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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, March 22, 2007
1:34 p.m.
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Somehow it's Thursday already — a dark, tempestous one, although the temperatures are supposed to be in the upper 60s all day. That kind of looks like the story of the week: warm, but kind of rainy and ugly. I've been paying special attention to the weather forecast for the past several days since I have half a roll of black-and-white film crying out to be used on more outdoor portraits. I've had my eye on Sunday for a while as the most likely nice day to go out, but now Intellicast is starting to load some rain into the prediction for then too. But, of course, you can never trust a weather forecast around here more than about 36 hours in advance, and sometimes not even then. So, assuming that Sunday afternoon is going to be relatively nice, does anyone want to be photographed then? Nothing overly formal, and I'll try not to make it take too long — two weeks ago Alan V. and I just kind of crawled around campus looking for interesting shots. If you let me know you're interested enough in advance, I'll try to come up with a few specifically for you. And you can definitely have prints once I finish the roll and get around to making them: I have a pretty good supply of photographic paper that it's going to take me years to use up at this rate. (Maybe I should see about summer access to the darkroom...) Photography aside, this week has been kind of a mish-mash of work and trying to get back on a normal schedule. Monday night I already wrote about; I woke up late enough on Tuesday that I went to campus without a shower and looked like a horror most of the day. After a quick walk outside around 6:00, I ended up finishing a few things at my desk and going straight home in order to not scare people. Yesterday went very nicely by contrast. A shower, nicer clothes because of my group's quarterly review presentation for software engineering (which seemed to go decently well), the LTI open house TG (free dinner from Aladdin's), a trip down to the Rita's in Oakland with Alan V. for free Italian ice, finishing off the MT assignment (which I ended up doing really badly on even though I really liked my approach, which fact annoys me greatly), and then half-price at Joe Mama's with Alan V. and Keith. Also got some new and interesting facts to put in my storehouse of random information, this time about collectable card games. |
Saturday, March 24, 2007
1:32 p.m.
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Two linguistics questions this morning, one in a programming language and one in English: I mentioned last week that I'd volunteer to take Larry Wall out to dinner if he ever came to Pittsburgh. Probably everyone at the LTI would agree with me — at least all of us who have to do string parsing like 40 times a day — but now I think one of the topics of conversation over this aforesaid dinner would be about a cetain matter of Perl semantics. "I say, Larry," I might begin, "why is it that s/\xE3([\x80-\x9E\xA0-\xBE])/\1/; works exactly as you'd expect when s/\xE3([\x80-\x9E]|[\xA0-\xBE])/\1/;, which I think of as exactly functionally equivalent, does absolutely nothing?" (Also, why is it that there are like 65 different text encodings? This E3-pruning business is part of a little script I had to write yesterday to convert UTF-8 to extended ASCII; my translation test data is now coming in UTF-8 format, but the part-of-speech tagger I'm using doesn't understand it.) So. Question No. 2, which should be more readable and less like line noise: What do people think about unusual uses of the imperfect in English? I know I use it in strange constructions sometimes, but I thought it was because of all the French I've taken. I think it's much more common in French, where you have sentences like "Je me sentais si frivole hier que je voulais passer tout l'après-midi en souriant." In English, you get two regular past-tense verbs: "I felt so frivolous yesterday that I wanted to spend all afternoon smiling." The first one you could change to the imperfect ("I was feeling"), but the second one ("I was wanting to")? I know I've done it sometimes, but I thought that was just a special case of my French language model interfering with my English. But then, at Eat'n Park after Capture the Flag last night, I was saying something about how I thought it was a bad idea for Brewer to eat all the sugar packets, and the response (I think from Chris) was "Why, were you wanting some too?" Now, I'm obviously not going to hear one example and say "Whoo! The imperfect in English is spreading," but I would be interested in hearing people's thoughts on its use. |
Monday, March 26, 2007
1:37 a.m.
