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ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
A Live Journal mirror of this site can be found here, so now you can leave me your comments even if you aren't a Live Journal member!
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
11:49 p.m.
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Those of you who read my hand-coded journal site (as opposed to the Live Journal mirror) know that I separate the content into pages, each of which gets to be 50 KB long before I start a new one. The last entry finished off what is now Page 30 in the archives, so when I started a new page tonight I realized that it had taken me more than five weeks to fill the previous one. Since this is my slowest pace ever, I conclude that the last five weeks have been rather busy and difficult to get through. It's true, and now that it's nominally midterms week I'm starting to get a little worried about my grades for the semester. If I thought I was having a hard time with the Language & Stats homework last spring, it was only because I hadn't yet sampled the horrors of Language & Stats II. We got our second assignment back today — the one that I thought I did decently on and kind of enjoyed doing — and my paper is full of negative or questioning comments and has a circled "3.3" at the top. A 3.3 out of what? We just don't know. The software engineering midterm on Monday, which I don't think I wrote about, also felt like it went rather badly. I'm either way too slow or the test was way too long — either way, I had to frantically come up with a domain model in about 10 minutes at the end, and that was a 25-point question. Rain all morning today, which meant I couldn't bike to class. My deepest apologies to those who had to see me today in a state normally reserved for long camping trips, especially those whose optic nerves I disturbed before 8 p.m. when I finally had a chance to shave. (Granted, I think I only saw two people today who actually read this, but it's better to be safe than sickening in these matters.) I was double-overdue for a shower and such this morning, but I managed to ignore my 7:00 alarm and sleep until 8:15, at which point I had just enough time to eat some cereal and check my e-mail before running off to catch the 71A at 8:30. I tried to stay in my office all day in order to disgust as few people as possible, but there were still my two classes and the Tartan ed staff meeting to go to. |
Random Stuff #34
Wednesday, October 18, 2006, 1:05 p.m.
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I think I broke a few people this morning. After seeing the line 11:32 -!- alanv-cluster [n=avangpat@XANADU.WEH.andrew.cmu.edu] has joined #cslounge in my irssi client, I grabbed a pen and a piece of scrap paper out of my recycling tray and started scribbling. A few minutes later, I had come up with On Xanadu did Alan V. And this was the response, when I posted it in #cslounge: 12:12 < huginn> c.c; Of course, ehuber discovered shortly afterwards that I have a structural ambiguity with "linked to IRC" in the third line: if you interpret it as an adjective phrase on "clients," then you can't resolve the second half of the poem because you find no finite verb there. It only works if you parse "linked" as a verb, which is what I meant it to be. I think this exactly exhibits the principle, whose name I've forgotten, that says people like to attach new things to the constituent already in progress. After "clients," you're working on an NP, so it's easier to extend it with an ADJP rather than close it off and start building a new VP. The fix is to put the thing in present tense so you have the more unambiguous "link" as an easy-to-spot verb. |
Friday, October 20, 2006
12:24 p.m.
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I don't know if today is the best day for a road trip, but very soon now I'll be leaving for lovely Ithaca, N.Y., to visit the excellent Nicole for the weekend. Depending on which map software you go by, the trip will take between six and seven hours each way, mostly driving on non-freeway roads through what (I hope) promises to be nice scenery. If only the sky weren't quite so solidly grey... |
Sunday, October 22, 2006
11:03 p.m.
