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ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
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Monday, September 10, 2007
12:20 a.m.
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There are some situations in which a mediocre or bad movie can be just as enjoyable as a good or excellent one. Among these, for example, would be watching the second new "Star Wars" movie with Susannah, at once a fine actor herself and an enthusiast of that horrific sort of bad community theatre that doesn't quite work, or the C-Club's showing of "Hackers" two weeks ago in Wean 7500. Tonight, I'm sorry to report, missed being such a situation by about as much as I would miss winning first prize in a basketball shoot-out competition. The offering was "Plan 9 From Outer Space," a title you know can only come from the '50s, and overall a movie that, if you believe what people were saying about it beforehand, would be eminently suited for a group viewing with a good dose of mockery thrown in. The line in front of McConomy at 9:55 was entirely KGB people, which should also have been a good thing. But we ran afoul right from the very beginning, I'm afraid, as the row behind me contained the loudest people in the whole place, all feeding off of each other like those giant blood-sucking plants that sometimes feature in other bad sci-fi movies. Now, if you want to provide 90 minutes of uninterrupted verbal output about a particular film, there are some excellent places for that. One of them would be in the comfort and not-right-behind-me-ness of your own home, where you only risk annoying your living room furniture; another would be on the bonus part of the DVD that's labelled "director's commentary." And even in the second case there are limits. If I wanted, for example, to hear hearty and vulgar aspersions pertaining to posited sexual relations between the full n-by-(n–1) set of character pairs, I'd sit myself down with the movie's IMDB cast list, a drunk frat boy, and a double for-loop and get the thing over with in a few seconds. But I shall refrain myself. It's enough to say that I was unable to provide any witty comments of my own about the dialogue, being able to hear only about six sentences of it the entire time. If you are going to mock, mes enfants, mock well and in the proper proportions. And, great goodness, if you really think, based on zero evidence, that the actors playing the two airline co-pilots are actually harboring repressed sexual tensions and want to strip each other's clothes off, present your opinion quietly to the blood-sucking plant next to you and not to me. |
Friday, September 14, 2007
10:46 a.m.
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My subconscious has been very active at night this week. I keep waking up in the morning remembering at least subjects and vague images from around four different dreams, and there's always one that I remember in decent detail. Sunday night it was of someone on the Tartan copy staff trying to turn the rest of us (her classmates) into zombies so she could control us, make us do worse on our homework for the class, and thus ensure a better curve for herself. I outran the zombie drone she sent after me by losing her among the houses and streets of my old neighborhood in Michigan, which I knew how to navigate but she didn't. Monday night I met a time traveler who'd made his first successful trip from the parking lot between Newell-Simon and Hamburg. "Fifty years ago, this was one of the largest open spaces in Pittsburgh," he told me. "Fifty years from now, there'll be a plaque here with my name on it." Then we went grocery shopping in 1987, and eventually I ended up at a KGB event with Captain and Admiral Janeway from the series finale of "Voyager." And then just last night I was in high school French class again, with the class as rowdy and unwilling to learn as ever, and Mrs. Gurnack (and some guy who was supposed to be her husband) decided to teach us vocabulary by dividing the class into two teams and having a war. We each had to write down numbers on a sheet of paper, which were then shuffled and dealt out as our HP limits. Lots of random smaller dreams too, which I won't relate here. If I were an actual novelist, instead of an errant scribbler with various works in various stages of completion scattered across my hard drive, I'm pretty sure I could get a really good story a month just by adapting bits of things that pop up in my dreams. I just don't have the time to formalize them. In real life, yesterday was the best day of the week so far. I think I knew that was going to be the end result around 7:10 a.m., even though I hadn't done any work or had my advisor meeting yet. In terms of what really matters, though, the Good Day bit was set to 1 in the space of about two seconds. I should make myself useful before breakfast more often. And then I did have my advisor meeting, during which I was told I was "doing exactly the right thing" with respect to a bit of code I'm working on that collapses one-to-many alignments in a parallel corpus. Somehow progress leapt out of the ether and jumped into my research folder; I felt like I was able to offer my advisor updates on everything we'd talked about over the last few weeks. I found it kind of difficult to concentrate in machine learning recitation after about 5:30, but there was dinner a little after 7 and then a wonderful showing of "Paris, je t'aime" in McConomy at 10. (I'm really working the McConomy movies this week; this was the third in seven days.) What did I say about this movie when I first saw it in April? "I say, [...] go see this movie and see it with someone you care about." Repeat as desired. |
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
9:49 a.m.
