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ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
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Sunday, January 21, 2007
2:51 a.m.
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The lesson for this week: there are some things that "click," and some things that don't, and maybe it's time to focus more on the ones that do rather than frittering away time and energy on things that I'll always fail at. You might guess that I've been playing Starcraft again, and if you did you'd be right. Tonight I got in with three other people against four computer players and was eliminated after about 10 minutes. Then I gave myself a timeout of sorts and played two one-on-one games against a computer, getting crushed each time by margins between two and three to one. On the way home, I started thinking about why I bother, and the answer "Because a lot of other people do" wasn't quite good enough. I mean, outside of Sim City 2000 and Tetrinet, computer games are neither germane to my interests nor well-matched (it seems) with my skill set. A good example is to compare me with tmoss, who played his first game of Starcraft about the same time I did, and who is now a very fine player whereas I'm still atrocious. So I think I should devote time to better — or at least more interesting — things, which certainly exist out there as well. Coming off of the Mystery Hunt, this week I've felt pretty connected to certain other people through either that, discussions and ideas following therefrom, half-price outings, or other activities that don't make me feel like I'm totally useless. Even though every time I hear a certain melody I only think of it as "The Derivative Song," today I'm going back to the original lyrics and saying "There'll be some changes made." |
Monday, January 22, 2007
9:59 p.m.
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Persuant to an exchange with jgrafton and a look at this week's Pillbox calendar, I note the following interesting facts:
I probably shouldn't spend the money to do them both, but I'd certainly like to go to one of these on Saturday. Any interest either way? |
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
4:33 p.m.
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Today I probably caused every lurker in #cslounge to fall out of his or her chair in paroxysms of giggling. The whole thing started by me trying to download some old e-mail attachments and realizing they were in plain zip format instead of gzip. I hadn't installed the zip package on my computer, so I issued su to get it from apt-get as usual. After two or three tries of the shell not liking my root password, I remembered that I'd changed it two or three weeks ago... but had completely forgotten what I changed it to! So I spent a few minutes trying to replicate my frame of mind and rediscover a likely password, but that ended in just a lot of "authentication failure" messages. So I took the problem to the IRC channel, showing a decent amount of agitation through ending a sentence with two exclamation marks instead of one. This opened up a discussion on kernel modules and initrd and boot parameters and root partitions that flew by me in a confused whirlwind until I pulled the brakes and reminded people that I could, in fact, only recognize about half of the words they were throwing back and forth. After some explanations by them and some man page reading by me, I got things worked down into a series of steps to perform and useful commands I might need along the way, and then I shut down my computer, edited the Debian boot parameters in Grub, passed init=/bin/sh as a parameter to the kernel, booted Linux, was dumped to a root shell, remounted my base ("root") partition as read-write instead of read-only, and then reset the password in the usual way with passwd. Most of the extra things I didn't understand weren't actually needed; I covered the ins and outs of mounting in another of my disaster episodes a year ago, so that part was simple. (I type all of this here as a service to all mankind — or at least people who like, as I do, a list of deterministic instructions to follow when trying something for the first time — and also because I might want it again in the future.) I wasn't sure how to get out of the root shell, so I just typed "exit" and ended up causing a kernel panic instead. The operation was a success, at least. At first it annoyed me that I could be so dumb again, but then I remembered that under my new rules I'm not allowed to let things like that get to me. Considering it from a neutral point of view, like everyone else in #cslounge will be doing when they come home tonight and read their logs, it is a pretty laughable situation. Running over it in my mind, I was laughing out loud a bit coming down Morewood as I walked to campus afterward. Think of a frustrated and breathless child suddenly running into a sedate and elite tea party: "I changed my root password and now I can't remember it and I can't even check that I did in fact change it and that I didn't get hacked because I can't run shadow and it's a root-only command and now I don't know what to do!" I could almost hear the nonplussed vocal intonation in the written response; the calm and bemused parent: "So, you can reset your password." Then the patient explanation, the ignorant questions, the simplified responses, the shaky implementation of the solution, the success, the slight knowing smile and amused shake of the head by the expert. |
Friday, January 26, 2007
12:05 a.m.
