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ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
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Wednesday, June 20, 2007
12:32 a.m.
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Somehow I neglected to remember, in writing my last post, that I spent Thursday evening playing ITG in the basement of Doherty Apartments with Klipper, Alan, and some other girl whose name was Chris — but not Chrisamaphone Chris or my sister Chris, of course. It went like a dream; I was doing amazingly and passing all sorts of stuff. Alan, Chris (the Chrisamaphone Chris), and I played again in the UC tonight, where I was not quite as good but still good enough to make me reasonably happy. Passing 5s pretty consistently these days, and possibly one or two 6s when I know the song well. I wish the game had more introductory marathons for people like me. On Thursday I played one called "Bounce" that I was pretty much on top of until the final song (where I failed), but it seemed to be the second- or third-easiest marathon in the game. The rest of them — the ones that people actually play — are killer death courses that my brain can barely begin to understand. I say, every time I think of ITG I'm awed again at what amazing things people can do. It's a similar feeling to what I might experience if I catted an audio file to plain text and watched the person sitting next to me suddenly start to sing it. Or, I suppose, like the time my mom's piano teacher, years after I'd stopped taking lessons, played straight off an arrangement of "The Star-Spangled Banner" that I was slowly just beginning to work on playing just for fun. Really it's not much more than learning to read a new language, something that I have experience with for various things, but that doesn't mean it's any less amazing to watch in action. Someday I hope I'll get there too: my goal is to be able to play 7s by the end of the summer, and perhaps the ones marked "expert" in another year, but that'll be a long time in coming. Just another two days until the GALE speech evaluation is over and I can get back to other things at work, which isn't a bad thing either way, but it would be nice if it was Friday already. |
Thursday, June 21, 2007
11:36 a.m.
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It's about that time of year again when I should be giving some thought to what I want to do with the one week off I get over the summer, i.e. it's time to play a game of Make the Most of Greg's Paltry Vacation Time. My original thought, back in the early spring, was that I'd like to spend it backpacking, but going to new cities or visiting people in old ones is also always a fun time. There's also the "null" option of staying here and just not working for a week, leaving lots of free time for museums, outings in the park, etc. The main requirements are really that I get away from my computer for a week and that whatever I do isn't terribly expensive. (Last year I managed a five-day trip to Montreal on about $300, including getting there and back.) The time limit is nine days — a work week plus the two adjoining weekends — and it would have to be between mid-July and orientation week back here at the end of August. Any suggestions? |
Friday, June 22, 2007
1:10 a.m.
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It's a little weird, but I find myself coming to the conclusion tonight that I might be doing better with Thai than I've been thinking recently. The last feedback I had was during our West Virginia walk two weekends ago, when Alan gave me a rough English equivalent of how my tones sound in Thai — those '80s speech synthesizers with bad prosody sound like polished orators compared to me. It's still the case that if my life depended on hearing a new word or phrase and identifying the tones for each syllable, I'd be dead by now more times than I can count. But I seem to be doing all right on vocabulary, and my voice doesn't wander all over the scale as much as it did two or three weeks ago. The subject of Thai (and my goal for ordering something from the Thai truck in the proper language by the end of the month) came up between Chris and me while we were climbing after dinner. That kind of loaded things into my brain. After I dropped Chris and Zack off and went briefly up to my apartment to check mail and things, I called Alan from there and gave him two unexpected sentences in Thai: "Khun yaak taam arai mai? Pom yu ti apartment." ("Do you want to do something? I'm at the apartment," in my own made-up and probably inconsistent romanization, since there isn't an official one and I don't know enough IPA, Thai phonetics, or real Thai script to write this more correctly.) I perhaps cheated a bit by saying them each to myself about six times in the car on the way over to the apartment, but on the phone Alan said the first one sounded "really good." It was, it's true, a great feeling saying it unannounced and getting back the response "Sure" almost immediately rather than a confused "Huh?" or a long pause while Alan tried to figure out what normal sentence I was mangling. And then, a few minutes before 1 a.m., when I should have been falling asleep, my overactive mind was instead jumping through some related topics and started noticing that eight lessons of tourist Thai actually gives it the ability to say things about a decently large variety of everyday situations. I just made a list, for example, of the words I know, and managed to come up with 45 — a decent mix of open-class and function words, too. I can ask where things are and say that they're here, "over there," or on such-and-such road; I can talk about eating, drinking, or doing something now or later; I can say something about speaking or not speaking English and Thai; once I know some food words besides "wine" and "beer," I can theoretically say hello and order them. I suppose Chris is right: I should just start speaking and get my nervousness over with. |
Sunday, June 24, 2007
1:30 a.m.
