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ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
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Saturday, May 5, 2007
3:45 a.m.
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Truly I'm making a mess out of work things this week. I keep feeling like I spend all day every day working — and yet, when I run over in my mind what I've gotten done, the list is pitifully short. My MT paper maybe got a page longer today, fighting and clawing its way to about 70 percent done, even though I spent more than six hours working on stuff related to it. Software engineering totally untouched; ditto MEMT work. What have I done with myself since I got up at 11:00 this morning? Well, I spent four hours at the KGB picnic in Schenley Park. Then I joined Psyfe, Car, Tom, and Tyler for "The Red Violin" and bread pudding at the house. Yesterday I was out for almost three hours at the Tartan gala. Why can't I just sit down for several hours and churn something out and actually get somewhere? I mean, in high school I could write a nice essay in an hour. In physics sophomore year I could do a whole lab report in three or maybe four. I'm such an ineffecient worker these days that it should make me sick; it shouldn't take me a blasted week to write a 10- to 15-page paper when I'm, in theory, working on it constantly. I'm off to bed now. I don't know what we're going to do about software engineering tomorrow... |
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
12:54 a.m.
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The academic work of the semester is done! The software engineering report (23 pages among the three of us), the associated presentation (72 slides), and my MT paper (11 pages) are all finished and turned in, so now the life is comparatively easy again except for a lot of research work I haven't been doing over the last several days because of all the other stuff. I had to fight to not give myself today as a sort of personal holiday — I ended up working pretty much straight through the weekend to finish the class stuff, and then the weather this afternoon was sunny and wonderfully warm. In the end, I did a little bit of work at my apartment in the "morning," after I woke up, then went to campus and ate lunch out on the Mall with Alan. We threw bread to a whole bunch of little sparrows that were flying around and hopping through the grass quite close to us. Then work from about 3:15 until 6:00, when I was again seduced by the call of being out in the sun and generally wandering around campus. Around 8:30 Alan and I ended up third and fourth in line for the Almost Midnight Breakfast in Rangos, which is a lot like the late-night breakfast in Leutner and Fribley during finals except that the sororities are in charge of it and there's no Doc Oc to start a frisbee food fight. Here they get professors to serve the food; I was given a heaping pile of like six sausages by the football coach, who started a pleasant conversation with me after noticing my Class of 2001 T-shirt. A bunch of us (Alan, gwillen, Evan, Kartik, and I) ran down to Scotland Yard afterwards to variously play and watch ITG; I played two games, passed two Level 5s, and got an 80 percent on a Level 4. I enjoy very much the fact that I make progress at this game, even if it's really slow and I still suck a lot compared to anyone who plays regularly. It's also kind of interesting to listen to songs other people are playing and amuse myself with trying to pick them apart a bit. Home (to the house) and to work for a bit around 11:30, where I'll be going to bed shortly as soon as some MEMT stuff finishes running. |
Thursday, May 10, 2007
3:58 p.m.
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Question du jour: if I were going to register my own domain name, what should I call it? I'm not 100 percent sure what I'll end up putting on it — the beginning will probably be a Web-accessible version of that Live Journal text extraction and language stats project I was working on some time ago. |
Sunday, May 13, 2007
3:10 a.m.
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As a copy editor, I suppose it would normally annoy me to not be able to select the appropriate or most precise word for a given thing. But then there have been a lot of things in the past almost-six weeks that kind of defy accurate description, and eventually I get sick of endlessly repeating words like "amazing," "wonderful," and "happy." Beyond that, the last two days have been extraordinarily relaxing, enjoyable, comforting, satisfying, interesting, worthwhile, amazing, happy, wonderful — and there I go again. Every now and then I have to stop for a bit and ask myself if this is really the same person who was going all emo over things two months ago. A more concrete event-based recap of around Thursday onward will probably follow when I feel less like sleeping. |
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
11:52 a.m.