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"The whisper of snow as it starts to deploy" — matthewj's phrase has popped into my head several times in the last few days now that Pittsburgh is finally giving us a bit of proper winter weather. We're still missing something, though: every day this week it snowed on and off all day, accumulated about half an inch, and then warmed up enough that it mostly melted by the next day. Tonight, however, we have Real Snow for the first time all year, which is only surpassed in its excellence by the patheticness that it took us until the last week in January to get it. (Disclaimer: Those of you from more southern or more western or more not-next-to-a-huge-lake climes may dismiss this post as the ravings of an insane maniac who escaped from an asylum in the Arctic. Well, take a look at this snowfall map of Ohio, and I gives you three guesses as to which part of the state I come from. That is what I expect from my winters.) Tonight I came out of Wean around 9:00 to find a good inch of snow covering everything, so my plans for the evening immediately crystallized into "Work for a few hours, then go wander through Schenley." The first part of this was carried out with reasonable success — some progress on changing the synchronization between the MEMT Java wrapper and the matcher — but then I ran up against the usual problem that everyone was else was doing homework and felt unable to devote an hour to walking through the snow in 12-degree weather. Eventually I had a quick IM conversation with Rachael called Jordan, which led to a very nice walk around Flagstaff Hill. Some people were already attempting to slide down the path in various sled-like things, and then we made it up to the top and looked at the panorama of Oakland for a few minutes. Pit stop in the cluster for a few minutes to warm up, and then I put my hat and gloves back on and went out to collect my bike. Yes, I did manage to run late for the weekly 11 a.m. IOD conference call and have to bike to campus on the coldest day of the year, but at least it was the mountain bike and not the road one. I also like biking through an inch or two of snow. I think I wrote last year that it sounds like the static on a 78-RPM record. Tonight it was a little colder than I would have preferred, resulting in me arriving at my doorstep slightly before midnight with kind of frozen fingers and feet. Nothing that a cup of warm chocolate milk couldn't fix, though. |
Saturday, January 27, 2007
6:50 p.m.
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Interesting — today was supposed to be the day for culture and fun, but it somehow mostly got transferred to yesterday. The Gershwin tickets that jgrafton, Evan, Rachel, and I requested Wednesday at the UC turned out to be non-existent when Jeff got a call yesterday saying that the Saturday show was sold out and that we could only go Friday or Sunday. Well, Friday didn't work for Jeff and Sunday didn't work for me, so we ended up telling Heinz Hall to not bother and deciding to plan something else for supposedly next weekend. I did, however, have plans to go to the Gallery Crawl downtown last night with Evan, Lea, and Akiva; we were also met at the bus stop by Dom, Trevor, and an art major (I think) whose name was Brenda. We began a little after 7:00 at the Wood Street Galleries, where there was an interesting multimedia exhibit on two floors. I grabbed what in old times would have been called the catalogue from a table at the entrance, so I was able to follow along with what each installation was as I saw it. The first thing I noticed about "modern" art is the difference in the piece descriptions. I guess I'm more used to little cards that say things like Claude MonetInstead, the Wood Street programme was loaded up with entries more like Carlo ZanniI unfortunately could only see half of the second floor, since while we were there a group of electric guitarists 'n' such decided to commence playing at sufficient volume to make my rib cage vibrate, so I sought refuge on the floor above. After making our way down to the street again, we stopped at four other places too. The 709 Penn Gallery had a wonderful photography exhibit up, and 209/9 (= 209 Ninth Street) was showing some interesting things based on architects' drawings. I'll admit that I've never been to an art exhibit event before, despite living for four years right next to Little Italy in Cleveland, but the ones that show up in books tend to come across as rather high-class functions involving the art-world elite drinking red wine and saying things like "My dear!" Not so in Pittsburgh. Here there are a lot of urban "indie" culture people under 30, and everyone drinks beer. Pabst Blue Ribbon. In cans. It makes for a slightly different atmosphere, especially when people are leaving their leftovers on windowsills and in overflowing trash cans like they were doing at Future Tenant. While we were walking between galleries, Akiva and Lea saw a poster for a movie they wanted to see, and it was thus that we all ended up at the Harris Theatre for the 9:15 showing of something called "Hair High." It's what "Grease" would be like if it had more skeletons, fewer songs, and an animator with a rather grotesque sense of humor. Not recommended for the kids, but a pretty good comedy for older people that pokes fun at just about everything from the stereotypical 1950s high school. The Harris is a fun little theatre that feels barely larger than a large classroom and that offers movies for $5 if you're a student and $6 if not. And yet our group was the only one in the whole place until a few more people sat down behind us during the previews. After the movie, Evan and I went for half-price at Joe Mama's and talked about plays, music, cognition, and "making things conscious." So many interesting ideas and other things to think about! We got back to Wean just in time for a sort-of cluster rave that ended around 2 a.m. |
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
2:20 a.m.