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Oh weekends, why can you only be 29 percent of my life? I mean, you just know that any reasonable span of time that begins with being allowed to act like a five-year-old again is bound to be good. There's a toy store in the South Side across the street from where Alan takes the bus home from work in the afternoons, so yesterday we had Play-Doh. First we tried making a shark, since that's what the plastic fins and googly eyes that came with the kit were supposed to be for, but we found that there really wasn't enough Play-Doh to support them all. Instead we had to settle for a clam, which ended up eating fossilized fish and getting connected to the Internet via a satellite dish. Then it was dinner time. Today went the way all good summer Saturdays should. Lingering in bed until what must have been after 10:00 — no rush to wake up and get out for anything — and then Alan and I made pancakes (with blueberries and raspberries!) at the house and watched another episode of "Voyager." After that, we eventually got our camera stuff together for a bit of a photographer's holiday downtown. I've been downtown comparatively rarely here in Pittsburgh, given how often I was running around Cleveland on Saturdays when I was at Case, and I've taken pictures there even less frequently, so today was really a fun outing. Downtown is full of nice little green parks tucked away among the buildings; there are also a lot of really interesting architectural details and some good locations for portraits and activity shots. Went through at most 20 exposures to Alan's digital hundreds — the more time I spend thinking about it, the more definite is my conclusion that I really ought to get a digital SLR. Two very satisfying rounds of ITG after we got back to campus, and then Tyler cooked an excellent dinner of chicken, rice, and bread pudding back at the house. Afterwards I worked on my Thai writing for a while. There also was a quick walk around campus and Flagstaff Hill, during which the sight of the top of Hamerschlag lit up in the deep blue twilight provided first-rate evidence for an earlier conversation point that some things can just be experienced or felt and not photographed or described. I ended up at Fairfax after the walk for a round of a German game called Bohnanza (a pun on the word for "beans," I think Tim said). Also a romp through the weird and funny world of Songs to Wear Pants To, which seems to be the home of a guy who takes random and silly requests for songs, fulfills them, and then posts the results. (This is again from Tim.) Certainly among the best is this one, which made Alan and me laugh for about two minutes straight. Tomorrow there will be film developing for me and ingredient buying for dinner, which I'm also quite looking forward to. Then, unfortunately, it will be Sunday night and time for another work week to begin again, which means five unremarkable days until we get fun time again. |
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
12:30 p.m.
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We (that is, Alan, Chris, Zack, and I) win at the dinner game! The goal was to make a nice homemade Italian meal for Tomczak, since he rescued us again from West Virginia this year on pretty short notice and quite late at night, which we carried out to perfection last night. Shopping on Sunday, as I mentioned, and then back to Chris's house in the late afternoon to try to make our own mascarpone cheese. Conceptually, this must be the world's simplest cheese: it's just heated-up cream that had a bit of acidic stuff thrown in it and then got cold again. For a long time nothing was happening and we were afraid we'd messed it up, but finally there were reports on IRC Sunday night that the stuff was thickening as expected. We wanted it to put in tira misu, which has to chill for several hours before you eat it, so I went over to Chris's again around 1:00 yesterday and we started the process. Making tira misu is approximately as complicated as making a bûche de Noël — one of those things you want two people and a whole afternoon for. It took about two and a half hours before the thing was done — partially because I spent what felt like about half an hour beating seven egg whites into stiff peaks with a hand mixer — but when I left around 3:30 or so there was a beautiful dessert in a 9x9 pan in Chris's refrigerator. Back again at 5:30, with everyone else, to make the pasta, three kinds of sauce, salad, garlic bread, and lemonade to fill in the rest of the meal. The four of us cook very well together, we found: all of us can be in the kitchen at the same time working on some subtask without getting in each other's way or on each other's nerves. Dinner at 7:00, and then an efficient assembly line for washing and putting away dishes had the kitchen cleaned in a remarkably short amount of time. An excellent evening overall. In all of this, I forgot to say that after cheese-making on Sunday night I went back to Fairfax and Alan showed me "Brokeback Mountain," since I'd managed to miss it in both the theatres and McConomy last year. He called it a "quiet" movie, which is quite correct. Not painfully short on dialogue or anything, but it's true that the story concentrates on the effects of the initial situation rather than on the causes or reasons: it's rather up to the viewer to fill in surmises about the characters' motivations and such. At its core, I kind of found it to be a study of two different approaches to an unexpected event, with neither one necessarily coming out better or being shown to be more successful than the other. Absolutely beautiful photography and composition, too, that reminded me of the Jean-Pierre Jeunet movies I've seen. I've been... not quite obsessed, but preoccupied with Thai writing for the past few days. My first words, in reading, from about a week or two ago were งาน ("work") and ทำ ("to do"), and I really want to get beyond that. I'm working on a few more vowels, two of which have terribly inconsistent pronunciation guides. Different resources describe the same sound, อื, as the vowel in "the" when pronounced quickly or slurred, in the French word "dur," or in the French word "coeur" — all of which sound quite different to me! Logic dictates that I should be putting my time into speaking, given that I only have the rest of this week to meet my goal of ordering food by the end of June, but so far I've only ever said four sentences out loud to a person who could understand them, and the thought of an actual conversation with my really limited vocabulary still makes me a bit nervous. |
Random Stuff #41
Wednesday, June 27, 2007, 11:07 p.m.