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Grand reportage of my trip to Ithaca: I got my stuff together and left my apartment almost immediately after posting Friday's entry, but then I had some errands to take care of before I could actually start the trip just before 1:30. People who want to test their driving skills under a decent variety of conditions should follow this route. I got in some city driving as far as the Highland Park Bridge and then headed out of Pittsburgh on Route 28, which is a freeway as far as Kittanning. From there I got 40 miles of rather hilly two-lane 55-m.p.h. country road, with a few intermissions and speed changes for small towns, before idling through Brookville and getting onto I-80. (I found on the way back that you can get on 80 before the town; this I highly recommend.) The next 99 miles were pretty smooth — there's not much around, and the things that are there have fun names like Snow Shoe Township — except for an attack of road construction that brought traffic to a complete stop twice within about five minutes. At 4:43 I got off onto U.S. 220 near a place with the fun name of Lock Haven; this is one area that demonstrates the pure meanness of the Pennsylvania State Police or Highway Patrol or whatever the officially-sanctioned aggressors are called here. There's a stretch of seven miles marked as a "safety corridor," which means a reduced speed limit, doubled fines, and giant flashing signs that say "2653 CITED TO DATE — DON'T BE 2654 — SLOW DOWN." I'm not even making this up. After that the road becomes a proper freeway again. The semi-large-ish town in the vicinity is called Williamsport, where I stopped for food and gas and picked up U.S. 15. This is a wonderful road, I say. Freeway style for about 25 miles, heading straight up into steep hills, which were all covered in orange leaves this weekend. After the 25 miles, one particular climb (or plunge, going the other way) turns into a plain divided highway with fun swoopy turns and scary advisory speed limits. About 60 miles out from Williamsport the road goes two-lane again, all the way into New York and up to I-86. By the time I got up there it was totally dark, so I didn't see too much of the view until the drive back. The last bit, along New York Route 13, is the best: there is nothing between Horseheads and Ithaca except two stoplights and 30 miles of smooth pavement. That's when I can really enjoy driving, ticking along at 60 m.p.h. with nothing in the way, just listening to the sound of the car and pursuing any random thoughts that happen to come into my head. I don't mean to imply, of course, that the drive was the highlight of the weekend. I got to Nicole's apartment a few minutes before 8:00 and found her in the middle of making pasta, chicken, and mushrooms in pesto sauce. (My cooking put to shame yet again!) After dinner we talked a bit and watched two episodes of "Fry and Laurie." Then to bed. Yesterday was the real visiting day. We were ready in the morning in time to walk to the Cornell campus and catch the 12:00 bell concert. They have a giant bell tower, equipped with a set of chimes, and student chimesmasters play bits of music at certain times of the day. You can also climb up into the tower at those times, so we did that and ended up with the bells clanging perhaps 15 feet above our heads. The songs made us look at each other and laugh more than once: first up was "Music of the Night" from "Phantom of the Opera," the second was something I didn't recognize, the third was the inevitable Pachelbel's "Canon in D," followed (for contrast, I guess) by "Part of Their World" from (yes) "The Little Mermaid," and the whole mess concluded with Cornell's alma mater. We spent the next two hours running around campus and looking at the pretty buildings; there were also several stops for photography as the sky started clearing up a bit. Cornell's campus is surprisingly large for only 13,000 undergrads, but I guess it's because the various quads have a lot of open space in them. Also lovely paths through gorges and near waterfalls. Nicole concluded the tour by taking me by the public display of the university's brain collection, which includes the brain of an Ithaca serial killer who was hanged in 1871. There's a restaurant in the town named after him, so it was only fitting that went there for lunch. Then shopping on the (in the?) Commons, a little pedestrian-only area of shops in downtown Ithaca that looks kind of like Cuyahoga Falls. We concentrated our custom on the two used book stores — one of them had a basement full of records, so I sorted through two stacks of 78s and came away with five of them. The book prices were pretty expensive, unfortunately, but they had a lot of good stuff in that department too. Back to Nicole's apartment in time to make lasagna and eat it with Nicole's roommate Joanna and their friend Joe, who kind of reminds me of Ben. We were just finishing the last of the wine when someone realized that the movie we all wanted to see back on campus was starting in 20 minutes, so the 15-minute walk was carried out rather briskly. The movie was "A Scanner Darkly," and it's about as weird as they come in terms of plot. The most interesting part is that the film was shot in live action, but then somehow half-animated so that the characters are somewhat cartoon-like in coloring and things are all outlined in black. My brain got confused trying to map images back to real-world scenes. After it was over, the four of us walked back to Nicole's and talked until about 1:30. Woke up this morning at 10:30 to the sound of Nicole making blueberry muffins. (How can you beat this?) Joe came over for breakfast, and then we talked about Monty Python and Animaniacs until I decided I should really get going around 1:15. If anything, the drive back was even more enjoyable than the drive up. I got to see New York in the daytime, for one thing, and didn't have to worry about getting anywhere as quickly as possible. I managed to get in front of a slow-moving truck and behind a string of fast-moving cars on I-80 just before the road went down to one lane for several miles, and when I came out on the other side the net effect was that I had the road entirely to myself for about 15 minutes. Ended up having to do the stretch north of Kittanning mostly in the dark, which was perhaps not ideal since oncoming traffic always likes to play a game of Let's Not Turn Off Our Brights and Instead Shine Them Directly Into Greg's Eyes So He Can't See The Road. Survived it, at least, and got myself safely onto the freeway part of 28 and so back into Pittsburgh again just before 8:00. |
Monday, October 23, 2006
11:57 p.m.