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Whee! I left the cluster at 9:45 tonight to go sample one of Alan V.'s truffles at Fairfax, and am only just returning now from a wonderful multi-hour discussion on comparative linguistic analyses of Thai, English, and French, with additional examples from German and ASL when needed. We started on photography, actually, and went along on that theme for a while until Alan mentioned something about Thai. Then I remembered that Alison was looking for a Thai speaker in Pittsburgh to go over some written text for her research project, so I asked Alan if I could give her his name as a possible contact. From there we were well launched: the Thai alphabet, the way the language sounds, tones, music, tenses, count and mass nouns, syllabication, degrees of formality, question methods, punctuation — my brain was jumping topics all over the place trying to come up with corresponding examples in French, though French structure is really too similar to English to be as interesting to analyze. Thai, on the other hand, seems to be optimized for minimum sentence length through a sort of implicit switch statement, where you can specify certain things if you need to but can always leave them out and fall into the default block at the end. (This seemed especially true in the area of verbs and nouns: just plugging base-form verbs and nouns together creates a built-in assumption about the verb's tense and the noun's number... and these assumptions might change based on context and the specific verb or noun used!) I think I may need to raid my linguistics textbooks from 11-721 and look for any Thai examples. So that was loads of fun, pulling together intuition with stuff I picked up from LTI classes, such as the whole process of eliciting linguistic features through questions. The photography part was interesting too, since I discovered that I might actually be able to get access to the CMU darkroom — albeit at a price. Still pretty tempting, though. I haven't developed any of my own film or made prints since those photo and graphics classes back in high school, and it would be pretty nice to do some of that again while I still can. I think I may have to e-mail the photo lab director and see how this darkroom access might work. Overall, then, things have been quite nice since I implemented the "new rules" for myself eight days ago. I'm no longer wasting time on things that pointlessly frustrate me, I'm recognizing that I don't have to be an expert on everything that everyone else is good at, and I'm focusing instead on reasonable things I do find interesting. I've started a little coding project on the side, for example, that's getting me into a few things I haven't worked with before, and it's not making me feel like a total moron. Client-centered therapy shown at its finest, perhaps — to the point of entirely dispensing with the psychologist! The next step is to cut out the horrible I'm-trying-too-hard comments on IRC. |
Thursday, February 1, 2007
12:25 a.m.
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Another one of these shortly-after-midnight entries... I need to pull my schedule back by about another half-hour or I'll be a little bit confused when I come across posts with screwy dates in them. Though in the end this week may be muddled enough that it won't matter. Various things going on, most of which I've forgotten to write about — or possibly have forgotten entirely. I keep making little mental notes along the lines of "Oh yes, write about this," but then I do a pretty bad job of converting the notes into printed reality. Before all the Thai talk on Tuesday, for example, I went to Veracruz with jgrafton, Chris, gwillen, and Kartik. Just as we were finishing, the following conversation occurred: gwillen: Dave and Andy's? But then we ate the ice cream inside before walking back to campus. This week I've also been watching "Fawlty Towers," an old BBC series from the mid-'70s that I saw three episodes of with Susannah that time she was sick junior year. There are only 12, so I've been watching them in order at about one per night. The first two seemed a bit off, but after that the actors and writers seem to have figured things out nicely, and the following three episodes have been quite excellent. I am eagerly awaiting the rat episode as the one I remember best from three years ago, but it may be a while before I get there because matthewj says it's the absolute last one. Writing that last sentence makes me think of names, since I never know whether to write "matthewj" like that or "Matthew" or "Matt" or his Live Journal name or one of his IRC names. The way I contact and meet people is definitely changing. When I first got to college, I e-mailed my high school friends and made a lot of phone calls to friends on campus with me. (Jeremy about Susannah's room freshman year: "Just dial 1 and then keep pressing 5 until someone answers.") Then I got standalone AIM halfway through my sophomore year and started using that to replace some of the phone calls. Coming to CMU started a bit of a blackout period, at the end of which Case-based communication migrated almost entirely to e-mail. For CMU people I tend to use e-mail, IRC, Zephyr, and IM in that order: I know almost no one's phone number since my only phone is the landline at my apartment, which I'm almost never near, and most of the time IM runs from home while I spend 12 hours at a time on campus. This is perhaps all just a giant lead-in to saying that I collected five new IM names today, three of which were told to me explicitly and two more that I inferred from the pattern of the first three. This brings my CMU list into serious competition with my old CWRU one, but I doubt I'll be hitting the Buddy List limit anytime soon. IRC logs, on the other hand, could really use a good organizing and possible tarballing; I may have enough by now to do some meaningful corpus-based linguistics stuff. |
Friday, February 2, 2007
2:29 p.m.