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Life has been pretty crazy recently, which probably explains why I'm updating only about once every four days. There have been some fun things that I've missed writing about, like the CMU Philharmonic concert last Tuesday or the fact that I spent the weekend at a wedding for Amber and Aaron (two of my Case friends), and I also realized last night that I never got around to making the usual "This is what I'm up to this semester" post back when classes started. And since doing that now would pretty much also take care of explaining the two or three bad days I've had in the past few weeks, I think I'll make that post now. The reason I was waiting was because the one class I'm actually enrolled in, Ph.D. machine learning (10-701 or 15-781, depending on what department you're in, I guess), was cancelled for the first two weeks of the semester. It started last week, though, and now we've had three lectures, one regular recitation, and one special recitation to go over background stuff. (Another special one, on Matlab, is scheduled for today.) That should give you an idea of how this class is going, especially when I mention that there are four TAs. I was already ambivalent about Language & Stats I, I hated Language & Stats II, and now here I am in a class with even more gigunderous probability equations and incomprehensible results. Someone normal someday, like a job recruiter, is going to look at my transcript and say "Hm, I see you have an excellent background in statistical methods. Let's talk about the little details of the voted perceptron algorithm, contrasting it with degenerate EM and the HMM inside-outside case, and see how it might be transformed with Lagrange multipliers into a linear program." And then I will look blank and say "?" — not even a word, just "?" I've been grappling with the first homework assignment in machine learning, which is eight pages of unreadable math and line noise to me, and after working on it for three hours I have completed enough to get me three points out of 100. For the rest I can't figure out what they want, or what I'm supposed to do, or why they seem to be expecting me to get a "messy integral" with a gamma distribution when I've just got a fraction with a lot of junk in it that I had to add in order to get the gamma in the first place... Last night I got so frustrated over this that I was useless for four hours. So much for the class I'm taking. I'm also TAing my advisor's class, Algorithms for NLP (11-711). This is a class I took as a new student two years ago, so the material should be somewhat familiar. So far it has been, to the point that I get really bored in lecture, but I'm discovering that understanding something generally, like I did when I was a student, isn't really enough: now I feel like I need to really understand the proofs, and the techniques behind them, at a very precise level so I can reproduce them formally and answer questions. It took me hours to get the notes ready for my first recitation, even though I was only presenting a problem that the previous two TAs had already come up with and explained. Same thing for the second one tomorrow, which I've been even more nervous about the correctness of since I came up with the problem somewhat on my own. Actually, if someone ever asks me what the job description of a TA is, I'm very likely to respond with "LaTeXing." I typset my recitation problems, and then add in my notes and solutions for a second version. Then there's the first homework assignment, and now its solutions, and by next week I need Homework #2 and then another set of recitation notes and homework solutions. I'm both concerned enough with the correctness and formal rigor of what I produce, and anal enough about my typesetting, that these documents are each taking approximately forever. And I haven't even gotten yet to the part of the proceedings where I have to grade 35 assignments. That comes at the end of this week. |
Thursday, September 20, 2007
1:15 a.m.
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I have been able to claw my way to having worked out and LaTeXed answers worth eight points out of 100 on the machine learning assignment (assuming everything I've done is correct). This has taken me six hours. And I think I've done everything that I have any clue about how to approach: the rest is just mathematical line noise to me. As is commonly said around here, this class can go die in a fire. Preferably a nice big one that I start. |
Friday, September 21, 2007
1:38 a.m.
