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ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
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Wednesday, November 22, 2006
11:01 a.m.
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This is another reason why I love Linux: top - 11:01:57 up 219 days, 37 min, 10 users, load average: 0.16, 0.26, 0.22 I haven't rebooted my computer since April 17; when I ran Windows 98 on the same machine, I used to have to restart about once a week to free up system resources and be able to open more than four programs without crashing. So being stable enough to run continuously for seven months is a nice improvement, I'd say. I'll probably shut my machine down within an hour, though, when I leave for home — it seems kind of wasteful to leave it running for five days when I won't be using it. The problem is that I've installed a few new things since April that need to be started from the command line — at least ddclient and privoxy that I can remember — and it's been so long since I got them running that I don't quite remember how to restart them once my computer comes back up again. I guess I'll have some trial and error work when I get back on Sunday. For the future, does anyone out there know how to do the Linux equivalent of dragging shortcuts into the Startup menu in Windows to make them execute automatically on boot-up? |
Thursday, November 23, 2006
11:08 p.m.
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Hello! Reporting safe 'n' all that from my parents' house in Northeast Ohio, where I'm likely to remain mostly avoiding my work for a few days. I guess I need a way to say "happy Thanksgiving" without referring to the holiday by its actual name — so far I've read posts about "Turkey Day" and "tryptophan-induced coma day." Maybe I'll call it "horrible death-by-Christmas-five-weeks-too-soon day." Seriously: 94.5 took away my oldies (usual driving radio station) and started playing Christmas music Friday after Light-Up Night, and my mom said that 102.1 started the same thing here on Monday. It hasn't even felt like winter yet! Quite the opposite these past two days, in fact, aside from all the bare trees. Yesterday the sky was clear and blue — perfect driving weather — and today it was 50 degrees. I went for a walk around the neighboorhood tonight to get out of the house a bit, and spent 45 minutes wandering round in the densest fog I've ever experienced. Houses even right across the street were defined only by their lights and a few other highlights like window trim and roofline. Overall it's been a quiet visit so far. Mom and Katie were baking pies when I got home yesterday afternoon, so Katie and I made up the collaborative apple pie we'd been planning. It came out very nicely, I must say, even if it was a bit low on filling. Then Andrew came home from a friend's house later on — every time I see him he's an inch taller, which always takes some getting used to. Now he's probably only an inch behind me, though perhaps looking slightly less like me than I thought previously. I was interested to see how he would do when we played Scrabble last night: not too badly — it seems he knows words like "czar" and "quartic." (I promise I'm not some kind of hooked-on-Scrabble fiend; I've just been writing about it a lot recently, I guess. And my mom is always trying to push "family game nights" whenever I come home.) Everyone kind of wanted a small Thanksgiving this year, so today it's just the six of us plus Chris's boyfriend John. More games today too: Monopoly between my dad, Andrew, and me, and then Andrew challenged me to checkers, which ended in a draw. Then we spent half an hour flicking the pieces across the carpet, putting backspin on them and trying to shoot them up a ramp into the box lid. Acting like a silly kid is one of the best parts about being home — last year we were trying to jump dominoes off the step between the kitchen and living room and seeing who could get one to go the farthest. Twinsburg or Cleveland or Case people should let me know if they want to do anything fun between now and early Sunday. I can be here through then if necessary. |
Saturday, November 25, 2006
12:06 a.m.