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Yesterday was a most excellent day — definitely the best of the week so far. I walked to campus around 10:20 for the usual Thursday IOD conference call at 11 a.m., which was not much different from the usual. Then I spent three hours testing and debugging the code changes I've been writing into the MEMT system over the past few days, with the result that by 3:00 I had a version of the system that can properly respect (by which I mean not break apart) source alignment chunks that it gets from a UIMA XCAS. Now the only thing left is to fix the IOD Java code to extract these chunks from the CAS rather than use the fake ones I made up for the tests yesterday. Advisor meeting at 3:00, and then a meeting with another student and a professor at Pitt immediately afterwards to talk about syntactic information in language modeling. We also came up with a MT class project for me that I'm really excited about: I'm going to be building a little transfer system for English-French and then trying to improve its performance by learning NP mappings from a large parallel corpus. Vamshi, the other student who was at the meeting, said it sounded like a lot of work, but someone did something similar for the SMT system last year and there's already a transfer framework that I can use. I have two weeks to write the formal proposal, so I should know more about the details within that time. The meetings ended around 4:45, perfect timing for me to pack up my stuff and run home and to the grocery store in preparation for cooking hot vegetable soup at Roselawn. (I'd been wanting some since last weekend, and soup's one of those things that's better in large quantities and with people, isn't it?) I'd already stashed most of my ingredients at my desk or in the LTI refrigerator, but I decided during the afternoon that we'd better have bruschetta as well since people weren't going to be coming for dinner until rather late in the evening. Eventually arrived, with full stock of food in tow, at Roselawn around 6:15, but found the lights off and nobody home. Jeff arrived around 6:45, so he let me in and the cooking began. Major discoveries: garlic is a terribly sticky thing to work with, and you can brown slices of French bread in about 60 seconds in the broiler. The long process of cutting up vegetables and boiling them in the soup followed, lasting until 9:08, when Jeff and I proclaimed it done and finally had our dinner. Car and Tom came by a bit later, and then we completely covered the whiteboard with handwriting samples and Greek letters and elementary-school mnemonics like "My Very Excellent Mother Just Sat Under New Pines." By the time Tyler came back from the cluster and half-price around 12:45, Jeff, Car, and Philip were all wearing pigtails, and Tyler said I was acting silllier than he'd ever seen me before. (This may be true, but I think it's because he usually only sees me at Roselawn during more sedate schoolwork times. People who know me from Case or from 3 a.m. at The Tartan know that I can be pretty silly sometimes.) People wanted to go to bed eventually, so I walked home around 1:15. I love having dreams with French in them; this morning I slept in horribly and had a dream that I'd gone to Paris with a big tour group. I couldn't quite figure out the group's composition: it seemed to have both native English and French speakers, and Mrs. Gurnack was there along with Cari and at least one other LTI student. The geography was also a bit muddled, since the only landmarks I remember us visiting were the Pont Neuf and the Brandenburg Tor. But there was a whole lot of French, both by me and the various other characters. I had a conversation with the driver of the tour bus about the meaning of faire les hasards, an expression my subconscious must have invented for the occasion. I guess the trouble with dream French is that you can't tell if you're doing things properly or if you're totally making the language up on the fly and no one seems to mind. |
Saturday, February 3, 2007
11:15 p.m.