"I began to be embarrassed at the thought that everyone was talking English entirely for my benefit [...]" These two quotes come from the same character of the same book (Selena from Sarah Caudwell's "The Shortest Way to Hades"), just pages apart, and I'd not previously thought about them as representing different states. Now, however, after expecting the first and getting the second, I note a definite difference between the two even if I'm not sure which one is better. In the first, you're at least on your own ground, even if you're rather grabbing the others and holding them hostage there with you; in the second, you're on no ground at all, although the overall group effort in speaking is minimized. I think the best answer would just be for me to learn more languages. This is just a fancy and abstract way of saying that I went to half-price at Fuddle tonight with Alan and his parents and repaid the meal very poorly in conversational terms. I guess I mostly felt kind of shy, even during the times when no one was talking, with butting into an otherwise wholly Thai conversation stream with horrible English pleasantries like "So how long are you in Pittsburgh for?" or "How are your quesadillas?" So mostly I just sat there listening for the odd word or two per paragraph that I might know, fielding from time to time an English life-line query about school. I definitely should have made more of an effort myself. Instead I went through about half of the meal thinking in French; at various points I felt like I could have started a conversation or made my next remark in that language. "T'as jamais essayé les quesadillas?" "Il y a certaines personnes qui font cela." "Ils ne veulent pas que l'on paie, évidemment..." Somehow hearing any foreign language puts me in French mode, which is probably a combination of the brain's separation between L1 and everything else mixed with a subconscious "Oh, another language? Ha! I can do that too!" I used to think it was really cool and indicative of high proficiency that I could get into French mode and get kind of stuck there, but more recent experience leads me to believe that the real mark of an excellent multilingual speaker is effortless and instantaneous transition between the languages involved. One fun part, though, was waiting out in front of Fuddle beforehand, when Alan must have slipped his parents the information that I was working on learning Thai. His mom turned around and said something to me along the lines of "You understand Thai" (I'm not sure if it was a question or not, since I wasn't expecting it, but I caught the essential), and I did in fact manage to come up with the correct answer of "A little," which was hopefully pronounced in something approximating the right tones, and which got a bit of a smile. Again, more of an effort on my part would have been nice, since I could have said more if I'd been thinking a bit. (Give me a minute to put a sentence together in that situation, and theoretically I can go as far as "I can speak and understand Thai a little, but not very well" — this being a conglomeration of some canned tourist phrases I got from that audio course I was messing with in May and June.) Basically the moral of the story, as in so many stories, is that we need either 28-hour days or eight-day weeks. Then I would have more time to devote to learning Thai again without neglecting my real work and other things. It was only earlier this evening that Car and I were swapping bits of Japanese, Thai, shorthand, Elvish, and other things and I was thinking how interesting those were as well. |
Monday, September 24, 2007
10:20 a.m.
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Technology and time are having some interesting interactions this weekend. Yesterday was the day that included the long-awaited "2007 09 23 14 38 00" — that is, the date on which hundreds or thousands of nerds converged on a park in Cambridge, Mass., to wait for something to happen at 2:38 p.m. in accordance with an XKCD comic that came out back in the spring. I really wanted to go, but things didn't work out well for that to happen this weekend. Also it's a 12-hour drive. But a few people from here did go, and as they were driving Saturday they connected Ivan's phone to the Internet and the rebroadcast the signal over wireless in the car, so there were all these Live Journal posts like "We're in New York!" or "Now in Massachusetts for the night." It was kind of interesting tracking their progress in this digital age of ours. Internet in the car is something I never would have even thought to attempt, since I guess I'm old-fashioned enough (or enjoy getting away from my computer enough) to have implicitly ruled it out. And then the actual meet-up was yesterday, and since then I've been feeling like I've gone back in time to a simpler era when news traveled by Pony Express and stagecoach. The rest of us back here at home have been wondering exactly what happened at 2:38 p.m. yesterday, and aside from links to a number of pictures posted on Flickr showing various CMU people at the event, we haven't had a full report of what the event was. Maybe Randall Monroe rolled up in a giant hamster ball and swore everyone to secrecy? There are, of course, the XKCD forums and Wikipedia, but I'm holding out for a fuller and more personalized account from one of the CMU people. This kind of fits in with a feeling I had Saturday night, when Car and I here, Philip at Roselawn, and Alan at his parents' hotel in Oakland were all somewhat connected to each other over IM and such. Philip was thinking of having an ITG party, encouraged by Car, but he had to finish his OS first with Alan, so I was getting progress updates in real life from Car and online from Alan, and eventually I poked Philip directly to see what was going on... I guess it's still true that very simple things amuse me! I hope it never goes away: as long as I have that characteristic, I'll never be bored. |
Thursday, September 27, 2007
1:50 a.m.