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I suppose this post qualifies as Saturday by a couple of minutes, although I don't ever consider the day to change until I go to sleep... which I will probably do as soon as I finish writing this. Last night I slept for more than 10 hours — my parents have me set up on the newly-purchased futon in the basement, which has the side effect of blocking out most light and noise that would normally wake me up in the morning. Not a bad thing, necessarily, but I'd like to get a fairly early start to tomorrow since I have to get my hair cut and then go visit my grandparents. (More on those tomorrow if I have the time.) Today my family went bowling, and I made some incremental progress on various things I brought home with me. I am really loving having my laptop here now that my parents dumped horrible dial-up AOL and have switched to wireless DSL. I can take my computer anywhere in the house and have the whole Internet at my command — and I could have had my desktop's files too, if I hadn't shut that machine down before I left my apartment Wednesday. I brought four LPs home with me in order to continue the never-ending process of transferring my record collection to CD. My laptop plus my parents' record player and stereo makes LP transfer wonderfully easy (though the 78s are out of luck until I can get around to shopping for a new phonograph). So far I've made it through two Artie Shaw sides and two Glenn Miller sides. The Glenn Miller ones are especially interesting — music the band recorded for a couple of Hollywood movies in 1941 and 1942, so the sound quality and balance is quite good for the time. Artie Shaw sounds kind of thin by comparison. I also started the vacation with reading "Dune," on Tyler's recommendation, since I finished up "Two Years Before the Mast" earlier in the week. I wasn't quite sure what to expect out of this new one. It began with the usual sci-fi mumblings of imperial plots, weird powers, and tenuous situations explained with liberal doses of vaguely-pronouncable words. But after the first 20 pages I started getting interested in the main character, and now, after 65, I want to know what major plot device is going to befall him if he stays as cocky as he is now. The only annoying thing is that the typeface in Tyler's paperback copy isn't consistent: every now and then a few lines will be set in a slightly smaller point size for a reason I can't discover, which I find somewhat disruptive and unprofessional on the part of the publisher. This is what happens to you when you become a copy editor. Another thing that happens to you is that you spend more than four hours talking about newspaper stuff with friends and have a great time doing it. Sonnie and I got together after dinner today since we hadn't seen each other in a while; I suggested driving down to the open hills near Virginia Kendall to look at the stars. We made it there eventually after a mulititude of wrong turns on my part, and once The Observer came up naturally in conversation we were both fairly launched on the topic of journalistic life. After our feet got cold from standing outside, we got back in the car and drove to the Caribou Coffee at First & Main in Hudson, where the discussion continued until long past closing time and we decided to leave since we were the only people left in the shop. Not sure what anyone else thought of us, sitting in our corner and discussing layout standards with the utmost earnest, but I enjoyed it. |
Sunday, November 26, 2006
5:10 p.m.
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Back in Pittsburgh now, after taking leave of my parents around 9:00 last night and getting to my apartment shortly after 11. I made my first visit to a Trader Joe's today (one opened in East Liberty a few weeks ago), so I guess I can start to understand what all the fuss is about when people from other cities rave about how great that chain is. It is a pretty nice shopping experience: some things that I explicitly mark as good qualities after having worked at Heinen's, plus some completely new aspects that might take some getting used to. In the first category is the friendliness of the employees, something that Giant Eagle misses by a mile no matter how many high-class Market District "we love food" circulars they mail out. As I came into the Trader Joe's, I noticed a lady ask a produce guy where the potatoes were. He put down what he was working on and led the lady through the aisles just like we did at Heinen's. (The lady, happy but a bit surprised, said something like "It's OK, you can just point.") Later on, my cashier started up a nice conversation after I mentioned that I brought my own bags. The ones at Giant Eagle just kind of stare at you sullenly or pretend you don't exist. In the second category we have the fact that the store is extremely small for what the management wants to put in it, so sections are crammed into all sorts of unlikely shapes and some products are squeezed into odd places. Cereal, for example, lives in a weird wrap-around corner area up at the front of the store, a bit in front of the place where tea, coffee, and meat share an aisle. All this makes navigation rather difficult. All sorts of new and interesting foodstuffs, though, mostly Trader Joe's store brand stuff that doesn't seem too expensive. I think I ended up floating vaguely around the store trying to figure out what things were and whether or not I should buy them, mimicing, in my ineptness, the exact clueless behavior that I tolerate so poorly in other shoppers. Came home with chicken taquitos as a new dinner option and blueberry wheat waffles for breakfast, plus Trader Joe's versions of the usual chocolate milk and orange juice. Question: Would anyone be interested in making a weekly trip (most likely on Saturdays) out there if I drive my car? After next week, I will no longer be The Tartan's copy manager, and one of the benefits of that is that I'll have part of my Sundays and all of my Saturday afternoons back. I want to do something interesting with the time — otherwise I'll just waste it in front of my computer, in all probability — and that would fit in nicely with this alternation I want to try of splitting my shopping between Trader Joe's on the weekend and Giant Eagle during the week. If you're interested, let me know in any of the usual ways. |
Monday, November 27, 2006
10:14 p.m.
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We're going to be having "fun" with Ph.D. applications this week after I realized that I have just about three weeks to get everything taken care of before the Dec. 15 deadlines — three weeks to come up with statements of purpose, research goals, letters of recommendation, GRE scores, and all the rest of it. This is a process that I certainly wasn't looking forward to going through so soon — if ever again. But here it is. I spent $60 yesterday and today just sending out transcripts. Twice the price, I suppose, since now I've got two universities' worth of classes to report, and we get some bureaucratic fun as well. The CMU application says I have to send an offical transcipt; this means I had to walk from Newell-Simon up to Warner, fill out a form to get the Hub to print out my grade report, put it in an envelope, and send it off via all-out U.S. mail so it gets as far as the CS main office in Wean Hall. Then the application material gets collected centrally and given out to the admissions committees in the various SCS departments, which means that my transcript is ultimately destined for... Newell-Simon, directly upstairs from where I sit. Fun. Today's job was supposed to be ordering my GRE score reports from two years ago, but it seems in order to do this you need about as much information as was contained in the score report to begin with, which of course I'm currently unable to find among my papers. I managed to get the exact test date thanks to an old journal post, so tomorrow I'll try calling ETS to see if they can look me up in the system based on that. In the meantime, it's on to recommendation letters, a process that involves starting online applications at four schools using three different systems and three different specifications for getting letters turned in. Assuming that all goes well, all I have to do is write one essay every five days for the next three weeks in the free time I find between three final exams, two class projects, two large homework assignments, one presentation, and some relatively urgent MEMT work! |
Thursday, November 30, 2006
1:06 a.m.
