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ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
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Monday, February 19, 2007
7:56 p.m.
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Most people have probably already heard the story of Saturday from soneone else involved, but since I promised a re-telling in my last entry I'll talk about it anyway. The day began for me with the phone ringing at 9:30 a.m. The tmoss–jgrafton housing group had found a dining-room table and six chairs they wanted to buy off Craig's List and were looking for ways to transport it from the North Side to Roselawn. I'd told Tyler in the cluster on Friday that if they needed my help I'd be willing to offer both physical assistance and motorized transport, so by shortly after 11:00 I was heading to campus in my car. From there I collected Tyler, Car, cpride, and Carolyn, and we all drove to the U-Haul rental place on Washington Blvd. There was some discussion about who was going to drive the truck once we'd rented it, mostly resolved by me being selected to fill out the paperwork and take charge of the vehicle as the person most willing to try navigating it through city streets. So once we'd officially gotten the thing checked out to us until 4:00, I gave Car the keys to my car and got into the front of the U-Haul with cpride. Our adventure began. The first thing you notice about driving a 10-foot U-Haul is that you can't see anything behind you, which makes changing lanes slightly interesting. I was using cpride as a right-hand mirror by proxy most of the time since he had a better view of that side than I did; my main goal was to get out onto Fifth Avenue and chug steadily along in the right lane. The second thing I discovered is that a U-Haul is indeed wider than a car, but not actually by that much. I scraped the pile of snow along the side of the road once in the first half-mile, which noticibly torqued the back end or otherwise caused a little mini-skid, but after that I aimed more centrally in the lane and tried not to turn too quickly. We eventually pulled up on campus, where we dropped off Tyler, and then our little truck-car convey headed down Boulevard of the Allies towards the freeway. Our goal was somewhere in Ross Township off of that wretched byway known as McKnight Road. I promise there is no better place to give yourself a thorough distaste for commericalism and congestion than the two or three miles of U.S. Route 19 off of I-279. The sidestreet we needed to turn onto amid this morass of insanity was both tiny and unmarked, so we drove along the whole stretch four times before calling back home to Tyler for a quick spot of Google Maps. U-Haul discovery the third: you can actually get pretty used to handling the thing once you've fooled around with changing directions in parking lots and shifting lanes on busy roads. As one of the last steps on the right path to our eventual destination, I found the one place in the whole county most desperately in need of a stoplight — and, this being Pittsburgh, there wasn't one there because they're all being used regulating imaginary traffic on baby little sidestreets back here in the East End. (There must be something about driving around here that brings out my sardonic side. As far as adventures go, this one was pretty low-stress and manageable, and I'd certainly do it again if we needed to. Possibly I just like finding the humorous bits to make a point of like the stand-up comedians do.) Purchasing the table, loading it into the truck, and driving it back to campus was quite easy and straightforward; then we took the U-Haul back to its home base, and I had a wonderful lunch at Aladdin's with Car and Tyler around 3:30. |
Thursday, February 22, 2007
7:46 p.m.
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I've been up to a lot of different things this week... I forgot to mention before that I went to Sherbrooke Saturday night and saw "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" with Akiva, Lea, and Dom. It would be what I'd call an entirely classic movie if it weren't for the three completely random "modern" (1969) musical sequences. The Wild West suddenly set to "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" is a little bit odd. Coming home from The Tartan around 1 a.m. Sunday night, I realized that I had MT homework due the next afternoon at 1:30 that I'd completely forgotten about after it was assigned two weeks ago. So I spent the day Monday on that and turned it in around 4 in the afternoon. Part of it was making slides about sample lexical and structural mismatches between languages that we know, which we all had to present Wednesday. I used French, of course, but the examples weren't all that great since I didn't have time to come up with anything really good in advance. On the plus side, I learned some really interesting facts about personal pronouns in Vietnamese. Monday night I was saved from a moderately-annoying headache and an evening wasting time at home by an invitation to half-price with Alan V. and jgrafton; by the time I biked to campus I felt completely better! I also found out on Monday that the CMU Philharmonic was playing the next evening at Carnegie Hall, so on Tuesday I went to dinner at Panera's in Squirrel Hill with Dave, Akiva, and jcreed before taking the bus back to Oakland. A group of three loud and utterly clueless girls got on at Hamburg Hall and then got off again at Craig Street, which made me shake my head and laugh a bit. The concert was a set of stuff by three American composers: Bernstein's overture to "Candide," a symphony from someone called Howard Hansen, and then someone else's arrangement of Gershwin stuff from "Porgy and Bess." I'm not really qualified to critique the orchestra's playing abilities — except that if you're going to have really really high flute notes, you should find a player-instrument pair that doesn't make them sound like rusted metal hinge just moving again for the