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ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
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Thursday, November 29, 2007
2:04 a.m.
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Today (i.e. Wednesday), although it started out very nicely, has been kind of a horror, which means I'm definitely not very excited to think that tomorrow will probably be just as bad. I stayed up an hour later than I wanted to last night trying to write up an 11-711 recitation on unification, and then managed to get to my desk by 9:30 today in order to finish it in time for the actual class at 10:30. I mucked it up fairly badly, too, due to lack of preparation and practice with the nodes, but the class is so quiet that no one really stopped me to say they were lost. It was probably my last recitation, so I wore a shirt with a pocket in it on purpose and had my reporter's tape recorder in there the whole time I was talking since I was kind of curious to hear what I actually sound like when I'm teaching. No go, of course. I hadn't used the recorder in so long that the batteries must have been on the verge of dead — when I examined the thing afterwards, I found that I'd gotten about 10 seconds of me walking down the hallway before the tape stopped advancing. Then came the main activity of the day: grading the old Homework #3s that I was promising to hand back yesterday, really want to get done before 11 a.m. tomorrow, but will probably end up sitting on until class next Tuesday. Today I worked on them from 11:40 until 12:30 and from 1:30 until almost 5 with minimal breaks, and in all that time I'd managed to grade Problem 1. (I don't do them in order, usually.) By then I wanted to throw up, so I ran away to Fairfax and played a new version of Carcassonne with Alan, Dan, and Tim. Then home to make dinner, eat dinner, and clean up dinner, so it was after 8:00 before I was able to get back to the actual grading again. My goal was to finish the last two problems by midnight, then move on to real actual research work during the overnight hours so I have something to show my advisor tomorrow besides a blank stare. Well, at 10:45 I was only halfway through the first problem and wanted to die, even after fortifying myself with tea around 9:30, and at midnight I hit two thirds — the rest, plus the last problem, are still sitting undone in my folder. Since 12:30 I've been at my desk back in my office, but Perl scripting is going slowly and I've already eaten the granola bar and banana I brought with me, plus a package of M&Ms from the free food table. I expect All-Nighter #4 is not going to have a very happy conclusion. |
Friday, November 30, 2007
3:30 p.m.
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The monitor problem has (perhaps? apparently?) been reduced to a certain error message showing up in my Xorg.0.log file: "AIGLX: Screen 0 is not DRI capable," whatever that might mean. This is the result of an hour or so talking to the #cslounge cognoscenti, during which time I ran a bunch of commands, posted a bunch of file output to a website called Pastebin, and generally got no further than "I don't know, man." Well, I suppose that means I don't have to feel bad for asking about something really simple and easy to fix. This situation is bringing up again my biggest complaint against Linux, which is that straightforward documentation and clear solutions that users can follow are still mostly lacking. Google searching reveals dozens of forum posts with people having screen resolution problems similar to mine, and the threads almost invariably go something like —"Help! I can't get my resolution to change! What's wrong?" —"Try this change, which is unlike any other change suggested on any other forum for this problem." —"Sorry, it didn't work." And then the thread goes dead. Very frustrating. Not-quite-relatedly: Does anyone have a small drill that I could use to put a few new holes in my computer case? I really need to replace my case fan, for the auditory sanity of everyone on the second floor of my house, but my ancient Dell is only provided with weird tab slots for clipping in special Dell fans that are no longer made, and it doesn't have the standard four corner screw holes that every other fan expects. |
Sunday, December 2, 2007
3:53 p.m.