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Well, I certainly feel less like sleeping now, since I've barely been awake two hours, and also less like working, now that the semester's over, so I might as well get myself caught up in here a bit. The "public-level nuggets," as Eric would call them in software engineering, from the last several days all seem to be about food, so I'll start there. Thursday I had a nice Chinese dinner with Alan and two of his friends in Cat Man, which was quite a fun and interesting thing even if I did spend the first half-hour feeling kind of awkward and outsider-y. When that happens, especially in food situations, I kind of turn into a more restrained version of myself: I ask for things quietly and more formally than usual, I'm more sensitive to "proper" protocol, and I try to take cues from what other people are doing. But then it turned out that both Christina and Lulu take French, and the after-dinner conversation was somehow much more relaxed. (Funny YouTube videos didn't hurt either!) Friday evening I ended up going to dinner at KFC with all the Fairfax people minus Apphia — they apparently do this often enough to have "the usual spot" where they sit. Then there was the world's longest game of Loaded Questions in Ian's room (43 rounds, I think...) followed by various people getting in the moving mood and shuttling boxes of stuff around. The next day I got into some of that myself, and brought two or three boxes of stuff from my apartment over to the new house. Then I picked up Ian and Alan for a trip to the Waterfront. Did you ever wonder about those all-day shopping trips that people used to make in the '50s and so on? That's kind of what Saturday felt like. First we drove to the Waterfront and parked the car in front of Target. Target, Steak 'n' Shake, Michael's, and Giant Eagle were all visited in turn, with us kind of gallavanting around and generally amusing ourselves, and then we went back to the car and struck out for REI at the South Side Works. That part of the programme failed when I got sick of hunting round for a parking spot and decided to abort the mission. We were going there just for me to get bike shorts anyway, and to tell the truth, taking a car to the South Side is kind of a dumb idea in the first place. Eventually we made it back to Fairfax and the house to unload some indeterminate time later. Then yardwork, since our backyard there was kind of turning into a jungle. More jungle-clearing on Sunday, plus some general maintenance things like putting screens into our front and back doors, so now the house is in summer mode and the yard well tended. Although, to tell the truth, we don't really have a suburban-style yard so much as a little plot of mostly not-grass surrounded by raised layers of plants, so perhaps the best term is "back garden." It is kind of wonderfully British looking. Tyler made dinner at the house around 7:30, and then I went with Alan and a bunch of other people to half-price at Fuddle as well. And then yesterday was Joe Mama's all-you-can-eat pasta night with Alan, Ian, Keith, and Philip. We saw another big CMU group there as well, containing people like Chris, gwillen, and Alisa, so I guess we're all adapting to the restaurant being closed for half-price over the summer. Starting around 10:30, Alan, Ian, Keith, and I decreased the potential energy of Keith's stuff by about 24mg, translated it by maybe 2000 meters, and then increased its potential energy again by roughly 7mg — all for the usual value of g and an m large enough to fill my car twice. Completed this around 12:30, I think, and then home shortly after. |
Friday, May 18, 2007
12:18 p.m.
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Here's something nice to share with someone you care about. It's Friday again, which is always a good thing. I did better Wednesday night and yesterday with getting work stuff done, but my brain really really wants to be in summer vacation mode. There are too many interesting and fun things I want to get done all at the same time — and running MEMT combinations and scoring them, while nicely easy work (assuming I can figure out now why the ASR references are all messed up), isn't as high on the personal-interest list as some other things I could name. Yesterday I cooked dinner at the house, so I went out just at 6:00 to walk to the grocery store in Squirrel Hill. We had some nice spring rain during the afternoon, so by 6 everything was wonderfully moist, cool, and green. I love the sudden depth of green at this time of the year, coming from several months of winter greys, whites, and browns. Walking along Forbes last night made me think of the English countryside, even though I've never been there; it just had that feel to it. After dinner I cleaned up the kitchen and talked online for a few hours — this had the side effects of making me remember the existence of Fruit Stripe gum and the Juicy Fruit song from when I was little. I've often wished I could come across a tape of just commercials, or maybe also TV show openings, from about 1991 or 1992. Certain things from then are still, I'm sure, stored in my brain 15 years later. Among less appealing pursuits, I also had to go stand in line for half an hour yesterday afternoon to pick up my cap and gown. I get a little yellow-gold hood-sash thingy this time because of my master's degree. The pick-up was in the UC; out in the hallway we were attacked by minions from the career center and Alumni Relations and all of those things, getting asked to fill out forms and give money to the university. I'm really glad the lady didn't ask me "Have you made your senior gift yet?" because I think I only would have been able to come up with a snarky and kind of impolite response: "No... I'm not a senior, and making a gift implies having money first. Do you know that I'm going to be paying off undergrad loans until the year 2020?" They did this kind of thing to us at Case too, only not so overtly. Honestly, I think that's extremely inconsiderate and tactless of them, trying to pump more money out of people who have been paying $40,000 a year (if they have it!) to take classes at this place. I mean, except for my first semester at Case I worked continuously in some capacity from my junior year of high school onwards in order to save money for those twice-semesterly tuition bills, and I had about six cents to my name when I graduated. I imagine there are people here, where the financial aid is pretty abysmal, who are doing worse. But I'll stop ranting now. |
Saturday, May 19, 2007
10:58 p.m.