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If there were only such an invention as a brain tape recorder or a thought dictabelt, I'd be offering you a good-sized novella right now instead of the 800 or so words I'll probably allow myself to write before going to bed. I've picked up the interesting property of mentally composing journal posts out of my thoughts, and while I certainly don't mind if my thoughts decide they want to express themselves in well-formed, complicated, and complete sentences, I sometimes run the risk of concentrating on the prose I'm making up rather than on the experiences I'm having — but I'm getting a little ahead of myself here. Today was an "off" day. Around 2:30 I came up with the crazy idea that I should drop machine learning class, and once my brain had got hold of this easy-out quick solution to what's been bugging me recently, it started taking it for granted and wouldn't let it go. Then it started analyzing and agonizing over the decision and what it reflected on me. I poured out my despondent guts, primarily to Alan, who gave me the advice I'd hope to find in myself, and secondarily to Chrisamaphone, who took my more pragmatic view. You can have the whole infinitely-recursive mental devil's advocate game from me if you want it, but the class-dropping problem is really just a starting-off point, since I was whining to Chris in the cluster because I'd stopped there to see if anyone wanted to go wander around outside with me. After how depressed I was feeling this evening I thought that would be the perfect cure. But Chris and gwillen were busy with work, and when I got home at 11:55 it was to an empty house, so it was destined to be a solitary ramble. At 12:02 I left again, armed with two granola bars and a quote from Dorothy Sayers — "In the afternoon, she could bear herself no longer and set out, under a threatening sky, to wander about Oxford, and walk herself, if possible, into exhaustion" — laughing a little at the quote because exhaustion took almost 40 miles and 18 hours back in June, but still determined to ignore time and real life for a while and wander the dark streets of Pittsburgh until I felt better about things. And so I headed out, with no plan and no timeline, looking for anything that might catch my attention in the roughly four square miles adjacent to campus I feel comfortable walking around in by myself at night. My first instinct, somehow, is to walk up the hill on Forbes, avoiding the park but skirting the edges of Squirrel Hill. At Wightman and Phillips I find a bizarrely porched and balconied house — half a castle, really — that gets me into a mood of looking at the shapes of the other buildings. Phillips between Wightman and Murray is all new to me; after Murray, I try to pick out the one Squirrel Hill apartment I looked at when I was first getting ready to move to Pittsburgh in the summer of 2005, but I can't recognize it. At Shady I see that the street continues on into what's probably the confusing (though very scenic) twists of Beechview or Beechwood or Beechsomething Boulevard, but I realize I'm running out of geographic knowledge and turn left instead. A car goes by, playing loud rap music and buzzing to the beat when the notes match the car's resonance freqency; it passes. I decide to stop at the store for some chocolate milk, so I turn again onto Hobart and walk back towards Murray. Squirrel Hill is almost deserted: no cars and only a few people heading for the store like me. I find the milk, pay, and leave. The receipt has the time printed on it, but I make a point of not looking at it. It begins to rain. just a little, right as I'm leaving the store. I make my way up the street under the awnings, remembering how I waited 45 minutes for a 64A the night, during my first fall, when I saw "Proof" at the Manor because I only knew vaguely how to walk back to my apartment and wasn't sure how safe it was. This time, I glance down Forbes back towards home but then continue on northward because I now have a particular destination in mind. It will take me half an hour, almost to the minute, to get there if I follow the usual route, but I'm distracted by a narrow cobbled street that Ross pointed out to me the night of my first KGB party. It was at the house called Middle Earth, which I think I recognize on Wilkins as I turn away from it. Murray Hill Avenue goes up, but not quite as far up as Negley, and then down, but not quite as far down as Negley, before running me alongside what turns out to be Chatam College, now marked as Chatam University on a sign for parking. I reach the tight curve that I remember at the bottom of the hill and suddenly find myself among the houses that I will write fiction about when I write fiction. Narrow houses with tall peaked roofs and tiered balconies, set at impossible heights above the stone street. I'm suddenly in Europe — possibly Germany, although I've never been there. I wonder if Vicky would agree. Fifth Avenue, at the bottom, looks so small that I'm a bit surprised when I read the street sign. I'm a block past Negley, so I head back, pass within a tenth of a mile of Keith's apartment, and work my way north through the familiar Shadyside street. A few people are out, as usual, just like the time I took six Jell-O pudding pies down to Wes's house on a whim late one night in 2006. The busway bridge; my left ankle twitches a bit as if it's anticipating the end of the old road a quarter mile in front of me. The curve up to Baum is familiar, but already there are a few differences: the tire shop has been neutralized in grey-white paint; the Eckerd is now a Rite Aid. Around the corner from the gas station (unleaded at $2.879 a gallon), and there it is, although there's no kitchen, no bed, no bit of floor space to command if I want it. Even though the lights are on in the two front apartments, I walk up to the door of the place I used to live. There's a strange name on the mailbox of Apartment 4, neatly typeset in mixed case to replace my handwritten block capitals. The whole house seems to have gone more American: there are new names for two of the other units as well, and now three cars out back. I leave the porch as the rain starts again. Back across the curve to Centre and Negley, just like on so many past occasions. The way is still perfectly familiar; the spring isn't that long ago; I cover the old route on autopilot as well as I ever did. Now, though, it's in reverse, and I idly wonder if I might bump into a previous version of myself going back the other way after a long day of classes, homework, half-price, and cluster. The rain gets louder, and five minutes later I'm stuck under a lighted doorway on Ellsworth as the worst of it passes. A taxi comes by, stops, and a twangy, informal voice asks me for the address of the building. I give it and move on through the rain — I figure I can dry my hair at home with a towel, change out of the wet clothes, and be all right after a morning shower as long as my shoes stay dry. A few minutes later I'm looking from across the street at what's been my favorite house in Pittsburgh since the first time I saw it. It's dark except for a light from a distant back room that shows through one of the front windows. The Winchester Thurston School; Morewood Avenue; campus — and now it's a modern night again and I'm coming home from Fairfax after the usual "good night; sleep well." Forbes, deserted, looks smaller than usual, just like Fifth Avenue did before. A bit before Beeler my legs unconsciously pick up the pace for the home stretch. Drunk or sleep-deprived students are shrilly singing something unrecognizable from a window. My own street; home again. Mentally, it feels like I've lived through the last two years of my life again, but my sharper reasoning knows — and the microwave clock confirms — that it's not even been two hours. 1:47. I head upstairs to duly make my report to Live Journal. Tomorrow, when I'm rushing to campus to not miss my 11 a.m. conference call, or when I'm falling asleep in machine learning recitation (if I still have one on my schedule), I may hate myself for this, but tonight I don't care. |
Friday, September 28, 2007
5:27 p.m.
