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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!
Thursday, December 21, 2006
2:52 p.m.
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Today's post is about journals, since I've been re-reading a lot of my old stuff recently. A fun excercise is to go into Live Journal and click repeatedly on the "Previous 20 entries" link, reading the top one or two post each time. For me this is a vignette of my life at one-month intervals, and there are some interesting things there. Software engineering death, Spring Carnival, my introduction to Tetrinet, game nights at Rebecca's — all floating round in there, and the writing actually makes me laugh every now and then. Especially this, in a post last fall about getting involved at The Tartan: "I kind of promised myself, when I first started writing, that I wouldn't go any further than that." Ha! See what your current self thinks of that, Mr. Copy Manager! I also decided that I was much more of a stereotypical teenager than I remember — still not as bad as most, I expect, but what appears in my writing from age not-quite-16 to 18 is certainly not the kind of sentiment I come up with now. Mostly it's me whining about not having a car and how annoying life at home was. I guess I've forgotten how obsessive suburban high schoolers are about driving, especially with all those Solon kids at Heinen's who all just got cars as a matter of course when they turned 16. I used to pick up those Auto Mart magazines on my way out of the store and obstinately work my way through them at home, probably knowing full well that it was about as useful as perusing real estate listings in Beverley Hills. (And when I did get a car it was by a lucky combination of events, not by careful product research.) Now here I am living in the middle of the city, with a decent car licensed in my name and parked behind the building, thinking that I could get along just fine without one if I never had to drive home or take long trips. I also came across stuff about college applications — including a few lines about visiting CMU in the summer of 2000 — and my parents going on and on about finding scholarships. Though there's not as much information there as I'd like, since my senior year of high school seems to have been a sort of lost year for me as far as journaling goes. There's much more about the grad school applications process and associated school visits two years ago. Which somehow recalls to my mind the interesting fact that the current round of Ph.D. applications will be the first time I haven't used a typewriter in some capacity to complete the process. Six years ago I typed out at least one form that way, just for fun, and two years ago I used an old manual to write the rough draft of my CMU essay. And a Final Note for Live Journal People: I also recalled this afternoon that I'm newly aware of the existence of journals by interesting people that I haven't been following so far, so I may have added you to my friends list. You don't have to add me to yours if you don't want to: I tend to write 500 or 600 words four or five times a week when my work's not killing me, and that's a lot to demand from an unsuspecting Friends page. |
Friday, December 22, 2006
7:22 p.m.
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At last comes the inevitable post about grades. I had written the whole thing out about half an hour ago, but when I was done it sounded mostly like me whining over a GPA that — all things considered, I guess — is still not particularly awful. I mean, I've never put too much stock in GPAs in general because I've always considered mine horribly inflated. Maybe this semester just represents a time when the final grades match up more closely with what I've truly learned in the full sense of the word? But still, this semester did result, as expected, in the worst GPA of my life, which annoys me some and is probably not the sort of thing you want happening in your third semester of grad school. Especially since the grading scale's so messed up there to start with. For an LTI master's student, anything below a C is treated as failing; for a Ph.D. student, anything below a B is. And, well, I got a B, brought to you by the number 11-762: Language & Stats II. I royally stinkified the final, a 24-point exam graded out of 20 on which I managed to get a whole 10 points. (But apparently the whole class did rather poorly overall: the average was 11.) The good news is that, by the grace of all the heavenly what's-its in existence, I got a 24 out of 25 on the lit review. I certainly didn't expect that project to be saving me in the end. An A in software engineering, which was a pleasant result although not too unexpected. We put in a lot of decent work on the project, and I felt pretty good about the final. The best class of the semester was (predictably) French, which I ended with close to a 97 percent average. Not quite enough for an A+, unfortunately, which actually matters in the horrble plus/minus scale they use for the graduate students, but still a very nice result. Then there's "Directed Research," which is a 24-unit representation of my MEMT work with my advisor. I forgot it was graded, actually, and was kind of annoyed to discover an A– for it in SIO this morning. The same thing happened last spring, in fact, when I was really surprised since the semester before research had been pass/fail. I should perhaps ask Alon what I should be doing in order to get an A next time, since reseach work is half of my total academics at this school. So — if I might be allowed to obsess over the raw numbers for a moment — the overall mess drags my kicking-and-screaming cumulative GPA down another 0.07 points. Not quite into the freak-out zone yet, but getting dashed close and starting to make a pretty lopsided comparison with my Case grades. I have to remember that my degree here only comprises 10 classes, so each one makes a fair bit of difference in the overall average. We will have to hope for more interesting classes and a better work ethic next semester. |
Monday, December 25, 2006
12:03 a.m.