first time in years — but I guess the music itself is fair game. And in that respect I have to say I was a bit disappointed. The "Candide" wasn't so bad, and Hansen's "Symphony No. 2" got itself together in the third movement, but the early part of that work and most of the Gershwin compilation I found rather hard to follow. In the latter, the arranger had written in a whole lot of fancy bridge stuff with triangles and brass fanfares and a sort of alarm-bell ringing sound, which would pop out of nowhere and scare you a bit, and then the orchestra would instantly context switch into something like "It Ain't Necessarily So" written in a slow shuffle. I think they would have been much better off playing the actual Gershwin works as a series of separate songs. Classwork's also been taking its toll this week. I spent some Tuesday night and most of Wednesday getting ready for software engineering (which seemed to go OK), and then Shilpa and I got stuck in the lab for more than two hours trying to cram the MEMT's IOD service into a downloadable UIMA pear file. I feel like this is kind of like taking the super deluxe edition of PhotoShop and wanting it to run on a PDA. And UIMA in general is kind of annoying to work with. When I made it up to the cluster afterwards looking for half-price people, feeling by 10:15 that my stomach was going to jump out of its usual place and start snacking on my left arm, no one was interested in going so I headed to Joe Mama's by myself. It felt a bit strange at first, but then I started making notes for my MT class project and got the next few steps figured out. Today I spent mostly writing some badly-needed scripts for the project that will eventually lead to the creation of a bilingual lexicon without too much hand labor. Basically I'm stitching together a bunch of toolkits with some extra processing before each step. As soon as I write one or two more Perl things, I'll have an amazing everything.sh that takes a French-English parallel corpus and spits out a decent bilingual dictionary based on learned word alignments and matching parts of speech. I'll be very much surprised, when it's all done, if it can run on my 28-million-word training corpus in less than 32 hours — though it looks like that's going to be about 31 hours 45 minutes of GIZA++ and 15 minutes of everything else. |
Thursday, February 22, 2007
8:35 p.m.
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There is in fact even more to the long story of this week than I wrote about in my last post, mostly because I found a few interesting things on the calendar and went to two lectures on various topics. The first was a talk by Bruno Réquillart, a French photographer with an exhibit opening this week and running through May at the Silver Eye Center for Photography, and the second was the SCS Distinguished Lecture by Luis von Ahn. The French photographer talk yesterday afternoon was actually in French, one of the big reasons I really wanted to go even if the subject wasn't also something I'm interested in. Bonnie (my professor from 82-302 last semester) and Christine (from The Tartan) were both there, so I had some speaking practice too. It's hard to explain how nice it is actually doing something with French — I really need to track down a French club on campus or get a converstion group together or something. The talk itself was pretty good, although this M. Réquillart liked to use the word zone a lot. He explained that a major component of his photographs is the interplay between different forms and lines, some of which were extremely subtle things when he traced them out on his slides. He also pointed out some spots where he burned or dodged the image, which is something I'd kind of forgotten you could do if you make your own enlargements. My brain was in French mode afterwards, so I was standing outside the lecture hall saying something to Christine in that language when another friend of hers came up and asked her "Is he... is he French?" We both looked at each other a bit (Christine and I), she said "No," and then I said "Oh no; totally American" in English. I don't know if I should add this to my list of mistaken nationality instances or not. At first I was inclined not to, since this kid was probably making the obvious assumption that unknown people would choose to chat with friends in their native language. But then Christine said that he spent a year in France, so he ought to be able to identify francophone imposters by their accents, and if he couldn't identify mine then maybe I had him legitimately fooled. Great fun in either case, though! Today I went to a talk on human computation by Luis von Ahn, one of the darlings of the CMU CS program, who probably has more to his credit at the age of 28 or whatever than most people could ever have if they lived to be 128. He's the one who invented captchas, those little "type in the distorted word" things you see on web registration forms, and now he's focusing on similar little things that humans can do without thinking that computers fail at. The idea is that people waste incredible amounts of time on the Internet, and if you can casually steal five seconds of their processing power to work on a really hard problem for computers, your hard problem can be solved very quickly. He outlined three methods, disguised as online games, that can effectively do things like label or tag every image on Google, identify which pixels in an image belong to which objects in that image, and improve translation between languages. (Two of them are already running here and here.) Also some stuff about using captchas to digitize online books when OCR fails or makes a mistake. Half the LTI was at this lecture, and as soon as Luis started talking about a collaborative game as an alternative to machine translation, they all raised their hands and flooded him with questions. It was overall a very interesting and amusing talk, with a few humorous explanations and fun questions at the end. |
Saturday, February 24, 2007
6:27 p.m.