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Right. I'll try to make today's entry not so long as yesterday's, though I do have evidence that at least one person made it all the way through without becoming comatose. Sorry if I bored everyone else with all the stuff about interstates and state routes and route descriptions. Today the outside world has no warmth in it, and I rediscovered that my hands don't like biking without gloves on when it gets below 40 degrees. I'm not sure if it got much above that at any point in the day: several times during the afternoon and evening it was cold enough to snow, although I don't really count it as anything until it starts sticking. I think before I go out tomorrow I'll have to call a search party for my hat and gloves and transfer them to the pockets of the light jacket I'm still wearing. I realized — I think it was on the drive home last night — that I have a massive pile of work to do this week. Unfortunately, today I didn't seem to make much progress towards finishing any of it. I made the mistake some time ago of volunteering to write an article about The Tartan's centennial for next week's issue, so I have interviews to set up and conduct, facts to research, and a story to write out and hand in by Friday evening. This is on top of the Language & Stats assignment (due Thursday and barely started), French reading, another French presentation, and a lot of MEMT work that I really need to get done before I meet with my advisor again. I can't imagine why he hasn't thrown me out yet, as I've been just about to run a certain set of experiments for the past three weeks and yet haven't done it. I also decided I need to devote some time this week to starting Ph.D. application(s) and figuring out what the heck I want out of the next few years of my life, but that's a topic for a separate long post. One thing that worked very well today was dinner after the KGB meeting. I missed the actual meeting because of the news meeting at The Tartan, but I got to the basement of Maggie Mo while people were still working out dinner plans. People managed to not ignore me this time, so after the usual pro-DineX crowd had stomped off to the Indian place in Resnik, I got myself attached to a group heading to Squirrel Hill for pizza. Good and plentiful food: three larges between the seven of us, which we finished off quite efficiently. Then back to campus to work until biking home a bit after 11. |
Random Stuff #35
Wednesday, October 25, 2006, 11:48 a.m.
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Yesterday (Oct. 24) was exactly the 100th anniversary of the publication of the first Tartan at what was then Carnegie Technical Schools. It was also the day, in 2004, I threw together a quick HTML page and began the online journal you now have before you. (I refer to the hand-coded version; the Live Journal part came later.) That means it's statistics time, since we are now Two Years After The Post The first column here is a repeat of the information I collected for my Oct. 25, 2005 post. The second column represents up-to-date information excluding this post. |
Friday, October 27, 2006
10:42 a.m.
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Updated results in the Guess Greg's Nationality game! This is a game the world and I are (apparently) playing, in which people I've never met before listen to me talk for a few minutes — sometimes only for a few sentences — and then ask me "Are you from ___?" The first time this happened was, I believe, sophomore year, so it gives me a convenient date to approximate when I first started mutating phonemes and altering sentence structure. It's kind of fun, actually: if you want to be perceived as foreign, all you have to do is pronounce more of your "t"s as "t"s instead of "d"s and not get lazy at the ends of words. Throwing in traces of French-style liason might help as well. Anyway, today's results show Canada starting to make a strong showing for first place. Britain still leads with five votes, but the lady I just interviewed for my Tartan article moved the True North Strong and Free up to a challenging position with four. Ireland holds a distant third with one. |
Monday, October 30, 2006
12:16 p.m.