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A fine fine weekend all around, filled with fun adventures and a few new things too! Yesterday I woke up and existed in my apartment for a bit until running off to campus in the afternoon. I got to do something new and exciting and interesting for a few hours, which apparently was a nice help to someone else in the process, and then it turned out that I got paid $8 for it. (Which was completely unnecessary, of course, since you're usually the one paying to do something cool, but Ben wouldn't let me say no.) Then I walked down to the Soldiers and Sailors auditorium for Greek Sing, since Jeff said it was going to be a cool show and I missed it last year. Now, what was called Greek Sing at Case, as far as I can recall from my very non-Greek memories, consists of fraternities and sororities alternately serenading each other outside their house windows and so on and putting 60 zillion classies in The Observer to the effect of "Fiji <3s the socks off of Phi Mu!!!" or "The lovely ladies of A Chi O think the Sigma Nu guys are the best!" Greek Sing at CMU is a three-hour variety act, where either single houses or pairs of houses perform little 15-minute condensed musical shows with live music, scenery, costumes, and choreography. It was an interesting time, aside from the fact that any insane Greek event like this inevitably draws huge crowds of insane Greek partisans, some of whom felt compelled to break out into sorority chants in between acts and scream histerically whenever their favorite people appeared on stage. There were also a few nitpicky tech things that I would have changed — for example, when you flash the house lights in the universal signal of "OK, guys, find your seats in the next two minutes so the show can start," I believe it's customary to leave the lights on for those two minutes afterwards so you don't have 600 people stumbling round in the dark trying to find Section 1, Row P, Seat 14. Not so last night, I'm afraid — but then they made up for it by shining really bright spotlights directly into some of the balcony sections at irregular points during the show. But these are all fairly minor things, as I say; the performances themselves were quite well done. I kept getting the urge to be in a musical, although with my mediocre singing voice and non-existent dancing skills, it's probably not something that anyone responsible will ever let me do. At least not anyone responsible for casting these sorts of things. On the plus side, I've got some new music to look into: the winning group did a condensation of "The Wiz," for example, which had some very attractive sounds in it. (Most of the words from most of the acts were blotted out by the band playing, and I was sitting on the band side of the stage.) Also some "Guys and Dolls," "Spamalot," and a few nice student-written parodies of existing songs that were fit together to make a storyline. After I got back home, I spent some time playing around with VMWare and Gentoo on my laptop. I don't know if I wrote about VMWare before, but matthewj's been using it to try out all kinds of cool stuff, so I got to thinking that I might be interested in playing around with it too. Then I found out that there's still this whole "you have to pay for software" paradigm, and VMWare licenses are $190. I was bemoaning the fact on IRC about a week ago, I believe, when Jeff mentioned that he had a coupon for a free workstation license from a talk some VMWare guys gave here last year, which he wasn't going to be using because he also had one from a talk the VMWare guys gave here this year. So, thanks to the magic of nice people helping each other out, now I have it. Last night I came home and did the install, which was shockingly simple and quick. In 45 minutes I went from not even having downloaded the software to having a working install, and then I started reading Gentoo docs to see about installing a system in a virtual machine. I like when things just work and I'm able to handle them competently; it somehow makes me feel that I'm not in fact as dumb as I sometimes feel here. Mm, and then there was today, which was pretty close to as good as it gets. Beautiful weather right from the moment I woke up (at noon, thanks to a timely phone call), and then I spent more than seven hours with Alan V. engaged in various photography-related funness. First lunch, and then all sorts of rambling outside looking for people to shoot and locations to shoot them in. It was a very relaxed time. Half the campus was out doing things; we stopped by the juggling club on three separate occasions, watched some frisbee games, and took some portraits. I finished my first roll of black-and-white film and an old roll of color-process black-and-white that's been in my camera bag for almost six years (we'll see how that comes out!), and Alan took one roll plus more than 600 digital pictures, so we proceeded to the darkroom to develop the film and make contact prints. I think I've got some good stuff to work with, which I'll be printing in the next few days or weeks. There was a nice conversation snippet I overheard when we were taking pictures of the juggling group: Girl 1: Rachel, I'm so happy! When sincerely expressed, that's a nice sentiment. |
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
1:45 a.m.
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Ingredients: Three wooden barbecue skewers, two pairs of chopsticks, one clove of garlic, one CD, one paper towel, one pencil-sized plastic tube, one long rolled sheet of paper, one kitchen table. Procedure: Clear off table. Hold the plastic tube or skewers tightly at one end and bang against edges of table at different locations along the stick to note the change in pitch of the resulting sound. Raise plastic tube to mouth and blow in various ways to produce different sounds. Place CD on tube or skewer, spin rapidly by grabbing CD near the edge and flicking wrist, then lower onto table and release. Attempt to catch rolling CD on remaining skewers. Interrupt CD's progress with remaining skewers and plastic tube. Interrupt CD's progress with clove of garlic. Play three-person soccer with clove of garlic using first the skewers, and then the chopsticks, to push the clove around the table. Place rolled paper onto skewer and fling paper by flicking wrist. Repeat as desired. Turn into ad hoc baseball game. Jab paper towel onto skewer and fling in similar manner. Attempt to pass paper towel around this way, keeping it from touching either the table or the floor. Place paper towel on table, distribute one skewer per person, and attempt to take possession of the entire paper towel by drawing it towards you with the pointed end of the skewer. Steal paper towel from opponents. Repeat as desired with resulting paper towel fragments until they all fall off the table. Serves: Tyler, Jeff, and Greg.