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I don't know if I ever used this exact phrase in here before, but sometimes I think of myself as living by the week but for the weekend; viz. staying afloat by working but most enjoying other stuff. Obviously it's not completely true, as what I've written about my MT project can show, but it's hard to compete with this weekend so far. Most importantly, we finally had our KGB Puzzle Hunt last night. This is an idea that was started in January after we all came back from the MIT Mystery Hunt. I mentioned to Chris that I'd been thinking about puzzles almost non-stop for days, and she said she'd done the same and was thinking about trying to write a hunt. So it shall be written; so it shall be done. We ended up with a puzzle-writing team of me, Chris, gwillen, Evan, mrwright, Ross, and two freshmen; absolutely stellar dialogue writing from Alan and Dave; and play-test and administrative help from Rachel, Alex, Pat, Val, and a few other people. It's really very interesting to see what different talents are required for something like this: it takes a lot more than an experienced logician or puzzler to actually carry off a hunt. And I think, all told, we carried this one off pretty well. There were some last-minute organizational insanities, like finishing the last puzzle while teams were registering, and then getting totally flooded with solutions at headquarters for about the whole first hour. We had a system worked out where teams would notify us (using a web form) when they wanted to submit a solution, which would send us a zephyr with the team name, puzzle name, and phone number we should call them on. Then we'd grab a cell phone in headquarters and call them to get their solution. I was sort of the central dispatcher; for a long time, I had five or six active zephyrs on my screen at once until Evan showed me how they can be much more easily managed with something called Owl. Later on, we were thrown into another frantic panic when we realized a team was about to solve the metapuzzle an hour before we expected people would get that far. Of course, the non-puzzle extra parts were probably the most fun. I got to be a short-lived Communist stooge for comedic effect in our opening and closing skits, and during the runaround I played Tweedledum opposite mrwright's Tweedledee. The dialogue Alan wrote us for the scene was so amazing — as soon as I read it for the first time on our administrative wiki, I really wanted to play that part for the event. The others said we did it quite well, and gwillen took video of the runaround, so I'll either post that or provide a link as soon as I have it. The puzzle site itself is here, in case you want to have a look at it or try some of the things yourself. I wrote "Arrr, Mateys!" (whose inspiration came from a long-division problem of 27 by 4 that someone did in paint on a traffic-control box at Aiken and Ellsworth), "The Speaker is Out of Order" (which ended up being the hardest puzzle in the whole hunt), and "KGB Undersized Tour." |
Sunday, February 25, 2007
11:11 p.m.
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I am in Ohio! Just briefly, though, to do my taxes (done tonight) and to have a 9 a.m. dentist appointment tomorrow morning. This is the first week I've been totally absent from Tartan production since I joined the copy staff at the beginning of November 2005. Even reading proofs for 14 hours is preferable to filling out United States tax forms with annoying software, though — at this point, I think the best option would be to zero out the national tax code and get people like Brewer or gwillen to come up with a new one that makes sense and is clearly defined. It's been a long time since high school, when I could fill out my own 1040-EZ form by hand in about 10 minutes. Otherwise, out of all the random thoughts I've had over the past week, it may make the most sense to dip back into musical ones a bit. I was coming home from Joe Mama's with jgrafton on Monday night, I think it was, and at Craig Street we both started mimicing the two-tone noise the little crossing indicator makes. I mentioned that the interval was larger than I at first thought, and jgrafton said he figured it was a third. At the time I couldn't say and actually thought it was more than that, but walking to campus Friday I thought of a really simple test I should have remembered and tried — especially since we were talking about Beethoven's Fifth right afterwards. Now, the part of the Fifth Symphony that everyone knows is a third; I remember that from piano lessons when I was little. Take those four notes and bump them up in the scale, to where the crossing sound is. Sing them out loud. Now only think the first two and sing the second two out loud. Now shorten the duration of the second one. That, mes enfants, is the Craig Street crossing sound. Of course, this thought led to the more interesting idea that I should be able to produce and identify any given interval — as in the Fifth Symphony test above, all you have to do is sing songs accurately and transpose them to different places in your vocal range, and these are both skills I have for reasonable songs that I've turned over in my mind a bit. In an octave, there are only 12 intervals, and I know I can store more than 12 songs in my brain, so it should be computationally feasible to note a particular passage of a particular song as an example of each interval. After I'd reasoned that far, I realized that in addition to getting a third from Beethoven (among other places, in fact), I also already knew that the first two notes in "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" give an octave. Now to fill in the other 10. As a side effect of all this, the Craig Street crossing sound is now permanently stored in my brain. |
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
1:20 a.m.