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It's a few minutes after midnight, so merry Christmas to those to whom it applies and happy fourth Monday in December to everyone in general! For what it's worth, I'm at home. Left Pittsburgh early Saturday afternoon in really fast-moving traffic and got here around 3:15. Family all going insane as usual — in that good way, though, that means you can join them and laugh your head off for hours on end. My little sister is especially random in conversation, and my brother seems to have cut his hair on purpose to more closely match mine. I say, one of these months I'm going to come home to find an exact clone of myself running around the house who just happens to answer to a different name. We went over to my grandparents' last night to pick them up and take them to my aunt's house for a little pre-Christmas thing, and my grandma saw me in the hallway and called me "Andrew." I'm struck again by the totally different mode of life that exists in the suburbs in general and in my house in particular. Over Thanksgiving I first noticed that phones were ringing all the time — all three of my siblings have their own cell phones now in addition to my parents' and the normal house line — where I'm lucky to get an actual non-telemarking incoming call once or twice a month at my apartment. Then there was the fact that I had to use my car every day I was here, in amazing contrast to most weeks at school when the only way my car gets out is when I drive to The Tartan on Sundays. More of the same feeling in the last two days, and constant shuffling of cars in the driveway since there are five of us who are officially licensed to take them out on the roads. Fuller reports in the coming days, I expect, as things have a chance to turn normal after tomorrow. I'll be at two Case-people parties on Thursday and Friday; if other Cleveland-area people want to do stuff outside of then, they should give me a call! |
Tuesday, December 26, 2006
2:33 p.m.
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I've been working through "The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison" over the last few days. The diary part, which I've read a few times before, is wonderfully light and witty — Edison seems to have been a great punner. It's the first time I've read the second part, which consists of a series of disjoint essays on various topics written between about 1920 and 1930. There's a lot of stuff about education and educational philosophy in particular, some of which is both interesting and still true: If our schools would stiffen their standards, and find a means of holding the intellectually lazy average student of the present day to these stiffened standards, we should find, I think, that the system of learning today and forgetting permanently tomorrow would go out of fashion. If the set, formal examinaiton were given less prominence I should that that would help too. A student must be of low caliber indeed if, with printed text and written notes before him covering the entire work of the term, he cannot cram enough facts into his head and keep them there long enough to get past the examination. When he has done this, so far as his present state of mind is concerned, he seems to be through with those facts — finished; he is never going to want them again, or worry about them. This makes me wince a bit. I'd like to think I've spent five and a half years now eating heartily from the table of higher knowledge, but I know I've more likely been playing the sort of game Edison describes: a binge-and-purge approach of overeating and being full of one particular kind of information long enough to spit it up all over the final exam at the end of the semester. Then we (by which I mean some abstract plural entity denoting myself) start mostly empty again, with a net result of having grazed from a field of random things and actually absorbed only bits and pieces. My dad says it's "learning how to learn"; I think of it as "winning the higher-education game," by which I mean figuring out how to work the system, in a sense, to get (this semester and possibly the last one aside) a nice GPA. And yes, that part I generally consider myself pretty good at. It often amazes me, though, how much information I once knew (or could have known, or should have known) and have since forgotten, and it's frequently the case that people who have taken the same classes with me but got lower grades have come away with a much better and longer-lasting grasp on the material. This sort of topic could easily turn into a new essay of my own, with numerous subtopics addressing current educational methods, the way to fix the problem, whether research-based grad school is any better or different, the differences between technical and humanities classes, etc., etc. I won't fatigue everyone with writing it now, but I did want to get the base of the idea out before I read too much farther into the book and get involved in a question in some other domain. |
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
3:15 p.m.