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For people who don't read the Live Journal comments: the monitor is fixed. I finally got it working Friday night after installing a new video card driver and mucking around with modelines for about 45 minutes. Now I just need that little drill I mentioned last time, and the computer should be nice and happy for the next several months. I suppose I should talk about non-computer things too, though. I fell asleep Wednesday night at 4 a.m. when I realized that my body was throwing an error when given the command "Move from the bed to the backpack five feet away and get out the laptop." I meant to sleep only until 5:30, then only until 7, and then it was suddenly 10:00 and I had to take a shower so I could be at my advisor meeting in a hour. That meeting didn't go so badly — I suspect in part because my advisor took pity on me after he noticed that I'd sent an e-mail out to the 11-711 mailing list at 3:30 a.m. the night before. Since then, I feel like I'm starting to get myself back on track again, as Friday was a decent work day as well. Another thing that kind of got dropped in favor of monitor posts this week: On Tuesday, I'd gone to the Carnegie Library at 5:00 for the semi-monthly meeting of Le Club Francophone. (French editing wants me to write this as "le Club francophone," and my English self wants me to italicize it because it's a foreign phrase.) I've been really wanting to find some culture club or conversation group or something that will let me speak French with people again, and finally a notice about this thing on the first and last Tuesday of each month popped up in the Pillbox calendar just before Thanksgiving. From this week's fare, it seems like the club's a cross between a French class and the old Quartier Français club at Case. Somewhat structured, with handouts and discussion questions, led by young-ish Moroccan lady who somehow reminded me immediately of Mme. Haymore. Ideally, I think I was looking for something more like "We just get together and talk at a high level of fluency," but I guess this will be close enough for now. |
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
2:58 p.m.
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Nominally speaking, this week has given me a string of Tim-style bad luck. Most people would tell you to "start the week off right" with a big breakfast or a long run before going to work; I started mine by breaking my umbrella, which means I've been through five of them since freshman year. Then it was discovered last night that my new computer monitor — the one you've heard so much about here — has a dead pixel already, which means I'll have to pack it up again nicely, take it to the store, and try to get a new one. If it weren't for the fact that anything else would be at least twice as expensive, I would consider just taking this no-name brand one back and getting something that's more verifiably reliable. But the crowning part — kind of like the second supporting argument in those five-paragraph themes you used to write in English class — is that I managed to shatter a piece off of my tripod and generally bang myself up a bit in the process. The thing came about in this way: It had started snowing Monday morning, so by the evening Alan and I were going to run around and take pictures in the light dusting that had managed to accumulate by then. I was thus progressing, with two cameras, a tripod, and a laptop bag, between my house and Fairfax at about the time of day, post-sundown, when what used to be water starts freezing into ice. Eh bien, you see how it goes. Puddle + cold + foot + WQED stairs = slip + throw tripod + grab handrail to keep from dying and/or destroying expensive electronics. I found the tripod at the bottom of the stairs, where it'd landed after bouncing off the handrail and the building and who knows what else some number of times, but by then the top part where you mount the camera had been cloven off and lost among the leaves and trash around the staircase. Alan found most of it, after dinner, after I'd spent 20 minutes or so scouring the area and generally making myself feel miserable. It kind of spoiled my mood for the rest of the night, since I was (probably unreasonably) upset about losing a good tripod after only five years or so and having to buy a new one when the shopping list is already dishearteningly long. I've got the thing on one of our workbenches in the basement, though, and it's possible that some strong glue plus duct tape might still keep it serviceable. |
Thursday, December 6, 2007
4:20 p.m.
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Well. There's nothing like a crushing advisor meeting to start the work day off on the right foot. Highlights: "I think, in all of your MEMT work, you haven't looked at enough data" and "It just popped into my head. You could have come up with it. I wish you had come up with more original ideas like that." More normal and happier post later, if I think of it and have time. |
Friday, December 7, 2007
10:21 a.m.
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More subconscious linguistic adventures! I had Thai in a dream last night for what I think is the third time now: Alan and I were loading stuff into my parents' minivan for some reason, and I said "ในรถ" ("nai roht"/"in the car"), which I'm pretty sure is a syntactically correct prepositional phrase. I love when this happens, and also when I can verify that my dream-Thai or dream-French (which is usually much more extensive) is actually correct. I guess this means I'm learning something. This morning, when I could only remember saying the "car" part, I was able to recall the beginning because I remembered that the word in my dream had a middle tone. Also: Now is a good time to link to my Thai vocab page, which includes a little quiz generated from my list of words with a PHP script. I started this a little more than a week ago — on the way back from Thanksgiving, actually — when I remembered the existence of Basic English. I couldn't remember the exact vocabulary size, but it got me thinking that 800 words and 50 grammar rules isn't really a lot, but once you learn that much of a language you can get across most things in everyday conversation. And 800 words at one word a day is just a bit over two years. Thus was born my Thai Word of the Day project, which is getting off to a slow but noticeable start — both of the dream words, for example, have been Words of the Day. Also also (wik): For those who understand such things, it's to be San Francisco. Of course, it's been expected for the last few weeks at least, but as of today it's official. It's kind of an ironic thing, in fact, that I couldn't wait to get past the 16th of last month, and now I certainly don't want it to ever be the 16th of this month. Little things keep adding up and reminding me how soon that is. |
Friday, December 7, 2007
1:54 p.m.