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Today has been a day for mood swings. Why do I find myself pondering horrible questions about life direction and purpose so much this semester? And is that a cause or an effect of my mental state? How much longer can I do the minimal-effort thing of just dealing with the immediate stuff, maintaining the status quo and forever postponing real decisions until some nebulous "later"? I thought I was doing OK this week. Yes, I was pretty sarcastic Monday night about those Ph.D. applications, but at least that was a specific complaint about a specific thing. Today I ended up just feeling generally listless and useless. I spent an hour and a half this afternoon trying to throw together what I thought should be a simple and straightforward Perl script for irssi. The first attempt froze my client; the second and third and fourth and fifth and sixth and seventh and eighth attempts did nothing at all. Gave up and came back to it two separate times, ultimately coming to the (possibly warped) conclusion that what I wanted to do was kind of silly anyhow. Left for class a bit before 3:00 in a despondent mood for some reason. I mean, at a certain level I should be old enough to not pitch internal temper tantrums like a petulant eight-year-old, but then I remembered the story about the straw and the camel. I have been feeling on the edge of something for a while. Tartan elections tonight, right after the board meeting, so I spent four and a half hours straight doing newspaper-related things. From a formal point of view, the elections were paralyzingly uninteresting: no position had more than one candidate running for it, and two of them had none. Still the usual format of statements, questions, and debate, though. Last year when I wrote about the elections, I remember thinking that the format was idiotic and wasteful — if only one person's up for an office, why not elect them automatically and move on? — but this year I found the debate much more... useful and necessary, I guess. I want to know something about a person before I cast a vote, especially if by asking a question or two I can draw out an important issue. Not everyone felt that way, it seemed, and I got a few snippy responses from other ed staff members during the debate periods. Eventually I asked Ali if I was slowing things down too much with my questions; she said no. Half-price with Kartik and Kelly at Joe Mama's a bit afterward. I wasn't especially hungry, but sitting in Margaret Morrison A14 for three and a half hours kind of put me in "I'm done for the day" mode. Some good conversation at the restaurant; as long as I can keep myself occupied I'm doing all right. It's in the solitary moments that I start to question and doubt things and get myself all mixed up inside. Why can't I concentrate on my actual work? Oh gosh, this post is such a mess — I don't normally consider myself an "emo kid," but these paragraphs probably rank up there with the melancholiest of the stuff poured out by the unhappiest stream-of-consciousness malcontent. But of course people are breaking via Live Journal all the time; it's what happens next that makes the difference. I wonder what effect this journal might have on someone from one of the schools I'm applying to who does a bit of clever Google searching. I doubt it would be that difficult to trace it back to me. |
Saturday, December 2, 2006
2:33 p.m.
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So. Sorry for the random outburst on Wednesday night, and thanks to everyone who's been engaging me these past few days. Pleasant conversation at Roselawn Thursday night, and then yesterday I had my first classic "Friday night out" in a while: KGB ice skating at the Schenley Park rink, food afterwards, and almost a movie too. I was trying to figure out how many times I'd been ice skating before. Certainly no more than once or twice before I went to college, and then probably four or five times since, so this made roughly seven. It was interesting to see my body adapt to the conditions. The first few times around the rink, I felt horribly unsteady and in danger of falling, but after about three minutes my brain had fetched its ice skating knowledge out of its remote file system; I rapidly got better. I even managed to actually skated backwards for the first time ever, and then started working on the quick switch from forward to backward that all the good skaters can do. Got it about 50 percent of the time, at least. Afterwards there was cheap, plentiful, and fairly good pizza at a place on Atwood Street ($5 for a large, and I think the place was called Pizza Roma) with a bunch of people: a lot of freshmen dragged in by KGB freshmen, it seemed. Also present was Jeff Johnston from Case, who'd been with us from the beginning but who I didn't quite recognize at first. All through the walk to the rink and during the skating, I kept thinking "That guy over there looks a whole lot like someone from Case — but it can't possibly be him, right?" Then Ivan referred to him as "Jeff," and I realized my error, said hello, and apologized for being dense. He's now a first-year Ph.D. student in ECE, working with a professor doing speech recognition all in hardware. A lot of the freshmen were making plans to go to the midnight showing of "Little Miss Sunshine" in McConomy, but I had software engineering homework due at midnight that I hadn't finished yet, so after pizza I ended up having to go back to my desk. Submitted the assignment at 11:59 and spent a few minutes answering e-mail until it was too late to make the movie, so then I popped over to the cluster for a bit. Nothing much going on there, except Jess told me about her full day of interview-death, so I caught the 1:00 shuttle home. Today is supposed to be a day for Language & Stats, but my brain isn't cooperating. |
Saturday, December 2, 2006
3:28 p.m.