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Wow, last week was kind of a week of death. I probably shouldn't have volunteered to write the Tartan centennial article when I had so much else to do, but I guess I was tempted by the allure of getting a front-page feature. The joke's on me, though, since we ended up giving over the entire front page to an extended graphical "Celebrating 100 Years" teaser that's probably going to use up all the ink in the printer's office and then some, and then my article (which wasn't the greatest anyway) starts on A5. And so it goes. There were, however, lots of fun things this weekend to offset the work. On Thursday I was in a photo shoot for Alan V., a very interesting and entertaining experience. I'm afraid, though, that I'm a pretty bad model — I move awkwardly and find it hard to arrange my body in a way that makes sense on film. The others in the shoot — Alan C., Jordan, Tarsis, some Andrew IDs I recognized had hadn't been able to put faces to previously, and some entirely new people — seemed to be much better at going through a series of interesting moves in front of the lights that led to very nice pictures when we clicked through them as a group right at the end. When I get a good look at the results I'll post one or two of mine if they're salvageable and Alan V. doesn't mind. Friday I spent mostly working on my article, having a minor panic over whether I would need to take the CS subject GRE for the LTI Ph.D. application, and then going to the KGB Halloween party. It was a year for a nerdy costume again: I was a capacitor in 2002 and a linked list in 2004. It would have helped, though, if I'd thought of an idea before Thursday afternoon. The party started at 7; by 7:15 I was fed up enough with my Language & Stats homework and my news article to leave my desk in disgust and put my costume together in a secluded part of Wean. This mainly involved cutting out bits of paper and taping them all over my clothes, so a bit before 8:00 I arrived in Porter Hall suitably attired as a syntax tree. (Two people erroneously guessed I was something in complexity theory after seeing an NP node on my arm.) The costume degraded fairly rapidly, but I think Chrisamaphone managed to grab a picture fairly early on. Afterwards I went to half-price with six other people, and then we played a game of Starcraft in the cluster until roughly 2:00. Saturday was PuzzleQuest, with the usual team of Greg Zearfoss, Car, Carolyn, and me, which was just loads of fun. This one sensibly started at noon instead of like 9 a.m., and was on the whole better organized and better constructed than PuzzleStorm was in the spring. Our team was actually leading for a good part of the morning (I guess by that I mean between 12 and 6 p.m.), but we hit a slump a bit before dinner that we never totally recovered from. By 10:00 we were racing through the metapuzzle trying for third place (Barnes & Noble gift certificates), but another team solved all the other puzzles and got it before us, and another team skipped one of the puzzles and got it before us, pushing the glorious Dancing Grues of Wean 4615 all the way down to fifth place, where we ended up when the final standings were released at midnight. Except for the horrible chess puzzle and the "Odd Man Out" picture impossibleness, I felt pretty useful on most of the things. We were done at 10:30, so rather than wait around for the ending meeting at midnight, Car, Carolyn, and I followed Tom back to Roselawn. Then it wasn't too long before someone mentioned Tetrinet, and then jgrafton and I were looking at French Wikipedia pages, and then — since it was 1:45 old time — we decided to stay up for another 15 minutes and have a 2:00/1:00 party for the end of Daylight Savings Time. (It really only involved me running date on the UNIX pool every few seconds until I saw the time jump back.) Then I packed up my stuff and went home. Tartan yesterday, which started off with Rob and Marshall trying to photograph a cake with 100 candles on it for the front-page photo. It was the most candles I'd ever seen going and one time, and by the time Rob had gotten the necessary photos their combined heat had melted all 100 of them into a solid sheet of wax with little wicks poking out that covered the entire cake. So we scraped off the frosting and served it up plain. Production also included a mad rush of copy all through the early afternoon and an absolute dead time between 9 and 10:30. Then we had a scramble to get pages finished and submitted before the 4:00 printer's deadline, which we ended up making, I assume, since all copy was done by 3:30. Home, then, and to bed. |
Monday, October 30, 2006
11:12 p.m.
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This is how my brain works: I wanted to come up with a witty title for my most recent Random Stuff post (the one announcing it had been two years since I first moved my journal to the online format), so my mind started searching for something to do with "two years." So it remembered that it had once heard of something called "Two Years Before the Mast" — probably from Trivia Club practice at Case — fixed the preposition, and transformed it into a pun by replacing the last word with a synonym that could be overloaded to mean something else in the online journal context. Thus "Two Years After the Post" became the title. Then, of course, I got curious about what the original actually was, so I turned to Wikipedia and found that "Two Years Before the Mast" is the story of a sailing voyage from Boston to San Francisco taken in the 1830s by a Harvard student who got sick and wanted a total change of life to try to effect a cure. Sounds kind of appealing, in fact. All this is just a long way of saying that I decided to abort my seven zillionth re-reading of "The Hound of the Baskervilles" in favor of this new volume, which I just grabbed from Hunt tonight on my way home. I was actually in the library to watch the movie version of "Le Colonel Chabert," which we're supposed to do by tomorrow morning for my French class. I should really have known better than to forget about the thing until the night before: when I got to the video room at 8:45 I found that someone had beaten me to it by half an hour, and when I came back to try again at 10:15 I found that two more people had made a team sneak attack and gotten in before me again. The video collection closed at 11, and now I find myself faced with only the option of waking up super early and watching the first half of the movie at 8 a.m. tomorrow before class. I had actually discovered my omission around 7:45, when I was in the cluster to work on homework for the rest of the night, and was on the point of heading up to Hunt then, but mrwright came into the cluster and announced that there was a giant leaf pile in front of Baker. Of course, seven more of us got up immediately and followed him outside. It was in fact a very large leaf pile, raked up just below one of those weird slopes on the Mall, which made it perfectly situated for running dives and getting buried quite past your head. I'm not sure how many leaf bits I managed to inhale or otherwise swallow in the following 45 minutes, but it was rather worth it. |
Wednesday, November 1, 2006
11:59 p.m.
