ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
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Saturday, July 28, 2007
11:35 p.m.
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This has been an interesting — well, at least unusual — week, mostly due to the side effects of my birthday. I"ve been getting up at 7:40 each day to take care of some "morning task," and those have been carried out with lesser and greater degrees of success. Getting a PA driver's license and re-registering my car, for example, I'm going to need three trips downtown and a visit to a certified mechanic who can write down the VIN from my dashboard and sign a form saying that he did it correctly. This will hopefully be accomplished by next Tuesday morning. I have, at least, managed to get the post office to forward my mail and Verizon to pay back the amount they overcharged me for failing to cancel my DSL order when I asked them to. And the grand emptying of the apartment is progressing at a non-zero pace.
My apartment is in its death throes, which is a sadder thing than it might sound. Almost all the furniture is out, except for a few little things, and the rest of my stuff has been being shipped off by the carload as I find time to sort and box it. By the end of tomorrow, there'll be really very little left to recall the environment where I spent almost two years. It's kind of a sad thing — after all, it was my first apartment, and I'd managed to get myself quite established there on my own. Sometimes I feel like I'm giving up a certain sense of order, independence, and control by living with people again. I mean, at the apartment, if I wanted to invent arbitrary and elaborate systems of dealing with recyclables, dishes, resource use, and general upkeep of the place, the vote of implementation was always unanimous. All the cleaning was mine, but all the mess was mine too. Here at the house, though, it's often very difficult to get such a stable balance — our sink piles high with unclaimed dirty dishes in a shockingly short amount of time, and of course with four different people there are going to be four different mess tolerances, four different lifestyles, and four different preferences for how to arrange things. I might be a little worried about how to keep things running smoothly enough for my liking without pestering people out of their minds with my little recycling signs and e-mails about leaving lights on.
But there's always one area of my life where I don't have to worry about any of that, where things just seem to fit so perfectly and effortlessly together. This has been a pretty good weekend for that sort of thing, from opinions on fuel efficiency to the four years' worth of Observers in my closet. It's kind of like how nice it was to discover that Chris, Alan, Zack, and I cook so well together, but extended into those same silly trivialities that make the apartment-to-house transition a little unpredictable.
And, I say, the cooking has been going quite well recently. Making and eating good food is so much nicer when you're not by yourself. Last night there was Italian-seasoned teriyaki pork stir fry with rice, and today the fare consisted of lemon-pepper tilapia with pasta, tomato-mushroom-olive sauce, teriyaki mushrooms, and chocolate pudding pies for dessert. I was thinking about how I would make this last one into an all-out three-course meal by starting with Car's basil, mozzarella, tomato, and olive oil salad, but then changing the dessert to something a little lighter and perhaps more Mediterranean to match.
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Monday, July 30, 2007
12:07 p.m.
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Only quick updates today, since I decided that I should probably write shorter and less difficult-to-follow entries. The car has been registered (finally!), with a license plate number that I find extremely satisfactory. Total cost: $68.50 to the state and $41 to AAA, thanks to the weird decentralized system they've got here where no one gets access to the single Pennsylvania DMV in Harrisburg except through an authorized "messenger service." The apartment has been emptied (again, finally!) and turned back over to the landlord. There are few things without physical pain that I enjoy less than moving, but having a helpful and sympathetic second person — not to mention one who'd give my dad pretty good competition at making things fit in boxes — is an excellent thing. I have only one week before I get my vacation.
And, before I forget it, does anyone know where people go to get haircuts in this city? Don't recommend Supercuts, since I probably don't trust them, but beyond that I have no clue and am open to possibilities.
Context Clues: I happened to pop in on CNN.com last week, only to have my attention drawn by the following headling: "Mindy McCready charged with battery." Of course I had no clue why this first and last name should be stated as if I should recognize it — it neither follows the usual standard for really famous people ("Bush") nor the one for middlingly-important people in high-profile jobs ("Ford CEO") — so the first thing I thought of was s/Mindy McCready/Cell phone/;.
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Wednesday, August 1, 2007
10:51 a.m.
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Hm... I'm not sure how I was able to write at noon on Monday that "the apartment has been emptied [...] and turned back over to the landlord," since I'm positive this wasn't actually accomplished until Monday night. The thing came about in this way:
On Monday morning I re-registered the car and took it into the mechanic's for a state inspection and an oil change. The plan for the evening was to rent a carpet cleaner from Home Depot, clean the floors in the apartment, return the cleaner, give the keys back to the landlord, and then come home with the last remnants of my stuff. You might see, perhaps, that this excellent programme of activities kind of implicitly assumes the availability of my car to do all this transporting. Which, as you might guess, is exactly what I didn't have Monday night. A little after 4:00 I got a call from the mechanic that, upon pressurizing the coolant system to look for leaks as I directed, he found a hole in my radiator. Replacing it was going to take until the following afternoon. (And it just figures that I get hit with a car repair, scourge of the middle class that it is, costing $660 only a day after being all excited that getting the $490 security deposit back from my apartment would go a long way towards a digital SLR I was thinking of buying in September. Now who knows.)