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I realized, while I was working on that last entry, that I've been saving up all sorts of linguistic things I wanted to write about. Might as well do them all together, then. First, ever since I transferred the song from record over Thanksgiving break, Helen Forrest has been singing "I Didn't Know What Time It Was" in my brain. Usually I join in; I think it would make a good song for a choir warm-up. Lots of line-initial "I"s that have to not turn into "Hi," for one thing, and then the odd "t" combinations like "didn't know" and "what time" that force you to think about enunciation. Relatedly, people already comment about how British I sound in normal speech; it's certainly not any less obvious when I'm singing. I think part of it comes from studying French for so long and making liaison with consonants across words in that language. In English, and especially in sung English, my final "t"s tend to hop across word boundaries and attach themselves to the following word if it begins with a vowel, which means I pronounce them as "t" rather than "d"s. "Oh, whah ta lovely time ih twas, how sublime ih twas too" in the song I just mentioned, or "Nice work if you can geh tit, and you can geh tih tif you try" in another. And going off the topic of pronunciation, I noticed again last night my tendancy to pay close attention to the speech patterns of new people I meet so I can try to guess where they're from. I'm certainly not an expert — or even a student — of phonology, but I feel like I've got a decent ear for it. Even then I'm probably wrong more often than I'm right: I thought Klipper was from the Midwest for sure the first time I heard him talk. But sometimes my instincts are worth something. Once, for example, I caught Matt Aument saying things like "ahrange" and "Margaret Mahrrison," and I said something like "Wait, you said you're from Washington D.C., right? Where are your parents from?" Turns out his family's from northern New Jersey. (Fun with place names as an aside: any normal person would call these two locations "D.C." and "north Jersey.") Which leads me to thinking about demonyms ("Chicagoan" or "New Yorker," for example) and syllable rules since I just heard a talk in Language & Stats this week about optimality theory. In French you get a random "l" in chicagolais. It's true that English seems to permit almost anything in a syllable, and then almost any two can rub up against each other. One of my favorite examples of that is to ask people how they'd pronounce "tchst," which does occur in English. Usually the response is "What! How can it?" and then I give them the word "matchstick." We also get stacked vowels ("go away"), but in French verb inversion you have to add a "t" (va-t-il) to keep two vowels from touching. But then I was listening to the BBC news on Thursday, when they were talking about something in Congo, and I guess the demonym in English is "Congolese" with an extra consonant. Is that the same thing that's going on in "Genovese" (for Genoa), or does that word come from the Italian name of the city ("Genova")? And, at any rate, why not use just plain "Congoese" or "Congoan" or "Congan"? |
Wednesday, December 6, 2006
1:13 p.m.
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What is this — you turn 23 and your immune system suddenly crashes? I'm sick for the third time since my birthday in July, putting me on pace to break the record set in 1991-92 when I had strep throat five times in third grade. At least this year's illnesses haven't resulted in any doctor's visits, so I've still got that streak going. And they are occurring almost exactly eight weeks apart, so maybe I can plan for the next one at the beginning of February. But why must they occur at such wretched times? In October a week's worth of lung-hacking was just coming on when I had to give my SRS presentation; this time it's threatening to ruin my busiest week ever. I came home last night at 6:00, ate a bowl of cereal, and flopped down on the couch for four hours before moving to the bed around 11. Then my plan was to get up around 4 or 5 a.m. to work, using 7:30 as a backup time, but it was actually 10 a.m. before I felt like moving. Spending 15 hours in bed for the loss, as they say. Gave my presentation on grammar formalisms for syntax-based machine translation yesterday, having started making the slides the afternoon before. Went badly, as expected. The only questions came from Noah (the professor), and I don't think I gave satisfactory answers to any of them. Plus I had to deliver the whole thing in a sort of croaking death-voice that — to me, at least — sounded pretty awful. I still have who knows how many papers to read and write about for the companion lit review due Monday. I want this semester to be over. I already know I'm getting the worst grades of my life, so let's skip the formalities of me killing myself for the next six days to hand in work that's going to be poorly done or incomplete anyway, shall we? |
Saturday, December 9, 2006
1:05 a.m.
