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ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
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Sunday, October 21, 2007
7:59 p.m.
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Yesterday I discovered that I can walk from my house to the Strip in an hour and five minutes. It's not a bad walk — it starts with what's technically a bit of Squirrel Hill, then hits campus, Oakland, a quick skirting of the Hill District (according to the street signs, at least), Bloomfield, Lawrenceville, and finally the Strip itself. Probably the dodgiest part is on Craig Street north of Centre, but then you get rewarded by seeing half of the East End laid out below you as you cross the Bloomfield Bridge. Unfortumately, the sidwalk's on the wrong side of the bridge to make a nice photograph of it, but your eye can parse out the concrete, light poles, and fence in the way from across the road. I suppose five hours is a rather long time to devote to mostly dinner-related activites, but I needed something to do yesterday other than feeling slow and stupid because research stuff is still moving slowly. Before that I stayed in bed reading until after 1:30, and after dinner Alan and I finally made it up to the West End Overlook with our cameras. The last time I'd been up there was at about 6 or 7 a.m. on a day in March when I hadn't been able to fall asleep at night; I'd been specifically avoiding the place until I could go there again in happier circumstances. Yesterday turned out to be a really nice day (and night) for being outside, so I managed to come back with a moderate number of good shots of downtown. I attempted a number of self-timer long-exposure shots, with the flash to light up the two of us and then the shutter open for three seconds to fill in the background, but I was flummoxed in every case by my camera's autofocus — or my inept use thereof — and didn't manage to get a single one I actually liked. Today was supposed to be work day, so I let an interesting Shadyside scavenger hunt and urban hike idea die for lack of interest, but I haven't been able to get through much of anything anyway. Roselawn people called about going to Pamela's around 12:45 (I was in bed reading again), so I went there with Alan, Zack, and Marty. Epsilon work progress at Roselawn during part of the afternoon, and then it was time for grocery shopping for the week, which turned into an indeterminately long process from which I've only just returned. We will have to do better this week. |
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
11:17 p.m.
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Blar. Tonight I'm feeling bored, uninspired, lonely, and otherwise wholly unremarkable in every way. Yesterday and today (up until about 6:00) were decent days; it doesn't seem to matter. I'm kind of hungry; somehow I find I lost at the shopping game this weekend even though I spent $25 at the Strip and the usual $30 or $40 at Giant Eagle. I have all sorts of work stuff I should be doing; I haven't been able to make myself do more than pick at it for the last four hours. I could go running or play ITG; I don't feel like expending the effort. I could find some people as distractions; the sound of others' voices in West Wing or the UC is making me want to shut myself up in a little box. Why oh why oh why have I been so moody recently? (And by "recently" I suppose I mean averaged over the last two months or so.) I think the answer has something to do with the realization, which started over the summer, that research progress has been slow over the entire two years I've been here and that it's mostly my fault for not working on my projects more focusedly and more self-directedly. Mix into that the fact that everyone around me is doing absolutely mind-blowing things in classes like OS and getting multiple all-expenses-paid trips to California and Seattle and Boston. The sum of these two factors — or I suppose I really mean addends — is a whopping inferiority complex that I've found very hard to get rid of, especially as it draws in smaller things that have kind of pinged in the back of my mind since I came to CMU. Everyone I know is smarter than me; everyone I know is faster than me; everyone I know is richer than me; everyone I know has a background and a future that I'll never be able to touch. Java summer classes in eighth grade, world travel at the drop of a hat, private high schools where you take 60 APs in your senior year, the hottest tech companies in the world clamoring to make offers and set up interviews — and then there's me, with my mediocre high school, second-tier undergrad degree, 26 months of research that hasn't given me so much as a tech report, and the feeling that I have to put myself on a $25-a-month budget for eating out in order to pay for the new camera that it took me four months to decide I could afford. Probaby the worst part is that, instead of working to overcome, minimize, or ignore these differences, some sadistic part of me is taking delight in pointing them out, mulling over them, and emphasizing — both in thought and actions — how different and worse I must be because of them. I owe apologies to at least three of you people reading this for making useless comments along these lines that only draw more attention to myself. The rational and more "normal" part of me, which still exists, has pointed out several times that the best way to make myself happy again would be to put a whole lot of personal and focused effort into my research such that something eventually works or comes out right, and then the resulting paper, system improvement, etc., will give me enough confidence that I'll realize I'm not a washed-up brain-dead chump who's only fit for the dregs of corporate drudgery. But, dang it, in these depressive moods I keep getting into, I can't even make myself get started. |
Random Stuff #43
Wednesday, October 24, 2007, 11:59 p.m.