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The quick report on Christmas: pretty good and along pretty predictable lines. I will be taking some excellent things back to Pittsburgh with me next week. The four-quart crock pot means that Cornish hens will be on the menu soon, and I got a bag of my favorite chocolate as an after-dinner treat. Then there's the 40th-anniversary DVD of "The Sound of Music" for when I'm feeling musical, followed by "Animaniacs, Volume 2" for when I want to laugh. Also some nice gift certificates and a head-start on finding new reading material. Later on my family went to my aunt's house for the usual giant get-together. After we got back, I may or may not have had anything to do with the creation of this, which will probably not make you laugh until you see the original site, which will probably not make any sense until you read the more comprehensible Wikipedia article on the thing. (For the lazy and/or knowledgeable: it's a parody of Time Cube called Thyme Cube.) Yesterday, jgrafton posted a link to some bizarre forum where Thyme Cube was already linked — there is something very satisfying about random strangers reading something you've worked on and calling it "brilliant" or "better than most," even when it's something totally insignificant. </death-by-links> Today we've been having "fun" with cars; mine was supposed to go in for an oil change, so I had to wake up at 7:30 in order to drive down to Ralph's with my dad at 8:00. That would have been a straightforward process, except you'll note I did say "cars" plural — things have gone wrong with both of my parents' vehicles as well, so it's been a full day of shuttling people and cars back and forth from the shop. First I drove down car A and my dad drove car B, leaving A at the shop and both of us coming home in B. Then we both drove B back, left it, and both came home in A. Step Three was my dad driving car C to the shop and me following with the jumper cables in A in case something happened; then we left C at the shop, I came home in A, and my dad followed in B. And we still have to go again at some point to collect C and bring it back! It makes me very appreciative that the place I found to take my car in Pittsburgh is just a quarter-mile down the road from my apartment. |
Saturday, December 30, 2006
1:15 p.m.
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Back from two days of parties, running around in Cleveland, and other fun stuff with Case people! We started at Susannah's on Thursday evening, where I discovered perhaps the fourth alcoholic drink I actually like: it's champagne with a bit of pomegranate juice mixed in. Eric was there with a supply of pictures from his mammoth six-month, 7000-mile cross-country bike trip, and Dan brought RoboRally. A bunch of Susannah's high school friends came over for a while, which led to an... intense game of 10 Fingers that ended as they usually do. Vicki, Paul, Eric, Dan, and I ended up spending the night. Susannah was running off to Chicago yesterday, so the rest of us drove all our cars up to Cleveland and made the CWRU commuter lot our new home base. First we picked up Kathi and walked to Presti's in Little Italy for lunch (the donut part closed!), and then we condensed into two cars for Galucci's and the Great Lakes Brewery. This is why I love Ohio's new smoking ban: I was able to spend 45 minutes in a pub with friends and come out without smelling like cigarettes. It was only 4:45 when we were done — and we weren't due at Erin's until 7:00 — so Vicki proposed a trip to a certain store (redacted for privacy and sanity, perhaps) at Richmond Mall. I was of course not in favor of such things, so I went alone back to campus and spent an hour and a half walking around. A very intriguing pursuit, in fact. All the buildings were locked for the night by the time I got there a bit after 5, but I passed someone coming out of Wickenden when I was near the doorway, so I got myself into Wickenden-Sears-Nord, at least. The renovators have been at work in the first of those, I see: I almost didn't recognize the third floor. When I came out again I walked all the way up to North Side and back just looking at the buildings and saying their names again. Realized again that going to CMU has overwritten a sizable chunk of my brain that stores college-related things. Saw the Greek letters for Sigma Phi Epsilon on the side of a fraternity house, for example, and couldn't remember if we had a short name for them at Case because the only thing I could think of was the Sig Ep Wars booth at CMU Spring Carnival last year. Then I passed the little art gallery at Adelbert and Murray Hill and only thought of the Frame. Started getting the hang of things after a few minutes, though. Party at Erin's apartment at the Waldorf at 7:00. There were lots and lots of people there and it was really noisy, so I was glad when Vicki got out her Settlers games and four of us escaped to the quieter dining room. Then Eric Litvak arrived with a Nintendo Wii, so I got to watch people play tennis, bowling, and boxing in the living room before getting involved in the more classical Bomber Man. Fluxx to finish out the evening, and then those of us who'd come up from Susannah's laid out our sleeping bags and went to bed. Today was a quick morning, since Erin was herself leaving fairly early on. We had another round of Fluxx after breakfast, and then I packed up my stuff and drove home around 11:30. No plans for New Year's Eve — I am currently still in Ohio and will by default stay there until the 2nd, but can be recalled to Pittsburgh if deemed necessary or desirable. Then I get an rlambert on the 3rd. |
Sunday, December 31, 2006
4:19 p.m.