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I would like the record to clearly state that my friends are amazing, as confirmed by various conversations over the past week or so. This makes me feel very happy. Today I was "out and about" for a good chunk of the day, which felt like a bit of a change. Around 12:30 I drove down to Chris's house to go climbing. We also went over to Cornell's to see if anyone was around there, but after finding no one home drove to the wall and ran into him and Rebecca there anyway. Then I went home, talked online, and packed up some stuff from my apartment, which I loaded into the car and took over to the house. After a bit it was off to the cluster for games with Alisa, Rebecca, Chris, Todd, and some other people until about 10:30. With graduation tomorrow morning, I also took a few minutes to sort out the mysterious bag of attire I picked up on Thursday. I think I have enough material in the pieces 'n' parts of my master's robe to make about six regular gowns — the sleeves, for one thing, have about a yard of Count Dracula-style extra material hanging uselessly off of them, and the hood runs about the same distance down my back. If it wasn't for the yellow and plaid back there, I think I'd look more like avenging death than a graduating student — but some of you can see this tomorrow and judge for yourselves. For the rest of you, I'll try to get some pictures. (It's at these moments that I miss Alan V. and his camera: he'd do an excellent job photographing and probably have fun besides.) And a final general contact note: Tomorrow my desktop goes down for a little vacation (moving, cleaning, maintenance, and then probably a kernel upgrade), so you'll have to catch me in person or signed in from my laptop. This may last some time, depending on how long it takes me to find a wireless adapter and a new fan. The kernel upgrade instructions also look a bit daunting, and it will be my first, so I'm not sure how that will work out yet either. |
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
5:55 p.m.
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Any entry I try to write about graduation is going to be long — probably too long — and since it's been half a week already I don't even feel like writing about it so much. It went mostly as expected: long and only somewhat interesting or relevant to me. President Cohon is a fairly bad speaker; Bill Cosby is a really funny one; none of the CS professors can say a word without looking down and reading it off of their prepared notes. The most interesting thing, trivially enough, was the colors. Different schools had set their "robing locations" in various places around campus; I was on the fifth-floor of Wean with the other SCS master's graduates, and the undergrads were in the lobby. Eventually the marshals led us all out to the Mall and into Gesling for the ceremony. That was a fun thing, since all the lines of graduates streaming out of Doherty, Baker, Purnell, etc. in different colored hoods and black gowns made a really interesting scene. Ditto in Gesling itself, where the straight lines and cream coloring of West Wing, Resnik, and the UC went very well with the light green on the trees and the light blue of the sky as it cleared up. If you ignore the football field, that open area there is really very stately looking. Also the people. Before the main ceremony I ended up standing near the 5300 corridor with Aaron, Mike, and Nimish from the LTI. Then I ran into Rachel in a parallel line behind the UC on the way to the field. Wes, mrwright, gwillen, cpride, et al., ended up three rows in front of me in the seats. Before the SCS ceremony at Carnegie Music Hall, we all wound up in the entrance hall standing around, talking, and taking pictures. My family came down and got me to leave the SCS thing early, since it was taking forever and they hadn't eaten in about eight hours, but then I ran into Joy outside too. That night there was a nice little get-together at Chris and Dave's house, where I played Mao for the first time in a really long time (and picked it up decently quickly too, I thought). And now I have a diploma, "given this 20th day of May, 2007," etc., the size of a TV tray. Twice the size, even, if you open the cover and lay it out flat. My sister wrote me a Facebook message Monday saying I should update all my information to say "first-year doctoral student," but I'll probably wait until the end of the summer when I officially start the program. |
Friday, May 25, 2007
4:47 p.m.
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Though this week has certainly had it's good (and even great) points, overall it's been kind of a "meh" feeling... But! In about 15 minutes I'll be on my way to the wilds of north-central PA with the CWRU crew, where like eight or 10 of us will be converging in the next several hours from five different U.S. states and one Canadian province. I'm glad; I feel like I need to get out of here for a few days — I've spent too much of this week being inefficient at work during the day and getting trapped in the Pittsburgh street system in the evening. (I say, they must specifically optimize the roads around here to prevent you from getting anywhere without spending at least 30 years and five sets of brake pads to do so.) But next week will be better. Eventually I'll run out of stuff to move from my apartment, and when I come back on Monday it will be after a certain airplane will have carried certain cargo from Phoenix to Pittsburgh... |
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
5:38 p.m.