But this is the part where they write songs with lines like "I get by with a little help from my friends." I walked out to East Liberty, wheeled the steam cleaner down the sidewalks the three-fourths of a mile from Home Depot to my apartment, cleaned the floors, called the landlord, wheeled the cleaner back, and was met at my door by the excellent Ben and his gigantic vehicle just around 10:00. Then Alan made me chicken and pasta for a late dinner, and I eventually got back home a little after 11 feeling so much better after what had been a very trying and tedious day.
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Friday, August 3, 2007
11:25 a.m.
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Learning Thai consonants reminds me of learning cursive back in second grade. We only did a letter a day, starting with "i" and "t" as the easiest ones and slowly working our way up though more complicated lowercase letters and on into the capitals. I remember particularly working on the shape of the lowercase "s" (which I always associated with "science bottle" — it does kind of look like an Erlenmeyer flask) and the bumpy, but not too bumpy, top of the "r." I guess even at seven years old I was a handwriting perfectionist. Some things, like the exact aesthetically-pleasing curves of the capital "L," I know took me years to get right.
These are good memories to dredge up in case I start to get discouraged that I still only know roughly half of the Thai alphabet. The last round of consonants has been so far the most difficult because they're kind of mutant cross-bred forms of things I already know. If, for example, a yaw ying (ญ) was involved in a high-speed collision with a maw maa (ม), the resulting valid letter is neither a yaw nor a maw, but a new chaw (ฌ). Technically, this shouldn't matter at all — if I can remember the name of a little squiggly thing I first ran across in May, I should be able to remember the different name of a different little squiggly thing I first ran across in July — but somehow I've been through the new set three times so far and still can't reliably identify them.
But I'll have plenty of time to work on this stuff when I'm off next week. I also want to get myself back into biking and/or other physical activity again. Alan asked me if I could go downtown today and pick up his camera from the repair shop at Market Square, so I thought it would be fun to try out the new tire on my bike (finally fixed!) and also the new bike shorts I bought online in June. My first experience with bike shorts kind of reminded me of my first experience with running shorts three-ish years ago when I was training for the triathlon. Not that you get much of a direct performance boost by replacing cotton shorts or jeans with 87 percent nylon and 13 percent Lycra, but you feel a whole lot more professional or something. I was having so much fun feeling my legs nicely pumping away that I got myself downtown by a somewhat roundabout way instead of just going directly and coming back. Gmap Pedometer (on the link above) asserts that the trip was about 18.5 miles; this seems a little high to me based on previous experience, but I guess the best way to double-check is to move my bike speedometer off the mountain bike and onto the road bike, then make the trip again. I'd also be curious to see if I can keep up 17 m.p.h. for 17 miles, since on my old bike I used to be able to do 15 for 15 on flat ground. (The difficulty here in Pittsburgh would be to find 17 reasonably flat miles without stoplights and traffic getting in the way!)
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Tuesday, August 7, 2007
11:36 p.m.
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Two and a half grrs are in order for the weather this week, which is disrupting my week off and making me (and a lot of other people) very annoyed and uncomfortable. I have three days off here in Pittsburgh, and I wanted to spend a large portion of them on outdoor activities like biking, running, and wandering, but those are all very tiresome things to do when everything is hot and grey and wet. Even sorting papers in my room is becoming intolerable because they're all limp and soggy, which is just about how I feel too when I'm sitting inside in my heat-trap 29-degree bedroom. Outside, I haven't seen the sun since Saturday (my first day off); since then, we've been treated to three straight days of solid grey, where the light level is permanently set to 8 p.m., even in midafternoon, and where the air has approximately the same consistency as a Florida swamp. These wretched atmospheric conditions also managed to spoil the second half of the weekend trip Alan and I took to Cleveland: the rain started about two minutes after we'd parked the car top of the hill, and continued all afternoon and into the evening as we saw what we could of campus, gave up, and drove back to Pittsburgh. I'd very much been imagining the day with sun and blue sky and puffy white clouds — the Case campus is beautiful in that kind of summer weather, and we would have spent hours photographing things and each other or just ambling around. No such luck, though.