For best results, garnish liberally with silly laughter, top with jokes, and serve with a side of warm night air coming through open windows. |
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
3:35 a.m.
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I'm not sure why I fail at falling asleep tonight. It's certainly not because of depressing thoughts — for some reason my default mood over the last five or six days has been a strangely satisfied one. Work-related stuff is progressing at a positively sloth-like pace, which I think will really kill me by the time next week starts, but on a personal level at least I've been feeling very nice. Most importantly, things have even been coming together on the Topic this week. Writing out that document last Monday night really helped, and so have various remarks or conversations with a few other people. This is another instance showing that what Mrs. Milano said in high school English is really true: your subconscious brain kind of continues background processing on a task even when you're not thinking about it actively. (For a while, the people involved were actually showing up in my dreams just about nightly.) All of this is leading up to today, when matthewj's Live Journal post containing the saddest quote ever (which I hope to write about soon in its own right) loaded the whole topic back into my conscious brain again right before I biked to campus. About a quarter-mile into the trip, on Negley between the busway and Ellsworth, the answer to the fundamental base question that made my mind so uneasy last week suddenly presented itself as an honest, reasonable, well-explained, and acceptable solution. I kind of couldn't believe it. An actual implementation of a satisfactory end state, of course, remains to be worked out — but, I say, you have to come to terms with your own self before you try to get other people involved, right? Even then, I've almost made a direct conversational attack at the core of the matter at least three times, but it's not exactly the kind of thing you can introduce suavely into a casual conversation. Probably by the end of the semester it'll pop out somehow, especially given prodding and the right conditions, and then I'll see how things go from there. (Though I find this compulsion to share kind of unexplainably bizarre. Am I secretly hoping to draw attention to myself? Or is it just some part of me that's asserting itself because it's been kind of ignored for too long and now it knows what it wants? There are for example certain CPU scheduling algorithms, I believe, in which processes gain priority as they age.) For now I'm just glad that the stuff won't be keeping me awake at night. |
Thursday, March 29, 2007
5:54 a.m.
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Sleep schedule? What sleep schedule? If this keeps up, I'll have a Live Journal post for every hour of the day. Sometime when I get bored I'll have to read through the archives and see how close to that I'm getting. Stayed up all night again in order to catch a 7:20 a.m. Amtrak downtown — that means I have to leave my apartment in about 25 minutes. I'm off to the University of Maryland for the CS Ph.D. program visit day. Not that I'm planning to switch schools now that I'm sharing a lease on a house through May 2008, but a professor from Maryland called me several weeks ago, was interested in my application, and asked me to come down to the open house to talk in person. Ignorant thing that I was, I agreed and signed up to attend without realizing how wretchedly awful this week and next are going to be from a work point of view. My translations for the ACL statistical MT workshop, for example, are due next Friday, and I still have a lot of work to do before I have a stable system, not even considering the question of whether or not it's competitive. Then there's the third homework for MT class, assigned ages ago, set aside while I was scrambling to finish the second homework, then set aside again in favor of translator work — now it's due Monday and I've hardly started. It's a good thing I've heard from Brewer and others that there's power on the train. I meant to spend all evening and all night working, but that kind of failed. I did pretty well between 5:30 and 8, and then between about 9 and 11:30, but then I went out for a nice walk through the park until 1:00, came home after a bit more work around 1:30, and spent until 3:30 on IM. Although, to be fair, I had some really good conversations that I think were probably more helpful in the long run than an extra two hours refining grammar rules and lexical entires. I drove to the 24-hour Giant Eagle in Squirrel Hill (inferior to the one in Shadyside in almost every respect, except of course for hours of operation) to get train food and breakfast, and now I've got everything packed up and am just about ready to leave. Enjoy the rest of the week, everyone. I'll be back a bit after midnight on Saturday night, assuming the return train's not horribly late. |
Monday, April 2, 2007
8:30 p.m.