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I return from camping! Total personal damages amount to some missed sleep and seven mosquito bites, which is a somewhat higher toll than usual, but I suppose it's not an awful price to pay for escaping my computer for three days (and doing some pretty interesting things besides). Vicki and I drove up from Pittsburgh on Friday to Stony Fork Campground, about six or eight miles south of a place called Wellsboro in north-central PA. We had some trouble finding the place, as it was after dark once we got to the area and the road our directions told us to take ended abruptly in what looked like a pond. Eventually we had to stop at some hunting lodge where people were out having a bonfire and ask for directions. I'd been kind of imagining, with four other cars in our party all facing the same situation, that we'd all be stumbling round in the dark for hours and hours and might eventually meet up with each other on the road, but when we actually did make it to the campground we found everyone in residence except Susannah. (I'd forgotten most of them were coming from the north and therefore following different routes in.) Vicki and I had a long time to talk in the car, and then after Susannah arrived around 1 a.m. we sat up around the picnic table catching up with each other. This went very well. A word about this Stony Fork Campground: The accomodations are about the standard family-style not-quite-camping stuff, but what really sets this place apart and makes it a prime target for mischief is its totalitarian insistance on speed limits. "The speed limit throughout the park is 5," Vicki and I were sternly told by the lady at the office. Apparently the Cleveland car got a lecture that if they were caught speeding they'd be given "what-for." And on our first two trips to and from the site, driving at the car's idle speed of between 8 and 10 m.p.h., we had three people from the porches of various RVs yell at us to slow down. This is all in addition to the 60 zillion signs saying things like "You! Slow down!" or "Speed limit 5 m.p.h. This means you!" It was getting to the point that Vicki and I were about to make weasel faces at the next grumpy RVer who had a problem with us driving at a speed that would get us to our site before next Tuesday. Anyway. Saturday's plan was hiking in the "Pennsylvania Grand Canyon," but that ended up falling through a bit. We drove to the top of the big steep river valley, then hiked down into it — that was probably less than a mile. At the bottom, the only option was a gravel towpath-style bike trail; after watching Eric and Susannah attempt to ford the river, we ended up just doing an about-face and hiking back up the ravine again. Lunch back at the campsite, and then the shock of having gone to bed at 2:00 and woken up at 6:30 set in — Susannah and I fell asleep in the tents, and I didn't really wake up again until people started calling that it was time to start making dinner. Which meant, of course, that I had a perfectly wretched time falling asleep Saturday night. After our game of Robo Rally ended around midnight, I spent what felt like about three hours in the tent feeling mostly awake and being pinned between two snoring people as well. At the end of that time, I took my sleeping bag out to the picnic table, which we'd put under the screen tent, and tried to sleep on the bench. I must have fallen asleep for about an hour — certainly not more than two — but I was awake again around 6:00 after Sonnie came out of her tent. For Sunday, Dan suggested driving up to the Finger Lakes region of New York and touring some wineries since we were only about an hour and a half away. This plan was adopted; around 11:00 we packed up food for the day and chugged northward in three cars. It was a wonderful drive up through the country, hitting freeway for only about 10 minutes the whole time. Right before Tioga, Pa., we came up along a really pretty lake with hills and valleys and trees around it, and then there was Seneca Lake in New York with sailboats and vineyards. We cooked our lunch at a little parking area on Route 14 just north of Watkins Glen, and then the wine tasting began. I'd never done this before, so I wasn't quite sure what to expect. The way it works is that everyone lines up along a wooden bar, standing, and gets presented with a list of wines and an empty glass. Depending on the place, you can either choose a pre-set programme of dry or sweet wines, or you can mix and match a set number of options (for us it was five) from anything on the list. This costs anywhere from nothing to $2. After each taste, which is probably about an ounce, you're supposed to rinse your wine glass with water and dump it out into a sort of slop jar. The wine people tell you a little bit about each wine as you try it, and then the printed list has a few lines of description on it as well. Some of these are more useful than others: although get very little out of "The nose of this bright crimson wine is a vibrant mix of vanilla and strawberry aromas," try the stuff, and say "Well, tastes like wine to me, kids," it's true that that kind of sommelier copy is more sensible than "Humphrey Bogart and Greta Garbo rapping on a raft as it drifts down the Amazon." At least the first one tells you what's in your drink. We were somewhat mystified when Susannah's car wouldn't start in the parking lot of the first winery, so after we jumped it, failed, and eventually got it started by pushing it down a hill, we all drove into town to see what we might do about getting the battery fixed or replaced. After some time at the automotive center of the local Super Wal-Mart, the report came back to us that the battery contacts just needed to be cleaned. This being readily accomplished, Susannah started the drive back to Toronto and the rest of us continued with the wines. In the end, we visited three places — Lakewood, Fulkerson, and Arcadian — before they started closing for the evening. Then it was back to the campground for dinner. More Robo Rally, during which I developed an awful headache from lack of sleep, and then bed, for which I switched tents and slept just about continuously for nine hours. Yesterday was pack-up day. Kathi and Paul wanted to get an early start for their nine-hour drive south, and I was pretty anxious to get back to Pittsburgh sooner rather than later, so we were completely packed and on our way out by 10:00. I was home around 2:30. |
Thursday, May 31, 2007
12:57 p.m.