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Whee! Tonight was such a wonderful night I can't believe it. I moved up from my lab to the cluster around 6:00 like usual, and then popped over to Roselawn around 8:00 to say hi and work there for a bit. I'd just gotten in the door when Tyler told me that a fourth spot in the house that he, jgrafton, and Car are moving into off campus was available again, and then he asked me if I'd like it. Shock of the week! We talked a bit and then went over to look at the house, which they all have keys for already since the lease starts Thursday, and by half-price time it was pretty clear that living with these people in this house is a great idea. Yes, I'll be paying double rent for five months since my own lease isn't up until the end of July, but as long as we keep the house a second year I'll end up saving a decent amount of money in the end. And yes, the bedroom is rather smaller than I'd prefer it to be, but I spent two years in dorm rooms that were smaller still, and this house has a whole lot of storage and common space. Actual logistical details remain to be worked out, but I'm definitely excited to be moving into a really nice place with really cool people about five steps off campus. The four of us plus Tom also got together for half-price, and then at Joe Mama's we combined with Alan V. and Philip to make a positively rollicking group of seven. Seriously, you guys are the best: it's been a long time since I laughed that hard. After a quick stop in the cluster, I walked home singing various songs as they occurred to me — especially enjoying the upbeat and energetic "Gotta Dance My Way to Heaven." |
Friday, March 2, 2007
12:26 p.m.
So desirable in every way were the apartments, and so moderate did the terms seem when divided between us, that the bargain was concluded upon the spot, and we at once entered into possession. The quote (from "A Study in Scarlet") is quite correct: I signed the house lease Wednesday and got a key yesterday, the same day our tenancy officially began. The next step, I think, is to measure out my bedroom so I can do my usual furniture-cutout experiment to see how everything's going to fit in there. This is probably a good thing to do tomorrow, when all four of us are planning on going over to put together the dining room table and break the kitchen in properly. Jeff, Car, and Tyler are also stopping over here to inspect the furniture I can bring with me once we all move in. So social/house stuff is working out very nicely this week. More good stuff from this week — I stated once on IRC, not too long ago, that certain things are best discussed in person rather than online. I may have to modify my statement somewhat after having had another really interesting and in-depth conversation over IM on Wednesday night. I think that makes three in as many weeks. It's very... refreshing, I think the word is, to find someone so easy to talk to, especially when that "intolocutor or opposite number in conversation" is a really wonderful person besides. My one fear in those situations is that I end up monopolizing the conversation, which is one thing that's still hard to judge online. In the procrastination department, Alan V. introduced me to the combination of Stepmania and Dancing Gorilla, two programs that let you convert a song file into an ITG-style step file, edit it, and test it out on your computer. You can also plug it into the ITG machine in Scotland Yard thanks to the fine idea of having everything run on the same open-source framework. So of course I've been experimenting with my kind of music instead of the techno club-dance mix that's usually standard on such games. The difficult part is finding a song that Dancing Gorilla can find the beat in: the first two I tried failed horribly, and the third is off somehow in a way that I can't seem to fix. For the fourth, I resorted to part of an exact-tempo track that Malcolm Laycock played on his BBC show some months ago, and the results there are much nicer. I regret to say that the work department isn't enjoying the same eventual success this week — for some reason I felt kind of uninspired from Monday through my advisor meeting yesterday. Fortunately, though, in talking to Alon I figured out something I was doing wrong in my alignment-processing stuff, which was enough to get my brain going again spending the whole afternoon coding up the right way in a bunch of Perl scripts. I expect to have a decent base lexicon in transfer format now by the end of the week, provided I can get myself into gear again this afternoon and finish it off. I would have liked to do it last night, but I came home feeling like I was going to fall asleep at 7:00, and by 9 or 9:30 I'd developed one of those crashing headaches that eventually made even looking at the computer screen painful. Went to bed at 11:00 and slept for almost 11 hours, thus waking up feeling much better today. I suspect the whole episode was weather related: it rained a lot last night after I got home, and now today we've got wonderful clear blue skies. |
Monday, March 5, 2007
12:16 p.m.
