|
ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
A Live Journal mirror of this site can be found here, so now you can leave me your comments — even if you aren't a Live Journal member!
Monday, January 14, 2008
2:45 a.m.
|
Wow... I really need to start pulling my sleep schedule back towards something normal. And, you know, spend more time doing my actual research work. Instead, this weekend I spent most of Friday and Saturday trying to learn how to work with images in PHP, with something now approaching moderately almost-successful results. (Anyone know anything about this, especially about dealing with transparency?) I also went climbing again and found I've essentially dropped a level since the summer: a V1/2 (and not even all of them!) is about what I can handle now, but climbing Saturday sure felt better than climbing Wednesday. Managed one game of ITG Saturday evening with the freshmen before they all ran off; then played two more with random other people who stayed. Another session and I'll be most likely almost back to where I was before break. Today was one of those strange indoor days. I saw Rebecca off, which involved a quick trip to my office to print her driving directions, but the rest was me sitting at home poking at various non-work things and wishing food was either instant to prepare or free to obtain from elsewhere. Made a little progress on Thai, which was basically confirming that the difference between daw dek and dtaw dtao is like the difference in the value of the "t" in "top" and "stop." In Thai I can barely hear this (Unaspiration? Deaspiration? No-puff-of-air-ing? My phonetics terminology is terrible...) and of course can't reproduce it at all. Tomorrow I really need to finish that research plan and get my semester in order. |
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
5:09 p.m.
|
This may be a rather pathetic statement for someone of my age, but I'm about as excited to be flying to Boston tomorrow as I am for the actual MIT Mystery Hunt itself. I guess it's a matter of economic background and family size: it would have been totally impossible for the six of us to fly anywhere, so I grew up with a pretty constant succession of car trips instead. Even now, my younger three siblings have never been on an airplane, and my mom hasn't been on one since her honeymoon. Then there's me with what will be my sixth round trip tomorrow, and my dad leads us all thanks to some number of business trips to Milwaukee and a few other places over the years. So I'm excited. I haven't seen a 28X in the past month that hasn't made me think a satisfied "I'll be on one of those before too long" to myself. (This kind of sentiment reminds me why I'd hate to be rich and have everything be boring and routine because I'd done it all a thousand times.) This afternoon I actually printed my own boarding pass and spent half an hour looking up security regulations and carry-on rules. We're flying JetBlue again, which means we get little map, altitude, and speed displays in the back of our seats, so I'll probably spend the whole time staring out of the window recognizing geographical features and being amazed at the fact that it would take me more than two hours to walk all the way back to the ground if the distance were horizontal instead of vertical. Mm, I love going places! I'm supposed to sit at my desk and get stuff done until about 7:30, when it's time to get ready for climbing, but I'm having the worst time concentrating on my work. |
Monday, January 21, 2008
12:10 a.m.
|
The Mystery Hunt finally ended at 8:30 tonight after running for 56½ hours — from hearing people talk, this seems to be rather on the long side of hunts within recent years, though still short of the two that ran into Monday morning some years ago. (Last year's, ending at around 3 a.m. Sunday, was just plain short.) It seemed that the organizing team this year (Dr. Awkward) got themselves in a little deeper than they'd hoped. Part of the opening meeting warned that we were going to get "a lot of puzzles," which turned out to mean 126... and I'm not sure if that even includes metapuzzles or not. (Of those, our team status page says we had 24 still unsolved at the end of the hunt.) Then the organizers seemed somewhat harried and understaffed for most of today, which was probably why they'd been sending out regular hints and eventually decided to stop accepting new answers after the first team finished the run-around at 8:30. Things felt a lot slower, on our side too, than last year in terms of continual progress, certainly. This hunt felt quite a bit different from last year's — maybe because I've already done one, or because I helped write and run the KGB's puzzle hunt last spring, or because my thoughts were part of the time in San Francisco rather than Cambridge, or because I found it a little harder than last time to poke people for information and start working on stuff with them. Somehow, though, I didn't feel like I was making much of a contribution — I didn't come up with any answers, and a lot of the things I worked on remained unsolved forever and/or got taken care of "by person or persons unknown" while I was asleep. I managed to have fun with a few, though: there was a substitution cipher — I like breaking them by hand — and a beautifully-arranged race around the MIT campus, and I got to play Charles de Gaulle in a hilarious play that we performed for headquarters, so all's not lost. I'll save a better recap of the puzzles, though, for until after they're all posted publicly with their solutions. Tomorrow Chris and I fly back to Pittsburgh at 9:30 a.m., so my somewhat-trashed sleep schedule is unlikely to be regularized again until early Wednesday. I should be back on campus — and back at my desk for meetings and junk — by about 1 p.m. |
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
1:54 a.m.