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Well, not dead yet, somehow. Software engineering final Wednesday afternoon, which didn't go too badly. I think I wrote something down for every question, at least. It was more time-consuming than anything else; I probably spent 30 of the 80 minutes of the exam drawing out the sequence diagram for Question 3. Then meeting for the group project, starting around 6:00 and lasting until 8 or 9. Then a vague two-day period of Language & Stats homework with some Language & Stats class in between. The talks yesterday were actually quite interesting: first Amr's companion talk to mine, on models and implementations for syntax-based SMT, and then one by Jaime on morphology induction. More software engineering group from 6:30 until 8:45, at which point I came home to take a shower and get ready for the Tartan gala at the Union Grill. Kevin had sent around an e-mail to some of the copy staff advocating us all going in suits or formal dresses and saying we were showing "Tartan style" — he eventually admitted he was joking, but by then we'd all made plans to get dressed up and decided to hold him to it. It wasn't until I got out of the shower around 9:30 that I realized I had no clue where my dress shoes were, but at least it only took me about five minutes to find them. The real trouble came from the tie. I will admit it: I have been male for 23 years, 4 months, and 14 days, and I still have never been able to tie a tie for myself. When I worked at Heinen's and they were required, I just had my dad tie my two work ties for me, and then I'd use them over and over again by pulling them on and off without undoing the knot. I thought I'd left them in the same state when coming here, but when I pulled out the formal attire last night at 10:30 for the first time since moving here, I was horrified to discover that one tie was stuck in some undefined knotty state and the other wasn't tied at all. So I pulled out the "How to Tie a Tie" advertisement from the '50s that we ran in an Observer April Fool's issue a few years ago (I saved it, and had a hand in putting it in the issue in the first place, for just such an emergency) and started fiddling with putting the wide end over and under the narrow end, keeping the know smooth, and all the rest of it — and after 20 minutes the best I was able to produce was a partially almost-tied thing that had the narrow end coming out of the knot and the wide end flapping uselessly upside down and backwards at the top. So I balled the thing contemptuously into my pocket — that's one of those phrases people write in books a lot; the motion's pretty satisfying in real life — and took it with me to the gala like that. Brad tied it for me at the door, which made Evan laugh and call me "adorable," but it turned out that neither Matt nor Kevin were able to tie their ties without help from the Internet. The gala did a pretty bad job on the food front this semester, but there was a nice photo slide show called "The ABCs of The Tartan" that included Ariane's picture of me flying down the hallway in a rolling chair at 4:20 in the morning one week when we were running behind. ("L is for Letting Loose.") Also a number of fine shots from this semester's papers mixed with the usual candids of people acting weird in the office. I had managed to arrive only a few minutes before the show, and after it I spent most of the time with the other copy staffers. Sometimes we are so insular it's scary, but we always manage to have such random conversations in a characteristically nerdy way. At one point we were talking about passing around my personal statement for Ph.D. applications during the copy party next week as seconds and thirds... |
Saturday, December 9, 2006
7:45 p.m.
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I seem to be alternating good and bad days. After the Tartan gala Thursday, I went back to my desk and worked on the Language & Stats homework until a few minutes past the 3 a.m. deadline without having time to run the full set of experiments I wanted, so that was definitely a bad day. Yesterday was quite nice. Software engineering group over at the Craig Street office from about 12:30 continuously until 6:30, when we finally submitted our project. We couldn't get the conference room, so it was just the four of us and our laptops clustered round a small table out under the skylights. The work went well all afternoon, and then Joy came over around 4:30 and told us to go eat the pizza he had for his practice thesis defense talk. KGB event as usual at 7:00; this week it was "naptime" in Baker Hall. We had cookies and milk first, and then I played a few rounds of Alan V.'s cluster card game with some other people before the pillow fights started. Then Alan asked me to play ITG, so we went across to the UC. Jordan came down to join us also, so the two of us played a nice easy round together and watched Alan V. play doubles. It still kind of amazes me that I get slightly better at this game every time I play it, even though before last night I hadn't been in Scotlard Yard in at least three months. I now apparently get Cs on Level 2 songs, which means I may be able to pass a 3 next time. Starcraft in the cluster came next (there's a game I don't get better at), and then Fuddle half-price with Alisa, Alan, and another guy called Dan. At home, I put a good hour into reading "Dune" before going to bed a bit before 3 a.m. So that was a most satisfactory day. Today is rather going the other way, though. The plan was to spend all day studying for the Language & Stats exam — I am getting really sick of typing the name of that class — and working on my lit review, with a possible quick break for grocery shopping or a trip to the Waterfront. Ha ha, planning, what a joke you are. I didn't wake up until 1:00, and then I decided that what I really and urgently needed to do was clean my apartment a bit. So I began with laundry, did some dishes, and then got distracted on Wikipedia. At 3:30, coming again back to reality, I realized that the stuff in the dryer was done and that I should go down and get it. It was only too late — as the click of the bolt in my apartment door was already on its way from the lock to my ears — that I remembered that, being still in my pajamas, my keys were in the pocket of my jeans on my bed. Yes, kids, I locked myself out. I'll have to save telling the whole story for tomorrow, since this entry's getting pretty long already, but it was an hour before the landlord let me back into my apartment and I could continue with my afternoon. Not that I'm doing anything productive with it anyway. Wasting time on the Internet, an early dinner, more "Dune," and writing this entry is all I've been up to since, and tomorrow's 1 p.m. meeting with Amr to merge our two halves of the lit review puts a hard deadline on when I need to have my stuff written up by. |
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
3:41 p.m.