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Great Scott, it's happening again: Folks, This is the third break on or around campus this year, and the fifth water-related incident affecting campus since I've been here. |
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
7:39 p.m.
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The weekend was kind of mixed good and bad, as most spans of time seem to be for me these days. I made a pseudo-birthday surprise happen late Sunday afternoon after some running around, losing in the process a certain amount of time I should have spent working, but work is going to be around indefinitely and certain other things are only going to be around for another six days. The surprise seemed to go quite well, too, so it was definitely worth it. There was also a fantastic group dinner at Buca di Beppo's on Saturday, arranged by Alan and attended by me, Ben, Zach, Dan, Mars, Tim, Apphia, Ian, and another of Alan's friends called Mark. You really want that many people to try the dessert platter, which is $30 of amazingness in the form of huge slices of cake and tira misu. On the other hand, I've been stinking royally at ITG. A big group of us were there Friday, when I passed a few 8s and even — which I could barely believe when it happened — a 9 ("Dawn Perpetual Mix"), so I guess I was hoping that I could be moving more into the 8s now. Not so, as every day since has confirmed: I can still mess up the 7s really badly, and I can't read a crossover to save my life. ITG troubles resulted in me coming home rather preemptorily on, I believe, Sunday night, which resulted in me poking around on the Internet for something I'd been randomly thinking about earlier in the day, which results now in me posting a link (if you'll forgive that it's MySpace) to that wonderful old "The Cat in the Hat" cartoon you watched when you were little. I don't think I'd seen this in about 15 years before Sunday night, and I was really shocked to see how much of it I remembered — even down to particular sound effects and the "CBS Television Network" screen at the end. Since then I've been going around with "Calculatus Eliminatus" in my head: writing numbers all over everything was of course the part that captivated me the most when I was little. (That and the "in French chat, chapeau," at least.) Today, when I was feeling lazy, I also managed to track down "The Lorax" and "The Sneetches," but those I don't think I saw so many times when I was little, so watching those again wasn't as interesting. ("The Lorax" is sadder than I remember it, actually.) Still feeling lazy and haven't gotten much done today, but off to the Almost Midnight Breakfast soon! |
Thursday, December 13, 2007
12:22 a.m.
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Today was marginally more productive than yesterday, but only marginally. I seem to have lost all motivation for doing work, but if I check the archives I find that's been pretty common for me at this time of year. Maybe it's all the undergrads switching into "I have nothing to do but take exams" mode — when it was me, I always liked finals week because I suddenly had masses of free time to go the public library and have lunch downtown, make adventures by public transit, visit the museums, etc. These days I'm still expected to be working straight up until about the 23rd, which I don't want to do at all unless it can be on the French system again, which I don't think I'll be able to go back to until at least the end of January. Along similar lines, an excellent part of yesterday was the hour I spent speaking French with Kempy and Greta in the Donner lounge. I'm slowly gathering critical mass for that francophone party I keep planning to have at my house, but I kind of wanted to get the invite list up to eight or 10 first so that a reasonable number of people might actually be expected to show up. Really, it would be nice to go as far as starting a CMU French club and pull in some native-French professors and such once we get going again, but that would be a second step once we get ourselves going again. My accent and vocabulary are still drifting towards "American" from lack of practice, which makes me sad. True bilingualism is amazing, and something I'm frustrated at probably never being able to attain. Yesterday I was finding it rather difficult to talk to Kempy or listen to Greta in French and simultaneously IM with Chris, navigate a website, or interact with Alan in English. I have to note that this is in contract to Alan, for example, who can interrupt an all-out conversation with his parents in Thai to say "sorry" to me in English (instantaneous context switch!) after bumping into me on the sidewalk. But to continue. This evening was the semesterly copy party, which went as they always do — that's to say with very humorous and witty conversation interleaved with tea and Scrabble. Also as usual, I ate about an order of magnitude more cookies and chips than is properly good for me, which means sleeping in about 10 minutes is going to be interesting. |
Sunday, December 16, 2007
12:13 p.m.