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Thoughts on Third-Language Learning, or Greg's Adventures with Thai Some people may already know that for about the past two weeks I've been trying to learn Thai, and as yesterday was the first time I tried to say anything in that language to a real Thai speaker, it reminded me that I've been meaning to write up a post about what the process has been like so far. (True, two weeks may not be a long enough course of study to say anything meaningful about linguistic typology or characterization, and saying "hello" to Alan V. at Fairfax is certainly not all-out conversational experiences, but still — first impressions are always entertaining and instructive.) This story really begins back in the early part of this semester, when Alan and I had that four-hour linguistic discussion I wrote about previously. After more recent developments, though, I'd been thinking more and more seriously about instantiating the old concept of "some non-Latin-alphabet Asian language that I want to learn at some point" in my brain with "Thai now." I first found a non-scary reference grammar in Hunt, but it obviously wasn't made for someone actually trying to learn the language from nothing. Instead, I properly started in with learning the letters of the alphabet from a little book Alan found in one of the shops on or off Craig Street, but after a few lessons in that I was starting to get curious about what real pronunciation sounded like. So I downloaded a five- or six-hour audio course from the Carnegie Library and started working through it on my computer. This audio file — I keep wanting to call it a tape, even though given the publication date it probably never existed as anything less technological than a set of CDs — uses something called the Pimsleur method, which I'm both critical and a huge fan of. It's totally oral: the course comes with no printed materials and you aren't supposed to write anything down during the lessons. And while I think it's incomparably wonderful to have access to (what I hope is) native Thai for learning indescribable things like vowels and tones, I also find it horribly frustrating to have to constantly guess at what I hear. "Wait — was that an unreleased 't' or an unreleased 'd'? Or even a glottal stop?" "Argh, is that thing that sounded like 'chi' there the same word that sounded like 'chai' when the other speaker said it?" "That's a rising tone? Are you sure?" These are the kinds of things I'm asking myself all the time during the tape lessons, and all of them would be decided by a simple phonetic word list. (And, I say, the fact that I even know that Thai has final unreleased stops in its syllables in the first place is due to the reference grammar rather than the tape.) Progress is consequently rather frustrating. The No. 1 lesson I'm getting out of all this, though, is that you shouldn't start to learn one foreign language and work with it for nine or 10 years before you start to learn another. My biggest problem is trying to compare my Thai competency to my French, and I've been speaking French long enough that my default expectation is that I'm quite good at it. I know that I suck at Thai, but my conscious brain has to keep reminding my unconscious brain that that's OK and that I probably sucked just as much at French too when I'd only been learning it for two weeks. There are so many tricks and automatic things in French that I do now without thinking, but I know I didn't really have them until four or five years out. I shouldn't expect them after four audio lessons in Thai. (Argh, but saying that doesn't always help because I really like being competent at the things I try. This is my weakness.) Anyway, aside from all this meta-mental stuff, I should probably give a clear indication of what I'm finding easy and difficult as a new learner. In the latter category, as you might expect, are the vowels and the tones, especially rising and falling tones: I'm still terribly inaccurate at figuring out what they are when I hear them, and in reproduction I still have to remember that words have canonical pitches and that I can't emphasize words by moving them higher or lower as I can in English or French. Anyone who ever hears me speak Thai is going to wonder if I'm either drunk or a robot with a speech synthesizer. Also my inability to reliably differentiate the various kinds of unreleased stops — I believe out of the five-ish examples I've talked about online with Alan V., I have been correct in only one instance. On the other hand, I'm happy to report that the alphabet is going very well: I can recognize and name 17 consonants and three vowels, even though I can't write anything I can say and can't say anything I can write. (This will be fixed in the near future, I hope, by getting a more integrated book and associated audio from the Pitt library.) My Thai handwriting is improving much faster than my shorthand did when I first picked that up five summers ago. I seem to be all right with vocabulary too: I have to listen to each audio lesson twice still, but after that I've got the new stuff down in my awful American accent. Still we press on. My current goal is to be able to order something from the Thai truck here on campus by the end of June, and two things I don't have to worry about are the motivation and encouragement to keep going. The motto, chosen fittingly in French, is on y arrivera — "We'll get there." |
Friday, June 1, 2007
11:37 a.m.
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It feels so good to be peanut butter... I was trying to turn this into a song late last night, but unfortunately "butter" is a pretty stinky rhyme word. |
Sunday, June 3, 2007
11:35 a.m.