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I guess it's been a while since I've had one of these Random Stuff posts. Today, though, provided some good material while I was trying to figure out some new stuff at work. We begin with an example of what you might call functional literacy: that is, method names so long they feel like you're reading a long work of prose. I thought I was forced into some weird names at Rockwell two summers ago based on the existing conventions, but nothing I wrote ever came close to void C_SuffixArrayLanguageModel::calcNgramMatchingInfoTokenFreqOnlyExtendingCurrentMatch I suppose it doesn't help that, in this example, the function also takes six parameters! Of course, the real place for writing unexpected novels is in the package documentation. I was scanning through the instructions and tutorials for Automake this afternoon when I suddenly came across this sentence lurking just below the table of contents: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a developer in possession of a new package, must be in want of a build system. And if Jane Austen isn't literary enough for you, you should have a look through the wonderfully classical SPL — the Shakespeare Programming Language. Alan and I were paging through some sites about it one night in the cluster back in April, and I copied a line I've been saving ever since for just such an occasion. For some reason it makes me think of the "Animaniacs" Shakespeare parodies. Juliet: You are as villainous as the square root of Romeo. |
Thursday, June 28, 2007
3:39 p.m.
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It isn't often that I get to make a music post that most other people reading this would find interesting — the people who produced the stuff I listen to have pretty much all been dead for longer than I've been alive. But then I've been entering this new world of ITG, with its completely different style of music that's probably closer to what most people I know are listening to these days (at least at cluster raves and Roselawn). At first it was all new stuff and I didn't recognize a thing: I didn't know any songs by title, and for several months I could only listen to a song and say "Hm... I think I might have played that song or watched other people play it." At a certain point, though, I started developing preferences of my own (we remember my "D-Code" posts) and actually started learning some of the music. It turns out that a shocking number of the songs I like (and recognize) the most were composed (written? synthesized? performed? — some subset of these) by a guy called Kyle Ward, who has a website with downloads and everything. (It also appears he graduated from high school the same year as me, despite being two years younger. It's surprising how much of the electronic world is controlled or created by people roughly my own age — it seems like every webcomic artist ever is 25 or 26.) Getting into ITG, plus throwing songs back and forth with Alan when we play things for each other, has kind of made me think again about what specific characteristics I like in my music. A well-known starting point is that I pay much more attention to instrumentation than lyrics — perhaps it's a learned response, since the lyrics of swing and dance (I mean '20s and '30s dance) songs are often terribly simple-minded and uninspiring. So it's not unexpected that the majority of the ITG songs I like don't have any words. When they do, I'm sometimes surprised to hear Alan quote them and then say they come from a song I know. If I play a long string of songs from Pandora, they're often identified as having "acoustic piano accompaniment," "interesting horn arrangements," "interesting part-writing," and "a mid-tempo swing feel." I like the insistence on complexity: I do like picking apart my music somewhat and following the muted trumpets, for example, or that little piano ornamentation coming up, or what the bottom line of the song would sound like when I only hum one long note at a time. And I guess I tend to judge how well I "know" a song by how many of these elements show up when I play it in my head. These are all swing-based things, though. What happens when I apply them to ITG? Something like "Euphorium" by someone or someones called DM Ashura, for example. It's arranged clearly enough that the instruments aren't reduced to background noise (which, from the few I've heard, happens a lot in pop songs since the emphasis is on the vocalist), and there's enough different stuff going on there to be really interesting. It's just too bad I can't play its Level 7 step file yet! |
Sunday, July 1, 2007
11:23 p.m.