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Il est parti ce matin. Je l'ai même conduit à l'aéroport, aidant ainsi sa fuite. Pour le moment, je ne me sens pas si mal, mais plus tard... À qui parlerai-je le soir quand les affaires ne vont pas? Pour qui ferai-je le dîner le vendredi? The next date of importance in this regard is April 17: four months and a day. My goal is to break the next four years into smaller, more handleable chunks of that size. |
Monday, December 17, 2007
5:34 p.m.
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Discoveries from today, in roughly chronological order:
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Wednesday, December 19, 2007
6:42 a.m.
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By the time this gets posted, I will have been working, with a few half-hour breaks for sanity, for 18 hours, and we're going to go right on into "tomorrow" and not stop until this total reaches something like 29. And then I will go home and sleep (I hope) for something like 12 or 13 hours. Stupid grading — and I thought that the real craziness wasn't supposed to start until Thursday. I think this is my fourth all-nighter, but the exact semantics of what qualifies, or how short of a nap you have to take before it doesn't count as falling asleep for the "night," may make this number somewhat inexact. It's really too bad that there's no one to go out to breakfast with, as I'm pretty sure I'll be doing once I go back to campus, tally up final grades, and e-mail the results to my advisor. My house emptied itself of everyone today except for me, and the other prime candidate is two time zones away and could only help get me to 2:15 a.m. via AIM conversation. Hm. I suddenly seem to be developing some kind of coughing chest-sickness thing. I hope I didn't just get myself sick... |
Saturday, December 22, 2007
11:53 a.m.
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I guess it's about the right time for the usual end-of-semester post: today starts (kind of) the somewhat nominal winter break I get. For grad students, vacation is an illusion; this year's doubly so because of the GALE evaluation. (Whichever silly person it was at DARPA who decided to make the retest end on January 7, I shake my fist at you.) But I cleaned up my desk a little yesterday, and am at least planning to not show up there again until the the day after New Year's, so we can think of the semester as being basically over. And I checked my grades yesterday, after Alan reminded me that SIO was back up. Result: this was my worst semester ever, academically speaking, by far — which is pretty idiotic given that I had already dropped the single class I was signed up for because I couldn't even handle that. So I had 48 hours of research on my schedule, and I got a B in it. Now, in the weird world of grad school, a B is the lowest grade you can get as a Ph.D. student before the class doesn't count for credit anymore, so I'm interpreting this as one step above failing. Not to mention that a 48-hour B (which is 16 credits on the Case system) sucks my GPA into a black hole. My advisor came by in the afternoon and we had a little talk about my Black Friday letter. (The big talk will be in January once I actually get the letter and read what it says.) He said it's going to be "less than stellar" because I haven't made any significant progress on anything I've worked on this semester, and if I have another semester like this I'd actually be in trouble. Not that I expected to hear differently — that's about what I'd tell myself if I were the faculty evaluating my progress — but still somewhat crushing, I guess, because at the back of your mind you always hold out hope that you're being unreasonably hard on your own self when everyone else thinks you're doing just fine. No longer possible in this case. One thing I am annoyed about, though, and that I'll probably bring up in January, is that there's no representation of my TAing anywhere on my official transcript. I wasn't really doing 48 hours of research a week — more like 30 hours of research and 18 hours of TAing — and I feel like I did quite a decent job on that part, so I'd like to see it taken into consideration. I mean, after all, I got 80 percent "excellent" and 20 percent "very good" on the little "rate the TA" survey I made a few weeks ago, and the recitation notes that took me ages to prepare got 95 percent "excellent." But still. Something major has to happen next semester, and that basically means some large amount of momentum on research stuff — "you can't get a Ph.D. by just implementing your advisor's ideas from week to week" — and a conference paper. If not, well, there's always a backup plan. |
Sunday, December 23, 2007
1:35 p.m.
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April, where are you? |
Thursday, December 27, 2007
9:02 p.m.