Nor have I been completely putting the time to good use on indoor activities. I poked a little bit at my Live Journal text-extraction program, which is the first step of a much larger bit of Web software that I want to do all kinds of linguistics calculations on an arbitrary journal, but I ran into trouble with how to secure people's passwords to my satisfaction. I really need to learn more about HTML forms and PHP. This morning I did manage to move some furniture around downstairs in anticipation of Jeff moving in next week, but there's still a lot of crap to go through and a lot of decisions to make about what goes where. Climbing yesterday with jcreed and Chris, and ITG this afternoon with gwillen and Chris, were both mediocre experiences for me in terms of performance. By the time I melted my really nice plastic container this evening by putting hot rice into it, I was feeling pretty unremarkable and not at all how I wanted to in the middle of my very long-looked-forward-to week off.
The thing that saved me so far was a combination potluck and Scrabble night at Selena's house. The usual Tartan copy staff group was augmented with Selena's boyfriend, Matt's sister, and Matt's sister's boyfriend, so the games were gigantic five-way affairs with teams. I had two excellent performances, the first of which included 96 points for WEEKEND — I believe only the third time I've ever used all my tiles, and certainly the highest single-play score I've ever had. There was also a good dinner, and then jasmine tea and blueberry pie between games for dessert. I came home around 11:20 feeling much better.
But I'm still putting my hopes on the upcoming Toronto trip (Thursday through Sunday) to be better than the first half of this week...
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Sautrday, August 11, 2007
8:59 a.m.
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Yay! I'm in Susannah's apartment in Toronto, in that fabled bilingual and metric land to the north, having a really excellent second half to my week off. And, since there's wireless here and I brought my laptop, I can start reporting about it now.
The fun began a few minutes before noon on Thursday, when Alan and I left Pittsburgh. We hit some rain going up 79 between I-80 and Erie, but nothing — we thought — that was too terrible. Things must have been worse back home, since we later checked our e-mail and Live Journals from here Thursday night to find that there had been massive flooding all over campus. (Maybe this is contractually required to happen yearly... there was the Great Wean Server Room Flood not all that long ago too.) We crossed into Canada between 3 and 4 p.m., spending about 30 seconds at the border stop and showing no identification. Then it was 130 kilometers to Toronto. I was beyond-expectedly excited to be in Canada again, and even though all the road signs had English on them, I was trying to think of them in French. We took a wrong turn coming into the city, but eventually we made it to Susannah and Julia's nice place near Chinatown by about 6:30 and had dinner with them outside on their balcony.
Yesterday was our first full day of exploring. Armed with an annotated (by Susannah) map, we first walked a few blocks to a grocery store for breakfast food and called in at Tim Horton's on the way back. Then we collected our cameras and poked around Queen's Park, Chinatown, and the University of Toronto. I'd heard, via Ryan North, about a new city park that had little fountain things coming up out of a concrete patio, and then the weekly alternative paper we picked up had a favorable (favourable?) review of it, so we got its address and made the two-mile walk there. I say, kids, if you ever have the urge to visit a place called Massey Harris Park in Toronto, just skip it. It's about a third of the size I expected it to be, and it looks like it hasn't had any maintenance work done on the landscaping in a couple of years.
But overall this is the sort of city for me. I happened to be wearing my sudo shirt yesterday, and the first interaction I had in this city was "Nice shirt! XKCD?" from someone walking down College Street. There are recycling bins on the sidewalks. The food you buy at the store has French on it. There are streetcars — everywhere. It's a big city with the stereotypically Midwestern friendliness. And I guess it looks like we fit in somehow: three people have already asked us for directions to various places, and we were able to answer one of the correctly, even.
After our rambles during the morning and early afternoon, Alan and I stopped by the Chinatown fruit markets a bit before dinner. Another point in favor (favour?) of living here: we found red plums at 59¢ a pound, containers of strawberries for 99¢, and tomatoes at eight for $1. And then, wandering around Kensington Market, we came across an entire store devoted to cheese. The result was inevitable: a dinner of French brie, crackers, fruit, fresh mozzarella, tomato slices, and green tea, all served on Susannah's balcony watching the clouds go by in the blue sky between the trees. I think I could get used to this.
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Monday, August 13, 2007
3:32 p.m.
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Further Toronto trip notes:
Always read the fine print, especially when paying for things. For example, Alan and I finished up our rambles Friday evening with a visit to the Royal Ontario Museum ("the ROM" — I wonder if there's a corresponding establishment in Alberta...). If you look up this place online and read the ticket prices, you'll find it's $20 to get in except on Fridays after 4 p.m., when it's $10. But elsewhere on the page is a little note saying that entry is free in the last 90 minutes before closing time on any day, so we waited until 8:00 and got in for nothing. Then there's the TTC (the Toronto Transit Commission), which advertises day passes at a frightening $8.50, but there's a clause in the arrangement saying that day passes on weekends can be used by one adult and up to five kids or by two adults and up to four kids. So Alan and I split one and went all over the place for $4.25 each, which is quite reasonable for a decently large system.