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Great goodness, it's November already — and I have to say it feels like it. The weather hasn't been too bad this week, but with the time switch this weekend it's getting dark way too early now. By the time I get out of class and make my way to The Tartan or KGB around 5:00 it's already looking like evening, and by the time whatever meeting I'm going to is over it's completely dark. It's kind of hard to imagine things getting worse for the next seven weeks until the planet starts to tip in the right direction again. Another thing that November means is that it's National Novel Writing Month (called "NaNoWriMo"), something Chris first told me about over the summer, I believe. The goal is to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days, which I will say flat out can't be done given my workload and current schedule. So I'm making up my own: National Short Story Writing Month, or NaNoShoStoWriMo. I can probably manage four or five pages a week, especially if I make a conscious effort, so I'm setting a more realistic goal of 10,000 words by Nov. 30. People should join me, or at least periodically bug me to keep writing if it sounds like I'm not making any progress. Tonight I decided to resurrect the old book idea I've been messing with for something more than two years and start it again. This is the same book I lost most of several months ago after a careless application of rm -rf at the command line, and all I've got left now is the first scene and a half. I think the rewrite will help a bit, although the setting will probably mutate some. I wanted to set the thing at Case, but as I spend more and more time away from there I expect I'll end up replacing a lot of details with CMU stuff or making them up entirely. We'll see how it goes. NaShoStoWriMo word count: 476. |
Friday, November 3, 2006
6:34 p.m.
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Prediction: The next five weeks are going to be possibly the busiest I've ever had, at least as crazy as the end of the fall semester of my senior year. Observation: I'm a lot lazier with respect to school work than I was two years ago. Conclusion: It's over. NaShoStoWriMo word count: 730. |
Saturday, November 4, 2006
7:05 p.m.
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The toy of the week is definitely the Pandora streaming music service, something cpride showed me Thursday night when I was at Roselawn. You provide the name of an artist or song you like, and then the system starts playing you more music that it thinks you'll enjoy. You can reinforce its decisions by saying whether or not you like each song, and your votes help refine the future playlist. It looks like the textbook binary classification problem using feature weights, where the features are the musical characteristics of the song (like "lyrical melodies," "light drumming," "two-step styles," "interesting horn arrangements," and so on). The only annoying part is they make you register after a few songs if you want to keep listening, and they're possibly kind of shady about storing cookies on your machine, but then you can have up to 100 "stations" (seeded and refined playlists) accessible from their central database so you can move to different computers and keep your preferences. It's a lot of fun. I started Friday by seeding with "Glenn Miller," and got some pretty good stuff after maybe three negative examples. Some of the audio quality isn't that great, but the depth of repertoire is quite amazing. Today I thought I'd bamboozle the server with Paul Whiteman as the seed, but the first two things it dug up were Ted Weems and Zez Confrey, so I confess myself beaten. The Confrey song was off a CD called "Keyboard Wizards of the Gershwin Era, Volume 4" — the fact that this exists (Volume 4!), much less is archived and available online as streaming audio, is astounding. Now I've got a ragtime number by Fred Van Eps, who recorded during the cylinder era. Wow. |
Wednesday, November 8, 2006
11:36 p.m.