|
Strange Request: Is anyone going to be passing through an airport in the reasonable future and then coming to (or coming back to) Pittsburgh reasonably soon after that? If so, could you wander by one of the JetBlue gates and get me a pair of the $1 headphones they have? I'll of course pay you back. The reason you all are getting such a bizarre question at 2 a.m. only 14 hours after I was actually in an airport is that I am an absolute moron and somehow convinced myself not to buy the headphones when they were available earlier today. And now it's keeping me awake because I feel kind of defeated and I'm not exactly sure what made me behave so stupidly. I mean, I need a pair of headphones; Alan told me months ago that you can get decently nice upgraded ones from JetBlue by paying $1, which is certainly way cheaper than they'd be anywhere else. Then I did in fact see the bin of headphones at the gate in Boston while we were in the boarding line. So why didn't I get them? I don't know. I think my excuse at the time was something like "Well, I'm already in line, and I don't really need them, and they might not be very good, and I really don't need to spend more money...," but all of these points are terribly flimsy. A dollar is not a lot of money these days; if I'd been at home this weekend, I probably would have spent that much playing ITG, so the loss of it to even a pair of mediocre or bad headphones wouldn't exactly trigger the financial apocalypse. Especially now that, if I actually do want to own a pair of headphones whose foam padding hasn't disintegrated and fallen off, I'll have to go out and spent at least 10 or 15 times that aforementioned dollar on something that may equally turn out to not be very good. It's a small thing, but sometimes I wonder how someone with my educational background can make such an illogical muddle of a decision that's entirely straightforward. So. If anyone's going to be in the air at a JetBlue airport — or flying an airline where some similar sort of deal is in effect — any time soon, could you let me know? |
Friday, January 25, 2008
4:11 a.m.
|
Very mediocre day today. Worst parts: Feeling trapped here and stupid this morning; taking an unexpected and unpleasant 45-minute walk home from the climbing wall this evening in –10-degree-C weather with no gloves because I missed the bus by 30 seconds. Best parts: Trying to compare the vowels in English "good" to French peut and Thai ชื่อ (something I don't know to what turns out to be [ø] and [ɯ]); hearing a voice at the other end of the phone say "Aw, what's wrong? Talk to me." Now I am awake and unable to fall asleep at 4:15 a.m. |
Random Stuff #46
Friday, January 25, 2008, 6:55 p.m.
|
A Question of Anaphora: A: You haven't been to Seven since last semester. Care to drop in some time? Question: Who hasn't been in the cluster: A or B? |
Monday, January 28, 2008
9:38 p.m.
|
I guess I haven't felt much in a journal-writing mood for the last few days... stuff keeps happening, some good and some bad, tending slightly downward perhaps since coming back from the Mystery Hunt. There's about a half an hour from Friday night that I very intently want to erase from the fabric of time, for example ("just Shout it out," right?), but it could have been a lot worse. I've been climbing, running, and to ITG, and those all went decently well as far as the activities themselves are concerned. Here's a good example of the kind of slightly-downward mix I mean: On Saturday I was supposed to go to REI with some people to look at climbing shoes; this was widely regarded (by me) as a good thing because I know how much I'll spend on shoe rentals at the climbing wall if I climb as much as I want to over the course of my membership, so I really wanted to know if decent climbing shoes might be purchased within that price range. Then there was some ambiguity or indecision about when we were going, and I only found out later from Live Journal that people had just gone without me. This was rather annoying, in part because I had been the first person to respond to the original e-mail saying I wanted to go, and second because I know nothing about climbing shoes and would have much preferred to look at them with people instead of all by my clueless self, which I'll have to now do as soon as I find the time. Walking back from the grocery store yesterday, when I wasn't slipping on the snow in my no-traction tennis shoes or carrying bags from underneath because their handles broke off unexpectedly, I was feeling a little sad because I didn't know of a game I could play online with Alan. (He and Ben have been playing Warcraft 3, which is apparently a Starcraft derivative.) He's not interested in word games like Scrabble, and my exposure to the mainstream computer games that he's an expert at is best described on the nano scale. Luckily — I think this was between the slip and the handle breaking — I remembered the existence of Tetrinet, which I predicted we'd both have about the same level of skill at and both enjoy. The surmise was happily confirmed a few hours later, until we both got distracted by the file format of the background music in his Blocktrix client and managed to get an MP3 out of it. I should mention for completeness that this weekend wouldn't have been complete without the excellence of Skype, which most of you may have already heard about if you have ties to Europe. Internet voice chat is a much nicer alternative to using more than 100 phone minutes in three days. Today the countdown stands at 80. I'd like to celebrate by reading some Jules Verne — I have a beautiful illustrated copy of "Around the World in 80 Days" that my parents gave me a long time ago — but if I do any for-fun reading after the book on language change I'm supposed to finish this week for Dr. Hopper's class, it should probably be "The Brothers Karamazov" for Akiva's book club. |
Saturday, February 2, 2008
12:29 a.m.