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I wasn't really planning to make a post today, but it's Statistics Day, so I'll at least do that. Oct. 24 is the day on which, three years ago, I first put aside my handwritten notebooks and started an online journal, so it's been my habit since then to recap the numbers a bit on the anniversaries. Statistics are not including this post.
I kind of expected, based on this summer, that it would be what you might call a lean year for writing. It seemed like I was writing smaller, less frequent entries, which is indeed shown above. My yearly word counts, for those who are counting, have dropped from 102,621 and 116,725 to 83,463, and I'd figured by now I had at least 600 entries in the online series. (Though I shouldn't complain too much, since I only had 189 in almost five and a half years of notebook writing. There are lots of months-long gaps where I kind of forgot about the journal.) But so it goes; in many ways, it hasn't been an average year. Now is also about the time when I more openly solicit feedback and a general tally of who's still reading this. If you feel like throwing me your comments about topics covered or not covered, style, length, frequency, etc., or if you just want to let me know you're alive, you know the usual methods. |
Monday, October 29, 2007
1:09 a.m.
Me: My goodness, whoever developed Java must have been one of those kids who annoyed his younger sister on Christmas morning with box-in-a-box-in-a-box-in-a-box presents. Yeah, it's that time again: the time when I find myself faced with a coding task that has to be done in a certain programming language that I still know very little about and generally end up shaking my head at every time I try to learn more. This is probably the third or fourth time this has happened, and each time I figure out just enough to do what I need, and then I forget pretty much everything through lack of use. Yesterday I was getting some useful tips from Alan, who knows the language backwards and forwards throughout its various versions. (Most people do here, it seems: C++ is rather vieux jeu for these younger people, and even I'm forgetting bits of it as most of my code for the last 18 months has been in Perl. Probably the same is true at Case now, since they were teaching ENGR 131 in Java the year after I left.) I should probably make learning some good Java my winter break project for this year, even though there are about five other things I'd rather do with whatever free time I might pretend to have in December. Aside from the programming annoyance — which really isn't so bad compared to some other things — this has been a fine weekend for photography. Yesterday was homecoming, so I met Alan and Eight at the chili cookoff at 11:30. I'd never been before, but it essentially consists of people cooking me free chili, offering me free mugs to eat it in, and then handing me free T-shirts when I tell them which chili I liked the best. "Sounds good to me," to adopt a Ryan North phrase. The camera went with me, and then we went to the football game at Gesling. I did probably better than at the previous game I went to, but I still suffer terribly from not having an autofocus telephoto lens. All of my shots have to be metered and focused by hand, which is more difficult than you'd imagine without a split image in the viewfinder when you really want crisp sports shots. Also my lens requires skin-searing amounts of light before it even begins to consider giving me reasonable exposure times. Out of perhaps 60 game shots, I got maybe five that are salvageable. Today, Alan and I got invited by Ben to take a tour of an abandoned power plant with him and some of his friends, so we woke up at the impossible time of 7:30 and were on our way around 8:15 with cameras again in attendance. I was a little worried about looking silly carrying my lens bag with me, but it turns out I was underequipped compared to everyone else. Even the guy giving us the tour carted around his tripod and very professional-looking Canon. I missed my own tripod terribly, as the inside of the plant gave me about 6000 interesting shots of strange and contorted machinery, all of which were only partially lit by the occasional window or light that was still functioning. (It was kind of like you might imagine the inside of a Borg cube, but without all the epileptic flashes.) The tour was quite interesting — the plant had been shut down as a power generator in 1986, and the facility had been used only sporadically up until about 1996, so there were masses of old documents and reports and artifacts lying around. Unfortunately, between my camera's wacky autofocus (which has now puzzled both me and Alan, which is saying something) and its poor light response, I'm afraid I wasn't able to come away with much of anything. Eventually I kind of gave up and concentrated on taking things in visually. Editing at The Tartan at 8:00 — back to my usual time again, which meant we started a game of Scrabble when things got slow around 9:00. But then we got dumped on around 10:15 or 10:30, and the pages continued unabated until we finally forced ourselves through the last round at 12:15. I had an early bingo (fancy Scrabble-ese for "using all your letters on one turn") for 80 with rENEWER(S) (fancy Scrabble-ese for "RENEWERS"); I think it's my fifth. In between, there was much commenting on the layout, which has given the copy staff about a month-long headache, and articles that can't tell San Francisco from San Diego or the Pennsylvania House from the Congressional one. |
Monday, October 29, 2007
11:40 p.m.