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It looks like everyone's made their obligatory election posts already. I guess the good thing about going last is that I have all the other stuff to think about first. This election had a lot of nice features. Ohio passed a smoking ban, and the state's Republican political machine got kicked out fairly solidly. I can't really take credit for those, though, since I voted in PA. Over here, we got rid of Rick Santorum, who's been on my list of scary crazy people ever since I read an interview with him in the Post-Gazette last year. It's kind of nice to see some of the major races go my way for once — going back to 2001, the first year in which I cast a ballot, I've been on the losing side of most things that were important. (It's true that I voted for the Cleveland Heights domestic partner registry in 2004, which passed, but its legitimacy or its effectiveness or something was called into question by the statewide marriage definition from Issue 1, which went through over my "no" vote the same year.) As of this minute, CNN says the Democrats hold a 33-seat majority in the House and are up by one in the Senate as well, which is kind of an interesting result. A lot of people said it's not enough, but I don't think it's possible to expect an entire government to reverse course overnight. And in fact, nothing's actually changing until January, which gives all the crazy people in control now an extra impetus to pass their most important legislative ideas in the next two months before they lose their jobs. Someone posted either today or yesterday that voting is "so much work" — this I do not understand one bit. If you'd like to vote in an election, all you have to do is find five minutes in the previous year to fill out a one-page form with simple information you already know, like your name and birthday. Then you pull 39¢ out of the change jar at home, buy a stamp, stick it on the form, and drop it in a mailbox; half the time you can find voter registration people who will do it for you. Then, on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, you walk down the street to your polling place, sign your name, tap a few times on a touchscreen monitor (if you live in Allegheny County, at least, starting this year), and they send you on your way. That's it. I guess that's my political rant for the day, so I'll stop now. I see I haven't written anything specific in a while about what I've been doing with my life, but it's not too exciting just now. Lots of work, which I of course don't feel like doing, that's getting in the way of much more important things like my research project and Ph.D. applications. Really I'm getting thoroughly sick of classes. I worked my 25th week on copy staff and my 21st as copy manager at The Tartan. The issue came out pretty nicely, but I felt all weekend and on into this week that my suggestions were dumb and that people were getting fed up with me in general. |
Thursday, November 9, 2006
11:06 p.m.
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On the long list of things I should have written about this week but haven't, I find the fact that a movie is being filmed on campus this week. Reports have been filtering in from other Tartan people about bumping into famous movie stars in Baker Hall or running across odd Hollywood film-industry silliness at just about any time of the day or night. I personally saw Dennis Quaid's dog romping along the diagonal sidewalk between the UC and Doherty on Tuesday, but my pop culture IQ is sufficiently low that I'm unable to say whether the guy in the long coat holding a red leash in his left hand and saying "Here, boy!" to the dog was Dennis Quaid or not. Whoever it was was walking too slowly with his entourage of three or four people taking up the width of the whole sidewalk, so I passed them kind of contemptuously on the grass. The reason I bring up this movie stuff now is that I ran into one of their filming sets on my way home tonight. I was coming through Hamburg from Newell-Simon to get back to my bike (parked in front of Hamburg before French class there this morning), and I noticed bright lights and big trucks and people with headseats milling about the parking lot behind the building. Inside, I was stopped at the top of the stairs on the first floor by another headsetted assistant, who said I had to wait "30 seconds" before I could walk down the hallway to the main exit. A scene was being filmed in one of the rear-facing classrooms, which was kind of interesting to observe for a few minutes. The hallway was filled with more headsetters, some watching little monitors or sitting in those folding director chairs, all going round saying "Shhh!" to everyone else. After maybe two minutes, someone's voice over a sound system said "Cut. Let's take one or two minutes," and a few of us who had piled up at the edge of the shoot were allowed to walk through. The super-bright lights that I'd seen out back were aimed at a pair of classroom windows that were covered on the outside with white screens; from the inside, it looked like the stereotypical daylight-shining-through-windows effect you always see in movies. The classroom had a bunch of student-type people in it, though I'm not sure if they were real CMU student extras or pseudo-students brought in from Hollywood. (I think it would be fun to be an extra in a big movie, but I imagine it's bad for business to let people with features like mine appear on a screen of any size, much less something that might be as giant as the movie screens at the Waterfront.) Like the time we walked by a wedding on our West Virginia trip, what interests me a lot in tonight's situation is the "no one will ever know that..." aspect of the thing. When this movie comes out (I think it's called "Smart People"), everyone will see this perfect daytime scene in Hamburg Hall with all the actors in it, and no one will ever know that I was standing about 50 feet on the other side of the camera or that the whole thing was shot at 10:00 at night. |
Saturday, November 11, 2006
11:22 a.m.