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Well, I survived Maryland, though I don't really feel too inclined to write much about it here even though I started writing several stub posts while I was on the train Thursday and Saturday. Basically, my conclusion is that the trip was mostly a waste of time. Yes, I got to meet with Bonnie Dorr and Philip Resnik, both very cool MT researchers who now know I exist, but aside from that there was really very little at the University of Maryland that was tempting in any way. As part of the Ph.D. program, the CS department naturally demands coursework in the usual non-NLP CS areas like databases, networks, and systems — things I'm not really interested in sitting through anymore since I found the LTI. And then the entire environment was just wrong: kind of a dead-feeling campus, inconvenient transportation, poor housing and living opportunities, etc. All of which leads to to conclude that, even if I was forced to leave CMU, I probably wouldn't end up there. Now that I'm back, this is crunch week for my French-to-English translation project for MT class. I need to run on my development data and the ACL's test set nightly, make changes and upgrades during the day, and hopefully by Friday I'll have something that might be submittable to the SMT workshop. Today I got cross-lingual noun phrase mappings from Sanjika for a portion of my training corpus, so tonight I'll plug those in and see what difference a phrasal lexicon makes. I really hope things start to click together on this project: when I met with Alon last Wednesday, he seemed frustrated that I wasn't very far along and hadn't followed up with things I was supposed to do. This week and last week kind of remind me of what happened to me just over two years ago: then, I was having an awful time feeling loaded down with academic work at the same time that I kept getting exciting mail (and a phone call!) from grad schools saying that I got accepted everywhere. This time around, like I mentioned last week, I'm feeling personally really happy even though school life is kind of sucking at the moment. Even the realization, at the end of MT class today, that I'd neglected to do the homework (that I now have until Wednesday to do and have no hope of finishing) was unable to deter me from this good mood I'm in. I came home a bit before 7:00 to have dinner, call my parents, and do laundry, and as I was putting dinner together I couldn't help but sing up-tempo swing songs from the '30s and even kind of pseudo-dance around the apartment a bit. (Precautionary warning: I'm sure this qualifies as one of the world's most horrifying sights. Don't attempt to picture it unless you can reliably purge your brain afterwards.) Earlier, since I had to type out a long document this afternoon, I took my laptop outside and spent 45 minutes on the little patio behind Baker letting the wind blow my hair apart. I'm sure that only makes it look all the worse when I come back in, but it feels nice while I'm out in the sun. Back to the laundry and translation, I suppose. |
Random Stuff #40
Tuesday, April 3, 2007, 2:32 p.m.
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I've been meaning to post a fun little peek into the stuff I've been working on since about the middle of February, and with the ACL deadline Friday I guess I've got enough work built up that you can see a nice progression. So I'd thought I'd illustrate the translation process somewhat by picking a sample input and showing how its translation's changed over the weeks. I won't talk about the system architecture so much, since that's a long thing that takes a while to explain, but I'll be writing up at least one paper about it by the end of the semester, so you can always bug me in the next few weeks if you want to read it. Look Who's Translating! Here's one example French sentence — it's something reasonably complex, but still quite translatable, that I found near the beginning of my development set. Mes chers collègues, au cours de ces derniers jours, comme vous le savez, Jérusalem, d'autres villes et les territoires palestiniens se sont malheureusement embrasés et les victimes sont déjà nombreuses. And here are two "references": the first one is what I'm using for automatic scoring, and it's just the published English equivalent of the same sentence. The second one is my own independent translation, which I include here just for fun and to show how divergent human references can be. Either way, these are "correct" translations of the sentence. Ladies and gentlemen, in the last few days, as you know, Jerusalem, other towns and the Palestinian territories have been thrown into a state of unrest, and there have already been many victims. So, on to the actual results. (On all of these I'm restoring proper capitalization and putting the puncutation back attached to words like it should be. My actual results come out in all caps and with tokenized punctuation, so there's a bit of a post-processing step that's not quite as good as me fixing things by hand.) This was my very first run, just under a month ago, with just a huge statistically-learned word-to-word lexicon — no grammar rules or reordering or anything: Mes dear friends, au year some ces last week, but vous the will, Jerusalem, d'other cities et the Palestinians Israel se is too embrasés et the people were still high. Then, of course, I wrote a whole bunch of grammar rules and detailed lexical entries for closed-class words like determiners and pronouns (ces and vous, for example). I also pared down the word-to-word lexicon to week out the junk. Mes chers colleagues, in cours of ces few days, as you know him, Jerusalem, d'other cities and the Palestinian territories se are unfortunately embrasés and the victims are already many. I was still missing a few closed-class entries, I guess. But, I say, look at what I got this afternoon after adding them and then throwing in a limited noun phrase lexicon that does some multi-word translations. My dear colleagues, the course of the past few days, as you know it, Jerusalem, other cities and the Palestinian territories are each other unfortunately embrasés and the victims are already many. |
Friday, April 6, 2007
1:36 a.m.