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Today I decided that I kind of want to run in a triathlon again next summer. I was feeling kind of lazy at home this evening, spending maybe two hours poking around on my computer rather than doing anything on the huge stack of work I need to get done this week, and then I eventually decided that if I wasn't going to be productive, I was at least going to go running in the UC and not waste the entire evening. Mission successful. I arrived at just the right time to have my pick of the treadmills, got myself going quite nicely, and stopped 30 minutes later after having covered 3.67 miles. My 5K time was 25:47, which is nowhere near as fast as I've been (23:50-something, I think), but certainly still better than when I first started the old Nerds of Plexiglass triathlon training senior year (something beyond 27 minutes). I found it kind of annoying, though, to think "Hm, I was in the best shape of my life in 2005," because that means that I'm nowhere near as active as I should be now. These days I just feel myself going more and more blind and out of shape by the day as I stare at my computer screens and sit at my stationary desks. I'd like very much for this to change; we'll see how much luck I have putting together a four-days-a-week program again. Some photographic updates: As expected, I got very few usable shots out of yesterday's power plant trip. One or two will probably make it to the photo gallery website I'm slowly piecing together in PHP, which I'll definitely announce when it's ready. I also had a look on Amazon to check the prices of autofocus telephoto lenses — it turns out, actually, that you can do better than I expected if you're willing to go third-party. The rough Pentax equivalent is a lot shorter and a good amount more expensive too. The first one is kind of tempting; I'll have to see how things are going in the spring. Ah well. Tonight is going to be a cold night compared to the last three. I think I'll go find something to read in bed for a bit. |
Thursday, November 1, 2007
3:15 a.m.
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Well, I've got an unexpected all-nighter on my hands here tonight after taking forever to get anything done this week. I lost all of yesterday to preparing my 711 recitation on bigram Markov part-of-speech tagging with the Viterbi algorithm, which (I think) turned out to be a decent recitation, but it was still annoying to spend something like eight hours getting it ready. Then I've had paralyzingly slow progress on the Java junk — we need the MEMT system to use the same English segmentation that IBM uses, and they get theirs from a pretty complicated Perl script, so that means I've had to reimplement that Perl in Java because that's the language the MEMT wrapper's written in. I hate Java. The only reason it exists, I have to conclude, is to keep the software engineers happy — no one sane would ever want to look twice at something that's so over-engineered and subclassed and partitioned. I spent today from about 1:30 onward getting rid of compiler errors, correcting the mistaken assumptions about the language that I'd made for about 500 lines of code, and chasing exceptions from function to function. A particularly annoying part of this was my discovery, during debugging, that in order to do a real regular expression match — the kind that can be done in Perl in one line — I have to use three different objects and two more function calls before I can even get useful information out of the result. Maybe this is a side effect of not learning the language properly, but I find it hard right now to imagine the people at Sun who came up with this crap doing anything but sitting around in a room trying to endlessly abstract and encapsulate the living what's-it out of every known concept in the universe. Hence the all-nighter. But I overreact, perhaps. I seem to have succeeded in the end, by which I mean that the code compiles and runs within the MEMT system, and I'm reasonably sure it's not doing anything too terribly incorrect. My goal was to start dumping n-best lists, to re-optimize the system, by 4:00, and I started that process around 3:10 just before I started writing this. I'm hoping to be done with that around 5:30, and then it's time to run the optimizer. Which really only leaves the question of food, since dinner was at 5:30 p.m. and 10 hours is a long time for me to go without eating much of anything substantial. I've always really wanted — perhaps because the actual reality of it happening keeps flitting away like an elusive wood nymph — to stay up all night and go to breakfast afterwards. There was that time at Rebecca's during my first year when we first had the idea, but on that occasion everyone got tired and went home a bit before 7 a.m. Then I had my first all-nighter this March, which included a late-night trip to Eat'n Park around 2, but it wasn't really the same thing. I was up again several weeks ago with Philip and Alan, and we were all set on running to Pamela's before class and such, but then the OS kids had some trouble with their code and sat in the cluster straight through to 10:30; I walked home at some point and dug out a box of cereal or something. So here we are again, but I'll probably end this one with, at best, a trip to the grocery store to pick up some necessary breakfast-making material and then eat at home. I'd love to have pancakes at Eat'n Park or Pamela's, but eating out costs money and I have no one to eat them with anyway. Ah well. I guess there'll always be another time. |
Random Stuff #44
Friday, November 2, 2007, 2:22 p.m.