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Yesterday was a pretty weird day. With all the old people coming back in town for Capture the Flag with Stuff, it almost felt like a holiday or the first or last day of the semester. I had so many little things to do that it didn't feel like a regular day with respect to work either. I tried working from the cluster most of the day — I don't think I realized how many people hang out in there at various parts of the morning and afternoon. At lunchtime it was positively crowded, and by 3:30 I think I'd seen almost all the CS (non-Tartan, that is) kids I know here. Finally had to leave around 4 to finish of my software engineering homework, the lit review rough draft with Amr, and then to meet with my advisor. So last night there were some flags, and I tried to capture them with stuff. I feel like I took an active role in the games for once, rather than uselessly peeping round corners and hiding in doorways on Wean 3. This time I got myself in with the offense for the first two games, which mostly involved conducting raids on the other team's building and led to me being shown a whole maze of passages on Doherty C level (and possibly below?) that I never knew existed. Elise and I helped secure the capture of two flags from Doherty 3; a bit later on I grabbed one unattended from the second floor just by standing near the door to Wean and hearing people on the other team shout "Flag on 2!" Ended up in jail three or four times myself, but I suppose that's rather to be expected. During the third game I played defense, in my usual territory among the art rooms on Doherty B and C — this time, knowing a bit more about the layout of the corridors, I think I did a bit better than last time. Managed to chase Cornell from B into the stairwell, where I noticed he went onto C level and back into the hallways. I figured he would try to come up to B level again via the steep stairs by the woodshop, so I ran back there and almost collided with him about 20 feet from the top of the staircase. After the third game (a bit after 1 a.m.), Rebecca proposed a trip to Ritter's, the 24-hour diner on Baum near Cypress (and therefore 75 percent of the way back to my apartment). We had a group of eight of us, so Dan started a round of Eat Poop You Cat that was quite funny. |
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
8:03 p.m.
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I seem to be building up quite a nice collection of French literature. Today in class we finished up "Huis clos," a wonderful little one-act by Sartre, and Thursday we're starting in on "Le Gone du Chaâba." We also got our compositions on "Le Colonel Chabert" back: I got a 50/50, with a little note saying I don't have to do the mandatory revision unless I want to correct some mechanical mistakes. That's a nice feeling. My first paper for this class was an analysis of a Renaissance sonnet by Ronsard, which I got a decent grade on but kind of hated doing. We had six topics to pick from for this one: five more serious things like that or one that was totally a creative writing exercise — for a change, I picked that one and quite enjoyed writing it. (Though it may be one of the oddest assignments I've ever had: write four pages of dialogue between Chabert and Ferraud when they accidentially meet up in a Parisian brothel and each gradually discover who the other one is.) So at least one of my classes is going well. This afternoon, when I was digging through my Language & Stats folder to find a clean sheet of notebook paper, I discovered a forgotten-about Homework 4, assigned two weeks ago, barely started, and now due... Thursday. My plans for a "normal" week evaportated almost instantly. Also becoming increasingly annoying is the group project for software engineering, now in its third week. It gets to eat up my life every Thursday afternoon from 4:30 until whenever we get done with our team meeting, which so far has been 6:30 and 8:00. When I finally escaped last week, I couldn't help but think about Jessica's song from EECS 398M that went to the tune of "Hotel California": as I recall, the two main refrain lines are "Sleepless nights with software engineering" and "You'll never escape from software engineering." My No. 1 goal for getting into the LTI Ph.D. program is more and more because I'll have completed either all or most of the class requirements as part of my master's degree. I'm so sick of being bogged down with classwork right now that the thought of going to another school and starting all over again makes me want to give up and become a burger-flipper. Another of those really long introspective posts may be in the offing, as soon as I get time to think a bit and write it. I had a very interesting discussion with Philip last night, during which I started wondering about the sort of person I thought I would become when I was younger and whether or not those expectations have been fulfilled. We also got into the philosophy of education, which reminded me of those nights in Wade Fireside with Susannah, Jeremy, and Brian. |
Friday, November 17, 2006
2:25 a.m.
