt, to Eat'n Park. Breakfast at 3 a.m. while discussing English kings and possible Pope names is quite entertaining. Alan dropped me off at home about 10 minutes before 4:00, and then I went off to bed. |
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