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What happens when you Google for... "Seven months" You get a few songs, such as one by a group called Portishead that doesn't say much but has both lyrics and an MP3 excerpt. A much more interesting site, from my point of view, is the excellent "Seven Months with Canon G1," a visual treat of 93 images from what looks like a European photographer's holiday. Also on the more intellectual side is a research article on babies (possibly) having some abstract numerical reckoning at a young age. Then there are the blogs, including one that gives additional proof that Verizon sucks. "Sept mois" In French, you can have a poem about pregnancy if you want it. There's also an interesting-looking book, in comic-strip form it seems, detailing the adventures of four people who went to Cambodia to work with deaf kids. You can also read a brief about two motocyclists going the other way, taking seven months to ride from Phnom Penh to Paris. เจ็ดเดือน I had to look up both "seven" and "month" on probably the world's best Thai-learning site, but that was a pretty straightforward process since it doesn't seem there's any classifier to worry about. From there, I didn't go much beyond the Google results page since I can still read only a very small number of words. Unbounded text is still not too helpful for me. I have about the Thai linguistic abilities of a two-year-old, and even though I know where to find a complete master's thesis written in Thai, you usually don't start a toddler off on something like that, do you? So I generally stay on the lookout for little things like food labels or, in this case, webpage titles. |
Monday, November 5, 2007
12:50 a.m.
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This week I've been feeling all messed up with respect to what day it is, even before the Wednesday night all-nighter. On Wednesday I was thinking that it was Thursday and that I needed to call my sister and wish her happy birthday; on Thursday I kept planning my evening around a dinner that was supposed to happen Friday night; the weekend days have kind of blended together, and now it gets dark really early because of yesterday's time switch. So when I want to make a statement like "I've been playing a lot of ITG recently — every day since Thursday, I think," I'm actually not quite sure if I played Wednesday as well or happened to not go at all yesterday. It's been enough, at least, that I think I've played all the appropriately-rated songs that I know at least once. In conjunction with the above, I find that I'm meeting a surprisingly non-zero number of freshmen. (I'm not sure if any of them have made it here to the journal yet, since I took down its link on Facebook in one of my more paranoid periods several months ago.) They mostly seem to be Zach's friends from Donner who all come to Scotland Yard in giant clumps to play ITG and shuffleboard and to click away on their laptops. Today I looked up and for a split second thought I saw my little brother, which is creepy but actually not as far off in terms of age as I'd prefer to think. The "kids" are fun, though, because they're not all crazy-good at the game and they don't go through all the medium and hard songs setting impossible-to-beat 99 percent records just because they can when they get bored. They prefer to play with more friendly enthusiasm and talk about other things between rounds, which I find nice and refreshing. I've ended up several times paired with a guy called Ben — we ended up playing together the first time by chance maybe a week or two ago, and since then it seems like we're almost perfectly matched in terms of skill level on the boundary between 6s and 7s. He's a bit ahead of me, perhaps, since he can handle crossovers, which my brain still can't recognize or parse, but sometimes we hit a song with interesting rhythms and long regular ( i.e. non-crossover) runs that I can keep us alive through. Other weekend activities: A little more camera work — eventually I'll finish reworking my photos script and post a link to my little digital galleries. Some progress in figuring out the autofocus. On Friday there was dinner, as I mentioned before, which was really really good. We went to Buca di Beppo's at Station Square, home of my excellent birthday dinner with my family in 2006, sat at the same table as then, and had an appetizer and dessert as well as the main course. I returned home $20 poorer but so full of good food. |
Thursday, November 8, 2007
3:25 p.m.