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Ugh. Today's been one of those long and annoying days, made all the more annoying by getting off to a bad start and having ugly weather. (Today it's winter again, complete with snowflakes and freezing temperatures. I've worn a different one of my three coats in the last three days, starting from the spring jacket Tuesday evening to the all-out winter coat and hat when I went to campus at 1:30 this afternoon.) Translator work's been kind of uninteresting, too — I realized today, in talking with my advisor and some of the AVENUE people at a new weekly meeting I get to start going to, that I could have carried out this project much more sensibly and ended up with a much better result. Mostly I should have brought stuff up to Alon and Erik more frequently to make sure I was doing reasonable things; in fact, it's only been in the past few days, with the deadline looming, that I've gotten feedback about things I should have devoted more time to weeks ago. But such is life. On another language-related topic, I should say that multi-lingualism is one of the most amazing things ever, especially if it includes multiple first languages. I mean, I've taken at least one French class per calendar year since 1997, and still the language isn't really as much a part of me as I'd like. (Probably because I get zero speaking practice in normal situations: French isn't exactly a high-profile language or culture in my environment, and the American francophones I know are all scattered in disjoint social groups.) Why they don't have decently available, or even mandatory, foreign-language classes starting from elementary school in this country is something I'll never understand — the current approach mostly seems to doom us all to being only second-rate speakers of some L2, and only that with practice and volition. |
Monday, April 9, 2007
12:30 a.m.
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Yay weekend! Low on sleep but high on interesting and various activities. Friday started out annoying in the same way as Thursday, as I spent all afternoon getting more and more nervous about all the runs I wanted to do on data before midnight for my French-English system. Eventually I went to talk to my advisor around 5:30, and we decided not to submit results to the ACL workshop since my dev data numbers were pretty wretchedly uncompetitive. It was the most reasonable decision, and I agreed with it, aside from some increasing annoyance that I'm going to be a freaking professor before I manage to publish a scrap of anything. But then I had surprise honey lemon ginseng green tea, and later chocolate and "Look Around You" and games and conversation and happiness and the world was wonderful again. In some kind of sensible order, that means mostly that Alan V. invited me to a chocolate party with a lot of his friends in Fairfax, where we had fondue-style stuff dipped in chocolate that was coming out of a little spinning three-layer fountain thing, and that the party also featured some fun large-group party games and two "Look Around You" episodes from Tim's computer. One game was something called "Hoopla," which involved getting the others to guess a person, place, or thing off your little card by you giving clues about it in some specified manner. I was predictably not bad at giving word-based clues, but my acting out left a lot to be desired. After that was team Loaded Questions, and then a lot of casual talk about classes for next semester and awful code-writing tips someone found on a website. Then Alan V. and I covered both sides of a sheet of notebook paper with code snippets and handwriting samples, and I left Fairfax at 5:30 and got home at 6 a.m. On Saturday gwillen and I went climbing at noon, then stopped by the Frame on the way home to see Lea and Dom's exhibit. Dom was making van Dyke prints (I think this should be properly "van Dyck," but Wikipedia is inconsistent) sur place and hanging them up on the walls; Lea was producing dresses. The prints were pretty interesting, and they reminded me a lot of the 19th-century photographers we studied in French class. ("That's because it's a 19th-century process," Dom said.) After that I went home and packed up stuff to drive to my parents' house, where there is currently a foot of snow, for Easter brunch, which was this morning at my aunt's house. Large events with my mom's side of the family are always strking, mostly because, starting with my grandparents and continuing through the four generations currently extant, there are approximately enough of us to fill a small town. When my uncles get together the laughter is almost non-stop, and I discovered that a good way to get away with acting like a five-year-old is to play with one, such as my cousin's kid who's one of the cutest ones ever. My kind of kid, too: today he put the balls from the Fisher-Price pool table in numerical order and called his little fighter-pilot action figures by number based on the order in which he got them. The Old Age Committee also reports that my not-quite-16-year-old brother has officially passed me in height by a quarter inch, a fact that was the subject of a decent amount of laughing for most of us and one of confusion for my grandma, who seems to be now getting the two of us mixed up. We finally left this evening at 6:00, which got us back home just in time for me to gather up my things and immediately leave again for Pittsburgh, where I was due at The Tartan at 9:00 for copy editing. |
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
11:13 p.m.