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Well, I've been at home for four days now (I mean at my parents' house), but it hasn't been quite the break or vacation I needed. Mostly it's because of the GALE retest, which seems to be making my advisor (and other people) think of this week as business as usual even though work is about the last thing I want to think about. Even at the end of last week I couldn't take it. I came home (to the house in Pittsburgh, I mean) last Thursday night and ended up watching "Mary Poppins" on my widescreen monitor rather than doing anything productive. Then, Friday night, I watched the special features over dinner and started trying to clean the kitchen a bit. Saturday, with the whole day in front of me, I spent at home with not much to do until I poked Ian for dinner and a Waterfront trip around 5:30. That let me do the necessary Christmas shopping, and I got back early enough to (theoretically) finish cleaning the house and get ready for driving back here the following day. Somehow the rot of laziness or burn-out had taken up a more permanent residence, though, because what I actually did was watch "The Sound of Music" with the French audio on to make things interesting. It also came with an on-screen sing-along feature that put the text of the songs on the bottom of the screen when they came up — otherwise I'm really awful at understanding French song lyrics. The dialogue was all right, and I understood most of it as I expected, but the songs would have been almost entirely useless without the subtitles... and were still really really weird and mutilated with. "Do Re Mi" and "Eidelweiss" were the only two that survived well. What we know as "My Favorite Things" gets translated into a mediocre song about "my daily joys" that includes quad-ruled notebooks (like the Europeans write on, I guess) as one of the items listed. The "16 going on 17" song is pretty awful too, but the worst-place honors go to "Something Good" (or whatever that one's called), in which the last line is rendered as "I did good like so many others," not really making sense or even rhyming with anything in particular. But I really wanted to see something in French, and the only real French movie I have on DVD is "Amélie," which probably would have reduced me to tears after about five minutes, considering the situation in which I saw it last. Even still, there were a few points in the Frenchified "Sound of Music" at which my composure was borderline. All the cleaning got pushed to Sunday, then, and I thought I'd never make it out of my house. Finally managed it around 1:40, though, and arrived here the appropriate time later (two hours, plus or minus about five minutes for traffic and other conditions). High on the priority list were getting away from the grad school life for a bit, finalizing arrangements with various siblings for other siblings' and parents' Christmas presents, and taking care of some tech problems I hadn't been able to resolve on my own or with what I had in Pittsburgh. Details on how that's been going in a separate post, since this one's already quite long. |
Friday, December 28, 2007
4:33 p.m.
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On to the at-home recap, then. Not much happened on Sunday after I got here, nor on Monday, which was a generally quiet day of getting presents wrapped and settling accounts. I pulled my camera out and took lots of pictures of my family's cat, who is almost nine months old and about 600 percent male terror. (If you read the "Rhymes With Orange" strip for December 24 when it appears in the archives in two weeks, you'll have a very accurate idea of things.) His favorite pastime seems to be getting into trouble in order to attract attention — either that or jumping outside and disappearing for an hour every time any external door opens by more than about 10 centimeters. In church that evening (where we were exposed to the most horrifying and out-of-tune children's choir I've ever heard in my life), just before the mass started, the older woman next to me asked in a voice from the other side of the Atlantic what the last part of the announcement over the PA had been. I repeated it, and got back in response "Do you have a British accent? I'm British, and I thought I picked up on something there." Linguistic success! Christmas Eve dinner had only five of us, since Chris and John didn't make it up until almost 9:00, but we were all around for Christmas morning. I had to be woken up at 8:45, accomplished rather suddenly by my dad pounding simultaneously on both my door and Katie's across the hall. The preliminary stocking presents went as the usually do — tea and those Rocher hazelnut things I really like — and then we moved into the general doling out. About two thirds of the way through, my mom handed me a little box with an unexpected name on the "From" part of the tag, and a few seconds later I was speechless and staring at a beautiful beautiful 70-to-300-millimeter autofocus zoom telephoto lens — the same one that I've been looking at on Amazon for more than a month and was hoping to be able to buy for myself in February. I couldn't really say much besides "Aw..." for about a minute; then I pulled it out to see what it could do with close-up shots of people across the room. When we left to go to my aunt's house for the big family Christmas, I hid the box under my bed so that it wouldn't get noticed in the (perhaps extremely unlikely) event that someone broke in looking for easily-stealable new Christmas stuff while we were all out. On Wednesday I