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I'm not sure how much I want to write about New Year's. I'd already gone through all my journal entries for 2006, excerpted bits from maybe 35 of them, and written up a whole "Year in Review" page, but I don't think it's all that interesting. And then I read the Plain Dealer comics today and had an overdose of "Now is the time to evaluate our personal lives and work out next year's grand plan"-style sentiment, and there's a limit to how much of that I want to inflict people with in one day. The best argument, though, may be that the calendar year is kind of arbitrary anyway to someone with a late summer birthday who's living on an academic schedule: the way I consider things, the real "year" is only about half over. So I can probably say what I want to say in a few paragraphs instead. And that would be what? I was kind of surprised last year to find Dave Barry's year-end column starting off with what amounted to "Good riddance to that 2005 crap." I think for me that's an opinion that might be better applied to 2006 in some respects. I don't believe I've ever before had so little idea of what I actually want out of life and what I sort of long-term career I'd actually be good for — the old CS-vs.-journalism agony from senior year of undergrad coming back with a double punch because I know I can't delay a final decision all that much longer. Figuring out where my priorities are cost me a lot of anguish this fall, and I'm not sure I've even yet arrived at more than another temporary decision. But knowing the sort of people I know has really helped consider the various alternatives. I see many more options for when things don't work out now than I would have a year or two ago, and the (relative) success with which they've been implemented by others means that I won't feel like a failure if I have to work with a Plan B or Plan C in my own life. It also means I've got those plans ready in case they're needed. The year 2006, in fact, may be best described as the year of people for me. Others have already written about how the group dynamic of KGB is changing, and I've personally gotten to know some subsets of people that I didn't even know existed a year ago. This has been a great experience — hopefully, if the thought isn't too self-important, as much for them as it has been for me. Maybe the best example I can give is meeting a person casually "in real life," as they say, talking a bit beyond the usual formulas and polite pleasantries, and then finding out that the same person has a Live Journal. It always intrigues me how people come across differently in text than they do in person. Often certain aspects of a personality, only mildly expressed in real-life group interactions, show up with amazing depth in a collection of journal posts, which to me is always somehow a nice feeling. I've discovered several extraordinarily intersting people that way this year; talking one-on-one or in groups of three with some others has had a similar result. OK; maybe I'll need more than a few paragraphs to completely treat the year-end chain of thoughts. I suppose what's above covers some of the personal and interpersonal aspects of the past year. My parents and I are going out for an early dinner in a bit, so I'll have to continue with some of the more objective aspects of 2006 tomorrow. |
Monday, January 1, 2007
5:33 p.m.
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Or, in fact, I might not. A summary of 2006 seems kind of vieux jeu after that extra round of "Year in Review" posts that must have gone up last night. If there's anything you want to know about in my case, just ask; otherwise I'll move on. So happy 2007 for what it's worth. It's kind of weird to think of the decade as being quite advanced now — it's not exactly like we just finished off the '90s and are still getting used to this 21st century thing. It's old and established and we're not too far from the 2010s. Last night I got myself some New Year's plans with the ever-excellent Sonnie and special guest stars Debbie and P.J. We all drove down to Liz's New Year's Eve party in Canton, leaving around 8:45 and getting back just before 3 a.m. Liz's street isn't very nice to people arriving after dark: the little stones that have building addresses on them are almost impossible to find in the first place, and you can't read them unless you make a full stop and roll down a window. Got there eventually, though, and had a nice fun time. There are many pictures of me wearing a little tissue-paper party hat that came out of a firecracker-like thing. At midnight we threw streamers all over Liz's living room and drank four bottles of sparking grape juice and one of wine. I'm packing up my stuff tonight and driving back to Pittsburgh, which means I can go ice skating there tomorrow with Sonnie and her physics friend who lives in the city. Then back to "work" on the 3rd until I leave for the MIT Mystery Hunt on the 11th. It should be a nice week coming up. |
Random Stuff #36
Tuesday, January 2, 2007, 12:51 p.m.