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Just got back from CMU night at the Pittsburgh Symphony: $7 tickets and a dessert reception afterwards. Rachel, Jeff, and I met up in the cluster at 5:30 and walked through blowing snow down to dinner at Joe Mama's. (It's odd going down there for full-priced food without the late-night crowds all over the sidewalks.) Then we grabbed a Fifth Avenue bus downtown and walked a few blocks to Heinz Hall. Heinz Hall is larger than Severance Hall by a good amount, especially when you consider all the fancy anterooms you can meander around in before going into the concert hall. On that level, it's more like going to the State or Ohio Theatre at Playhouse Square. Our seats were in the far reaches of the balcony, Row Q, up I think four flights of steps from the lower-level coat check. Probably only half of the balcony would fit inside Severance Hall, though the overall layout was the same right down to those little boxes on the sides. Jeff had brought his glasses pour mieux entendre la musique, but it probably wouldn't have been an awful idea if I'd done the same. At first I was wondering if the distance was contributing to the lack of that nice separation between the high strings and the low strings that I enjoyed so much at the Rachmaninoff and Dvorak concerts I went to in 2005, but the other things we heard convinced me it was just an artifact of either all or part of the first piece. Some words about the music, then, since I generally review these sorts of things here. The programme was called "Nordic Nights" and had three parts. The first, before intermission, was a Symphony No. 1 (1894) by someone called Carl Nielsen — quite representative of other stuff I've heard from that time period, which I think is my favorite in classical music, even if the brass sounded a little too... brassy at times. We saw a lot of high-energy conducting on that one, including some interesting fist-shaking at the first row of the cello section. After intermission we got a trumpet concerto by Johann Hummel that I liked a lot. Normally I get bored more easily with concertos (or "concerti," isn't it?) and chamber music, but not so much tonight. The first movement was very 1803, but in a good way, and then the second and third movements were excellent. Perhaps writing to showcase a trumpet forced this Mr. Hummel to stick to more lyrical stuff than what I tend to think of as representative of the time. It gave a nice result. The last piece was a combination of stuff from Grieg's "Peer Gynt," which I hadn't heard before. I didn't know, for example, that the stereotypical sunrise music that all the cartoons use is in fact "Morning Mood" from this suite, and if my brain once contained the information that "In the Hall of the Mountain King" was included, it had forgotten it until I looked at the program. From the other parts, I should say that if your final moments are anywhere near as drawn out as those in "Ase's Death" were, you had better just call straight away for the nurse with the drugs. Also "Anitra's Dance" was a sort of "Mountain King" preview, with the main tune from that coming through inverted or something. (My music theory is really awful these days; it's been a long time since piano lessons when I was nine and 10.) "Mountain King" itself started very nicely — why is pizzicato so amazing? — but then the orchestra went into a sort of spasm that blotted out the clarity of the ending. Definitely good stuff, though. I think I need to track down a copy of the full "Peer Gynt" suites. |
Tuesday, February 6, 2007
9:08 p.m.
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The weather has been the topic of conversation around here for the past few days. The fun started over the weekend, when people started noticing that the predicted temperatures for the early part of this week only had one digit in them. Sunday it made it as far as 11 or 12 during the day, but I didn't really go out until between 9 and 10 p.m., when Evan, Ally, and I spent 45 minutes looking for Ally's lost glasses somewhere between India Garden and Wean — around then is when Intellicast and diode both reported the temperature as 5 degrees. When I got home after a bit more Tartan work around 1:30, I pulled an extra blanket around me in bed and read "To Build a Fire." Yesterday morning I woke up to a 64-degree apartment, and then got filled in on stories of people running out to class in –3-degree weather, which reminded me of that time sophomore year when I went to my 9:30 calc class when it was 4 degrees. I was able to beat that, though, on two occasions yesterday: when I walked to campus around 11 a.m. it was 3 degrees out, and when I walked back a bit after midnight it was 2. Today starts our great warm-up: into the 10s for the next few days, and then comparatively summer-like 20s and 30s by the end of the week. So the cold has been kind of fun. Evan and I determined that it gets difficult to say certain consonants (notably to distinguish "b" from "p") when your face is freezing from being outside for 45 minutes, but then it's interesting to have to consciously think about moving your mouth and forming syllables. The rest of this week's activity, unfortunately, hasn't been that great. I'm finding myself suddenly with a lot of things to do, all of which are taking much longer than I'd like. Yesterday I spent what felt like an hour fiddling with LaTeX bibliography styles: I really want to use the full-name style I used for the 762 lit review last semester, but now it absolutely refuses to work in my new document. Then my goal for today was to get a working implementation going of a machine learning program called MinorThird, but I've been stalled on idiotic Java inventions like classpaths and jar files. MinorThird needs all these extra resoures like log4j and trove and svm-something or other, which seem to come pre-packaged as jars... but no matter what I do I can't get Java to see them, and the MinorThird documentation craftily assumes that everything works perfectly right after you compile its own Java from source. |
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
6:42 p.m.