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My entry of April 2, 2007, was written an hour or two too early, but it does say this: 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. Yesterday was two months from April 2. Life is happy and wonderful. These two things are related. |
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
12:17 a.m.
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Mixed progress on things over the last few days, including a bout of my usual computer woes that tend to come about when I attempt to do new things for myself. I went out Friday to buy a wireless PCI adapter for my desktop so that I can finally get it running again on the wireless network at the house. The adapter card came with a handy little driver CD for Windows, but of course my desktop spends all its time in Linux these days. Assuming there would be some Debian package or at least a driver I could compile out there somewhere, I sought information from the Internet and stumbled across something called NDISwrapper that should do the job. Problem No. 1: You need to have the source for your kernel modules installed in your distribution, and I didn't have them. So I strung an Ethernet cable all the way down to the DSL router downstairs, got my computer online, and went to download the source from Debian. Problem No. 2: Debian released a major kernel upgrade about a month ago, with the result that they removed the source for the old kernel modules from their list of available packages. Which meant I had to upgrade my kernel first. I had wanted, in fact, to do that at some near point in the future anyway, but I think I started the process incorrectly (by just trying to install the new image from apt-get) in the first place and then managed to follow the instructions improperly or something. My computer boots, but I must have done something extraordinarily screwy to the configurations. Whereas before I had a happy little 2.4 kernel with Gnome set up the way I liked it, I now have an untamed 2.6 beast where the window manager magicially switched to the horror that is KDE. I haven't completely explored what's going on here, but does anyone have a clue how to change things back? My first step will probably be to attempt to re-create the way I changed my window manager in the cluster last summer, but I'm not sure if I totally remember how that was done or if the same process can be applied here. Then I guess I should start exploring what else I messed up... |
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
1:12 a.m.
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Today I recorded myself working through what turned out to be a rather difficult Thai audio lesson, and then I sent it to Alan and let him listen to it. For some reason sending it off was the most nervous-making thing I've done in a week and a half, which is really perfectly idiotic since I don't suppose I'm learning a new language just to speak it to myself in my head. Preliminary results indicate that I'm extremely inconsistent with tones (I can hear this fact for myself!) but still "very understandable." This makes me feel worlds better, since I saw Alan this evening and his ears weren't bleeding, and now I shouldn't have such a mental block with saying things out loud. My plan is to record myself at some sort of regular intervals so I can note what progress I'm making. So after I stopped being on edge for half the afternoon, I ran home at 6:30 to grab my baseball glove and then headed to Gesling for an IM softball game. A number of LTI students have joined up with the Stonecutters, an overall SCS team, and earlier this week I figured I should actually start going to some of the games. Today it was an excellent idea; I think I needed something active and different to occupy myself for an hour and a half. The game went a lot like the IM games I used to play in for The Observer at Case: I got myself on base a couple of times, scored a run, got put out a couple of times, and made a nice catch in right field. Alan came by to take pictures at some point, and then we both walked up to a cooking party with Chris, Philip, and Zach at Philip and Zach's house. (The five of us were also at Joe Mama's yesterday for the all-you-can-eat pasta, followed by a bit of ITG in the UC — that part was most enjoyable.) Massive quantities of good food were served some time just before 11:00, and after Chris got into logic stuff we ended up writing entailment rules for Settlers of Catan on the whiteboard in the dining room. Encouraged by the appearance of the lollipop operator and something called "tensor" that looked like the symbol for a vector going into the board, I wrote the 17 Thai consonants and three vowels I know, plus three words I thought I remembered from the book I have. I need to get back to writing work too, hopefully in a way that will make it overlap with the words I know by sound. Hm... this post keeps coming back to Thai and language, but I guess those are two things spending a lot of time in my head these days. Yesterday I came up in my head with the mish-mash "mai kowjai pas," throwing in the random French "pas," and then today I was running over the four cases for pronouns and noticed that my French "sa" (as in "son, sa, ses") sounded kind of Thai-ish. |
Friday, June 8, 2007
1:14 p.m.