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Last night and this morning I gave myself a pretty good talking-to, logically demonstrating that it makes so sense for me to be upset about most of the things I'm currently letting upset me in such a passive way, so today we are feeling a little better. I think I just let a lot of small-ish and vaguely-defined annoyances all pile up over a period of however long, so that when one specific thing (what to do about machine learning) was giving me a relatively larger amount of anguish, the rest of the things (lack of research progress for more than two years, declining work ethic, being slow at things in general, feeling like no company will ever care enough about me to talk to me on the phone for five minutes, much less fly me across the country for a final round of interviews, etc., etc.) just kind of poured out as well and made me feel like an absolute failure for about 40 hours. In that frame of mind, I can't even objectively consider a true fact, such as that the average B.S. CS graduate from CMU starts out at a salary of $68,000 a year, without implicitly turning it into a depressing comparison about how much better everyone else here is than me and how I'd be lucky to get about two-thirds of that even with a master's degree. But after two days of this, even my uncontrollable subconscious brain was starting to see how ridiculous such thoughts are. So, like I said, we're getting better. I still feel like I'm fighting the universe in order to accomplish relatively straightforward little tasks, but I've often found this is just a reflection of my mental state rather than an indication that the universe is being particularly vengeful. I just need to figure out what's wrong with me, fix it, and then make something good happen to give me confidence again. For the curious, incidentally, my 105-minute walk from Wednesday night is mapped out here, where it assumes a starting and ending point of Forbes and Margaret Morrison. I think you'll have to ignore the distances a bit: I still find Gmaps Pedometer to be a little bit too generous in its estimates. Where it assigns a length of just over six miles, I have a hard time believing that the real distance is much more than five. |
Monday, October 1, 2007
11:19 a.m.
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It seems like it wasn't that long ago that Sonnie was starting off a post with "It's July these days," and now here we are in October. It's starting to get dark quite early now, and the weather's gotten noticibly cooler over the past few weeks. Not that I mind 20-degree days: my room's been very nice and livable again, and I don't object to wearing pants. I think I need to collect people to go apple picking sometime soon. This weekend was kind of mixed. On Saturday evening I had a difference of opinion with the color laser printer in CFA. I maintained that the correct sequence of events should be that I swipe my card, get charged $1.50, and then walk around the corner to find a 11-by-17 page in the tray, and when I flip it over there should be a nice image on it awaiting me. The printer, on the other hand, persisted in the belief that this last step was optional. I stormed home in kind of a huff after five attempted prints, having nothing to show for my annoyance except three terribly color-managed horrors and two entirely blank pages. So much for my print quota. But then Alan came over with evidence that the color management was apparently working fine, so I took him back to CFA with me to show me step-by-step how he made it work, and after further raiding my print quota I came home with three decent prints. Still, the experience annoyed me enough that I suggested half-price instead of cooking something boring at home — given how the past week went, I probably would have ended up setting the kitchen on fire — and that turned out to be the second-best decision of the week. Off we went to Joe Mama's in a group of seven, where I met Evan From the Internet. Since he knows Chrisamaphone, it was only a small surprise when he turned out to be a computational linguist. Playing Eat Poop You Cat turned into a suggestion of making a collaborative drawing on the eighth-floor Wean whiteboards, the amazing results of which you can see here. It was a lot like the time Katie and I started with a drawing of a small hamster in the lower right-hand corner of a sheet of paper, and then took turns adding attacks and defenses (and attacking and defending the attacks and defenses) until we filled the entire page with an extraordinarily chaotic scene that didn't make it at all clear whether the hamster was safe or got destroyed. Since tomorrow is the second of the month, we went out to dinner yesterday as well. This time it was Uno's, which