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Question: is there anyone who's going to be living off campus next year who wouldn't mind the possibility of an extra person (i.e. me) joining their group? I may be interested in changing my living arrangements for next year, assuming I'm still here, and moving in with other people is certainly something I'd consider if the right group of people came up. What exactly "right" means in this case is kind of hard to describe, but one good indication might be that the group likes sharing cooking duties. Also that it has a strong probability of being somewhat stable or at least finding replacement members — now that I have enough stuff to outfit an entire apartment, I don't want to go through the insanity of shuttling it all to a new place just to find out I've got to take everything out again at the end of a year. I can't make any actual real relevant decisions pertaining to myself as an individual until the Ph.D. application decisions come out (by the beginning of March, I expect), but I thought I'd bring up the housing topic now, when people are getting their plans worked out, just in case we get a mutually better result. |
Friday, February 9, 2007
1:22 a.m.
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The best online conversations always happen after midnight. Conversation flow, at least in my mind, can be so chimeric: by turns awkward, humorous, farcical, and quite profound. I don't know what impression the other people in #cslounge have right now, but I have a few new thoughts to play with. Today's really been a most exciting day. |
Saturday, February 10, 2007
12:43 p.m.
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February 9 is up to its old tricks again, and the effect even seems to be spreading. In my advisor meeting Thursday, Alon mentioned that the LTI admissions committee was meeting all day yesterday, and then I heard from Mike in the lab that they were supposed to be done at 4:00. At 4:03 p.m., my sister sent me an IM in Google Chat saying that she'd gotten into Akron, her first choice for psychology grad programs. (She's two years younger than me, so it's kind of interesting that we were both going through the Ph.D. applications process at the same time this winter.) She was all excited, of course, and we were talking back and forth about it, until at 4:15 four or five LTI faculty members came into my lab. Maxine was counting out loud and pointing at various people in the room, which confused all of us because we couldn't tell who she was pointing at, and she also stopped at three when there were four second-year master's students there who'd applied to the Ph.D. program. Eventually they made it clear that all four of us had been accepted, and then at 4:16 Alon sent me an e-mail that resolved any remaining uncertainty: Date: Fri, 9 Feb 2007 16:16:12 -0500 (EST) Well, you can imagine that this is the pinnacle of great news in an already pretty great week. Aaron, Ben, and I went out to the Dec/5 TG to celebrate, and I drank a whole 12 ounces of an alcoholic beverage (Woodchuck pear cider) for the first time in my life. I kind of felt like I wanted to shout the news — my department likes me! — to the entire world, but then I calmed down enough by 7:00 to just mention it casually at the KGB potluck. Whee! |
Monday, February 12, 2007
1:29 a.m.
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A recap of the weekend, perhaps, since it's still fairly early by Tartan standards and I've been on a horribly late sleep schedule for the past few days. This weekend was apparently the time to pick up things I hadn't done in a while again. Friday night there were ITR Games, and then I ended my three-week avoidance of Starcraft and played four games in two days with cluster people. This time I'm attempting to learn it "right" by asking a number of questions as the game progresses, a pursuit that probably annoyed some people but got me some useful pointers from Brewer and Tyler. I'm still not sure if I like playing in a large group with experienced people around — I feel like they prefer to take off with their complicated strategies and highly-developed techniques without caring two pins about the idiot in the corner who wants to know what ground units can attack air. But I expect my new questioning method, if I apply it long enough, will have better results in the end. Then yesterday (Saturday) afternoon I played two games of ITG with Alan V. and was astounded to find myself getting decent passing scores on Level 3 songs. The Level 4s still elude me — 7 percent and 0 percent on the two I tried — as does playing when other people are watching, but I still wonder how I keep getting better with no practice. It's kind of the reverse of climbing, where I'm just now able to climb a V1/2 or two after six weeks. Last night Rachel called Jordan had a movie night in McGill, and we watched a really interesting German film from 1931 called "M." It starred Peter Lorre, who played Señor Ugarte in "Casablanca" just over a decade later. It was the first time I'd seen a German movie, so I had some fun trying to pick apart the German audio and match up what I knew with the subtitles. The numbers were pretty easy, of course, along with some nouns and little words like ich, kleine, kein, and und, but there were also some surprises. Apparently "result" is Resultat, just like in French, and I could also pick out a character name or two that were completely left out of the subtitles. The movie stopped short of answering the central question raised by its plot, which left us all in a "That's not fair!" sort of mood, but really it would be difficult for the director and/or writer to make a positive statement either way on the matter. Today turned out to be a fun day on campus, starting at 11:30 with lunch with Ally and Justin from Case, who apparently met Ally online through a mutual friend a few years ago. We went to Bangkok Balcony in Squirrel Hill, then took Justin on a quick tour of campus before I had to run off to The Tartan. It was nice describing some of CMU's characteristics in CWRU terms again: kind of like I was acting as a translator between two different languages. The only difficult part is selecting the appropriate pronouns — whether it's Case that's "we" and CMU that's "they" or the other way round. Justin had to leave a bit before 3, so I ran up to The Tartan and spent four hours reading copy. At 7:00 they didn't need me anymore, so I escaped and spent six amusing hours at Roselawn talking with people, working on a certain soon-to-be-not-so-top-secret KGB project, and chatting on IRC. |
Random Stuff #39
Tuesday, February 13, 2007, 12:38 a.m.