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I regret to say, academically speaking, that this week is probably going to figure among my worst ever. So much to do, so little interest; so many reasons why this semester is important, so few ways in which it's turning out the way I needed it to. I do love talking with interesting people, though. Last night, since I was expecting a long night with Language & Stats homework, I tried to collect people for half-price and ended up going to Joe Mama's with Evan and Matt Aument (one of the freshman Matts). Quite amusing — Evan described an interesting (and nerdy!) art project he saw at a gallery crawl some time ago, and then we got into synesthesia and its different forms (sounded like 5 C 2 on the set of senses, plus a few extra things involving more abstract things like "personality"). Associating colors with words and characters, for example, doesn't sound like such a bad thing — there'd be one more piece of information to work with and manipulate in language. (Matt said it works for him between colors and music too, which he thought was really nice for composing because it's like "painting with sound." Now there's a very lovely image, interpreted concretely.) Another interesting part was when I asked Matt how the color is received, either visually or not — he said it's not visual, but that it registers in his mind in some way that was difficult to understand. I modeled it as current (the color signal) being induced in a circuit due to certain stimulus patterns (mental processing of word) in a neighboring circuit. So that was good stuff. I tried doing more work after food — was contemplating pulling my first-ever all-nighter, but stopped a bit after 3:00 — but I made very little progress on things. Then I slept through the beginning of French this morning and decided to skip the class. (That's the second lecture I've skipped in grad school, though I guess one a year isn't too awful.) After a horrible afternoon of Language & Stats and software engineering group, I ate a quick dinner at my desk around 8:00 and then went over again to Roselawn. It was there that I decided that the desire to finish the 11-762 assignment was inferior to my apathy towards it, which touched off a whole series of melancholy reflections that would have made it into this post if Evan hadn't come downstairs and started a conversation. An hour later, after talking about fun stuff like leap seconds and vocal intonation patterns in noun-noun compounds, my mood was further saved by tmoss and Eight when they came back from half-price. Then the discussion was about working vocabulary size and Live Journal posts until we realized it was 1:30 and time I should be catching the shuttle home. |
Monday, November 20, 2006
8:06 p.m.
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'Y a beaucoup d'choses à écrire ici... Let's see... Friday was a long day. I was strangely excited at the prospect of cooking dinner for the kids in Roselawn, but neglected to get up early enough in the morning to collect many of the necessary ingredients from the store before I had to go to campus for a 12:30 software engineering meeting. I spent part of the afternoon on writing my annotator and hopping by the TG with Aaron, so it wasn't until 6:00 that I got free of my work. Home by bike, to both Giant Eagle and Whole Foods by foot, and then to Roselawn by car. It was already past 7:00, and Philip and I had planned dinner for 7:30! As it turned out, 9:15 would have been more accurate. We made Tandoori chicken kebabs, grilled with vegetables, and backed up with couscous and baked potato slice things that Philip came up with at the last minute as something that would cook rather quickly. (The whole time we had four or five people out in the living room salivating, in my mind at least, and getting hungry enough to come eat us if we didn't feed them soon.) Dinner seems to have gone well, at least, though most of my efforts ended up in preparation rather than consumption. Aftewards, someone put on "Hackers," so I got to alternately laugh my guts out at that and feel kind of stupid at the same time. My great plan for Saturday was to wake up decently early and bake a pie for the Tartan ed staff Thanksgiving party before going to the office at 3. Failure — I ran out of time for pie baking, so I had to run out and buy a pre-made something instead. Arrived at the Tartan office just before 4:00 with a nice pound cake, spent two and a half hours writing a board ed about tuition increases, and then walked over to Ali's apartment at Fairfax with Kristen and Sarah. I discovered I still fail at parties where there are more than about 10 people. I have no trouble with a group smaller than that, but as soon as we hit critical awkwardness mass I feel like conversations are going on all around me and that I'm part of none of them. Things calmed down a bit towards the end, which was nice, and then Evan gave me a ride home just before 10:30. Which brings us to the usual Tartan Sunday. Production ran long this week, and we ended up turning in the last two pages right before the 4 a.m. printer's deadline. But there were still huge chunks of time when we had nothing to do in copy, which this year means Scrabble games. In our first, I made 57 points with "jeer" in the upper right-hand corner of the board; on the next turn I had a wide-open spot to play "stagnant" and use all of my tiles for the first time ever. (I think I'm more excited about this than I should be!) The word managed to miss all the interesting spots on the board, so even with the 50-point bonus I only got 63. As much fun as it was, between 2:30 and 3:30 a.m., drawing crazy pictures on the whiteboard with Brad and Brittany, I'm seeing little signs all over the place that the time is right to stop being copy manager. If I took another term I'd feel like I'd worn out my welcome and that people were sick of me putting my two cents in on every issue remotely connected with the final form of the paper. Sometimes I guess I don't know when to stop, it's true. The nice part about all of this is that I don't feel at all sad or conflicted about turning over my job after our next issue. I'll find some other stuff to do. Two days of work this week, and then I'm heading home for Thanksgiving. Can't wait. |
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