And Toronto is one of the golden lands of public transportation. All during the day Saturday we didn't wait more than three minutes for anything: buses, streetcars, or subway trains. Even at 9:30 at night the wait for the Spadina Avenue car was only about six or seven minutes.
If you're navigating the city by foot, you have the power to make your directions completely unhelpful. Just imagine this: —"Excuse me. Can you tell me how to get to Queen Street?" —"Sure. Just walk down this way and turn left at the Tim Horton's." —"Which one?" —"The one where there's a Second Cup just across." —"Which one?" You can probably have this exact dialogue just about anywhere in Canada: these two establishments are more common there than Starbucks and Caribou Coffee combined here, and any anglophone city worth mentioning seems to include a Queen Street somewhere. In Toronto Alan and I managed to find one Tim Horton's one level above another Tim Horton's in the same subway stop complex, and then later on two Second Cups right across from each other, which reminded me of that little Starbucks-crushing scene in "Shrek 2."
I already commented a bit last time about the availability of recycling in the city. This includes bins on the street corners, in restaurants, on subway platforms, etc. — combined with the public transportation, it's enough to already make me feel like I'm walking around in a city of 2.5 million Greg-brain clones. But wait, there's more! In talking to Julia on Saturday I found that the city also provides composting services when you put out your trash. Garbage and recycling alternate weeks for pickup, but compost goes every week so you can keep a separate little trash can in your apartment.
Saturday evening Alan and I discovered where all the skyline postcard pictures are taken from: it's a place a bit out into the lake called Ward's Island. There are actually ferries to three separate islands, even though I believe they're all connected by roads at some point, and we decided in favor of Ward's because it was where the amusement park wasn't. It was an excellent decision. Instead of masses of parents with strollers and coolers, we got sailboats, beaches, and a boardwalk. Not to mention very nice views of the city across the water as the sun set. There were some neat tricks in the sky that made me wish for a digital camera again.
In fact, the only really annoying part about the trip was that it had to end, which meant driving home. The entire way we were plagued by road construction slowdowns, and the Canadian side of the trip featured QEW-clogging heavy traffic for most of its 130 kilometers. Then, of course, we had to cross the border into the U.S. The process of going into Canada on Thursday took about 30 seconds, plus about the same in waiting for the car in front of us to be processed. The way back on Sunday, however, took long enough that I wasted an eighth of a tank of gas just idling the car in line. The cars and trucks were backed up who knows how far across the bridge and past the duty-free shop on the Canadian side, each one being intently scrutinized by paranoid representatives of the U.S. Stern and Humorless Questioning Department. As much as I love road tripping and inter-city driving, I get rather annoyed when a six-hour drive takes eight hours to complete.
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Wednesday, August 15, 2007
12:09 a.m.
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Today (by which I mean Tuesday) was a nice day, which is excellent because I was celebrating two years of living in Pittsburgh. I woke up with that morning-after-climbing feeling of being kind of strong and powerful and eventually got to the LTI around 10:30 to find that my computer had been moved to my new office upstairs. The timing fit very well with my date of celebration, and the new office looks like a quiet and nice place to work, but it does mean I give up the spacious, well-lit, and sometimes chatty master's lab for a windowless and serious workplace on an interior hallway. Well, at least going from sitting with more than a dozen students to being one in five won't be a bad thing. And I'm right around two corners from the kitchen.
Cleaning things out and shuttling them upstairs took up a good chunk of the morning, and then it was time for the MT lunch at noon. Heard some interesting stuff about noun phrase extraction, which seems to be working better for Sanjika now than it was in March when he ran it for me. I worked mostly through the afternoon, a pursuit strongly indicated by the amount of stuff I'd like to have done by Thursday, and sold my old software engineering textbook for $35.
I remember last year that I made myself a nice dinner on August 14; I did the same this year to keep the tradition going. It was a three-course meal of Car's salad (this is what I call spinach, tomato slices, and fresh mozzarella in balsamic vinaigrette dressing, although I think it's supposed to be made with basil instead of spinach), broiled pork chops, and strawberries in whipped cream. I should say that this year's dinner was made a whole lot more enjoyable by having someone to eat it with — fancy food is always kind of nice, but eating it alone in your one-bedroom apartment throws in a pathetic farcical air that I'm glad to be avoiding. After dinner, Alan and I met Ben for ITG in Scotland Yard, where I had an average performance. At the very end I tried "Euphorium" on 7 with the no-holds modification (I can't even read it otherwise) and failed about 15 seconds before the end of the song. Argh! I'm not sure if I've ever concentrated on playing a song as much as I did on that one tonight; I must have looked kind of crazed. I really though I was going to have it, because I know the song well enough to fill in the rhythms when I can't read them in the step file, and ever since I first heard Alan play this song months ago I've wanted to pass it. But this is the kind of disappointment that makes you come back for a second try rather than get frustrated and give up.