|
Long and somewhat difficult week. I've been feeling more personally stable for the past few days, but that might be because there's been a ton of work to focus on for the NIST eval that ended today. Last night and this morning I was getting e-mails from other people in the AVENUE group at the rate of about one every five to 10 minutes. Just one of our threads had 23 messages in less than 11 hours. A lesson from this week: I am still not eating enough. I guess I'm having a difficult time balancing availability, cost, and preparation time. The last few times I've been at the store, the thought of another week of lunchmeat sandwiches has made my stomach die a little, so I've been skipping the deli counter... which means I end up with very little to take to campus with me for lunch, which means that I have to buy food if I want any... which means some days I don't eat very much. (I guess it's getting to be standard practice for software companies or whatever to offer free snacks and/or meals to their employees, but not yet grad schools.) Cooking for one, once I get home, is also getting to be a fairly depressing business. Something will have to be done: if I lose another five pounds (in addition to the five I've already lost), there won't be anything left of me. Other lessons from this week, which mostly involve the same sort of annoyance that the economics of grad school suck, will be skipped since relating them here will only make me feel permanently poor and depressed again. I'll only mention that it seems like most people with good real jobs must be getting at least half again their salaries in free stuff and other perks, and the salaries are already three to four times mine to begin with. Tonight I went to the KGB Useless Person Auction and took about 5 million pictures. (Well, 210.) It is inconceivable that there's not at least one good one in there, so watch the photos site soon for an update. I also owe the Facebook crowd a January photo album. |
Monday, February 4, 2008
1:57 p.m.
|
Everyone reading this should go right now and open this Language Log post from Friday in another browser tab. You may, however, want to take care to do this in a place where sudden laughter won't get you carted off to the room with the fun bouncy pads on all the walls — I did kind of collapse into my bed snickering when I got a certain distance down the page. Special Note: Even beyond the error being discussed by the Language Log post, each of the circled paragraphs in the bee article has another mistake in it — pretty obvious ones, too. I'm kind of disappointed in Reuters' newswriting if that's the kind of thing they pump out. Copy editors are not obsolete, people! |
Saturday, February 9, 2008
4:05 a.m.