always makes me think of Ann Arbor in the early '90s and a less-than-11-year-old me trying to puzzle out to himself whether the name of the restaurant ("Pizzeria Uno") was properly translated as "Pizza One" or "One Pizza." It turns out to be a non-issue these days: what people in southeastern Michigan call Uno's is now formally known, it seems, as Uno Chicago Grill with the pizza part taken out. The deep dish is still excellent, though, with the big chunks of tomato that I remember and the cheese so stringy that my dad never let us order the extra cheese topping because he was afraid we would choke. I spent a few hours grading once I got back home, and at 10:30 Alan and I ran off to Scotland Yard to play some ITG. I guess I haven't had an ITG update in a while. Aside from the executive order that I passed earlier in the week saying that, if I continue to be not mature enough to handle marathons without getting upset, then I just won't be allowed to play any for the month of October, the rest of the game is progressing pretty well. Playing the 6s pretty comfortably these days, I feel, and I've noticed on two separate occasions now that my feet can correctly step through long eighth-note runs without my conscious brain actually being aware of how it's happening. There was a lovely 7 earlier this week that was a solid run — I couldn't get the beginning right and failed right away, but then something else took over and I think I got through the rest of the song without missing more than a few steps. Last night I passed "Cartoon Heroes," forever subtitled in my mind as "gwillen's favorite 7," by a sort of fluke, and also came within five or 10 seconds of passing "D-Code" on 8. This week coming up is an important week for several different reasons, so I need to make it go well. This should be doable. |
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
11:32 p.m.
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Today was a day for remembering that, although I do a large number of things slowly and/or badly, there's still one thing that I do very well. It makes me really happy to know that I can make someone else happy, and seeing the soft eyes and natural smile on the right person, when you surprise them, is worth more than all the research publications in the world. The fortunes of my work and personal life may be kind of flipped from what they were six months and a day ago, but knowledge, understanding, and discovery don't only come from scientific pursuits. I know without question that I wouldn't trade the last half-year for anything. |
Random Stuff #42
Friday, October 5, 2007, 10:27 p.m.
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I almost managed to order food from the Thai truck in Thai today. Not because I've been practicing or anything (unfortunately, I haven't), but I suppose because the idea came back into my head after meeting Alan's family a few weeks ago. Then, I actually said about three sentences in Thai over the course of the weekend to actual Thai speakers, and, while I know the sentences sounded pretty awful, they were OK with them anyway. I couldn't quite do it today, though, even though I've had the set of food-ordering sentences I'd need mapped out in my head for months. Every time I think about high-school French, I think about those restaurant or post office or hotel or dry cleaners scenes we used to act out in groups, so to keep the trend going, I'll offer my own example in Thai. These are words I mostly know by sound only, so here's the rough romanization (there's no one standard system, and my IPA knowledge is pretty patchy) of what I think you'd get. I'm using brackets to denote unreleased final stops, by the way, which as far as I can tell is the default case at the end of a syllable: Me: Sawa[t] dee khra[p]. It's just about the world's simplest conversation: —"Hello." —"Hello." —"I'd like pad thai with chicken, please. Thank you." I looked up the words online and found that the whole thing doesn't use more than about 10 different letters and a few vowels. Since I really like the way Thai writing looks, I'll put the "real" written conversation here too. Me: สวัสดีครับ I should be able to do this — especially armed as I am with reserve ammunition like being able to answer simple questions about speaking Thai with "A little, but not very well" and anything else with "I don't understand." Maybe we will try again in a week. |
Sunday, October 7, 2007
10:36 p.m.
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My housemates are crazy people. They are at this moment engaged in making chocolate-covered bacon, which I can't possibly imagine coming out well. I've fled with my slowly-coming-together Perl code to the relative safety of the second floor. |
Thursday, October 11, 2007
11:01 p.m.