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I did a link-based Random Stuff entry two summers ago, and I find I've again got a lot of saved Firefox windows hanging round at the bottom of my screen. Today wasn't such a good day for getting a lot of work done, so it must be a good time to point out the following additional Distractions That May Make You Less Productive We begin with Alan V.'s Live Journal Friends Quiz, one in a set of PHP pages he was showing me a few weeks ago. (PHP looks a whole lot like Perl embedded in HTML, where the output of the Perl programmatically fills in more HTML.) Apparently this quiz was responsible for 20 GB of bandwidth in a month from Alan's server when it circulated for the first time some months or years ago; when I tried it, I got some pretty funny results, but I unfortunately forgot to save them. |
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
4:50 p.m.
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Pittsburgh is finally giving us what I'd call real winter weather. Yesterday it was above freezing for the first time in more than a week, and it felt like spring. Today we have four inches of snow, plus ice on the way. The best part is that I have yet to see evidence of a snow plow: the sidewalks are pretty passable because of all the apartment buildings, but the streets are masses of churned-up slush. Not that I mind, of course, if it keeps some of the crazy and silly people off the road — the kind who see half an inch of snow and suddenly develop a compusion to crash their car into the nearest concrete barrier or telephone pole. This way, those guys will all stay home, and the people who do take their cars out will have to slow down a bit and remember that we're not masters of the universe just yet. All of us at CMU, on the other hand, are as excited as eight-year-olds to go out and play in the snow. (I brought my snowpants to my desk today in anticipation.) People have been copying weather reports into #cslounge and Live Journal for days and saying things like "Yay!" and "Sweet!" I don't watch TV anymore, but I imagine this is the exact opposite of what all the news stations are doing. "We interrupt whatever entertaining and possibly interesting program you were just watching to bring you this earth-shattering announcement," they're probably saying. "Our Super Duper Quadruple Doppler 5 weather lab has just reported that an absolutely apocalyptic snow storm is heading this way! Accumulation of up to four whole inches — that's enough to bury some of the smaller chipmunks and rabbits! Everyone hearing this should go out all at once and buy 30 gallons of bottled water and enough canned food to last until the 22nd century. And we'll bring you live updates from our top-secret underground bunker as soon as the first flake starts falling!" |
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
8:18 p.m.