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One thing I love about the Tartan copy staff is that we find word-nerd humor in almost anything. Yesterday I was only supposed to work from 1 to 6, but there was so much to do that I ended up staying until 12:30 a.m. I thus got to hear Kevin come across the phrase "a periodical trip to pick up toilet paper," which led to us make laugh-filled comments about Time and Newsweek. We also had to work with Stats Speaking a bit so that the header "Here's how women are making an impact" wasn't followed immediately by a stat saying that women earn on average only 77 cents for every dollar a man makes. ("Making an impact by saving big corporations lots of money?" we wondered.) I think Claire was also having trouble with the stats out in the main room, since a while later we overheard "You can be on death row and still have an impact. Shut up!" — a quote we immediately wrote on the board back in the copy cave. Other good stuff this weekend, too. On Friday I went walking in the park with Jeff for an hour in an attempt to take advantage of the fleeting sun and warm weather we had that afternoon. Later on I walked from the KGB event to the cluster with Brewer and Evan and ended up jumping up, down, and onto things as those two are wont to do sometimes. It's actually quite amazing: you look at the wall outside the wheelchair ramp in the Hamerschlag-Porter parking lot, for example, and see Evan take two steps and hop backwards onto it (with no hands) so he ends up sitting on the wall, and you think "What! There's no way I could do that!" But then you try it and find out that you can. Similar experience with hopping onto those concrete trash cans by the Fence from standing right next to them, or starting on a landing in the Wean stairwell and jumping up six steps. (In some of these activities I make up for a lack of springiness or technique or practice by being a bit taller than either Evan or Brewer.) I'm still pretty bad at wall-running, though: I probably look more like a baby bird thinking about flying for the first time. Saturday was house day. Car, Tom, Jeff, and Tyler came over here around 4:00 to quickly look at my furniture and pick me up, and then we drove to Roselawn to move the dining room table to the new house and get ready for the potluck we were having at 7:30. We gave the basement a thorough exploration and discovered a new closet room that had a lot of generally-useful maintenance things in it — spare globes for the lights, some radiator covers, window screens, a stepladder, etc. We were able to effect a few repairs ourselves with those supplies before and after dinner, and then pfriedma took a look at our wiring and fixed the doorbell. There were also some furniture-moving games — including trying to get a couch down the third-floor stairwell, which we deemed impossible on the assumption that the lower landing must have been reconfigured some time after the couch was originally moved up — but since I'm not exactly built for strength I measured everyone's bedroom instead and said I'd make up nice floor plans to give out. After most people had gone home, we ended up all crowded round the radiator in the living room talking about various things, a very cozy scene that lasted until around 2 a.m. |
Saturday, March 10, 2007
3:48 a.m.
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Rar rar rar — why am I unable to sleep at 3:45 a.m.? This is one of the worst possible nights to have sleeping trouble. I'm expecting to be woken up by a phone call in a little more than five hours, and silly Congressional energy bill zaniness is taking away an hour of sleep tomorrow night for the switch to Daylight Savings Time. I'm kind of apprehensive about this coming week in general, in fact. I didn't escape the general insanity of this past week, which was the eighth of the semester, and now I'm faced with the rather ironic situation of having my own super workdeath week fall over what's technically spring break. Thank goodness there aren't any classes — and especially no instructor meeting for software engineering — to suck my time away. But still my MT class project, software engineering work with MinorThird, two long homework assignments, and regular MEMT research work are already spoiling what I hoped would be a really fun week. You see, I'm getting an rlambert from tomorrow afternoon through next weekend, and then a Sonnie next on the 16th and 17th, which means actual meals to work out and fun activities to arrange and take part in, but what I really ought to do is lock myself in my lab for 168 hours and write transfer grammar rules and MinorThird annotations until my head explodes. Well, we will see how it goes: I'm certainly not missing out on Rebecca's planned Pi Day and random-ingredient cooking parties, and it's kind of hard to be a good host in absentia. Today turned into a rather adventurous day, after my subconscious pulled the plug on a rather ambitious work plan and made me sleep in three hours later than I would have liked. The result was that I completely missed an 11 a.m. software engineering meeting and (it seems) made the rest of my group kind of upset with me. (We're supposed to make this up on Sunday now...) At 2:45 it was off to accompany Car to a doctor's appointment down at the hospital in Oakland, which proved to be several hours of really interesting conversation when we found that the doctor's office was running ridiculously behind. A quick foray into the UC for some ITG with Alan V. afterwards, cut short by a rude and overbearing campus police officer, and then dinner at the Rose Tea Café with Car, Volki, and Ivan. Once we got back to campus, I walked with Car over to her room in Henderson, where we picked up matthewj for a little tea and Internet-browsing party. I was also able to make some incremental progress on writing grammar rules, both in the hospital waiting room and during the times when the browsing moved away from my tastes a bit. One thing I should mention, since it falls into the category of wordplay and fun with language, is that Car had obtained a little kids' activity book based on the movie "Happy Feet," and that one of its pages had a little thing saying something like "How many words can you make using the letters in 'heartsong'?" (I assume this is a reference to something in the movie; I highly question the word's validity otherwise.) I said I thought we could come up with 50; matthewj seemed a bit sceptical. So we had a go at it and eventually stopped at 65 — mostly common words, but we each ended up finding two really good ones as well. Well, maybe we'll try this sleep thing again... |
Saturday, March 10, 2007
11:51 a.m.