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The weather is cold suddenly! One of the most overt and immediate effects of this, for me at least, is that my tea consumption is going up. I had two cups today already, one caffeinated, just to have something warm to drink. The plunge kind of happened over the course of yesterday: earlier in the week we were pushing 31 degrees again, but then we had a day of pretty solid grey when the temperature didn't go up much from Tuesday night. Today, with the predicted high at 13, I came home to find the heat on because Car said it had been 14 in the dining room. This is a pretty dramatic change, but certainly not unusual for this time of year. Yesterday was kind of difficult. My work productivity, which had gone up over the weekend and the early part of the week, kind of bottomed out again, and by 9:30 last night all I really wanted to do was sleep. I was too hungry, though, so instead I distracted myself with the thought of food and ended up corralling together a half-price group of me, Alan, Philip, Jeff, and a tall guy who whistles a lot in the cluster and said almost nothing at dinner. (I said almost nothing too, but I imagine it was for a different reason.) Bed eventually, a little later than predicted. I guess one somewhat interesting thing from yesterday was my 11-711 recitation, the fourth one that I've taught. Alon asked me to review material on the analysis of algorithms (just up through introducing order-of notation), which I'd been kind of dreading because I expected 33 people in the class would go into comas of boredom while the two remaining people failed to keep up. Luckily I covered the stuff as a recitation rather than a lecture, as was originally planned, so some of the bored people just didn't show up, and I brought a deck of cards to visually demonstrate insertion sort and merge sort to keep the rest of the people awake. One thing I've always worried about in my recitations is that I'm deserving of the exact phrase another LTI student used to describe a professor two years ago: "He is quite nice, but his lectures are quite boring." Apparently, though, I'm doing a little better than that, because one of my officemates, who's taking 711, said that the sessions have been good and helpful. My morning commitments are on the rise again, with up to three days a week now requiring me to be on campus by either 10:30 or 11:00, which today meant I had to run to the IOD conference call with minimal breakfast and no time to shave. Fair enough, though, because today was a much better day. Advisor meeting went well, 711 lecture wasn't too bad, and then in the AVENUE meeting we talked about the design of an Urdu-to-English MT system we're going to be putting together. I've got some stuff to do for that, too, which I'm hoping will turn out to kick me into a better mental state with respect to work. We'll see how it goes, at least. My plans for the weekend are kind of open-ended, so I'd like to get a good amount of stuff done while I can. |
Friday, October 12, 2007
9:10 p.m.
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I was sitting at my desk at 12:19 this afternoon when I heard my phone make an unfamiliar noise, so I fished it out of my backback to see what it wanted. It turned out I'd just recieved my first ever text message. It was a fairly small note, compared to e-mail at least, but it made me feel so happy that I had to stop working for several minutes and just enjoy the feeling. It's too bad Western Union stopped transmitting telegrams (just a year or two ago) before I was able to send any; there's something so inherently exciting and romantic about that style of abbreviated English. You just know that, with the number of words so limited by sending rates or space, each one of them really counts. |
Monday, October 15, 2007
4:46 a.m.
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This is the point to which OS is affecting my life, even though I'm not actually in the class: I'm staying up all night to sit with Alan and Eight, who are still chugging through the requirements for the kernel checkpoint that's tomorrow. Today's been kind of a weird day by consequence, as I've taken up a supporting role for this great effort and have tried to fit my own work in on the side. I kind of feel like a housewife — today I've cooked two meals for three people (and served them off-site), cleaned the kitchen somewhat, gone grocery shopping, and variously dispensed caffeine and moral support as required. A worthwhile occupation, I'd say. I managed to slip in some grading, homework assignment creation, and a spot of ITG on the side, which was rather necessary because I'd been avoiding my own work Friday and Saturday. I still had to go edit at the newspaper from 8 until 11 p.m. I got there eight minutes early to find the copy cave going insane with homecoming content. (There's no paper next week because of fall break, and the weekend after that's homecoming, so the stuff's got to come out now.) We were running mostly on time when I left three hours later, just flooded with stacks and stacks of pages with really awful layout. The first time I wasn't actually reading anything was about 10 minutes before I left, which meant that our usual game of Scrabble was completely out of the question. Another thing about today is that I get to remember an idea that I first came up with on March 29, and that's to see if I've been able to make a journal entry in every hour of the day. I checked through my entry times just from 2007 and found, kind of surprisingly, that I've already got 22 of the 24 hours covered. (March was particularly useful for this.) My hand-coded site, which tracks entry times by when I start writing posts, tells me I'm missing 4 and 6 a.m.; the Live Journal version, which records when I finish an entry and post it, predictably says I need 5 and 7 a.m. I have to admit that I'm writing this post now with to influence the statistics a bit and pick up that early slot — and possibly on Tuesday I'll be able to get the later one as well, since I agreed to drive Alan to the airport before the 28X starts running. More regular information on the weekend, perhaps, when I get bored again. Right now I've been commissioned to make some ASCII art. |
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
11:26 a.m.