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If you're looking for a small, quiet restaurant for a nice dinner, I would submit for your consideration the excellent Murray Avenue Grill, in Squirrel Hill at the obvious location. The menu is small but well selected, and though the prices might look a bit staggering to people used to the trucks and half-price, they're certainly not out of bounds for a special occasion or an off-campus change of pace. Good service, too, or at least it was tonight. If there'd been a slightly more Mediterranean flavor, and if the front end of the restaurant had been open to the outside kind of in the style of the Union Grill, it would have reminded me a whole lot of the place Rebecca and I ate at last August on our last evening in Montreal. (That's the one where I was mistaken, in French, for a Belgian.) It's difficult to keep track of my mental state from every moment of the last almost-24 years, but I'd be hard pressed to name a time in more recent memory when I've been so consistently happy — outside of work, at least. I can't beat the weekends I've been having; today especially I felt like the only thing I had to do was spend the day enjoying life and possibly dance down the street for good measure. For starters, since Friday the weather's been in that ideal summer state of puffy white clouds, light breezes, and temperatures right at the 25-degree mark. (If this last part confuses you, now is when I remind you that jgrafton and I converted ourselves to Celsius at the beginning of March.) It's a beautiful time to be outside, either for chasing lightning bugs at night, grocery shopping in the evening, a bus-and-walking trip down to the South Side Works during the afternoon, or walks to and from other places at any time. Today Alan and I spent an hour or two at Phipps looking at the glasswork exhibit that's been mixed in among the plants, and even that had a few random sorties into outdoor courtyard gardens. (And also a line of Thai writing on a sign for a sort of "countryside of Thailand" room, which I was able to sound out almost half of.) One interesting thing to report is that I'm being retrained to fall asleep more easily at random times of the day. Saturday I slept more than I ever thought possible: going to bed around 1 a.m., finally getting out again at 10:30 long enough to make breakfast and watch an episode of "Animaniacs," then sleeping again from about 12:30 until 2, then again from about 2:15 until 3:45. I didn't feel so tired after half-price at Fuddle with the Fairfax group, so I worked on Thai writing and read a bit until after 1:30. Woke up today feeling fine a little after 9:30, so I guess I needed all that extra sleep. I'm excited for this next week for various reasons. Tomorrow night we will have an rlambert, on Wednesday I'm probably going to Kennywood (with about 6 million other people, no doubt), and then Friday night I'm driving back to my parents' house so we can all go to a wedding in Lansing on Saturday. |
Friday, July 6, 2007
11:53 a.m.
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Life goes on. (I say, wasn't that the name of a TV show from the early '90s? I remember it being on before "Full House" or something like that.) Anyway, it does, and it's been pretty good and pretty busy this week. I got Rebecca from the train station late Monday night, and then the two of us plus Chris went climbing Tuesday evening. Since Wednesday was a holiday, we also snuck in an eight-person midnight outing to Eat'n Park (recently made smoke-free!) at which Alan re-named all of our crayons and I drew giant lice and some other things on the back of my placemat. It was kind of surprising to find people crediting me with some kind of artistic skill. There was even a short conversation about "Promoted to Grade 13," that "weekly web comic" I was drawing and posting for fun in the fall of 2005 when I was bored and didn't know many people. I'd actually forgotten its existence until mkehrt, looking at my placemat, said "You should draw a webcomic!" For the Fourth of July (Wednesday), I went on an all-day outing with Alan, Keith, Ian, and Mars to Kennywood. It's been some years since I've been to Geauga Lake, Six Flags Ohio, Six Flags Worlds of Adventure, or whatever they're calling that place these days (Geauga Lake again, I hear...), but Kennywood is probably smaller than even the old Geauga Lake side. Something like four roller coasters, for people who are interested in that sort of thing, but I was really glad to find myself in a mixed group where I felt like I wasn't a scared little kid being humored when I asked if people wanted to go on the tunpike cars. Ian and Keith rode the big stuff; Alan, Mars, and I managed the Jackrabbit — the park's smallest roller coaster — and a number of smaller things. I started wondering about the distribution of spinny rides that spin clockwise versus counterclockwise: the Turtle, the Paratrooper, and the carousel went counterclockwise, but the swings and Wipeout went clockwise. Either way, by dinner time I was feeling a little bit stomach-sick, which was highly annoying given the fact that the previous five things I mentioned aren't exactly what Erin would call moderate thrill rides. But then there was lemonade and "supreme" funnel cake, followed by the highlight of the day, which was listening to Keith play in the East Winds Symphonic Band. The programme was somewhat varied, starting and ending with Sousa (as might be expected), but covering a lot of other ground in between. We got, for example, a medley of songs from "The Wizard of Oz" followed by a medley of songs from "Wicked"; there was also a "Tennessee Salute" medley that included part