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I got "tagged" on this by winning Dan's, so it's time for the Turing Test Journal Post Game! This is a game of subterfuge and adaptation, and, secondarily, if your mind works like mine does, copy editing. The goal is to trick people into thinking you're me by writing a journal post that's indistinguishable from one I actually did write. (A formal definition of the game, as explained by Dan, is here.) Basically, you communicate to me a journal post — or, since my posts are usually between 500 and 600 words long, shall we say an excerpt of a journal post if you'd prefer? (If you submit via Live Journal comment, they're screened.) Then I collect all the entries until Friday-ish, mix in zero or more of my own from events or days I haven't already described in real entries, and put them all up to a vote. Readers vote on which one(s) actually are mine, and then the cleverest trickster wins the right to do one of these him or herself. |
Thursday, January 4, 2007
12:11 a.m.
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Went climbing yesterday with rlambert, who's here visiting until the 15th. She said she "heard a rumor" (that she made up on the spot) that I want to go climbing all the time now. It's possible — I have to look into how much I want to spend on one single activity, and climbing seems quite expensive even once all the discounts are mixed in. (Last night it was $13 including shoes, and I can't climb for more than an hour, even taking breaks, before my arms start to fail me.) I do like the way it makes me feel physically, though, sort of like "Hey, the top half of your body was used for something besides typing today!" I could definitely use the strength training, it's true. Earlier in the day I biked downtown via the Furnace trail to give a notebook to Sonnie at the ice rink; the 10-mile trip was more physically difficult that it should have been. Afterwards we came back here and had a game of Scrabble. I scored 302, which may be my best ever, and got my second 50-point bonus by using all my letters to make "laureate." Later found out that "fusty" was indeed a word and would have been worth massive points, but I hadn't played it during the game because I couldn't remember if it was something I've read in a book before or something my brain was inventing. Alisa, Sean, and Rebecca came over for a hastily-arranged games party at 7:30 this evening, so we had an even party of four. One of the things we played was a songs game called "Encore," where teams have to come up with (and sing!) song snippets containing words that you read off little cards. It felt a bit awkward at first — what exactly is this nervy wobbly thing I've got instead of a solo singing voice? — but eventually I started actually coming up with things and reproducing them somewhat non-catastrophically. Shameless Advertisement! People should submit entries to my Turing Test game. The results won't be so interesting if I have to make up all the entries myself! I remind, for those who may be hesitant, that you don't have to write a whole entry: a paragraph or other suitable-sized excerpt will be just fine. (But do make sure you submit entries via comment on the game post and not this one; these here aren't screened.) |
Friday, January 5, 2007
1:12 p.m.
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Final deadline for entries to the Turing Test game is Saturday (that's tomorrow!) at 5 p.m. You have been warned. After that I will collect what I've got and put them up for voting. |
Random Stuff #37
Sunday, January 7, 2007, 1:32 a.m.
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Here comes the second half of the Turing Test Journal Post Game! I received four entries, which I have listed and labelled below in accordance with a somewhat random and totally arbitrary algorithm. Now, to steal a chapter title from Agatha Christie, the question you must ask yourselves is: Which of Them? Decide which one(s) of the four entries below was written by me and cast a vote for each of them. I don't have a fancy enough Live Journal account to be able to post a poll, so you'll have to vote in a more... hands-on manner. You can vote via (screened) comment, e-mail, IM, Zephyr, etc., as long as the results are only viewable by me. After a few days — definitely before Thursday, and probably sooner — I'll post and discuss the results. |
Monday, January 8, 2007
11:33 p.m.