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Report on the sleepless night, which had a rather unexpected conclusion: I was still awake at 5:45, my brain having pursued a series of disquieting and, I admit, frighening thoughts on a certain subject. At 10 minutes to 6:00, I gave up the idea of sleep and decided I needed to do something interesting and out of the ordinary. I turned on a few lights in my apartment. I checked Intellicast for the time of sunrise in Pittsburgh: 6:40 a.m. I loaded a roll of color film into my point-and-shoot camera and put a roll of black-and-white into the Pentax. I got dressed and collected my car keys from the bookshelf. At 10 minutes past 6:00, I got into my car and headed west. At 6:30, my photographic equipment and I arrived at the West End Overlook with 10 minutes to spare. I set up at a suitable place along the railing and started unfolding the tripod. The only other person in the park was a guy with a digital camera probably a few years old than me. We talked a bit; his name was Matt, he had done his undergrad at Georgia Tech, and he was up in the park to see the sunrise after staying out late and spending the night at a friend's house up on the hill. His accent sounded like he was natively from Pittsburgh. I took a few shots of him and the skyline on his camera, then made about 10 exposures myself with various lenses and cropping. Matt seemed impressed that I still shot with film. At 7:00 I got back in the car and, feeling rather tired, reached my apartment at 7:20. After a few minutes I fell asleep on the couch. Phone call from Rebecca just before 9:00, as expected, but I was actually asleep for a few periods of decent length between 7:20 and about 11:00. Now I think it is tea time. |
Sunday, March 11, 2007
11:40 p.m.
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Spring break week is off to a good start socially. Rebecca arrived yesterday afternoon around 2:00, and then we collected Pat and Car for a nice climbing trip. Then I proposed making dinner at my apartment rather than eating out, so we bought pasta-related ingredients at Trader Joe's and picked up matthewj on campus to bring the group up to five (which, I discover again, is about the maximum number of people I can cook dinner for at my apartment). After-dinner tea time devolved into terrible Internet browsing, leaving me kind of left out on the side variously cleaning up dishes and hopelessly trying to get rid of the second pot of English breakfast tea I'd just brewed. People got tired eventually, so I drove them back to campus; then Rebecca and I talked for a bit and played a game of French Scrabble against someone online. Today I woke up at 1:15 — a combination of the time switch and yesterday morning, I expect — and spent three wonderful hours taking photographs around campus with Alan V. and matthewj. I used 15 more exposures out of my roll of 36, and I think Alan said he'd taken 194 digital shots by the time we were done. My stuff was about 50/50 mixed informal portraiture and more abstract architecture or contrast shots, and I'm already kind of excited to finish the roll and develop them. A lot of the compositions looked quite nice through the camera, and it didn't hurt having two subjects who both photograph very nicely besides. (In terms of this second quality, I expect I repaid the favor but poorly in return; we'll have to see what Alan comes up with.) Alisa was already in the Newell-Simon atrium when Alan and I passed through there sometime after 6:00, so we went down and started Rebecca's 8:00 games party a bit early. Started out with Trhyme (TM) first, a game I'm apparently pretty good at — it's a sort of relational wordplay game, which is so exactly how my brain is set up. I still noticed, though, that it took some time to get properly into it: at the beginning, I was missing answers and feeling kind of sluggish; by the end, my mind was putting together possibilities while the card was still being read. I find this in general, actually, when my brain is shifting major gears. My accent, fluidity, and working ability take about 20 minutes to fully develop when I switch myself into French mode, for example, and I play my best Scrabble in between editing pages at The Tartan, when I'm already in all-out word-based processing mode. Well, anyway, after Trhyme we moved into Settlers. A bit into the game I started getting a really annoying headache and feeling like I wanted to go to sleep, and by the end I was pretty useless both as a player and as a conversationalist. So I excused myself and went home, even though we were going to play Alan's cluster card game next, which I remember as being pretty fun and easy. (The reason why I'm still awake now, after in fact coming home and going to bed at 10:00, may be discussed in a separate post.) Tomorrow is death by MinorThird (if I can make the stupid thing not return a Java error when I try to train an annotator) and then fun Rebecca stuff. |
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
9:19 p.m.
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Here's one example of what makes linguistics textbooks totally different from the math or CS books I'm more used to: The structural parallelism between the various different types of Phrase in (5) above is clearly so striking that we would like to be able to replace the particular statements we have made about the internal structure of specific types of Phrase (Noun Phrase, Adjectival Phrase, Verb Phrase, etc.) in (5) by a single more general statement about all types of Phrase. But how can we do this? I think any normal book, if the author was being careful, would dispense with all this with a quick "Let X be a word-level category and then skip straight to (6). Perhaps this is why this particular linguistics textbook ("Transformational Grammar," by Andrew Radford) is 625 pages long. After pounding the difference between specific and general schemas into your head in the two full paragraphs above, the following paragraph, for example, reminds the reader once again that X is a category variable, standing for a noun, verb, preposition, adjective, adverb, etc. Just in case you'd looked at Figure 6 for a second and had forgotten or something, I suppose. Also, I love how British writing is spottable from like six miles away. You can't possibly read this excerpt without seeing, in your mind, the Oxford cricket 11 warming up on the pitch while tea is being served to the classics master in the bleachers. And it's not just because Radford wrote "generalise" instead of "generalize." Sentence structure, capitalization, quotation and dash style — they're all screaming this guy's linguistic origins more than the "Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex" line on the title page. |
Thursday, March 15, 2007
2:42 a.m.