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I don't want to let too much more time go by before I mention the excellent French movie I saw yesterday with Alan V. (He had to go watch it down at Pitt for his photo class — his professor was introducing the showing — and he invited me to go along too.) It actually turned out we were watching the U.S. premiere of "Paris, je t'aime," a series of 20 vignettes or "petites romances de quartier" (as I think the opening credits called them) spotlighting various interpersonal relationships in each of Paris's arrondissements. (I'll try to stop with the French now...) Each was filmed by a different director and starred different actors. I say, if it goes into an actual U.S. release, go see this movie and see it with someone you care about. It's really very emotionally striking: by turns sad, humorous, and completely random (e.g. vampire romance, the ghost of Oscar Wilde, invisible cars, etc.). Within about 10 minutes I went from almost crying right in the theatre to out-and-out laughter and confused head-shaking. On the language front I did rather worse than I would have liked — silly distracting subtitles: if they're there I feel compelled to read them, and I can't listen to French and read English too well at the same time — but there were also a few segments in English or with American francophones that were naturally easier to follow. Still, overall a very fine experience. And beforehand we went to the all-you-can-eat pasta thing at Joe Mama's, at which you can get as many plates of your choice of (pasta, sauce) combinations as you can hold, plus a side salad, for $6.95. I had "only" two, but that was enough to last most of the rest of the night, even though I went to bed at 4 a.m. I had to spend some of the intervening time revisiting the wretched word-alignment assignment from MT class (the one I stayed up all night to work on a few weeks ago) since Alon e-mailed me and asked if there was some technical error in my output because it was so bad. I messed with some parameters a bit, but only succeeded in producing something that was worse, so I ended up getting the worst results in the class. Performance was only 20 percent of the points on the assignment, but that means I'm down to about an 80 to start with, and this combined with the fact that I didn't do the third assignment (in favor of translation project work, which in the end didn't produce excusable results either) has me a bit worried about my grade in the class. I really want an A in MT since it's my area of research and a really interesting topic besides. Also I'm sick of my GPA going down every semester. But this, I suppose, is a separate chain of thoughts. |
Friday, April 13, 2007
6:28 p.m.
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When it rains, the salt in the Morton container may still pour, but the Internet in the new house goes out. This was the discovery of Wednesday, after I went over there after leaving my desk around 6:30 and not really wanting to go all the way back to my apartment. Equally strange is the fact that, if you pick up the kitchen phone and then hang it back up again, you get nice DSL connectivity for about two or three minutes before the signal disappears again. By 8:15 I could endure these conditions no more — I had non-Internet stuff to do, but I was having the worst luck trying to read a PDF paper on conditional Markov models sitting at the kitchen table with six other people there too. I existed briefly in the cluster, and then ended up doing work in the McGill lounge at Jordan's weekly "Mythbusters" TV thing, which was somehow less distracting and let me run MinorThird learning experiments without worrying about my connection dying in the middle of something. Kind of a bad advisor meeting Thursday morning, I felt. I don't know what my problem with work has been recently, but somehow my interest in it's been draining away to just about nothing. This is a pretty rotten time to get lethargic, though, with big end-of-semester deadlines coming up and all. But it's still the case that I'd rather spend hours and hours sitting in the cluster coming up with amazing and silly things like
On the other hand, I seem to be not failing at stuff I don't need to be doing. I don't really play enough ITG to ever give comprehensive progress updates, but last night I went down to Scotland Yard with Alan after some $5 all-you-can-eat pizza fest thing and got about a 50 percent on a Level 5 song, which is apparently close to passing. Naturally, I can't remember the name of the song, or even how it goes, just that I was feeling it really well and was even hitting a lot of the blue arrows. Normally, the screen throws those eighth-note steps at me and my brain just spits up. I also found a very attractive-sounding Level 5 called "D-Code" that I got a 0 percent on, but it has such a nice swing style to it that I want to learn it now. |
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
5:44 p.m.
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I've been getting myself by degrees back into work gear today and yesterday, which is good for my productivity and advisor meeting on Thursday, but bad for my personal annoyance level. This is because I'm dealing with the hated Java and the almost-as-much-hated Mixup — the syntax for the former is something I still find partly alien and strange, and the syntax for the latter is terribly (and sometimes incorrectly!) documented. It's therefore not surprising that it takes three re-writes to make the Java work, or that almost an hour of syntactic trial and error so far hasn't gotten even a pretty simple Mixup program off the ground. But so it goes, I guess; at least I'm spending time on the stuff. Other weekend activities have occurred. One fun thing was pizza and games with Alan and the people I'm getting to know as the Fairfax crowd on Friday night, and then I went climbing with Chris and gwillen on Saturday. I spent my first night in the new house on Saturday, since I didn't leave the cluster until just before 4 a.m. and really didn't feel like walking home in the windy rainy weather for half an hour. Slept instead on my sleeping bag and coat on the floor of my new room, which wasn't quite as uncomfortable as that night on the floor of a classroom during the MIT Mystery Hunt when I had only the coat, but it was still rather hard and suboptimal. Some ITG and the usual copy editing on Sunday; then yesterday there was all-you-can-eat Joe Mama's pasta again, a fair amount of work in the cluster, a quick walk through the top of Schenley Park, and then conversation and happy stuff until 3 a.m. Today I went to the MT lunch (for the first time ever; I really should be getting into these department seminar things more) and heard some stuff about elicitation in Thai and Bengali. Then work and a software engineering group meeting in alternating chunks. Tonight is a trip to the Maggie Mo darkroom, which I hope will yield a few more interesting prints from my first roll of film. |
Sunday, April 22, 2007
2:04 p.m.