|
Hm. February 9 again — I should have known. I'd have to go through my old hand-written journal archives to collect all the specifics and supporting evidence, but ever since about 1995 (when I had two teeth pulled out on the date), February 9 has been a day when "stuff" tends to happen. Last year it was the day Chris and I found out, within about 15 minutes of each other, that we'd both been admitted into our respective Ph.D. programs of choice. This year, it features my grandpa's funeral. I'm not quite sure where to begin in writing about this, though I'll probably do a long hand-written entry for myself when I'm back in Pittsburgh. I had a very difficult week, but nowhere near as difficult as my mom and some other members of my extended family had, and not entirely for the same reasons. It's less the death and funeral itself making me sad than the things these events make me think of. My grandpa was, after all, 90 years old and had a week in the hospital first, under a none-too-cheery prognosis, as a sort of get-ready time for the rest of us. But then I start thinking about my grandma, of her sitting day after day next to my grandpa's hospital bed, and now at home alone and falling asleep by herself every night after 66½ years of marriage, and, well — I suppose you can't expect emotional attachment to increase linearly with time forever, but I consider the case of someone who's been in a relationship for (say) 10 months, or a case like my sister who's been dating her fiancé for three years now, and you see how even in such a comparatively short time you can get so used to always having that special someone there for you, and you already start to feel a bit lost when they suddenly aren't. (I think that last sentence is still grammatical, or at least understandable, even though it's got 121 words in it. New personal record by a bit; I tend to construct these horrors with length proportional to how many hours I've been awake without sleep.) It's these kind of thoughts, mixed in with some frustrations about work again, that have been swirling in my head over the past five or six days. Monday through Wednesday I felt completely listless and got no work done at all; even after I got myself back together for Thursday, I've been feeling somewhat isolated from any sort of a social group. It may be because I've been living on West Coast time and spending large amounts of time shut up in my room with my computer, and not enough time poking people — who may be effectively living on anything from GMT to Hawaii-Aleutian, given how little I seem to overlap with my housemates — to cook dinner together or do something interesting. The goal for next week is to make that change: I spent a nice time late last night playing ITG with Eight, and now that I finally have climbing shoes there's no incentive to not go to the wall as long as my membership remains in effect. My mom is waking me up in four and a half hours. Perhaps I should try to sleep. |
Monday, February 11, 2008
12:47 a.m.
|
The less said about the last week, the better. I'm not even talking about the funeral, although I don't suppose that helped matters. Couldn't work; felt alone and lost and isolated; lacked at many points the energy necessary to poke people to distract me or even get out of bed to find food. The copy proofs at The Tartan tonight were extra annoying — I started thinking about wanting to edit a special section some time just to show people that pages can in fact be produced where the margins are all the same size and things are lined up with each other. Alan and Vincent are making me want to do some careful portraits again — photography is something I didn't manage to mess up this week, and people are actually interested in my Useless Person Auction photos, many of which came out well. Anyone want to be photographed more... directedly? I'm thinking next weekend, so let me know if you're interested and when you're free. |
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
1:22 a.m.
|
A varied day today in a number of facets, which kept me from getting bored, though perhaps at the expense of having long periods of time to work. The most interesting may be the weather — we have snow, which I was sufficiently bubble-bound this morning to find out about via Live Journal rather than looking out the window. By the time I went out a bit before 11, there were a few inches on the ground and it didn't look like Forbes had even been plowed yet. Not that it really would make a difference: this is the kind of weather that happens in Cleveland about eight or 10 times a year, so it's barely worth mentioning. Here, I guess, it's a bit different. I ended up in the Underground for about 10 minutes (long story) to write out my historical linguistics homework, and they had a big TV there on to Channel 11, where the news people were having paroxyms of late-breaking live reports and going on about how this was the biggest storm of the year so far (you could hear the italics) and how Allegheny County had up to three and a half inches of snow and Washington County as many as five. Then stuff started closing: Alisa said her boss told her to go home at 11:30; then the SCS help desk at 3:00, all SCS staff at 4:30, and the Climbing Wall at 9:00, which was a half-hour after we'd gotten there. I would have thought that Pittsburgh was still northerly enough to not freak out over a bit of dust with frozen water around it — it's winter; it snows here; it's not exactly the end of the world. I used up the rest of my eating-out budget for the week by going to lunch with Alisa at Lulu's (planned and excellent) and then to half-price at Fuddle in a group of nine (unplanned, but still excellent). I am nicely full, after having eaten two other meals today, all of my Classic Maggie, and then a small amount of the remains of Dom's nachos and jcreed's fries. More evidence that I really need to stop underfeeding myself, I expect. Chris, jcreed, gwillen, and I swapped what I guess are called lateral-thinking puzzles — those things like "A man is found dead in the middle of the desert, a little ways past a pile of clothes. How did he die?" We're still only partway through Chris's lake problem, after having successfully solved my bicycle one and jcreed's elevator one. More work tomorrow, I hope. A lot of today has been waiting for scripts to run, which is somewhat annoying because I'd really like to start English parsing as soon as possible since it's going to take approximately forever. |
Sunday, February 17, 2008
10:45 a.m.