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Observations from the last 30 hours or so:
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Saturday, November 11, 2007
5:49 p.m.
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Weird and busy weekend... and not exactly the kind I was expecting, which is neither necessarily a good or a bad thing. But all this in due course, starting with Friday in this entry and probably taking care of Saturday in another because of length. We start with the GALE meeting on Friday morning, which was pretty unremarkable except for the fact that I really want to bring my camera to one of these and take a few pictures. Unfortunately, actually doing so feels so out of place that I've never gotten up the guts to bring in my lens bag or even ask my advisor if it would be OK. (Other photographers are much more bold than I am in these matters.) I got through some work during the rest of the afternoon, and around 5:35 I went up to the UC with Alan to get in line for Randall Munroe's talk. For people who might not recognize the name, Randall Munroe is the person who draws "XKCD," which may be the most popular webcomic among engineering and CS nerds in our age bracket. I expected there would be something of a line for the 6:30 lecture, but what I wasn't expecting is that it would go from the main doors of Weigand all the way to the info desk. We all still got inside somehow, at least. The "lecture" was a little bit of semi-prepared rambling mixed with roving-microphone questions from the audience. Randall got invited to Capture the Flag with Stuff, of course, and had the game partially explained to him. It was pretty entertaining, except at the end where there was a rant against punctuation at the end of quotes that had most of its facts wrong. But the chief annoyance, I'd say, was the disfunction of my camera. The longer I have this thing, the more restrictive I'm becoming in who I might recommend it to. It's fine if you only take pictures of things that are well lit and that don't move — but take away either one of these requirements and the equipment will let you down. Even the 18-to-50 lens that comes with the camera requires a huge amount of light; I was consistently having to reduce the shutter speeds Alan was getting by a factor of 1.5 or 2, and people just don't move slowly enough that you can work at those long exposures and expect useful results. I came away from the lecture kind of annoyed and proceeded to Wean 7500 for Capture the Flag with Stuff. I kind of thought I'd like to photograph a game, play one, and judge a third, but that kind of went haywire from the beginning. Everyone from the XKCD lecture was there, so the KGB officers just kind of gave up on counting them all and tried to approximate the team sizes. I took the camera out for the first game, discovering not very long afterwards that the flash is terrible. It takes several seconds to charge, for one thing (again compared to Alan's, which is ready within about a half-second), and then has a really uneven effect on lighting. People complain of it being really bright, but it only carries about eight feet, completely whiting out anything close in and leaving anything far away in the dark. (I have a nicer external flash, but the camera doesn't understand it and I'd have to work on full manual.) Near the end of the game I retired in disgust to the judges' room. The scene there would have been a curious thing to a student of psychology. Randall Munroe was there and thus the center of attention for hours at a time, from posing in photos to signing various things thrust at him and listening to everyone's stories. Never let it be said that nerds and geeks are impervious to the siren call of celebrities — they just go in ones that don't happen to be the Hollywood pop star or the New York sports hero. Maybe I was still residually disappointed from my camerawork, but I couldn't really enjoy it — too crazy and too competitive and too loud, and that's not including the game going on outside. Eventually I sought the refuge of the cluster and went home without even inquiring about late-night trips to Ritter's or Eat'n Park. |
Monday, November 12, 2007
9:17 a.m.