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It's been Carnival week! Not a bad week from the productivity angle, though I've had a rather strong feeling at times of existing in a completely separate academic world from all my friends. First it was class registration: I really was hoping to sign up for either phonetics or the photography class that Alan's going to be taking, but when I even obliquely approached the subject of classes with my advisor I got back the impression that the rest of my life as an upcoming Ph.D. student will be research. I can take one class at most, and next fall my advisor wants it to be Ph.D. machine learning in the CS department. I think back to the Language & Stats II mess this past fall and start shuddering already. Then all the undergrads (and the old people who are back visiting) have been off of class and (mostly) work since Thursday, so the academic life on campus has been put into a sort of freeze-frame... except for us grad students, who I suppose are supposed to carry on buried in our research as if nothing interesting was happening above ground. So these kind of things have been grating a bit recently. But. This isn't to say that life is bad or annoying, because once you dismiss the work stuff I've been consistently way above averagely happy and relaxed and satisfied for a good three weeks. Thursday evening I wandered Midway a bit with Alan, running into all sorts of people, and then ended up in a seven-person group for half-price at Fuddle. One of life's great things is hearing people you care about laugh and knowing that they're happy. Friday night there was a very nice dinner–dessert combo: couscous maghrébin and cocoanut milk ice cream with what I'd like to call, if I'm remembering the sounds properly, either kaa nùun or khaa nùun, the whole followed by "Amélie" and random talking. The movie was a noticibly different experience than a previous time I wrote about it almost a year ago. Then I think I found it more sad and cutting than usual; now it's happy and sad and poignant and wonderful all at the same time — and also, if anything, even more easy to relate to. C'est drôle, la vie. There's also been a lot of photography. Alan and I met up at Buggy Friday morning around 10:15, and after taking pictures of a number of the races we went over to Mobot and did the same thing there. Yesterday we took our cameras to Midway, found a nice night scene in front of Hamerschlag, and documented the Carnival fireworks at Gesling. I went through a whole roll of color film between Hamerschlag and the fireworks, and the roll of black-and-white I loaded Thursday evening has only a few exposures left on it. (This multiplexing, I should note, was possible because I borrowed a camera from Alan for the color stuff.) I'm anxious to see the results: shooting with Alan has made me look for some different things in my own shots, though I'm not sure I've been able to incorporate them nicely yet. |
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
4:09 p.m.
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I realized at The Tartan Sunday night that there are only two weeks left in the semester, which means they're going to be fairly busy for me as I finish up everything that's due by May 4. Yesterday I gave my MT presentation on the French-English stuff, which I thought went kind of mediocrely (if that's a word), but the first thing my advisor said when I met with him afterwards was "Good job!" Maybe not so bad, then: I suppose all the questions at the end could just mean that everyone was following along closely and was interested in the work. There's still the corresponding final paper to write, but I got a start on that last night using my presentation slides as a rough outline. The rest of the week will be filled with more of that, software enginnering, and the ghost of an old MT homework that I can still turn in for (reduced) credit as soon as possible. After leaving my desk yesterday I went over to the new house, where I in fact stayed until my software engineering group meeting at 3:00 today, to see how people were doing over there. The answer is that they've all picked up Super Smash Brothers. In attempting this strange and new-fangled entertainment for myself, I rediscovered that video game technology and styles have advanced quite a bit from my family's old '80s Atari and then second-hand Nintendo in the mid-'90s. Not that I've never seen a modern game console before, but my playing experience with anything in the past decade or so has been extremely minimal, and sometimes it really shows. Why in the world, for one thing, would any designer think it's a good idea to have the game camera's point of view constantly moving? If it's to make the game more challenging, I can tell them right now that they've succeeded only too well: I spent about 50 percent of my playing time trying to figure out which shape-shifting colored blob I was supposed to be, and the other 50 percent trying to keep track of where it was going. After a few games (during a general work break after 1:00), I called it quits and spent the night on my floor upstairs. Much better results than last time, since I remembered to cart my beanbag chair and pillow thing up from the living room. |
Thursday, April 26, 2007
12:52 a.m.