of a rather bizarre-sounding "Chattanooga Choo-Choo." Along more predictable lines for July 4, I also enjoyed an "Armed Forces Salute" medley (are we detecting a theme here?) that had at least 10 different song smippets in it, at least one of which I didn't recognize. Overall a good show, and one that reminded me of the existence of music I haven't heard or thought about in quite a while — I have some old tapes, records, and audio files I want to go back to now. I'd been thinking earlier in the day, actually, with the music being played over the random park loudspeakers, that it's too bad George M. Cohan and John Philip Sousa aren't alive to keep collecting royalties on their stuff: if I were a Kennywood employee, I think I'd come home with nightmares about "Give My Regards to Broadway" after a few days of this treatment. After a kind of irregular food day Wednesday (dry cereal, Boston Market, Pepsi, lemonade, funnel cake, Steak 'n' Shake), Thursday followed with a potluck cooking party here at the house in honor of rlambert's birthday. I made up a concoction I called "vegetarian stuff in a pot," which was essentially that: black beans, green peas, couscous, and pasta all inserted into boiling water at the correct times over the course of an hour and a half. It seemed to come out pretty well; Alisa recommended supplementing with sun-dried tomatoes, which I may have to try next time. We also had Thai curry (a kind of spice I can handle, it seems), quesadillas, some kind of avocado rice, hummus, fruit, liquefied fruit calling itself "strawberry soup," apple pie, and a cake. I spent about half the time managing people and things in the kitchen — you start to see why people used to have butlers or whatever, as doing this and cleaning up as the party moves along is definitely a full-time job. But there were some excellent people who popped into the kitchen at intervals to talk or to feed me tasty snacks, so I felt all right. And then cleaning up afterwards wasn't as deathlike as it would have been otherwise. And today is Friday again, which I like. It's a weird Friday, though, since I only exist this weekend as part of a family trip to Lansing to go to a wedding; I guess I had my weekend Tuesday and Wednesday this week. We'll be seeing friends from Michigan again for the first time in just over four years. In a roundabout way, though, I'm looking forward to being at home with my parents tonight. |
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
10:41 a.m.
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Yikes: another long recap entry! On Friday I drove back to my parents house after a quick dinner here. At dinner I had my first experience with carbonated milk, which sounds absolutely terrible until you consider two facts: first that they dump in a lot of sugar and other stuff so it's not pure milk anymore, and second that you try it and it actually tastes pretty good. If you want to experience this for yourself, I understand that you only have to go to Seoul Mart and look for a Korean drink called Milkis. This I highly recommend, if only because you can scare the rest of your friends by talking about carbonated milk. Saturday was the wedding in Lansing, which is only a four-hour drive from Twinsburg. My parents woke me up at the shouldn't-exist time of 7 a.m. and we were gone by a little after 8. The drive was fun: we had to take two cars since there were seven of us going, so I got to go with Katie and Andrew and talk to them a lot. There were a number of Saline people at the wedding, including Kurt, who we hadn't seen it at least six and possibly as many as 12 years. It's an odd thing to run into people you remember at, say, 12 years old and suddenly find that they've been to high school and college and work and are now 25 and real people. Doubly so, in fact, because everyone else is thinking the same of you. One thing about weddings is that they always have receptions, and one thing about receptions is that they always have dancing. And, if you see where I'm going with this, one thing about dancing is that everyone expects you to. Really, dancing is kind of like chocolate: everyone assumes everyone else likes it, but if you think for a minute, you probably realize that you know someone who doesn't. Except there's not really any social pressure to get those people to eat chocolate if they don't want to. Luckily the dinner Saturday took so long that dancing didn't start until around 9:00, and then I had the company of fellow non-dancers Katie, Andrew, and John (even though the first two were electing to stay at the table only because they didn't know anyone). We eventually collected my parents and left around 11. I drove back to Ohio with my parents on Sunday, and then packed up my stuff and took my own car back to Pittsburgh. Yesterday was a decent day for getting work done, and then there was climbing. We are collecting more and more people for our group: last night we had to bus for the first time because my car only holds five. Chris, Zack, Philip, jcreed, mkehrt, ehuber, and I all took one of the 67s from Beeler Street out to the wall, where the 33-degree high for the day plus an enclosed space with lots of people in it made the climbing environment rather like the "fiery furnace" you sometimes read about. I was alternating attempted climbs with drinks of water from the fountain out in the hall, ending up with a moderate headache by the time we left. Pasta and water with Alan and Ian at Joe Mama's afterwards effected a partial cure — I hadn't eaten much yesterday — but it still turned into a rather early night. I slept for 10 hours and woke up this morning feeling a lot better. |
Thursday, July 12, 2007
9:44 a.m.