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Every now and then, I remember why people sometimes use the expression "sleep the sleep of the dead." Last night, tired and with a headache, I went to bed at 10 p.m., and the next thing I knew it was 9:30 this morning. I'm still feeling a little out of it even now: I think that, if I didn't have a conference call in an hour and massive piles of work to do, I'd prefer to go back to bed and just ignore today. But then I'd be even more messed up in terms of schedule when it came to tomorrow. The best answer is probably to go running or biking or something today so I feel more awake. That reminds me that I've been missing a lot of updates about more "real" things. Specifically, in the realm of biking, I forgot to mention that I gave myself a sort of a flat-ground speed test two weekends ago. The point was to maximize x such that I could bike x miles at x miles an hour. On a mountain bike I used to be able to get 15; I was expecting 17 on a road bike (again, on flat ground); my experiment on some of the riverside trails confirms that I can indeed get 17.7. I think I need to work on endurance next, because on the trip back home I definitely noticed I was slowing down. This past weekend had some fun adventures too. On Friday night I took a ramble through the extreme north part of Schenley, which basically means along Northumberland Street until it turns into a surreptitious dirt path along the edge of the golf course and back to campus, where it connects to the brick part of Frew Street. Then I poked around that intriguing tall red brick building on the hill there, which looks like an apartment building but is, as far as I can tell, unmarked and unnamed. It would make sense if students lived there, since it's so close to campus and really not much else, but I saw no evidence to support that. Probably it's some hospice or semi-supervised-care apartments for old people — all the really cool and convenient old buildings around the Case campus, which were crying out for an active and healthy student market, were things like that. On Saturday I decided to have an adventure with my camera, so I recharged the batteries and grabbed a downtown bus around 2 p.m. The goal was Mount Washington, but I felt like a tourist on Grandview Avenue taking the same old shots of downtown that everyone's got three dozen times already. I turned inland a bit, then, and wandered half a mile down Virginia Avenue to get a feel for what the Mount Washington neighborhood is actually like. At some point I remembered that I still hadn't ridden the T any further than Station Square — a massive two-year oversight on my part given how much I love trains and public transportation — so I mentally put away the camera-adventure plans and decided to have a transit adventure instead. At Station Square I got on the first outbound train that came by, which was a 42S "via Beechview," and rode it to the end of the line. Someone had conveniently left a timetable in the incline when I came down, so I had a map and everything with me. The various neighborhoods to the south are kind of interesting. Beechview, which I think I've heard described as "the suburb in the city," does kind of look like Cleveland Heights, and Dormont (an actual suburb) without a doubt warrants further wandering and exploring with my camera. After that things are more variable. One weird thing I always notice about Pittsburgh is that the hills often give you the sensation that you're miles and miles out in the country even though you're maybe three miles from downtown. In Cleveland, where it's flat, you don't get that feeling: you can see the rows of houses and churches and taller buildings all packed together and stretching away to infinity. I had tea at South Hills Village Mall ("You took the T to get tea," as Alan very nicely put it) at 4:00, the trip from Station Square only having taken half an hour despite feeling much longer. South Hills Village isn't anything spectacular, but it does look quite new, and the rail line is right across the street, so it's worth mentioning. The Irish breakfast tea and cranberry-walnut muffin were perhaps a mistake, though. For one thing, I could have spent 75¢ more and had a full meal with meat from one of the Asian places also in the food court; for another, I'd only had my stuff for about two minutes before I managed to spill some of the tea on my pants and had caused the muffin to somewhat self-destruct into a pile of crumbs by picking it up from the top. But we survived. I got the train back at 4:53, missing a chance to explore the top of the tall parking garage next to the station, and switched to a Forbes Avenue bus downtown. Home around 6:00, I think, which turned out to be just in time to meet Jeff's parents and become the fifth person in the little dinner party they were arranging. It was quite exellent all around — partially because we somehow managed to get onto the topic of languages and Europe, leading to some fun stories from Jeff's parents about about adventures in French, German, Greek, and Dutch. The waiter managed to make a pretty good linguistic joke — at least to my mind — without realizing it by mispronouncing "prix fixe" in such a way that his sentence came out "We have a prefix menu on the back." It's too bad they couldn't make up a cheap sou fixe menu to put at the front! |
Friday, October 19, 2007
2:43 p.m.
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This morning I woke up to find the heat almost on downstairs (set at 20; house temperature 21) and an air conditioner running upstairs — with the house, I'm pretty sure, entirely empty except for me. Now, I know I'm several standard deviations above the mean in terms of how much I care about conserving natural resources and money, but you have to agree that this waste is kind of silly. |
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