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So there's been this "life" thing going on for the past few days... I promise I haven't spent all week checking Live Journal every five minutes to see if I'd gotten any more Turing Test submissions or votes. The week mostly lived up to my high expectations of it, in fact. Starting Wednesday night I became Stop No. 2 on rlambert's tour of Pittsburgh, so I was in roommate mode from then until Saturday night when she went to Cornell's. It was a bit surprising that I still had a roommate mode to exist in, but I did enjoy not existing in a void for a few days. I made dinner for two on Thursday, for example, and then Rebecca made lunch on Friday. The only annoying part was that I was doing research work each day and was consequently a worse host than I ought to have been. Lots of gaming and assorted fun stuff, though. People over here on Wednesday, as I think I mentioned previously, and then on campus and at Chrisamaphone's house with various people on Friday. On Saturday the programme began with lunch at Veracruz, followed by climbing again — I decided to buy a three-month membership to The Climbing Wall, so now I'll be falling off those stupid metal "jibs" at least once a week. Games back at Chris's afterwards, followed by a trek over here to try the classic "Wizard of Oz" with "Dark Side of the Moon" experiment. This is the kind of thing that feels like it should be done with a record player and a film projector; we used three laptops. The video ran on mine, stationed on the coffee table, while Chris plugged hers into my speakers and played the Pink Floyd soundtrack. Then Rebecca got her computer out, pulled up a list of the supposed synchronizations, and read them out as they came along. I say "supposed" because a lot of them certainly were weak and far-fetched, the sort of things you'd come up with if you were looking for excuses. There were some others, though, that were pretty fun: characters reacting to events in the music, scenes changing on song transitions, walking or dancing with the beat, etc. We followed up the performance with two "Animaniacs" episodes and half-price at India Garden. Dinner at Aladdin's yesterday, followed by lots Tetrinet and Scruples (another game I generally fail at) at Chris's with Rebecca and Cornell. Today I went running at the UC in the afternoon and climbing at the wall with Chris, Rebecca, and Pat in the evening — that's probably a nice workout for both halves of my body, although the climbing today was a bit frustrating. I think it was the combination of my different-sized feet, poorly-fitting rental shoes, and appallingly puny arm strength. (Discussion question: Why do I hyphenate those first two compounds but not the third?) There are still a good number of V1 starting positions that elude me, and at least one V0 I haven't been able to finish yet. |
Random Stuff #38
Tuesday, January 9, 2007, 11:55 p.m.
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I haven't gotten any new Turing Test votes in more than 24 hours, so it's time to reveal the answers and dissect the submissions a bit. After that this activity will finally be dead and I'll return to more normal things. The Results. Entry #1 — 0 votes — Written by Chrisamaphone. Analysis. When I read a new specimen of writing, the first thing I look for almost without exception is whether the serial comma is being used so I can check for consistency in that respect, even when I'm not actually reading the text to edit it. That didn't turn out to be an issue here, but being a copy editor, I first looked at the three non-me posts from a mechanics point of view rather than content, and I was able to find elements in each of the fake ones that are convincing enough to show that I didn't write them. In #1, I would write "MP3s" instead of ".mp3s." In #2, there's "half price" instead of "half-price" and also the expression "crawled into bed," which somehow rubs me the wrong way and is something I'd probably never write. Entry #3 writes "2:00pm" when I would without a doubt write "2 p.m." and then "5-7 hours" when I'd for sure say "five to seven hours." (These are both AP style issues that have been engrained into me from six years of newspaper work.) There's also some wacky and unbalanced punctuation in the "spoon into hens and truss" sentence. So a fun game overall. More posts and more votes would have been nice, but what I got was pretty interesting to analyze. Someone else should do one of these now... |
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
2:27 p.m.
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Questions for today: (1) What is my personality? My advisor once called it "Midwestern"; yesterday Chris called it "small-town." These aren't really off the mark, since by most people's standards I've lived in both, but I'm still intrigued. How are these things expressed? (2) What is it about certain situations (parties) that makes me go all awkward, shy, and quiet, and what in other situations (mostly on IRC) turns me into a conversation hog? (3) Why doesn't it snow more in this city? Yesterday I had lunch at the crêpes place with Rebecca, Chris, and Cornell and messed around with work for the afternoon. Around 5:30 I got bored, left, and wrote a crossword puzzle with Rebecca and Chris. More properly, perhaps, I critiqued the layout of black squares and chugged patterns through Arthur's crossword dictionary while Rebecca and Chris wrote a crossword puzzle. Now we just need to come up with the clues, and I'll see about running it in The Tartan during the semester. Then the three of us decided we wanted a cheap dinner, so we went down to the Giant Eagle in Squirrel Hill for ingredients and then made burritos at Chris's house. After dinner we all tried reading "Fox in Socks" out loud; I did it not badly except for an annoying difficulty with "s" and "sh" in the sewing paragraphs. I wonder if this is a lingering problem from when I was younger — up until I was about eight, I couldn't pronounce "sh" or "r" properly. The interesting thing is that the sewing paragraphs don't seem to have any "sh" sounds in them; I somehow insert them where they don't belong! Knowing this fact, though, makes a second reading quite easy. Today I'm poking at my work in a very desulatory fashion, which is probably not good. Tonight is climbing, cleaning, and packing, and tomorrow I take the 12:20 28X to the airport for the MIT Mystery Hunt! |
Sunday, January 14, 2007
9:02 a.m.