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Life has been continuing very well for the last two days. I have conquered Lesson 6 in the Thai audio and will be moving on to the next one today. Alon complimented me three times since Wednesday on how well I'm handling the logistical craziness of the GALE evaluation, and today I'm writing a little script that should make scoring MEMT combinations a whole lot easier. I managed to switch my computer back to using Gnome. Other things too. One odd thing, however, is that for some reason the designers of the new version of both Gnome and KDE seem to have decided a "shut down" or "reboot" menu item was totally superfluous. (Trying this from the command line as root actually just me logs out, at least under Gnome; I had to resort to the power button last night.) Still no luck with the wireless card either, but at least I can use the box again. For now I have a long Ethernet cable strung all the way from my room to the wireless router downstairs, which I hope won't kill one of my housemates if they trip over it in the hallway. Last night I went to dinner at Eat'n Park with Alan, Tim, Mars, Ian, and Keith, which was quite fun. We asked for crayons and got those little-kid activity placemats as well; then Tim named all the crayons with colors like "philanthropy" and "Newt Gingrich." Afterwards we had ice cream at Cold Stone and pie at Fairfax. Alan and I were sitting by his computer at some point and he happened to receive an IM... Alan responded with "Here's Greg" or "Talk to Greg" in four different conversations (some of which he started himself) and handed me the keyboard. So I got to talk to Apphia and Christina (whose apartment we had dinner at several weeks ago) and two other people called Zeke and Kellie ("or Quellie, if you prefer") who I'd never met before. That was pretty cool, actually: it reminded me of two recent XKCD comics (here and here). There's always something to be said for spontaneity, I guess! Today features more GALE eval work, hopefully some ITG, and last-minute planning for Round Two of the walking to West Virginia adventure. Yes, we're trying it again: tomorrow morning at (ugh!) 6:15. If anyone wants to be on call to possibly pick us up afterwards (in case we give up Saturday evening or in case we make it to the hotel thing Sunday morning), please let me or Chrisamaphone know very soon. Alternately, if you want to come yourself, let us know even sooner, since then we need to do more ride planning. |
Sunday, June 10, 2007
2:27 a.m.
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Success! It took us 18 hours to cover the 36 miles, but, dang it, there's a picture of the five of us in front of the Brooke County sign in West Virginia. We did it; you guys are amazing! |
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
10:42 p.m.
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Two nights ago I pulled out my old handwritten journal to try and find some entries I made about "Voyager." Alan and I have been watching episodes from Seasons 1 and 6 over the past few weeks, including two of my favorite ones that I remember seeing back in high school when they first aired. I knew that I once made a list of three or four episodes I really liked, but I couldn't remember if it was in the journal or on some other sheet of paper that I also shoved into my desk drawer some night seven or eight years ago. So I pulled out my journal, as I said, and started skimming through from the fall of 1999 ("Voyager" Season 6). My high school existence feels like a really different world these days. The pages of my old entries reveal it to be one of asking for permission to do anything, getting picked up from after-school activities, and squishing myself into my sister's friend group. Our main goal in life, it seems, was to borrow the car as frequently as possible — I was two years older than them and had recently gotten my full license — and go to Arabica's or people's houses or out for dinner. I spent a few pages in one of the entries describing all the effort we went through to be able to drive the van to school for one of those half days of finals. Last night I finally ran across at least part of I was looking for on January 20, 2000, though I still think a separate list must exist in my desk at home: I think I mentioned before about the Star Trek Voyager episode I saw where they said the Yankees won the 2032 World Series in 6 games. I saw another good episode last night. Voyager got stuck in a gravitational field above a planet in a different "timeframe" than Voyager so that a second on the ship was a day on the planet. When Voyager first got stuck there the planet just had a primitive culture that worshipped gods in stars and they thought Voyager was a new star-god. The Voyager crew watched the civilization develop until 1000 years had gone by — and the people on the planet were still trying to reach Voyager — they now called it "the skyship" because they could tell what it was. I also came across an entry, dated January 2, 2000, that doesn't quite make me laugh, but it does get a sort of wry smile and appreciation for its candor. What I'd really like to do is to re-type my entire journal — not to post it here, but just to have the electronic copy for myself. Searching and such would be a lot easier, and then I could do interesting corpus-based linguistics stuff like model writing style or look at sentence length or punctuation or something. I'd also get to re-read the entire thing as I typed it. The problem is that I'd certainly introduce a number of typing errors in the transcription, which would be indistinguishable from stupid mistakes I actually made in writing the thing unless I went back over it all again and gave it a really close copy edit. Since I've now filled 842 pages in those half-size 9½-by-6-inch spiral notebooks, I kind of think that would take too long. |
Thursday, June 14, 2007
12:02 p.m.