Off to bed now, though, since work and other things await me in the morning.
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Friday, August 17, 2007
1:44 p.m.
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Yesterday turned into surprise Tartan production night, which, though annoying, wasn't quite as bad as it could have been. I went up to the office at 6:00, like I did Wednesday, to see if there was any copy that needed to be read for our orientation issue. I was kind of expecting, like what happened Wednesday, that there might be a few things that I could either read quickly or take home with me and return before people came back into the office today. (The work schedule was supposed to be 1 to 6 p.m. each day.) Instead I found all the production computers in use and three members of the copy staff back in the cave in all-out production mode with a printer's deadline of 2 a.m.! I managed to escape long enough to go climbing and have dinner, but I promised I'd come back at 10:00.
Climbing was a decent trip — I got a new V2/3, and then Chris found a quite excellent V3 I could do, but I hurt my shoulder working on another V2/3 and had to stop kind of early. I think I've climbed a total of seven-ish V2s that are currently on the walls, and now two V2/3s and one V3. There are certain parallels between climbing and ITG, such as the fact that the ratings for various things aren't always monotonically increasing in terms of difficulty as the numbers go up. Also you can eventually do things you practice over and over again, but being able to do one you know well doesn't usually mean you can do other things rated at the same difficulty. If I practiced ITG a bit more, there would be a very reasonable equivalence for me, in terms of what I can do, between a Level 5 song in ITG and a V1/2 route in climbing, between a Level 6 and a V2, and between a Level 7 and a V2/3.
Anyway, the copy came in moderately slowly back at the office, so we had a game of Scrabble, but it also meant that I had to stay around until 2:30, when everything was finally finished. I had, at least, the satisfaction of writing "Do work, please" in Thai on the whiteboard as something fitting the situation that I actually knew how to write. We also had a good number of laughs in the copy cave, such as over a proposed SciTech headline: "Research links reading to brain activity."
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Sunday, August 19, 2007
10:34 p.m.
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Six years ago yesterday — it was another Saturday, August 18 — I had my freshman move-in day at Case. Today, it's the freshmen's turn here. As events have been happening, I've been going through a lot of those corresponding old memories: waiting in line to get my ID, getting a free water bottle from The Plain Dealer and a highlighter from The New York Times (both of which I still have), moving all my stuff from Lot 54 up into Tyler 222 with the magic of Sibling Power, the res life meeting at night with the long discussion over what separated cooking knives from weapons, and having my early mental map of North Side off by 90 degrees because we first entered campus from the side. (I remember thinking that Tyler was the building "behind" Sherman.) Somehow all these things feel not so long ago, but it's difficult to imagine myself these days as 18 again.
I've actually been kind of experiencing move-in because, as unlikely as it might seem, I know a freshman. Well, more accurately, Alan knew a freshman first because he mentioned DDR or ITG in his Facebook profile, and then the three of us played once when Zach (the freshman) was on campus for something over the summer. Today he invited us over to Donner for Wii games after he and his roommate got unpacked. Except for the old-style Bomber Man, I'd only watched Litvak and some other people play at a Case New Year's Eve party last winter, so it was my first time really trying anything interesting. The games are pretty fun. We first tried something called Wario Ware, which I sucked at at first but picked up satisfactorily quickly under a flood of people telling me how it worked. Then we switched to darts, which was no problem, and then it was going to be an off-putting kind of shooting game (which I would have sat out on) until all the freshmen realized they had a floor meeting at 8:00. After some of the people from neighboring rooms stopped in, I decided to not say anything about myself that would indicate I was anything but a somewhat old-looking freshman who'd unaccountably grown up in some kind of Amish land where video games were unknown. Seriously, these kids' talk was about 70 percent incomprehensible to me. Kind of fun being around them, though, and secondarily seeing if they'd let me get away with it — no one called me on the "Class of 2001" T-shirt I'd purposefully selected for the day.
The weekend has been surprisingly excellent — I mean, they're usually great, but it's nicer when your expectations, whatever level they are, are unexpectedly exceeded. Details of some of this, such as conversations with my five-year-old cousin, may be forthcoming when I don't need to clean up my room. Tomorrow I get to meet people from Alaska and hear about a language called Inupiaq, which will also be fun except the slight glitch of things starting at 9 a.m.