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Coming to you live and sleep deprived from the sixth floor of Building 24 at MIT, where people are in decompression mode after finishing off the MIT Mystery Hunt. There are a few people sleeping on couches, some sitting in chairs eagerly discussing the Round 8 metapuzzle, three or four playing Bomber Man in another room, and two here in the main room reviewing songs for a square dance. The team I'm on, Manic Sages, finished the "endgame" just before 8 a.m. today, having worked continuously from Friday noon, but I suppose I should tell this in the right order. A very nice flight from Pittsburgh to Boston on Thursday afternoon: half empty with a leisurely and picturesque decent over Massachusetts. JetBlue has little LCD TV screens in the back of every seat, and one of the channels is one that shows a map and flight statistics interspersed with a lot of annoying advertisements. I didn't know airplanes flew so high; I kept resisting the urge to bug the sedate-looking 60-year-old lady across the aisle from me by saying "How can you sit there and read and not get excited knowing that we're seven miles up in the air?" Chris, who was sitting next to me, I did bug on various occassions to point out what we were flying over. Flying with me, I guess, is kind of like flying with a five-year-old. We met mrwright and pnelson in the airport, waited for Akiva at a place called Lobby 7 at MIT, and then I met Someone From the Internet for the first time when we called in gaspaheangea from #cslounge to have dinner with us. Then it was off to the Manic Sages pre-hunt party in Cambridge, where we CMU kids clumped together like horrible introverts and played Citadels. Then we wanted to play Apples to Apples, but didn't have any red cards, so first we played Let's Make a List of Nouns, then Let's Rip Four Sheets of Paper Covered in Small Writing into Little Slips, and then Apples to Apples. By then I had to leave almost immediately to walk to Aaron and Amber's in Somerville, where I was spending the night. Aaron and Amber seem to be doing fine in Boston-land; we sat up and talked until after midnight before going to bed. I was up around 7:45 Friday (the sun rises early here) and at MIT by 9:45, reporting for duty in the ESG suite of rooms that were the Manic Sages headquarters. We spent two hours setting up laptops, labelling power bricks with masking tape, etc., until going down to the actual hunt opening show at noon. Details of the hunt and its puzzles in a separate entry, probably, since I don't want this one to be too long. I've been staring at my laptop for 35 out of the last 45 hours, so I might not type it right away. |
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
8:37 p.m.
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I was already working on a long write-up of the Mystery Hunt, but waiting a few days was a nice idea. So instead of me spending paragraphs and paragraphs going over all the details, I can point you to the official site that explains the structure and includes all the puzzles, their answers, and some nice extras as well. Personal stuff, then. We began solving around 12:45 p.m. Friday, after the official opening thing in a place called Lobby 7 — at MIT the buildings do actually have names, which I didn't even realize at first, but everyone refers to them by number. I was chiefly worried about making myself useful, since the Manic Sages already had masses of people (who all seemed to know each other) with years of Mystery Hunt experience each, so I wanted to kind of justify my presence. It happened right away, when I picked one of the five starting puzzles, worked on it for a bit, and gave the team its first correct answer of the contest. For the rest of Friday afternoon I worked on various things in groups with other people, mostly Chris and gwillen, until we were served with "Unsound Effects." I sat down with my laptop, cracked one step of the solution, and turned the results over to another group. To bed in one of the sleeping rooms around midnight, though it didn't fall asleep until perhaps 3:00 because of all the people who were coming in and out of the room the whole time. Awake Saturday at 6 a.m. to replace the people who had stayed up all night and were getting tired. Around 9:00 we got an amazing crossword puzzle that involved waking jcreed up early to ask his advice. That puzzle took the team hours and hours to solve, resulting in us hatching the idea that we should call up the American embassy in Bangladesh when they opened at 9 p.m. Eastern time. I also spent several hours on Saturday working with an MIT freshman called David on a horrible trivia puzzle that made me feel like I was caught in an eternity of fact-checking at The Tartan. Late on Saturday, Ivan and I did a nicely-solvable thing that seemed to establish my credibility as a EE