had to be on a 12:30 conference call with the usual GALE people, and then my advisor and I spent some time on Gmail Chat going over progress updates. I also had a surprise e-mail from Susannah inviting me to her family's usual Boxing Day party. I meant to work on the GALE stuff for the whole afternoon, and then head down to Susannah's, but in the end most of the time went into reading Wikipedia and going out to dinner with my parents. I've been having a hard time focusing on the work stuff I have to do, espcially coming off of an extremely poor semester that's so frequently made me hate work. Susannah's from about 8:00 until maybe 12:30 or so: we played a game where everyone got a name tag put on their back as they arrived, and then you had to guess who you were by asking other people yes-or-no questions. (I was Smokey the Bear.) Then we read Trivial Pursuit questions and played Catchphrase. Yesterday was another day at home. Some work in the morning; some reading and Scrabble in the afternoon; some poking around on my computer in the evening. Chris came back for the night, so we amazingly had all six of us at dinner. [Medium-long rant about not wanting to work removed.] In the end, I worked on some stuff for a new website until fairly late, then talked online until later and read until much later, so I ended up sleeping until noon today. My dad and I devoted some attention to sweeping out my computer and figuring out what to do about the CPU fan, and then I put some more glue on my broken tripod. People are coming over for dinner tonight, so I expect there will be not much exciting to report in the next 18 hours or so. Tomorrow I head back to Pittsburgh for Vicki's party with all the old Case people. |
Monday, December 31, 2007
3:08 a.m.
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Back in Pittsburgh now, where I've inaugurated my first night back at the house here (after one night with Case people at Vicki's) with another one of my periodic breakdowns. Now complicated and grammatical thoughts are forming in my head, and I don't really feel like going to bed until I've typed them out a bit even though it's 3 a.m. and I spent last night getting about two hours of sleep on a chair. This particular session started over something so trivial that I won't even mention it, but it wasn't long before I was running through the usual cycle of feeling stupid and lazy and seeing no way to break myself out, next semester, of the rut I've gotten myself into this semester. What I want more than anything, I keep concluding, is some kind of long break — this pick-away-at-GALE-stuff six-days-at-home worry-about-not-wanting-to-do-work pittance I got isn't cutting it. There do exist such things as semesters off in the form of leaves of absence, but I can never actually see one working out. First of all, no research work for a semester means no progress, which means no papers or conferences, which means I'd be ever further behind and further away from finishing my degree. Then there's the financial question: I could live off of my savings for some time, but then I'd have that much less in savings, and I'm already only able to put away a very small amount compared to what all my friends with real jobs are able to do. Third is the question of what I'd do — I want so much to go travel and speak French and see things and go places, since it always seems like everyone gets to do this but me, but traveling is mostly unthinkably expensive, and then we run into Concern #2 all over again. It's such a shame that I can't put the world on pause for a while and fix myself up without any crushing side effects. So I just feel lost: trapped here, with no opportunity ever for a break, pushing against an infinite pile of work that I don't want to do and have lost the ability to force myself to do. If I don't make something big happen by May, I'll be in trouble, and then what will I do? Live as a parasite in San Francisco while I beg for a company to hire me to do language technology work with a master's degree and a failed Ph.D.? A great impression that will give off to the recruitment people. I'm beginning to feel that I've got some kind of malevolent process in my brain — let's call it unhappyd to capture its uncheerful products, unending uptime, and demonic nature. The loop invariant is that not everything in my life can go well at the same time, so this task comes up with impossibles and imponderables to keep me awake at night. We can already see it at work. In the fall, I got kind of depressed and agonized over what I wanted to do with the next few years of my life. Well, I picked, and got what I wanted, and within a week I was caught up in the relationship question coming back to haunt me stronger than it had ever been. No sooner was that satisfactorily dealt with, six weeks later, when I started to go into the beginnings of what turned into a summer research slump, which resulted in the death semester of zero progress and thus the melancholy broodings you have presently before you. What, I ask, do I need to do to get a kill -9 on this thing? Ah well... off to bed now, I hope. Tomorrow is theoretically New Year's Eve and I'm completely out of whatever planning loop may have existed for interesting things. I guess I'm not really up to full social standards anyway, so maybe that's just as well. I could be persuaded to host something small here, if there's anyone else with nothing to do, but I'm guessing the default will be just me by myself. Odd... I don't think I've ever spent a New Year's alone before. |
Monday, December 31, 2007
10:36 p.m.