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I'm aborting (at least for now) a description of the Microsoft College Puzzle Challege that was on Saturday in favor of a more recent thought, which is this: If someone were to examine me and report back that I'm clinically depressed, I probably wouldn't argue the point. This is somewhat frightening. A very small, tiny part of me is starting to wonder if I should investigate CAPS to see if they cost money. I feel like I'm starting to overburden one particular person with all of my problems, and it's doubly unfair of me to do so when this person is taking OS (a class that tends to become more important than personal relationships), and it's triply unfair of me to do so when this person is someone I care about who has their own emotions that I feel like I'm ignoring because I can't get over my own. So it would be nice to have someone to talk to. On the other hand, I did spend 90 minutes on the phone to my parents two weeks ago bascially spewing everything out, and what came out of that was a nice card in the mail but no practical advice. I'm not sure any can exist beyond "Try to get over it and work harder," which is probably all my advisor would say. I don't know. |
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
11:47 p.m.
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Feeling better about things today, and yesterday too. Thanks to everyone who left me little notes on Monday's post; it feels good to know that people are still reading this and can offer me their advice. Probably the best I got was from Chrisamaphone about doing more stuff with people — I do always feel better when I'm distracted and not surrounded by things that make me feel like I suck. This strategy has been nicely applied over the past two days because certain people are amazing and thoughtful. Alan, Eight, Car, and matthewj hauled me out to dinner in Oakland Monday night, and then today I met up with jcreed, Chris, and jcreed's friend Melissa for ASL "conversation" at the Carnegie Library. I hadn't even realized that people were getting interested in ASL, but it appears they are, and I theoretically have a semester's worth of knowledge (from almost three years ago) filed away somewhere in the recesses of my brain. This evening we didn't converse so much as compare signs and review things, which was pretty fun. I didn't have much luck piecing together sentences on my walk over to the library (and even got a Thai word by mistake when I was trying to come up with the sign for "understand"), but after we'd been going for half an hour I felt a lot of things coming back. We're hoping to make this a weekly event; eventually I'll get back to the point where I kind of implicitly expect meaningful information out of people who gesture a lot while talking, and that will be cool. |
Friday, November 16, 2007
11:54 p.m.
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Rar, I'm so sick of hearing about OS. And even when it's theoretically over (i.e. in six minutes), it's not — everyone's taking their late days, so the madness continues until Monday at midnight. Today wasn't a very good day for my work either. I had a hard time making myself work on a particularly annoying script I had to write, so I spent like 90 minutes this afternoon reading Wikipedia pages on important stuff like Indiana and the War of Toledo. There was a nice game of Scrabble at the KGB event between me, Dave, and Paul (of the Storytelling Committee). It was kind of fun, actually: I wandered over to Porter with some people, wondering aloud if anyone would have thought to bring a Scrabble board, and just about the first thing I heard in Porter A18A was Dave looking for players. Then some ITG with the freshmen, which happily solved the problem of what I should do tonight because there were so many people there. I think it took more than two hours — possibly three — to play three games, although I wasn't keeping careful track of the time. I ended by passing "Finished Symphony," which gave me my second 8 ever. Tomorrow kind of looms over me in an indeterminable fashion. I have massive piles of work to do, but I don't know how much success I'll have in making myself do it. |
Monday, November 19, 2007
11:35 a.m.