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I hate to ask about something that reminds me so much of UML, but I'll go ahead with this anyway: Does anyone know of a software package that, given a list of (labelled) nodes and the set of edges between them, can draw a nice-looking graph with minimal and/or readable crossing edges? I would very much like to produce a dependency diagram for a set of classes and files, but my two efforts to draw it by hand have so far just shown that there are too many nodes and arrows to plan it out graphically as you're going along. Incidentally, it sounds like this tool I'm looking for would be the same as an automatic Planarity solver. |
Friday, July 13, 2007
2:01 p.m.
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"And besides," I wrote on the first page of an empty notebook on May 17, 1999, "lots of famous people kept journals." It's true, and I've spent half the afternoon reading about Samuel Pepys and Mary Chestnut. I don't think I knew about Pepys yet at the time — we read him in Brit lit, which wasn't until 11th grade — but when I wrote that first entry more than eight years ago, I remember thinking of Mary Chestnut and the excerpts from her diaries in the Civil War documentaries we saw in 10th grade history class. I was thinking very strongly of running over to Hunt about a half-hour ago to track down the newest authoritative edition of Pepys — the 1893 edition on Project Gutenberg's been redacted where certain passages "cannot possibly be printed," according to the sensibilities of late-Victorian editors — but now it's raining, so I'm contenting myself instead with a Mary Chestnut e-text from the University of North Carolina. I should, you know, probably be doing some actual work — or at least my laundry. Cleaning my room wouldn't be an awful idea either, nor would having lunch, or seeing if someone in this house has a tire iron so I can fix my bike... |
Sunday, July 15, 2007
11:22 a.m.
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An excellent day climbing Thursday. I got a V2 that had been bugging me for several weeks and in general felt really strong. Still no progress on any V2/3, and there are some V1/2s that I continue to fail at, but I came home Thursday (and woke up Friday) feeling really nice all the same. On Friday afternoon I played some ITG with Alan — finally managed another 80 percent on a Level 5 this week. I feel like my accuracy is marginally better, but my reading skills are somehow getting worse. If I threw in a note about Thai here, I'd have a progress update on all three major things I'm working on this summer. Unfortunately, I haven't touched the stuff in about two weeks; it look me a good 60 seconds Saturday morning to remember the word for "now" in my mind. I do have, at least, an empty can of curry on my desk, with half its label written tantalizingly in Thai, to spur me on to further reading efforts whenever I get going again. Currently the only full word on the thing that I can read is "gram." But otherwise, I love the summer and I love the weekend, so I love even more the things that happen to me when you put the two together. A good dinner with better company is one of the world's best experiences, so I should say that we've successfully located the closest Olive Garden to campus. It's about baseball-hitting distance off I-279 in Green Tree; I was pretty confident that we should be able to drive there in under 20 minutes, but due to the mess the city of Pittsburgh is making out of the world down where Forbes, the Boulevard of the Allies, and 376 all come together, it actually took us 23. But traffic notwithstanding, it's extremely hard to improve upon a meal that starts with Olive Garden salad and ends with a big dish of chocolate gelato and two spoons. Then there was a drawing party at Chris's house, which was also an excellent idea. I thought I'd make nice ink versions of some of my old comic strips, but after I figured out how to draw the characters again and started on the first one, I kind of lost steam and interest. Instead I made a three-dimensional bee and dragonfly to go with Alan's potted flowers. Those came out kind of structurally unstable, so I finished the evening with a sort of truss shape that I made from pipe cleaners by putting three tetrahedrons together. July goes by too quickly: we're halfway through the month already. I think classes start again six weeks from tomorrow. |
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
12:29 p.m.
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Two anniversaries to mark today: it's been exactly seven years since my trip to France and exactly one year since I played ITG for the first time. Anniversaries are fun partly because they let you have a sense of progress. When I was in France, after my third year of studying the language in high school, Devin, Sarah, and I had to resort to talking among ourselves if we wanted any conversation practice: our French accents were bad enough that most people in shops and things always answered us in English. I remember buying a cheap Glenn Miller CD in a little store in Paris — the label in the case said it was "Les Succès de jazz" Vol. 3, but the disc itself is marked as Vol. 2. I noticed this about five minutes after I bought the thing, so I took it back to the store and tried to explain, in my nervous and incomplete French, the discrepancy in the numbers. The guy behind the counter looked at me for a second. "English?" he asked. And so we went from there. I would contrast this with an experience from when I was in Montreal last August. Rebecca and I were looking for a French Scrabble, so we'd been wandering around the Centre Eaton or something checking in all the game stores. At one place, I asked an employee on the floor (in French) if they had a French Scrabble. The guy turned to his co-worker, asked (in English!) about the game, got his answer, and then repeated it to me in French. I alao bought a roll of film in the métro, something that I remember making a particular mess of in Paris in 2000. On the ITG front, there's my initial entry of July 17, 2006, in which I was horrified at receiving a score of 2 percent on a Level 2 song. From there I can trace my progress via journal entries to "may be able to pass a 3 next time" in December, to "the Level 4s still elude me" in Februrary, to "Level 5s will in general kill me off early in the song" in April, to "possibly [pass] one or two 6s when I know the song well" in June, to getting my first-ever full combo (on a Level 5 song, "The Game," with 88.82 percent) just on Sunday. I still mostly fail the 6s, it's true, but we'll get there. And I say, if I'm going to be doing this for another year, I think I might as well clear some space on one of my USB drives and start getting "official" (whatever that means) — or at least complete — stats from the machine itself. En avant... |
Thursday, July 19, 2007
7:56 a.m.