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The year is running out. Normally, working at Heinen's over winter break just means being flogged to death by Christmas music eight hours a day for up to six weeks (if you work that long), but sometimes it has nice side effects in that you pick up and remember something good at the right time. The song for today, for example, is the one that goes "What are you doing New Year's, New Year's Eve?" (playable from here). It suits my mood perfectly: slow, quiet, a little sad, not knowing what to expect from the future. I spent a lot of the day singing and humming it. |
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
1:47 a.m.
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At midnight I stood alone at the top of Flagstaff Hill, watching the world in front of me as it was at one moment in time. There were fireworks and cheering as 2008 came in; I stood there and was silent. A bit later, intending to wander aimlessly through the streets for lack of anything better to do, I heard someone say "Happy new year, Greg!" from across the sidewalk. It was Mark and his girlfriend Kathryn, similarly intending to wander aimlessly, so they invited me to join forces with them. We spent two and a half hours in north Oakland, a bit of Shadyside, and parts of campus ("as my whimsy takes me") before heading home around 2:30. Then I got to feeling depressed again and didn't actually go to bed until 5 a.m. Today's been an extremely quiet and utterly forgettable day for the 14 hours I've been awake so far. I spent 99 percent of that time in my room, either hunched over in my chair at the computer or sitting on the bed at the laptop. You'd think that that's enough time to have taken care of several pending projects, and you'd be quite right if you were talking about anyone else but me. Everything I touched got stuck on something or other, so by the end of the night I was almost afraid I'd blow up my hard drive if I tried to take pictures off my camera. Does anyone know anything about (1) uninstalling Windows XP in any way more graceful than formatting its partiton, (2) reinstalling and/or re-configuring GRUB, (3) using OpenSSL in PHP, or (4) running Photoshop or Photoshop Elements under Wine? There are probably others, but those are the principal things I can come up with at the moment. Secondarily, is anyone interested in the things I'm interested in and feel like spending some time doing them? Tomorrow I go back to work to sit at my desk and do real work in the usual drudgery, which will probably go very differently from today. |
Thursday, January 3, 2008
1:59 a.m.
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"Remember, no man is a failure who has friends." Mm. Chris, Alisa, Ian, Keith, and especially Alan: thank you. |
Friday, January 4, 2008
8:09 p.m.
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As you can probably tell from the previous post, I'm feeling better now because of a combination of small things and nice people who think of them. (I somehow managed to leave off Rebecca and Ben, who definitely should have been there, in my thank-you list Wednesday night, which is perhaps an indication I should stop writing journal posts immediately before going to bed at 2 a.m., when my brain is shutting down for the night.) Wednesday's date, which I'd completely forgotten about, also helped after I'd been reminded of it. Last night Chris and I organized a "cooking + angst" party, as she wrote it, and invited jcreed, William, and someone called Donna as old and experienced grad students who could give lots of useful advice. Under the heading of "cooking," I made quite a nice tomato sauce by opening a jar of regular sauce (Classico spicy red pepper — good stuff!), heating it, and throwing in mushrooms, tomato chunks, and spices until I got bored and the pasta was ready. Chris had tomatoes, mozzarella, and basil put out as a salad, and William produced some fancy-looking things called Benedictine sandwiches to go with tea afterwards. In the "angst" department, I brought up all the troubles I've been having with work and got in return some useful bits of knowledge and things to think about. Readers of jcreed's and Chris's journals may have already heard something about our game of Rummikub (similar to rummy but with tiles instead of cards), during which I had to pass my first 14 turns because I didn't have enough points to make an initial meld. With 28 tiles, though, I finally managed to barely scrape by the minimum... and by that point there was so much else out on the table that I found places for all 28 of my things and won the game! I hope William keeps the game easily accessible in his trunk a lot, because for some reason I found myself understanding it and liking it immediately. I think I played it somewhere before, a really long time ago, and there was about a 12-month period during my sophomore and junior years at Case when my friends and I played occasional games of plain rummy or gin, but somehow even the new mechanics seemed to fit a lot better with the way I think than does, say, Loaded Questions. Work work work all day today — I'm still at my desk now — and probably for most of the weekend, but it's a series of well-defined and manageable tasks that won't go any longer than Monday morning, and then the GALE retest will be over and I can hopefully do something more interesting and fun. |
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
12:31 a.m.