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I do have an 11 a.m. conference call tomorrow, but I don't want to get even further behind by not updating for yet another day or two. And I've already been all over the place with my sleep schedule in the last week, so one more late might probably won't make it much worse. The evening adventures continue with Rebecca here: on Monday we tried to have a campfire in Frick, but the path was totally submerged and everything in general was wet from Saturday's rain, so we gave up without even making an attempt and all went in various ways back to campus. Brewer, Ross, and I biked and were the first to arrive at the Fence, where we planned to roast marshmellows and such on the grill there. Problem No. 1: no grill. So we collected everyone again and moved to Donner Ditch instead, where we found ourselves better equipped. Then I did about an hour's worth of work in the cluster before biking home again. Yesterday I went up to the cluster at 4:00 to talk to Alan V. about MinorThird, and eventually yielded to his and Rachel's insistence on taking a walk to the Squirrel Hill Giant Eagle to buy stuff for pie-making. I was worried about not getting enough done that afternoon, but it was more than 70 degrees outside... they convinced me at last, after I asked for enough time to at least e-mail another grad student who might be able to answer some more MinorThird questions. We decided to walk into Schenley and come out through Hobart Street; it was thus that, walking along outside of Phipps, we met up with jgrafton and matthewj, who'd been attempting to visit the greenhouse but had found it closed when they arrived shortly after 5. We got them to join our party instead, so the five of us worked our way westward by degrees, stopping at various things that we found amusing. After about 10 minutes of this I decided that listening to Alan and Rachel's advice was really the best answer of the day — walking through the park and being as silly as an exicitable five-year-old definitely made me feel so much better. Alan took pictures of us standing on fences, swinging on swings, climbing a dirt mound, walking through the grass, etc. I talked with Alan about photography, matthewj about VM Ware, Rachel about French politics, and Jeff about online journaling, generally feeling more relaxed and carefree than I have for the last several days. Just being on the swings, for example, was making me laugh out loud at nothing at all. (Annoying thoughts about the Topic are finally receeding again to manageable levels — I guess it's not unusual to have a go of what Jeremy used to call spring fever when it's spring break week.) At some point we arrived in Squirrel Hill and had dinner at Kazansky's, then grabbed pie stuff from the store for the Pi Day party today at the new house. There were also supposed to be fun adventures later last night, but in the end I think a lot of us were tired and uninterested, so I just stayed in the cluster listening to jgrafton and matthewj poke around AFS a bit. I say, listening to these two throw things back and forth makes me feel like a high-school French II student running into a pair of native Parisians. I managed to pick up a few key terms and partially follow along at my computer with a bit of Googling and questioning ("How do you write that while loop in shell script? What cell is that again?"), which I suppose may have been kind of annoying for them. Came home late and went to bed even later. Pie party today. Our house is still empty, so Rebecca and I drove a load of ingredients and supplies over this morning, then left the car there and went to campus as normal for the rest of the day. The two of us cooked things there starting at 7:00, but everyone else brought a pie ready-made (or ready-bought, I suppose). We feasted upon, in order, two apple pies, a spinach and cheese pie, a chocolate pie, an apricot pie, and a peach pie. There was also whipped cream, tea, and assorted other things. Those of us left while the dishwasher ran around 1 a.m. talked about domestic subjects like apartment mishaps, cleaning, and housemates until we finally packed everything up and left shortly before 2. |
Sunday, March 18, 2007
6:25 p.m.