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Got back last night a little after 11:00 from a night at the theatre, which is really something I should do more often. I saw "Homeless: the Musical!" put on by a group called the Summer Company down at Duquesne, and somehow, since it was opening night, the show was free. (The reason I even know anything about this in the first place is because of the excellent Mars, who sent out an e-mail inviting me, Alan, Keith, and Ian to see it with her.) We managed to arrive almost an hour early, and since there weren't really any massive throngs flocking around the ticket booth, we went back outside again to wander the campus. My impression of Duquesne, from going by it on the bus, was that it was a rather dirty gritty place filled with boring '60s buildings in a bad part of town. Not so, I found: the façade you get along Forbes may be like that, but the actual campus is up on top of the hill above the 10th Street tunnels, and it's actually an extremely nice-looking place. Some very nice ivy-style buildings that look like Penn or John Carroll, a number of small green spaces with little fountains in them, a few '60s buildings (but none as horrible as Wean), and even a modern building or two that fits in quite well. The whole topped off with panoramic (if noisy) views of the river, the South Side, and — as I pointed out to the others — the county jail. My camera and I should be making a trip back that way again soon. I should also say something about the play itself. "Homeless: the Musical!" (stupid exclamation point included) is a modern work in two acts, co-written by someone called Chris Dimond with a CMU connection. Mars had described it as being in the style of "Avenue Q," which I haven't seen, but I suppose a good indication is that a sign at the ticket counter said the play featured "adult language, adult themes, adult everything." It's true that the opening song was very... strong. A little too strong for my tastes, I'd say, but after that either they toned things down a bit or I got used to it. (Most likely the second, as Alan pointed out.) The story is essentially concerned with the manipulation and exploitation of "the masses" by the rich and powerful via chain stores, watered-down TV news, distractions of war, etc., which is both madly funny and creepily true at the same time. The actor playing Kevin, the lead, looked a lot like a cross between Alan Caum and Matt Aument, although the more Alan-style dialogue was had by Taitor. (That's Senator Richard Taitor, ha ha.) At times the play turns self-aware and into a sort of meta-theatre, which I thought was also very well done and quite funny. But, despite the characters, the show really belongs to the piano player, who sits at the back of the stage and provides all the music. This ranges from the main songs to a sort of "Animaniacs"-like stream of evocative snatches at just the right time during the dialogue. It's as much a part as some of the minor cast, since the guy filling the role last night brought in a certain amount of interaction with the other players and some wonderful and subtle things for the audience to pick up on (like changing hats or pulling out a conductor's baton during what would be the big classic orchestral numbers). The songs are interesting, with rhymes that are either very clever or so predictable you can guess them before the next line even starts — there didn't seem to be much in between. Modern songwriting is generally better than the old stuff I listen to, though, so I enjoyed it. All in all an excellent show. My only regret is that, even if I find the songs online, I'll be able to sing very few of them thanks to all the gratuitous bad language thrown in. I suppose I'm too old-fashioned or something. The style of the play was perfect; I have no trouble with things making little or no sense if the comedic effect is good (think Monty Python), but the writers could perhaps have been a little less coarse on this one. |
Saturday, July 21, 2007
1:53 p.m.