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Pittsburgh's suddenly decided to give us a two-day vacation from winter and make it April instead. (Well, at least in one way.) Yesterday it was 16 degrees, and I went out with my camera for 90 minutes during the afternoon and out into the park and Squirrel Hill with Keith and Ian for 90 minutes at night. Today it was 18, so I biked 23 miles and explored the South Side a bit. The photographic expedition yesterday started with the Cathedral of Learning, because I was getting annoyed that I'd been here for almost two and a half years and still hadn't managed to get inside it. I was looking, of course, for some large high-up window that would allow for fun cityscape shots. After waiting an eternity or two for an elevator on the fifth floor, I just decided to climb the building manually, stopping finally when the stairwell hit a dead end after 36. Unfortunately, the higher floors are all sealed-off offices or fancy wood-panelled suites where a random photographer's probably not very wanted, so the best I could do was a few narrow north-facing windows in the stairwell. Maybe I'll go back again and hunt for something that faces CMU, or bribe a Pitt student into showing me which rooms I'm allowed to wander into. Then I struck out north and went into the new parking garage that Mark, Kathryn, and I had gotten close to on New Year's Eve. It's actually attached to the VA Center, and not Pitt as I'd assumed. It's a nice six-floor thing, but the whole outside is covered in Scaife-style screening and the wall at the top is more than six feet high, so the views are somewhat obstructed. Still, I managed some very nice shots by sticking the camera lens through the holes in the screen; no doubt you'll be seeing the results on my photos site soon. Biking today, I selected 18th Street for my foray beyond Carson Street because it was the first cross street past the South Side Works that you have immediate access to from the riverfront trail — I figured I'd find a way up the hill from there. It turns out the choice was pretty fortunate, since 18th Street itself spends 1.15 miles winding up and slightly behind the hill before dumping you into Mount Oliver, which incidentally look like that great of a place. There's a cemetary right at the top of the hill, though, that has a very nice view of half the world. Downtown's just visible along the line of the hill on the far left; you're far enough from East Liberty Presbyterian that it looks thin and distant on the right. I think I found Hamerschlag as well, but it's also small enough that I wouldn't say I was certain until I scoped it out a bit with my telephoto lens. The people buried in the cemetary seemed to be mostly German, with some of the older headstones actually inscribed in that language. Down the hill again, which at 30 m.p.h. made me feel a little unsafe for the turns — some of them are sharp, and the pavement's rather bad, so the brake was brought into action on numerous occasions. That was kind of annoying, because when I was struggling up the thing at 8 m.p.h. for what seemed like an hour, I was really looking forward to begin able to zip back down. Still, better braked than dead. Tonight I have a Rebecca, who's in Pittsburgh up until classes start, I believe. She and Evan and I ran off to half-price at Joe Mama's and discovered they've changed their menu slightly again. Cent jours, but who's counting? Oh no, certainly not me. I'm sure I haven't had a piece of paper taped to the back of my door since Wednesday... |
Friday, January 11, 2008
12:44 a.m.
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One of today's discoveries: I still get the nice morning-after-climbing feeling the morning after climbing. Yesterday's related discovery is that I now suck at climbing since I haven't gone at all since the summer. But I have a three-month membership again now, so I expect I'll get better if our old weekly or twice-weekly group still exists this semester. Today my advisor and I decided that I should write a research plan for the semester, which is essentially going to be a document fleshing out the four or so topics that we talked about today, including required steps, how long they might take, and some kind of prioritization. Then we'll figure out next week what I should do over the next four months. I think this is a decent approach, since I get to write up my priorities and hopefully push my work towards what I think is interesting. The best part, though, is that I get to drop machine learning again and take it now next fall, so I'll be having a beautiful beautiful semester of historical linguistics and advanced MT seminar as far as classes are concerned. Camera Work! New photos, including some good ones from Monday's outing, are uploaded to the photo site. Let me know if you people have any comments on site design or coding: it's my first real attempt at anything worthwhile in PHP, so I'm sure it's got a lot of silliness still lurking in the corners. Especially let me know if you break anything, either intentionally or accidentally, or if you want to have a look at ye olde source code. |
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