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After a rather frustrating Saturday evening, yesterday I had a sort of escape in the form of a day trip to Cleveland. When I first got invited to Eric's pre-Thanksgiving party, I let the e-mail sit in my inbox for a while without a response because I wasn't sure if the trip would be worth it. Cleveland and back means five hours in my car, for one thing, and I have 16 hours' worth of grading that I was hoping to have finished by tomorrow. Also, with gas at $3.169 a gallon (as it was in University Heights yesterday) and tunpike tolls at $7.50 for the round trip, I wasn't sure if I wanted to spend that much money either. But Eric sounded like he really wanted me to come, and last Monday getting out of here for a bit sounded like the best idea in the world, so I sent in my RSVP and let the matter drop. I almost changed my mind again Saturday night, after spending an hour driving around in the cold and the rain and the traffic in order to buy a case of a certain kind of beer Eric requested, but then there were certain indications that I should still go. So I went. And, to be fair, it was quite worth it. The day started out grey and ugly, but there was almost no one on the roads and the car was running decently well. By the time I got into the eastern suburbs of Cleveland, the sun was out, and I caught a bit of the "Sunday Swing" program on WKHR. It was a beautiful day in Cleveland Heights, with sun and colorful leaves and pretty houses, so I was feeling in a really good mood by the time I got to Cedar-Fairmount. At Eric's I talked to some of the usual suspects (Eric, Erin, Ben) and Brian Szuter, who I hadn't seen in quite some time and who filled me in on some details about the project I worked on when I was at Rockwell in 2004 and 2005. I also was introduced to someone called Brooke, which pinged something deep down in my mind, so I asked her if we'd met before. "I... don't think so. I don't know," she said. "I run the Film Society." That was it. "Ah, right!" I said. "I interviewed you for a mass funding article three or four years ago. I used to work at The Observer." A few minutes after that, I heard her say "orange" a certain way and asked her if she was from New York. She was, so that makes me two for two this week on localizing people by their accents — I identified a freshman called Sully as being from the upper Midwest on Friday based on how he was treating his "a"s. There was some programming and tech and job talk, of course, but among my Case friends I don't feel stupid or slow or poor. Half of them are paying $60,000 a year for med school, and the other half are working for very normal companies such that they too (like me) would make a little sarcastic laugh if they heard someone call a starting salary of $68,000 in this part of the country "kind of low." So we got along very nicely, even if I did have to drop out of the conversation a bit when Eric and Seth started discussing C++ macros. I left a little after 5:00 to go meet Sonnie in KSL, where she was stuck working on a project. KSL is one of my favorite buildings on the Case campus, and I hadn't been in there since I graduated, so it was a really nice feeling to be in the library again. After talking to Sonnie, I went immediately to the place on the third floor, next to the TK 140 shelf, where I used to sit at one of the study desks and look out of the window at the old apartment building across Wade Lagoon. I found, again immediately, the first volume of a 1929 biography of Edison that I read when I was a freshman, and I noticed that my two date stamps (November 29, 2001 and something in December of the same year) were still the last ones in the book. Then I walked over all four floors, including the basement, just reliving things a bit. Not many changes — the group study rooms that, if I recall correctly, were supposed to be glass horrors underneath the main stairs have actually taken over what I remember as offices in the basement, and the old PDELC lab and ESS office are now the massive and modern and multimedia Friedman Center, but otherwise the only big thing I noticed was that everyone's got a laptop now. (And, equally, a cell phone; Sonnie said a lot of people don't even use their room phones anymore.) I ran out of time to wander campus a bit, since I had to get back to Pittsburgh by 9 for copy editing and wanted to get back a little earlier for other reasons, but I couldn't stop myself from thinking how attached I still am to that place. Everything I see there brings up 600 little memories. There's the time I looked up 1940 New Yorkers in the basement of KSL, one particular warm day when I ate a six-inch Subway sandwich next to the lagoon, or the last week of French class when Mme. Lathers took us all to Arabica's. They might change the university logo, common name, and president every two years to suit their fancies, but they can't rip the old version out of my mind. |
Monday, November 19, 2007
12:22 p.m.
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Well, I say. I found this in my old journal under the date — you may recognize it — of November 29, 2001: I'm writing this in the reading room on the third floor of Kelvin Smith Library. I realized this morning that my book on Thomas Edison ("Menlo Park Reminiscences" by Francis Jehl) was due today, and I finally got around to taking it back here to renew about 8:00 tonight. I didn't realize that I had already done the math homework for tomorrow, so after I read tomorrow's pages in my French book, I grabbed the Edison book, this book, a pen, and came over here for a while. And then, on January 16, 2002: I'm writing this from the 3rd floor of the library at a study carol next to the window and across from a shelf marked "TP 855 to TP 986" — way up in the corner. [...] The side window I'm sitting by faces out towards the lagoon, the Euclid-Epworth Baptist Church, and an old U-shaped building that looks like an old-style brick apartment building. There are lights in lots of the windows, so I wonder if people still live there. |
Thursday, November 22, 2007
5:36 p.m.