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Tuesday, August 21, 2007
2:08 p.m.
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My subconscious has been throwing me some really weird and kind of creepy dreams over the past 10 days or so. This is highly annoying.
I promised in my last entry to throw into this one some conversation tidbits I had with my five-year-old cousin over the weekend. (I don't think I ever mentioned it, but I was back in Ohio on Saturday for my grandpa's 90th birthday party.) This is the same cousin that I've described before as one of the cutest kids ever. I think this part was my favorite:
Dominik: Do you know where my house is?
Me: Yeah, a little bit.
Dominik: Do you have a car?
Me: I do. It's not here right now, but I do have one.
Dominik: Could you come over to my house some time?
At some other point, I asked him if he could count to 100.
Dominik: [Counts to 29 with minimal hesitation, drawing out the "niiiine" at the end just like everyone used to in elementary school, then gets stuck.]
Me: [After a moment.] Thirty?
Dominik: No. The one that starts with a 2. What's that called? Twenty. [Continues counting to 100 from 20 again.]
When we had to leave at the end of the party, he came up and hugged my knees.
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Saturday, August 25, 2007
12:32 a.m.
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I came home, about 20 minutes ago, to find an astonishingly large number of things in the house annotated with little yellow lined Post-It notes. These range in usefulness and amusement factor, going from cupboards labeled "glasses" and "cups" to "blender (it blends things)," "mail," "switch (doesn't work)," and "the floor." I am expecting a good story behind this... as soon as someone else comes home and can tell it.
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Monday, August 27, 2007
12:27 a.m.
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The last few days certainly have been interesting and eventful, mostly because of side effects from freshmen, and then returning students, filling campus to the maximum carrying capacity again. It's been kind of fun to watch things get more animated by degrees, starting with training for the orientation staff, followed by a huge flood of freshmen, and finished with a dump of old people who are all having house parties. (I came home Saturday night from half-price, and from the frat quad all the way to our street it seemed like every house was open to everyone passing by.) But I should tell things in the proper order.
Friday actually started out with a bit of a crisis — not a nervous attack or anything serious, but I got way too fed up with myself about something I shouldn't allow to bother me (ITG, since if I don't say it I'll get comments asking for the details anyway), and then I was getting more annoyed for being annoyed in the first place, etc., until I eventually just had to walk away and head into Schenley for a bit. I guess this is a byproduct, for the year-plus that I've been nominally playing ITG, of exclusively playing it with people who are worlds better than I am — the sort of people who laugh in the face, at least implicitly, of things I can barely read, plus the preekie who really did laugh in my face because I have "that little rhythm" that I was still struggling with 6s after a year. But the cure was not long forthcoming: as I say, I walked out in the park a bit, got a lot of thoughts out, had lunch with Alan and Ian, and then worked quietly and nicely from Fairfax for the rest of the afternoon. In the evening there was cheese and chocolate fondue at the Melting Pot, followed by a very nice five-mile walk back from Station Square. By Saturday morning I was humming ITG songs again.
And then it looked like a good day for something cool, so I dug out my goggles and combination lock and headed to the UC to go swimming. I made it a rather short outing — just long enough to make sure that I haven't in fact forgotten how to swim over the past year and to decide that I could probably still go a decent distance if I had to — and then walked back home. I say, I love living close enough to campus that home to the UC is even shorter than Kusch or Glaser to Veale. The only bad part is that I discovered I stupidly left my goggles in the locker room showers, which to my intense annoyance had been scooped up by thieving pirates by the time I went back to collect them perhaps an hour later. So now no more swimming unless I expend $15 and time enough to go to a sporting goods store and buy a new pair. The UC's appetite for stuff recently has been getting quite voracious. So far this summer it's gulped down a lens cap and a USB drive belonging to Alan, and now it's starting to go after my accessories as well.
Today was the grand move-in-and-out day. Marty, Philip, and Zack came over in the early afternoon to cart Marty's 11 computers (unless I miscounted) over to Roselawn, and in the middle of this process Car and her mom arrived. Then, in the middle of that process, we got Erin, who's staying with us for a few days until her own lease starts Sept. 1. I'm extremely happy to have the "correct" four of us in the house now: it means we can clean things up (badly needed!) and finally arrange our furniture properly.
Classes start tomorrow, which is mostly exciting but a little bit sad because the summer's over. I'm not really sure what kind of a semester this one will be yet. Further details on that, perhaps, by the end of the week.
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Wednesday, August 29, 2007
10:33 a.m.