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People are coming back from spring break! And my sleep schedule is still really messed up! Whatever I might say about this week, I can't claim that it hasn't been interesting and a big change from regular routine weeks, which I guess is good. Thursday was all work — LTI stuff from 11 a.m. until 9:30 p.m. Friday night Rachel planned an impromptu pseudo-KGB movie night in Doherty, during which we saw "Titan A.E.," "Saved," and "Ghostbusters," and then I had pasta and tomato sauce with Alan V. and talked about PHP and web hosting until 4:30 a.m., so I didn't get home until 5. Yesterday was a day of flitting from activity to activity and from group to group — I hope I wasn't rude to anyone in switching in and out of their plans. I went to the crêpes place in Shadyside with Rebecca and Cornell, and then we went climbing. It was a frustrating day at the wall, actually, until Rebecca found the world's best V2 inside that central cave area. It goes all the way around the perimeter, but it's marked "open feet" so you can put your feet anywhere you want and just follow the marked holds for your hands. It's so much fun to do, and it really gives your arms some good strength training. After that I found a few more interesting V1/2s, so the trip ended on a good note. We went back to the cluster afterwards, eventually talking with Chris, gwillen, Alan V., Tyler, and Jeff for a while before dinner. Then I went to the Rose Tea Café with Tyler and Jeff, played a game of Starcraft with the same, and walked down to Chris's for part of a game of Psychiatrist and fun adventures with burnt baklava and blackberry wine. Back to the cluster around midnight, and then Jeff, Tyler, and I went over to the new house to drink tea and finish the last few slices of leftover pie from Wednesday. Car and Tom joined us there after they came in from the airport, so the talk turned to their recent Florida adventures and then to water-based activites in general. It appears I'm the landlubber of the group, the other four having grown up in close proximity to larger bodies of water where there's more interesting wildlife than walleye, zebra mussels, and driftwood. We eventually cleaned up dishes and left the house at 2:30; I got home at 3 and went to bed at 4. Awake at 12:15 today, and by the time I got out of the shower Rebecca had gone out and left me the apartment to myself. Not that I've been doing anything exciting with it today besides sitting at my desk and variously working and getting distracted by IRC. (I have a whole series of thoughts built up related to this, but they'll have to wait for a separate post, I think.) I have about a week's worth of work to do on my MT assignment due tomorrow, some of which, however, is being made easier than expected thanks to the magic of Perl. If Larry Wall ever stops by Pittsburgh, I think I volunteer to take him out to dinner or something. I wrote up something in an hour and a half Friday morning, for example, that I'd been vascillating on and picking at for a few days before without any nice progress. Now I know all the ingredients for what I want to do, and I'm hoping I can write them between now and 1:30 tomorrow by staying up all night and falling in with Rebecca's idea of a late-night meal before I drive her to the Greyhound station for a 5 a.m. bus back to Washington. |
Monday, March 19, 2007
8:44 a.m.
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This morning's dose of the surreal brought to you by the Homewood Cemetery in Squirrel Hill, a representative of which called me on the phone a few minutes ago saying that my number had been randomly selected to win a certificate worth a single in-ground plot. I've only been awake for 20½ hours so far... I don't think I should be hallucinating yet. |
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
5:15 p.m.
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Well, I say — I go to the trouble of pulling my first-ever all nighter, spend 15 hours working on the homework due the next day, and now I don't even get the satisfaction of carrying off my coup and turning in the completed assignment with a satisfied click of the "Send" button? Somehow I think I may have introduced an error into my final script between 12 and 12:30 p.m. yesterday, and then I got an e-mail a few minutes before class saying that the due date's been extended for two days anyway. So I feel kind of cheated, even though the extension means I have time to do some better parameter tuning and possibly throw in another module. But I did have my overnight adventure, which was a mix of social activities and real work. This is a distribution I highly recommend, by the way, since I didn't start feeling tired or slow until quite into the day yesterday, and even then I was able to get rid of it. Major operations began Sunday at 2 p.m.; I worked straight until 9, when I went to Chris's house for fruit smoothies and to play in the box fort people built there Saturday. At 11 it was off to the cluster for a few more hours of work until a bunch of us left for Eat'n Park at 2 a.m. Then I drove Rebecca to the Greyhound station downtown, came home, and worked more between 5 and 8 a.m. A quick trip grocery shopping to get my blood going again, then a walk to campus and more work in the cluster from 10:00 until roughly 12:30. It was at 12:15 p.m. that I crossed the 24-hour mark, a first for me. Shortly afterward matthewj and I had a swordfight in the Wean fifth-floor hallway with those foam things that fit along the sides of CPU and monitor boxes. MT class at 1:30 was difficult; I kept fading out and missing little quarter-seconds of audio every now and then. Brittany used to talk last semester about falling asleep in her 9:30 the morning after Tartan production and writing journalistic word salad in her notes — my notes from yesterday are showing similar signs of mental lapses: "Search for low-frequency n-grams on the Left campus at 6:30 (T-plus 30 hours), feeling kind of slow, with the intention of going home to bed, but managed to get myself into a really intricate series of thoughts on the way that woke me up completely by the time I arrived. So instead of sleeping I spent more than two hours writing out 2600 words on something that's been bugging me a lot recently. (I don't know exactly what I'll do with the document, but at least it's there.) Then I started feeling tired again and went to bed at 9:35 p.m. after being awake for a total of 33 1/3 hours — a fitting number for a guy who collects records, I'd say. |
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