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I'm at my parents house, reading a collection of one-act plays that Chrisamaphone recommended last week. Something by David Ives called "All in the Timing." The only problem with reading good one-act plays is that I start wanting to put them on. (Really, there are lots of people in KGB who would have all sorts of fun with "The Universal Language" or "Variations on the Death of Trotsky.") A bit ago, I laughed out loud for about 90 seconds over the following paragraph from "Long Ago and Far Away": You know how the secret purpose of bees is to pollinate flowers? Has anybody ever thought the secret purpose of human beings might be to pollinate furniture? I mean look. I sit down on a couch, I move to a dining-room chair, carrying some couch pollen on the backs of my thighs, maybe in the middle of the night a little divan quietly blossoms into being. Or maybe I sit in a chair, you sit in a chair, we change chairs, and a love seat is born. |
Saturday, November 24, 2007
12:08 a.m.
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Today (by which I mean Friday) was a long and fairly interesting day; I've been far more commercial in the last 24 hours than I can remember being in a really long time. Yesterday Alan and I dissected the sales papers and wrote down some stuff that looked worth buying, and today we actually woke up at 5:15 a.m. to go get some of it on sale. Not something that I'd ever think to do on my own, of course, but I suppose it's the kind of thing that you ought to do at least once just to see how it goes. It went pretty straightforwardly, in fact: brushing two inches of snow off of the car at 5:20, leaving at 5:30, arriving at Target at 5:50 and getting in a long line of people waiting for the front doors to open at 6:00. No stampedes or pushing or shouting or any of that nonsense. Inside, most people streamed towards the big-screen HDTVs at the back, while we wandered in the direction of various smaller things like DVDs and Play-Doh that were somewhat less in demand. We were second in line at the checkout and on our way out the door in a half-hour. The second port of call was Best Buy, where I'd really hoped to get 100 recordable DVDs for $6.99, but of course they'd been all sold shortly after the store opened at 5. I did, at least, manage to secure the last of the 19-inch flatscreen monitors that were something like 55 percent off ($99) so I can finally replace my six-and-a-half-year-old CRT. After Best Buy came a little store called Ink Stop — there have been several new stores and even a few entire plazas built since I really lived here — and Heinen's so we could take some breakfast home with us. The overall adventure ended around 8:15. Not much else happened for the rest of the day. I sat at home, variously poking on my computer and talking to my parents. My mom and I made an apple pie after Katie, my intended collaborator in this undertaking, left to go muck around with horse manure instead. Dinner at Yours Truly in Hudson, eventually, and some time after that Sonnie came over for games. Note to everyone: if you ever have the chance to play the Trivial Pursuit 20th anniversary edition, don't. We started out as per the regular rules, which we later modified to "until we get bored," and finally to "first pie of any kind wins." We played for perhaps 45 minutes; I don't think anyone answered more than one question in a row correctly the whole time, and it took that long for anyone to get a pie piece at all and put the rest of us out of our misery. On to Pictionary next, which was much much better and ended in a near-tie with Alan and Sonnie beating out me and my mom when both teams were on the final square. As much as this doesn't sound like me, there may be more shopping tomorrow. All the jeans I bought in late high school have developed gaping holes over the last two months, so I'm in fairly desperate need of replacements if I don't want to start doing laundry every week or going to advisor meetings in my underwear. For those in the area, I'll be in Twinsburg through end of day tomorrow (by which I mean Saturday); at some late point, when no one else in on the roads, we'll be heading back to Pittsburgh unless something weird happens. |
Monday, November 26, 2007
11:06 a.m.
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Tech question time! So here I am, playing with my new 19" widescreen monitor and trying to get it to work with Debian. I ran dpkg-reconfigure xorg-xserver and set the new screen sizes, and after a reboot I can correctly select 1440 x 900 (the monitor's native resolution) and get a desktop that doesn't look stretched. The fonts, however, render quite badly, especially at small sizes. If I check the monitor's on-screen menu thing, it says that it's operating at a resolution of only 1152 x 900 even though Debian still thinks it's using 1440 x 900. To make sure that this wasn't a problem with my graphics card, I rebooted to Windows for the first time in almost two years and tried it out there. No problem: both Windows and the monitor agree on 1440 x 900. Any ideas of what to do next? I've done dpkg-reconfigure xorg-xserver a few times, and it seems to have written the xorg.conf file correctly, for what it's worth. Otherwise, I'll leave you with some quotes from the weekend: Alan: Um, you might want to put your laptop down. |
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