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This morning I woke up at 4:50 a.m. to drive Alan to the airport. It was probably the easiest time I've ever had, or at least the easiest time in several years, getting up that early — much nicer than getting up at 4:30 or whatever it was for the triathlon in Columbus just two years ago this week. It helped, I suppose, that I somehow managed to fall asleep last night not long after 10, and also that there was an externally-imposed goal of leaving by 5:00... which was met to the minute. I was home again at 6:00, almost again to the minute, which surprised me a little because I'd been allotting 40 or 45 minutes for the drive each way. I thought about making myself a bunch of pancakes for breakfast, but then had the lazier idea of reading in bed for a bit first, which then turned into the laziest idea of turning off the light and going to sleep again in my clothes. From which I didn't wake up completely, after a bunch of kind of random dreams, until just before 11:00. The whole waking-up-early thing is actually an excellent idea that I should continue applying to my mornings. Both Thursday and yesterday I was out of bed at 7:40, which greatly enhanced my productivity both in terms of work and getting a lot of other errands done. A lot has to happen in both categories by August 1. Objectives for today are going to clean out more of my apartment, changing the flat tire on my bike, and — as silly as it might sound — ITG. I was listening to some of the music on my computer yesterday while I was working, and I just can't hear "Utopia" three times in a row without feeling energized to the point of wanting to play the step file. I've already noticed that, in some places, if I let myself hum or wordlessly sing the songs, I end up producing only the notes that correspond to steps in the game. This gives me interesting ideas about people memorizing a given song that way for each of the levels in the game and then singing them together all at once. I guess that would be a cappella mixed with Ray Conniff and modernized by 50 years. Or a good thing for SCS Day. |
Sunday, July 22, 2007
10:06 p.m.
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Well, yesterday turned out to be a remarkably unproductive day: the 6 percent of the world that had earphones on and ran away from the siren call of Harry Potter was engaged in other activities. Combined with a good serving of laziness on my part, this kept me from accomplishing any of the three objectives I wrote about yesterday. The only thing I did manage to do was find out that I can spend an hour trying to change the tire on my road bike and still not have completed the job. I don't suppose they've yet invented magically shrinking tires, or equally magically enlarging rims, but I still remain defeated in the simple game of making the one fit around the outside of the other. If you catch me on the bus to the South Side sometime this week, looking simultaneously forlorn and frustrated, carrying a bike wheel and inner tube kind of uselessly in one hand, you'll know the expected conclusion to this matter — I think I'm just going to have to take the thing down to REI and hope that their tools or techniques are better than mine. In much happier news, today was by contrast a decently productive and exciting day. I went through some more junk at my apartment, with the view of hopefully condensing everything by next weekend into some finite and manageable number of boxes to be transported to the new house. I came back, a little after 4:00, kind of horrified at the amount of stuff I own and have managed to save over the last six years. I grabbed Chris on the way back in my car, and then we met gwillen in Scotland Yard for a bit of ITG. It was an excellent session. At the end of the first game, I chose a 7 marked medium over a 5 marked easy, and came away passing my first 7. The song was "Anubis" — not one that I'd ever played before or had been planning on making among my first 7s, but an excellent candidate for it as it's probably the easiest 7 I've seen yet. Extreme happiness either way, certainly! This evening, Tyler and I brought order to chaos and such by taking our frustrations out on the kitchen. The refrigerator, freezer, and cupboards have been cleared of all old and rotting food; the tea and dry goods have been classified and consolidated; the spice rack has been organized and alphabetized. These are all manifestly Good Things, as the kitchen continues to be the most recalictrant room in the house when it comes to keeping clean. Now if we can just keep the dirty dishes from piling up in the sink while people dump food scraps on top of them, or rice bits from collecting underneath the burners on the stove, we'll be in fine shape. |
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
11:56 p.m.
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Today's the day that (int)greg.getAge() starts to return a different value, the biggest practical effect of which is that starting next Wednesday I'm responsible for my own health insurance. Over the past month or so, in fact, I've completed pretty much all of the remaining steps that make me my own Real Adult Person™, completely separated from my parents and a stand-alone resident of the There are some who would claim that 24 is a perfect age. I can't really say — one of the prime things I've learned from being 23 is that I shouldn't try to predict the future. This coming year certainly has a pretty high record to beat in terms of unpredictability and sheer variety of mental states, but, all told, it's also getting its start at a time when such lofty and abstract terms like "absolute happiness" and "greatest potential for success" have more concrete definitions and more real possibilities associated with them than at any other time I can remember. I'm excited for that. And it's true that the new age-year is off to a pretty perfect start. Tonight I had excellent chicken pad thai — probably my second-favorite meal now, if I think back over what I always order in restaurants — and green tea from Bangkok Balcony, followed up with Rita's ice cream for dessert. Alan brought back Season 4 of "Voyager" from his recent trip to see his parents, so we watched one of my favorite episodes that I remember from way back when I was in high school. My parents are coming Thursday evening for dinner, cake, and furniture-moving, so I have more fun to look forward to as well! |
Friday, July 27, 2007
11:17 a.m.
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Public service announcement for those who haven't heard yet: I have a (relatively) new phone number. You can tell it's the new one because it has an Ohio area code in the middle of it. The old number will be invalid after Tuesday. If you'd like to update your address book or cell phone directory or scrap of paper where you keep contact information, you should let me know in any of the usual ways. |
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