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If Mark's conversation is "remarkably 19th-century," I feel I'm on a similar track. Monday night I managed to get this reaction from #cslounge just by saying hello and having the usual conversation-openers with one person in particular:
23:19 < fawndaddy> whoa <ghannema-laptop> isnt a bot
23:19 < sajasj> LOL
23:20 < sajasj> fawndaddy: No, no, he is not :-p
23:20 < ghannema-laptop> I DO NOT KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN THERE ARE NO HUMANS HERE
23:20 < fawndaddy> lolol
23:20 < fawndaddy> your first messages seemed really algorithmic
23:20 < sajasj> well, we haven't taken him apart yet
23:20 < sajasj> so maybe he is :-p
23:20 < ghannema-laptop> :-D
23:20 < sajasj> *shrug* :-p
23:20 < ghannema-laptop> My fault for using the word "detect," I suppose.
23:21 < sajasj> heh
23:21 < fawndaddy> indeed
23:21 < fawndaddy> and using punctuation :O
23:21 < jbauman> robots always use fancy words like that
23:21 < ixdy> ghannema-laptop: your greeting to sajasj also sounded scripted
I guess the reaction's not totally unwarranted, and yesterday I did have two separate conversations, with (my sister) Chris and Alan, about how brain are like CPUs.
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Thursday, August 30, 2007
9:46 a.m.
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I've spent a lot of the summer, and now this first week of class, feeling a lot like Feynman before he saw the rotating cafeteria plate:
But when it came time to do some research, I couldn't get to work. I was a little tired; I was not interested; I couldn't do research! [...] I would say to myself, "Look, they're giving me these wonderful offers, but they don't realize that I'm burned out! Of course I can't accept them. They expect me to accomplish something, and I can't accomplish anything! I have no ideas..." [...] Then I had another thought: Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing — it didn't have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with.
Reserach progress since the spring has been extraordinarily slow. I can't imagine why my advisor hasn't outright yelled at me yet: I often feel like I've spent two years doing minimal code maintenance and trying a few new things that failed, and they probably expect more out of you in grad school than low-level drone activities like these. I expect more out of myself, at least. I'd like to make a contribution, to publish a paper, to feel like I've done something. Instead I too often feel like a dunce, and then I start to wonder what essential intellectual capability I'm missing. I'm not going to get into the "everyone's smarter (or faster, or better...) than me" argument — I still feel it, but it's not very helpful to dwell on it.
I would love to adopt Feynman's solution. Several times over the summer I thought to myself that I would love nothing more than the world putting itself on pause for a month so that I could play around with things without worrying about my next advisor meeting or putting the requisite amount of time into the project work that's funding me. I would love to kick the MEMT code to the curb for a few weeks and mess around with various things related to that Live Journal analysis program I'm still supposedly working on, or learn some more Thai and try to write a segmenter for it, or play with VMWare and Gentoo and whatever else sounds fun. These things would get me going again, I expect, but unfortunately they're not what I'm supposed to be working on. They're not what my advisor's going to ask me about in 57 minutes. They're not why I'm here. But, dang it, I want them anyway.
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Friday, August 31, 2007
11:15 a.m.
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There must be some unwritten law at this university — maybe Andrew Carnegie had the official hex put on him by one of the Scottish lochs — saying that water is this institution's nemesis, and that battles in a sort of on-going war between the campus and that force of nature must occur with high frequency. Probably most people reading this remember the Great Wean Server Room Flood of 2005 and the more distributed flood that took place a few weeks ago when Alan and I were in Toronto. Yesterday we got hit with the other extreme, in the form of a broken 20-inch water main in North Oakland, which according to the news left people with reduced or no water from Polish Hill to Greenfield. (For the non-Pittsburgher: I think that's about four miles.)
It was kind of fun, actually: the water pressure on campus dropped over the course of the afternoon, and we kept getting e-mails from Facilities and SCS about the effects. First the bathrooms across campus were shut down. Then no water meant the air conditioners couldn't run, as they apparently require a "chilled water supply," so all the project servers in Wean were turned off as the temperature in the machine room rose while I was in the AVENUE meeting. I was released, around 5:45, and got the news from Car via Alisa that our house had no water, so Alan and I went briefly to Fairfax (which only had reduced pressure) to use the bathroom and then to a Chinese buffet in Oakland for dinner. The strange thing was that, although Hobart and Phillips streets in Squirrel Hill had completely lost water, Craig Street and the main part of Oakland seemed to be just fine. Today the water's back, but we're under a boil alert through tomorrow.
The Story: As usual, there's something off in the newswriting of this Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article, but it at least has the factual details of the water main break, if you're interested.
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Monday, September 3, 2007
12:32 p.m.