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Last night I went to Philip's ITG and dinner party in Roselawn 7, which was all sorts of fun. Not many people were too interested in taking a lot of turns at the pads, it seems, so I actually managed to play myself to the saturation point of about 10 or so songs. By saturation point, I mean that I was suddenly unable to parse even simple Level 4 songs that I've done decently well on before and became as a result really frustrated with myself. There was, luckily, not a shortage of people to talk to, and also someone to sit on the couch with, so after a moderately-long break I got back in and felt a lot better. A nice thing about playing ITG at home is that it doesn't cost anything and the atmosphere is pretty relaxed, which means you don't feel weird about trying a wider variety of things. I think I can say with decent confidence that I should be able to get at least a 75 or 80 percent on any Level 3 (modulo the one reading error that will invariably keep me from being on top of a whole song from start to finish), that I shouldn't worry about trying Level 4s, but that Level 5s will in general kill me off early in the song with a pretty low percentage. After dinner and a few more ITG rounds, Philip set up something that the Roselawn people discovered some time ago that they called ZZR, which is playing The Legend of Zelda with two people on DDR pads. One person controls character movement while the other handles attacking and picking things up; the catch is that these two things can't be done at the same time, so it takes some inter-player communication and a lot of Philip hitting the "rewind the last two seconds of game play" command on his laptop. I'd never seen the Zelda game before, so I just watched while Nesky, Evan, and Zach actually played. Early this morning I had a dream where Alan V. and I were sailing a sailboat across the grass and sidewalks from Wean to Margaret Morrison to play ITG in the basement, and then I woke up with ITG songs running around in my head. I think after last night I'm at the point my brain can play snippets from about six different ones. Certainly no full songs yet, and the snippets aren't as detailed as they might be, but even the little bits I'd managed to pick up are already helping. I spent the entire walk to campus today running through parts of the "Singin' in the Rain" soundtrack to match the weather, and then at my desk I listened to Malcolm Laycock's show for the week on the BBC, so the music centers of my brain certainly can't complain about being neglected. Off to bed now. I should promise to make my next post less stereotypically nerdy, perhaps. |
Saturday, April 28, 2007
10:02 p.m.
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This afternoon was wonderful. I mean, just a small part of it was baking banana bread at the new house, and that's already pretty nice to begin with. Later on Tyler made chicken fish-sauce curry stuff for dinner; now various people are scattered in the kitchen and living room clicking away on their laptops. Yesterday was more mixed — one of those bad days for work that sometimes (or perhaps often) happen when I get off to a bad start in the morning. In the positive column, I managed to run by the drug store on the way to campus and pick up my roll of color film with pictures from Carnival fireworks, which came out very excellent indeed. I also got free food from the CS undergrad picnic (in Wean), and then nice half-price at Mad Mex with Alan, Chris, gwillen, and mrwright. Balancing this in the negative column, though, is the fact that I let myself get too showy and decided to develop my black-and-white Carnival film in one of the metal tanks — the nice shiny ones that all the real photo people use — instead of the clunky plastic ones that I learned in high school, misloaded the reel, and as a result lost about 15 exposures from where the film stuck together and didn't get developed. Well, I guess I just have to remember what they say about pride and falls. And I shouldn't let it annoy me too much since it's only the first film I've ever ruined out of about 30 that I've developed in my life. Continuing backwards in the chronology, on Thursday I installed ITG onto my laptop in order to carry out some learning experiments with songs and step files, and then I went for an hour-long walk in the park. Results from the learning are already encouraging, I'd say, but I won't say much more since I promised a non-nerdy post this time. |
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
12:17 p.m.
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Another great thing about life, aside from sun, good weather, and late-night outings in the park with friends, is that I can have all of those things and participate in four-language conversations like the one below: A: Ça va? The language nerd in me delights in further pointing out that, given this restricted domain and vocabulary, between us we could just as well have brought in another three languages. (The restrictions would be my fault, since my knowledge of German has always been quite superficial and I'm forgetting progressively more and more of the ASL I learned two years ago.) The academic life, on the other hand, is going to be somewhat trying this week until I finally turn in everything next Monday. This includes my final paper for the French-English system, some more system development work and error analysis I really need to get done, a late MT homework that Teruko's been repeatedly asking for, MEMT updates and some runs for the GALE dry run this week, our software engineering group presentation, the associated final report, and a lot of work associated with actually completing the project. We, as they say, are not amused — especially since I spent more time last week working on stupid PowerPoint slides for the software engineering project than actually working on the project itself. If it were up to me, I'd say that actually doing the development work is more important than having the wording on our slides repeatedly critiqued and getting different feedback from the professor and the TA on what we should put in and leave out. I could never be a business major. Ah well... off to work again. |
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