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"It's time to select your seats!" I bought plane tickets for the first time in my life yesterday; my advisor let me have a few extra days off for over winter break, so I'm going to the MIT Mystery Hunt right before classes start in January. I looked up the usual bus ($116) and train ($171) prices, and was trying to decide if I wanted to take a train trip enough to pay that much extra for it, but then Chris checked an airfare site and reported that we could fly for $119. (It appears JetBlue is running a special from certain airports; Pittsburgh to Boston is $49 each way, and then the rest comes from tax, departure fees, Sept. 11 paranoia fees, etc.) So I'll be making my fifth round trip by plane next month, and I guess flying is still enough of a novelty that I'm a bit excited. Other things are going nicely as well — or at least I'm ignoring them enough that I feel fine. Like it or not, the hated Language & Stats II is finished and there's nothing I can do about it. The final was yesterday, an incredibly long test with 24 points' worth of questions but only graded out of 20. I only had reasonably confident answers for 17 points, and no answers at all for a few more, so we'll see what that translates into when the grading's done. The lit review was due by midnight, which caused me a pile and a half of headaches in the evening hours. What happens, you ask, when a copy editor and a non-native English speaker collaborate on a written document? Nothing good, that's for sure. I spent three hours in the noisiest cluster in the history of the universe editing the first 16 or 17 of our 26 pages before running off to half-price, returning around 12:30 to find that my partner had somehow made his updates to and submitted the pre-edited copy instead of the final one. What. Ever. I'm so sick of looking at that thing that I actually don't think I care that much. So now all I have left is a French take-home and all my statements of purpose for the Ph.D. applications, all due by Friday. Plus I have to clean my apartment today because the copy staff is coming over at 7:00 for our semesterly party. But compared to what I've been working on for the past few weeks, these things don't bother me all that much, and I'm rather looking forward to getting back to some research work this week. |
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
11:49 a.m.
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Something else with a Friday deadline I keep forgetting to post about: Is anyone interested in doing something for the SCS Day talent show, or is there an existing group that wouldn't mind an extra person? Some ideas for an act I thought of in a few minutes in the bathroom this morning are: a nerdy parody song, similar to what the group did last year (I've heard at least two other songs that sound like Billy Joel; that could be a theme), or a skit about computers or computer science done in the style of "Look Around You." I should admit, for completeness, that my theatrical and singing skills are not "skills" so much as forgotten or under-developed possibilities; I said five words on stage once when I was Peter Cratchitt in my fifth-grade class play (and ran the lights for the eighth-grade show, if that counts), and I haven't sung formally since I was 13, but I think I'm willing to give this a try. I think the deadline to register is this Friday, though, so people who might be interested in forming a group should let me know soon. |
Saturday, December 16, 2006
12:43 p.m.