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I've been giving a pretty incomplete picture of my life recently, which I suppose is a side effect of too often implementing my mental "stuff to write about" list as a stack rather than a queue. New things keep coming along and booting the old things out of the way. Today's is that I finally succumbed to self-pressure and ordered myself a digital SLR yesterday afternoon. Very soon now I will be the owner of a Pentax K100D (roughly equivalent to a Nikon D40, except it fits all my old Pentax K-mount lenses), and then I will be very poor but very excited. I spent part of Friday afternoon, when I was feeling physically lazy thanks to the usual beginning-of-semester cold that attacked me suddenly from Thursday, figuring out how I can pay for the thing, and though the restaurants (and probably the climbing wall) won't be seeing much of me between now and December, I think I can manage it. This is partially due to the excellece of Amazon.com, which sells for $450, in this case, what goes in the stores for $600. Which is good, because I also had to get an SD card for the camera and should also look at an external hard drive for storing its photos.
Other big news yesterday includes that we finally started getting the house in order. Car and I attacked the bathroom with various cleaning supplies; a lot of the furniture downstairs has been put into its final location; the basement is slowly emptying of other people's random stuff. The kitchen is on the agenda for today, which means I should finally be able to get the box of tea and other baking supplies out of my bedroom.
The good food that was supposed to be had yesterday, since it was the second of the month, got reshuffled to Saturday instead. I went with Alan, Ben, and Ben's friend John to a Chinese/Japanese place about 45 minutes south of here that John said was really good. I didn't get the full impression, since I only had lo mein and tea, but the others said it was worth it. In the Never Expected That Department, I found myself surrounded by a conversation on various types of caviar and discovered that I was the only person out of the four of us who'd never had any. Chalk it up to my being American and cheap, I suppose: the only experience I've ever had with the stuff was stocking it at Heinen's, where it was one of those weird things (such as clam juice) that sold so slowly that it feels like we only ever ordered it once the whole time I was there. Yesterday's dinner, by contrast, was breaded pork and pasta, which should have also included the corn on the cob I forgot about, followed by pound cake and Cool Whip.
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Wednesday, September 5, 2007
12:42 a.m.
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I'm pretty sure the only time I've ever used an emoticon in here is when I was imagining the sort of translations that might come out of an MT system trained on blogs, but tonight I really am speechless beyond ":-D."
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Wednesday, September 5, 2007
3:16 p.m.
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I say, this online-journal game is hard. If I don't write enough details, I get accused of being what is distastefully referred to as an attention whore. If I put in too many details, I get comments yelling at me for gushing about relationships. Apparently it's a very narrow line we digital authors walk: in some posts, I'd feel like I'd be taking up more space trying not to offend anyone than would be used by the straight-up content itself. Anyway, to reduce the risk of further annoyance, for those who are inclined to get annoyed, I've helpfully created the following Official Disclaimer, which you should mentally interpret as being attached to all future posts as well as each of the nearly 600 entries I've written so far, preferably in small type and attached to the main text by an asterisk.
Disclaimer: Greg's Online Journal, in Whatever Form You Choose to Read It (hereinafter "GOJIWFYCTRI"), is a reasonably accurate, mostly chronological, and partly philosophical account of Greg's Life TM, ©, LLC, GmbH, &c., and therefore contains content that has been shown to draw on, provoke, or otherwise induce an emotional response in Greg (two-tailed t test with c = 0.95). The U.S. Surgeon General has warned in an official report — or at least he would, if he read GOJIWFYCTRI — that some of this content may also draw on, provoke, or otherwise induce an emotional reponse in you (hereinafter "you"). Possible side effects include laughter, thought, disagreement, interpersonal bonding, repulsion, or a curious desire to know more. GOJIWFYCTRI is part of this complete diet of information sharing, but only part. Please consult your author if you require further interaction. Batteries not included.
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Thursday, September 6, 2007
11:02 p.m.
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The UPS driver must think I'm insane — out of the four packages I was expecting in the relatively near future, three of them came today. The best three, too, I might add: my camera, 500-GB external hard drive, and 2-GB SD memory card were all waiting for me in a big pile by the door when I came home for dinner around 6:30. Of course, as soon as I'd gotten the dangerous substances like tomato sauce and cranberry juice out of the way, I started breaking into cardboard boxes.
Here is my camera's first picture:
The face is intentional; the horrible drop shadow is not. I wanted to see what else the camera could do, so I wandered a bit through campus and tried a few handheld night shots. Most of them came out too blurry, as expected, but somehow I managed this excellent image with a one-second exposure:
One thing that made me very happy, besides having this great new toy to play with, is that I can plug my hard drive and my camera into my Ubuntu laptop and have both recognized right away. I was kind of afraid the camera would need some Windows-only driver in order to operate. I now have a very strong prediction of what I'm going to be doing this weekend.
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