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This is going to sound extraordinarily strange coming from me, but I'm seriously wondering if now is actually the correct time to get a cell phone. I need to be updating all my contact information within the next week or so, including doing something with the phone service at my apartment, so it would be very nice if I could come to some kind of conclusion quickly, only have to update everything once, and then keep things constant for the next four-ish years. There are a number of factors at work here. First is my longstanding dislike, from the time I first came into contact with it, of the cell-phone culture and how people are constantly pulling the wretched things out of their pockets and poking around on them instead of paying attention to the real life they're actually living with the people around them. (Part of this comes from how rude people were with their phones when I worked at the grocery store and was trying to ask them where they'd like their eggs.) But, of course, not everyone who has a phone is like that, and I'm sure it's quite possible to use a cell phone responsibly in the same way you would a land line. Then there's the factor of cost, which now slightly favors a pre-paid cell plan. I can get free local calling on my regular line from the phone company, but then you have to add in the dial tone fee, a federal subscriber fee, a 911 fee, a surcharge for the PA relay service, etc., etc., and by the time you're done you have a bill of $15 per month. After seeing the success of Alan's pre-paid thing with T-Mobile and running the calculations myself, it seems I'd have to talk for 250 minutes a month before a cell phone would be more expensive. This gives me a little less than an hour a week for both incoming and outgoing calls, which I'm pretty sure I could do if I e-mail my parents more instead of calling them. A third factor is that cell phones to me just don't feel right. They're too small, often leaving you talking into space with a transmitter wedged up against your ear, which you end up pressing closer and closer into your skull because it's difficult to hear the person you're talking to through what would normally be the earpiece. That transmitter is Issue No. 4 — I feel the same way about phones as I do about wireless routers: sure, they're convenient, and no one's shown yet that they necessarily lead to tumors or anything, but if I can avoid having one in close proximity to me for as much time as possible, I'm going to do it. (This is why I never got wireless set up in my apartment: I didn't want to be sleeping five feet from the router every night.) But the world certainly isn't going to stop evolving its technology just for me; I can't really reduce my exposure to background radiation or public WAPs and such. Which leads to the final consideration, one related to why I got my laptop as soon as I did last spring. I admit that I'm falling behind. Recently there's been a little voice at the back of my head — still pretty quiet and inoffensive, yes, but it's there — that says things like "Psst! Sorry to disrupt you, but you realize that just about everyone you can think of except you has had a cell phone and an iPod and a PDA and a this and a that for years now, right? And that you have barely the first clue about how to use any of them? Now, I realize you don't need any of that stuff, but aren't you a little concerned that you're getting older and dumber and that if you don't jump in now you're going to be completely lost in the future? Think of Mom and video games — for that matter, think of you and video games." And I do very much like to feel competent. |
Monday, June 18, 2007
1:53 p.m.
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A lot of fun and interesting and different things from the last week... Last Wednesday I played French Scrabble with Christine and lost a close game, 249 to 233. It seems that French scores are a bit higher than English ones; when I played in French against Rebecca (using an English set), I remember us only scoring in the 160s. This is probably because the French version has more death letters worth 10 points. Speaking in French during the game Wednesday also reminded me that I really need to organize a francophone party at my house sometime soon. I could use the conversation practice, I think, and it would be a whole lot of fun to have a get-together like our Quartier Français meetings back at Case. On Friday I made chicken parmesan at the house (cheating a little bit with pre-breaded chicken, it's true) and watched "Voyager" and "Animaniacs" with Alan. Volume 3 of the "Animaniacs" series is out tomorrow — my copy is already on pre-order from Amazon! I also was perusing some old journal entries and friends' entries and comments during the afternoon, which led to me coming across that old personality test and taking it again. I used to score as an ISTJ (details here or here), but it seems that in the last two years I've become more like an ISFP (here or here). Some of the ISFP things are totally wrong: the idea of me being uncomfortable with logic or having graceful body movements makes me laugh down the walls in my house. But of course some of the ISTJ things are pretty off too and more correctly describe a totalitarian robot. I guess I need to average the two or take the test again. Saturday afternoon I drove back to my parents' house for a surprise birthday dinner my sister and I arranged for them both. They had no clue I was coming and were pretty shocked when I showed up with a pie at 5:00. We took them out to Damon's and paid the bill, then went home again and had dessert out on the deck. I also saw my family's new kitten, a light-orange puffball called Jake who's still working on developing a meow rather than a squeak. He's one of the cutest things ever, though! I got back to Pittsburgh yesterday a bit before dinner and spent an exceptionally nice and interesting evening at Fairfax. Tim, Ian, Alan, and I played Password, and then Alan taught me his Student Wars card game since I'd been asking about it recently. It seems to be a good game. A lot of reading and categorization and interaction information to keep around in your head, which would make it rather difficult to pick up and build a deck on your own, but using a pre-built (and pre-optimized!) one makes the game surprisingly manageable if you don't object to slow play on the part of the newcomer. I don't suppose it would take more than four games, with four different nice decks built for you in this way, to get a good handle on characters, attacks, game mechanics, and deck construction yourself. Somehow I think I expected it would be more complicated. Today I'm having a hard time working on stuff for the speech portion of the GALE eval, especially since two weeks of text evaluation just ended Thursday. My mind is kind of ready for something new or for another weekend already. |
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