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Well, in summing up the past week, I certainly can't say that it wasn't adventurous. Also I'm proving once again that there's no minute like the last minute for getting stuff done. I had a French take-home that had to be done in 24 hours, so I printed the thing late Wednesday night and tried to get started on it then. Unfortunately, the prompts were unexiting and I had an awful headache, so I looked at the thing for maybe 10 minutes before I decided I really just wanted to go home and sleep. Picked it up again late Thursday afternoon, and then spent the rest of the night (until just before 11:00) writing essays in various places on campus: in the cluster, on Flagstaff Hill, at the Underground, in the Tartan office, on a picnic table across from Roselawn (they weren't home), at a table in the Carnegie Mellon Café, and finally back in the cluster again. I think either my writing procedure has changed or I've gotten dumber: I used to be able to count on a page an hour in French, including references, but I was definitely not maintaing that pace on this final. Yesterday was wholly given over to finishing Ph.D. applications in light of impending deadlines; I had just started writing the prototype statement of purpose the night before after the French final. Eventually concocted 860 of decent stuff for the CMU application, most of which I had to cut out and fill in with different stuff for USC because of the difference in prompt and length requirement. The Maryland deadline was also yesterday, but their horrible online system is actually only Part One of a two-step process, and you're supposed to wait two business days for the second. Which means, probably, that they'll reject mine out of hand because it's going to be something like four days late. The Johns Hopkins deadline, I discovered, is actually January 15 instead of yesterday, so suddenly that school is moving up to No. 2 on the list of places I want to go to and haven't screwed up the application on. And I say, who comes up with these online horrors? You can't do online statements of purpose or recommendation letters at Maryland until you get Part Two — why can't they have a single online step to manage everything like every other school in existence? Then, yesterday, USC asked me about my high school and dates of attendance ("Date Entered: August 1997") — they only had RBC in their system and not THS, and even so, are they going to try to call up my now-retired teachers and ask them what I was like when I was 14? There has been much complaining about grad school apps in the cluster recently... Anyway, the imminent-deadline stuff was all finished by a little after 7:30, so I went climbing with Chris, gwillen, Ivan, and jgrafton. I do believe the last thing I climbed was a plastic wall of corn at the 2001 Ohio state fair, so I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. The Climbing Wall (yes, that's the actual name) near Penn and Braddock feels a lot like Free Ride and the Food Co-Op in the same area: laid-back, handmade, and kind of alternative. The employees take your money and pretty much turn you loose in a room full of wooden wall shapes you can climb, and that's that. Lots of fun, though I was glad Chris, gwillen, and Ivan were able to explain things a bit. The routes up the wall are color-coded with bits of tape (which can be hard to see when you're looking for the next foothold from some impossible position that you're too weak to hold for more than a few seconds!) and labelled with difficulties. VB is the easiest; if they'd only had an NNS to match I would have felt like I was climbing through syntax trees in the Penn Treebank. After that, I found I could handle V0 without much trouble, so I went to work on the V1s. It took me five or six tries to make it to the top of the first one I approached, and after that I failed over and over again at another one. That's the one that will make me go back — I feel like I should be able to handle it if I can just get started properly. After I introduced the |
Monday, December 18, 2006
4:26 p.m.
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Does anyone have two Ethernet cables I could borrow for a few days? They don't have to be long; anything in the three-meter or 10-foot range will be just fine. I am ready to begin the process of introducing Linux to my laptop... |
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
1:04 a.m.
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I should give a recap of interesting happenings from over the weekend, but often my internal "stuff to write about" queue turns into a stack. Tonight is one of those times. I'm T-plus four hours into my second experience installing Linux; the first one was about 13 months when my desktop first made the jump to dual boot. Now it's the laptop's turn. After I got Ethernet cables from cluster people this evening, I biked home — quite excitedly, in fact — to get things set up. Backups of important data made: check. Six-CD set of that ridiculous IBM Thinkpad hidden partition burned: check. Ubuntu and GPartEd images downloaded and burned: check. Laptop scanned for errors and defragmented for good measure: check. And so on and so on. This is the kind of thing I needed right now. Coming to CMU, and getting into the social situation I'm currently in, has had a strongly negative effect on my perceived intelligence and self-worth at times. There are days when I feel like a perfect dunce for being a "worse" CS major than so many other people I know. So sitting in my apartment, surrounded by computers and cables, singing along to Glenn Miller or Frank Sinatra songs while methodically following (and completing!) a set of steps I laid out for myself was a pretty nice boost in the "Yes, I am in fact reasonably competent" department. I only went to ask for help on #cslounge once, and even then I figured out the answer myself about 90 seconds after posing the question. It's a big change from the way things went last time (entries of Nov. 17, 2005 and Nov. 20, 2005, for example). Now I'm all set up for the actual partitioning and Linux installation, which will happen tomorrow when I'm in range of the campus network and can thus test Ubuntu's recognition of my wireless card. I'm thinking of what you might call a tripartite setup: 20 GB NTFS for Windows (which eats disk space horribly), 10 or 12 GB EXT3 for Linux, and then the remaining 28 or 30 GB in FAT32 for general file storage. My next post should hopefully include a note about the success of the operation — either that or a write-up of the weekend, which also has a number of fun and exciting highlights to recount. |
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
12:52 p.m.