in the meta room. (Digression: When I write "EE" I say it as "double-E" in my head, so I write it with "a" instead of "an.") Also very late on Saturday when we were working on the meta-meta-puzzle I answered the question "What do the words 'deed,' 'banjo,' 'layout,' 'tons,' and 'ovals' have in common?" correctly on our team wiki, causing Hubert to run into the seminar room excitedly shouting "Greg!" These are all things I'm proud of, selfish as this post may sound, so I wanted to type them all out in case I want to know next year how exactly I was involved in Mystery Hunt '07. I didn't say anything about the nature or solution of most puzzles, though, so you can all try them out on your own if you want! The hunt wrap-up was Sunday at 5:30 p.m.; afterwards everyone from the team who was left went to a Chinese restaurant on Massachusetts Avenue that was barely big enough to hold all of us plus the few regular customers who were already there. Afterwards we went back to the campus and had fun with MIT people until 1 a.m.-ish, then I spent the night with a guy called Femtomatt in a really weird MIT dorm called East Campus. |
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
11:13 p.m.
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Today I'm suddenly back in the academic world, as both of my classes met for the first time and tried to define what the next 15 weeks are going to be like. I'm excited for Machine Translation (11-731), especially the linguistic aspects of it that it looks like Teruko's going to emphasize during part of the course, and my group project for Software Engineering II (11-792) doesn't sound too awful. MT is going to be another of those "musical professors" classes: three main instructors, plus guest lectures from at least three more over the course of the semester, and then we go into presentation mode when each of us students has to give a 30-minute talk in April. In software engineering, on the other hand, there is no class, just a semester-long group project and meetings with the professor and TA to measure and grade progress. And now it's time for a mini-rant against the hated textbook publishing companies and all the professors who willingly fall in with their evil designs. In August I dispensed the sum of $65 to obtain a nice-looking book called "Francoscopie 2005" for my French class. We had a few reading assignments in the book during the first week of class, and then it was never used again all semester except as a reference for our individual presentations, which I put together from other sources anyway. So now I have this barely-touched book that I want to sell to someone taking the class this semester. I went to the bookstore yesterday to check the price on the used copies, and found above the "82-303" sticker a big stack of shiny new "Francoscopie 2007" books! My copy is now unsalable. Ditto various now-old-edition CS books that I've been trying to get rid of for years. (If anyone wants a book on operating systems, formal language theory, or a few other things I could dig out of my archives, please let me know.) On the plus side for the future, the only book I have to buy this semester is a $20 comb-bound packet of photocopies for 11-731. Otherwise, not too much going on yet. Research work for the next two weeks or so, I feel, is going to be rather frustrating. The Tartan ed staff meeting yesterday took an unexpected turn that had me kind of upset for a while, but now I'm not convinced that it wasn't a good thing in the end. Basically I'm no longer on the editorial board, and am in fact no longer even on ed staff unless I come up with a sort of project proposal and submit it next week to become a contributing editor. Objectively the second part of this makes a whole lot of sense — it's probably exactly what I would have advocated a year ago when I wasn't personally caught up in the matter — but it was still kind of abrupt. Also yesterday I stopped in at Roselawn for a bit and went to half-price at Joe Mama's with Chris, gwillen, and the two freshman Matts. Joe Mama's changed their half-price menu a bit, taking out the more expensive stuff like my oft-ordered fish sandwich and filling in with cheaper stuff like cheese ravioli. If it means more people will be willing to go there instead of Fuddle now that the prices are 50 cents or $1 lower, I'm all for it. In the meantime I have a few new dinner options to try out. Today I played French Scrabble with Cari and lost by three points, 160 to 157. The death letters in the francophone version are K and W, both of which I had at the beginning, failed multiple times to combine into "kiwi," and then had to subtract off at the end. Visited the cluster from about 9:30 until 10:00, then came home to go grocery shopping and found blueberries and blackberries on sale at two for $3.98. |
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