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Chris and gwillen win the prize for yesterday — after Evan and I finished a little... redecoration project in Wean, they appeared in the cluster shortly after midnight with a stack of trays from the KGB office looking for me to play outside. We picked up Kartik as well and went traying, first on the West Wing side of Donner Ditch, then briefly on the hill by the tennis courts, and then we met up with another group of people and ran off to Flagstaff. My gloves were soaked after probably the third ride, and on Flagstaff I flipped off my tray and slid through a huge slushy puddle that got snow down my back. All sorts of great fun! On the way back, we found a really cool scene just behind Baker where little blades of grass were poking through the snow and had gotten covered in perhaps a centimeter of ice, and then Chris and I had to fish Kartik out of of a steep ditch-thing right up against the building. Finally left campus at 2:00 and arrived home 35 minutes later, sliding most of the way (it seemed) and stepping in no less than four deceptively-deep slush sinkholes. I've been trying to think of something to write related to today's date, but I want it to be something both interesting and reasonable to post publicly. On my way to campus this morning I was kicking some stuff about attraction around in my head, so that's a good place to start. For a lot of people this probably first leads to images of physical attraction or fatal allure or coup de foudre love scenes — but, contrary to what every article in this week's Pillbox might lead you to believe, there do exist people who aren't flaming with desire to have sex with the first available person. I seem to be a somewhat extreme case of this: sometimes I wonder what it is in my essential me-ness that exudes a sort of stuck-in-the-'40s prudish old-maid impression whenever the subject of dating or sex comes up. There are, and have been, people I'm physically attracted to (however awkwardly or badly I may have expressed this quality in real life), but what I find much more interesting in myself is that I notice a very marked attraction towards certain people in terms of personality — and this is, interestingly enough, regardless of gender. Possibly it's that, having come to CMU and been driven deeper into reflective thinking than ever before, I'm looking for some kind of personal connection that I've never achieved physically. I find it kind of fascinating, for example, to notice in someone else a sort of magnification of some of my own current or past qualities: "If I had concentrated more on X, or had never gotten into Y, or had been grown up in environment Z, there's a chance I would have ended up a lot like person P." And there are always people who have done such interesting things, or have such thought-provoking ideas, or have picked up such astonishing skills that I want to know more about what they're like inside. Suddenly the idea of online dating starts to have some logic to it: where you don't have any physical contact, you're forced to draw a lot more from a person by these kind of interfaces. If the previous two paragraphs sound like the mad ramblings of a strange recluse who can't keep a sentence to under 40 words to save his life, I should apologize. If you want something on the lighter side, there's probably a short story floating around in all of this about a lonely copy editor who falls in love with a reporter whose articles he edits. Just think what fun you could have as the author when these two characters meet for the first time! |
Sunday, February 18, 2007
12:41 a.m.
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It looks like I have a few days to catch up on again, which is generally bad since it means I can't fully describe all the fun and interesting stuff from each one. Some highlights: Thursday was the kind of day I needed to follow Wednesday's post. Some people responded with interesting comments, and then I had more than an hour-long IM conversation with my sister, who is definitely the person in the world I could talk about anything with. So we (that is, mostly me) talked about stuff, and it was really nice to just unload and explain everything to someone else without feeling weird about "too much information." I guess it had been a while since I've discussed personal things with anyone but myself! But the big news for Thursday is that I saw Alan V. in the cluster on his way to the darkroom in Maggie Mo, which led to me following him there, talking with the lab manager, getting access for the rest of the semester, and generally re-acquainting myself with the ins and outs of black-and-white photography for the first time since high school. This is exciting stuff — I thought I was done with real photography years ago until I turned into a real house-owning adult who could maybe spend a lot of money and set up a darkroom in an extra upstairs bathroom if he really felt the urge. Now for a mere $35 a semester, plus film and paper, I can pretend I'm a CFA student and work on stuff there. Finding out what was left in my brain under the photography folder was also really interesting. There are two kinds of reels and film tanks in the darkroom: a metal-wire kind that I'd never seen before and that will probably give me some trouble for a while, and then the exact plastic ones that we used at THS. After failing a few times at loading a metal one with test film in the light, I grabbed a plastic set, looked away from it, and slapped the film in almost immediately. This was nicely reassuring. Later I watched Alan V. make a prints until he let me try one — and when I got to the fix something popped up in my mind that said "You should fix it image side down." Now this bit of knowledge has been stored in my brain since 1998, completely untouched since 2001, and here it is popping up again in 2007 at exactly the right moment after I'd forgotten its existence for years. Similar thing with remembering that brownish stop bath means it's old and probably has some developer in it. Friday (i.e. yesterday) I worked during the day from the cluster and decided I wasn't terribly interested in going to the KGB event. So I asked on IRC if anyone wanted to do anything interesting, and ended up arranging a tea party in Welch with ehuber, Tomczak, jbauman, and someone named Eli who happened to be coming through the Welch lounge at the right time. This was a nice relaxed and moderately intellectual affair that lasted from 7 utnil around 9, and then I went back to the cluster and ended up working on next week's totally amazing KGB Puzzle Hunt event (which you should all play in) with the appropriate people until I finally left for home at 3 a.m. Today I spent four and a half hours having fun adventures with four other people and a U-Haul, which led to a Car in my car and me driving a truck for 43 miles, but I think I'll go to bed now and wait until the morning to tell that story. |
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