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Long overdue (and just plain long) report on the weekend: I think I laughed more Saturday night than I have in quite a while, thanks to a party given by Cari, one of the LTI first-years, to celebrate the end of the semester. I didn't know most of the people there too well, but it was nice to do something with other grad students and also to figure out who these guys are who share my lab with me. The hit of the evening turned out to be a game of something like verbal charades: on each team's turn, one person has to draw a slip out of a pile that we made and get his or her teammates to guess the name written on it. (The names can be anything — famous people, infamous people, random people, cartoon characters, etc.) Repeat as many times as possible within 60 seconds, and then the next team goes. After all the names are guessed, the entire process begins again with the same names, but this time the person doing the describing is only allowed to say two words. It was an excellent game, especially given the multicultural nature of the crowd, since unfamiliar names had to be extracted from teammates one syllable at a time. "Ella Fitzgerald," for example, started out as "French pronoun, third person, the singular one... English indefinite article..." The best was when someone said what sounded like "Female terrorist... who does good things... in Africa, I think," and it took us nearly the whole minute to figure out that he actually was saying "charitist" and that the person in question was in fact Mother Teresa. After the name game we switched to Taboo, which I hadn't played in a really long time. More hilarious guesses during that game — one in which a speaker of British English got a TV show across using "soap" and "serial," which the Americans parsed as "soap" and "cereal" and were totally confused on, though I think the overall best was "Jack the Stripper." For Sunday, I had tried to plan a "grand day out": an afternoon of interesting activities along the lines of walking through the park, visiting the museums, having tea in the South Side, etc. It was supposed to begin at noon in the cluster, and I e-mailed invitations to like 20 people who I thought would still be in Pittsburgh this weekend and interested in having fun on two days' notice. "Good guess, but not very correct," as a physics TA once wrote on one of my lab reports. At 12:15 the cluster contained only jgrafton and myself; by 1:00 we had collected mrwright and gwillen; it was 2:00 before we went as far as the crêpes place on Craig Street for lunch. After that the world fell into a series of Starcraft games in the cluster, of which I played two. Not that it wasn't an acceptable way to pass the time, but I had rather been hoping for something more... active and outdoors. It was like 60 degrees out, after all. Eventually I was saved by #LOLHAT4LYFE, specifically by plans being discussed there for dinner and then a movie in Roselawn. Jeff and I thus escaped the cluster around 8:45, and Car, Tom, and Tom's car met us in the parking lot. Dinner was at Aladdin's in Squirrel Hill — excellent as always — and then we collected matthewj and Philip for the movie. I can now add "Highlander" to the list of utterly bizarre and somewhat regrettable things that from time to time take up a few hundred meters of photographic film. The movie is much better, it's true, than that "Battle Royale II" thing we saw 20 minutes of about a year ago, but it's still solidly in the "mockery" category. It's mostly a sequence of very strange special-effects-laden scenes strung together by wacky transitions and interludes of '80s music. (Apparently a sword striking anything produces massive showers of sparks.) Also some really bad work with accent consistency: the character who's supposed to be Scottish comes across as sounding variously Scottish, American, Russian, Spanish, and probably a few other things that don't really have a national origin. I think we were all kind of surprised to learn that the thing has four sequels. |
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
3:31 p.m.
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I have a functioning dual-boot four-partition laptop! (Four partitions because Ubuntu yelled at me when I didn't have a totally separate swap partition allocated, so I had to go back and shrink the data partition by 1 GB and make a tiny new thing at the end of the drive.) I spent another two hours in the cluster yesterday evening getting everything installed, but that time could have been drastically reduced if the "Go Back" button in the installer actually meant "Go back to the partition list since that's the only part you did wrong and need to fix, you goof" rather than "Exit the installer completely and do the whole process all over again as punishment for making a mistake on the second-to-last step, you moron." Also, if I'd known the install process included repartitioning your drive, I probably wouldn't have spent a half-hour doing it beforehand with a separate copy of GPartEd. But whatever — the Linux is installed and working, the Windows part seems to remain functional, and the data partition's got my data on it. Sounds good to me. Finished just in time to walk home, collect food and games, and leave immediately again on my bike for Chris's fondue party at 8:30. I was surprised at how many people were still around, and all of them wanted to talk about linguistics and cross-language phonology, topics I decided I should know much more about than I actually do for all the time I spend going around excusing my mediocre CS skills by saying I'm half a linguist. I guess I have more of an ear for accents and the mechanics of usage than knowledge of formal terminology — but I suppose I can make that change if necessary. Which brings me to the fact that I've been meaning to post a checklist of what to do over the break. I used to make these things for the summer when I was about 14 or 15 — the second one I made, I remember, was right after we got a computer at our house that could do smart quotes instead of straight quotes in Word, and this was sufficiently exciting to me that I tried to use as many of them as possible in the checklist.
I am historically really bad at completing items on these kinds of checklists, but we shall see. I've kind of arranged them in order of priority, so that might help a little. |
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