|
Biggest. Surprise. In my. Entire. Life. How do you react when someone who's supposed to be on the other side of the country shows up on your doorstep with flowers and a stuffed teddy bear? As I found out a little after 7:00 last night, I, at least, stand there in shock for about five minutes unable to come up with anything to say that's not "You're here... you're here..." repeated over and over. No offense to anyone if I seem a little preoccupied between now and Monday morning — I had expected to have to wait four months for this. I'm wordlessly happy right now... happier that I've been since at least December. |
Monday, February 18, 2008
9:11 p.m.
|
That was the best weekend — or at least the best 36 hours — I've had in about two months, and Saturday afternoon (before 7 p.m.) wasn't so bad either. I guess I kind of forgot what it was like to have things to do that aren't spending the day on my computer. Saturday afternoon I finally forced myself out to go climbing; on the way back I stopped at the Borders in East Liberty to use my gift card on "The Time Traveler's Wife." The book happened to be on the "buy one get one half off" table, so I let myself go a bit and also got something called "Paris to the Moon," which seems to be a series of essays by a guy who moved with a wife and newborn from New York City to Paris. I'm expecting something between Bill Bryson and Peter Whatever-His-Name-Is ("A Year in Provence," etc.), I think. And, I say, if my idea of "letting myself go" is spending $8 on a book, I probably don't have too much to worry about. Then there was the Surprise, followed by ITG and a lot of people-visiting as soon as I recovered. More of the same Sunday (yesterday), plus lunch with the Fairfax people at Five Guys and half-price with the same at Fuddle. I had my camera out again too, which I've really been neglecting since the Useless Person Auction. Overall, it felt so much like any normal weekend from last semester, which was incredibly nice in a lot of ways. It's just too bad it's not the "normal" state anymore. Hm. I think this is the part where I remind everyone that the SIGBOVIK conference is back again this year! (Someone came around last week and put little reminders, with Hershey's Kisses attached, into all of our mailboxes at the LTI. I wonder what the other students thought... outwardly it always seems to me that we have such a straight-laced department.) I spent an hour and a half today working on my submission instead of on the six-page paper on the definite article that I have to write for historical linguistics class between now and next week. And, to get you all in the mood as well, even though it's still a month and a half before the canonical date for such things, I really should point out a song and an (older) announcement from Jason Eisner at Johns Hopkins. The second one had me laughing non-stop for minutes. |
Friday, February 22, 2008
9:02 p.m.
|
I can't imagine what this world would be like without books in it. If you'd asked me yesterday, I might have replied snarkily that, if it meant I wouldn't have to spend hours and hours looking up possible mediocre sources for my linguistics paper, that I'd be all for that world. Mm, but save the fiction. My goodness, save the fiction. This afternoon, when I couldn't stare stupidly at my computer screen for any longer, I made a total escape and spent three or four hours, I think it was, losing myself in finishing "The Time Traveler's Wife" for the second time. (I know — that much deeper of a hole I'm digging myself into in terms of work, but it kept me from moping through the whole afternoon feeling lazy and behind and depressed.) This reading was a lot like the first time in terms of feeling like I fell out of my physical reality for a while, although the surface emotions then aren't quite what I'm feeling this time around. I guess it's similar to how my framing of and reaction to "Amélie" changed between the last two times I saw it. Other side effect: I want to write about a city — kind of like what O. Henry did for New York, Arthur Conan Doyle (and Sidney Paget's illustrations) did for London, and what Audrey Niffenegger did for Chicago here. These stories aren't really about the cities... but you can't really imagine Sherlock Holmes without the mad rush in a hansom from Baker Street to Charing Cross in 1885, can you? That newspaper book I've been kicking around in my head for years would have been similar for Case and Cleveland, if I'd ever gotten more than five or 10 pages into it, but now it's been long enough that I'm not sure if I'd do it right without going back and sitting out behind KSL for a few hours looking at the apartment building across the lagoon, or staring out at downtown from top of the hill as people make the planks resonate in the Elephant Stairs. I kind of want to take my time and my place and ball it up into something that stays put; that's one way of taking out and savoring the past. |
Sunday, February 24, 2008
11:44 a.m.
|
Interesting day yesterday, the middle part of which featured a Costco and Target run with Eight and Kempy. We went to Target first because I needed gloves and penny rolls, which of course meant that the penny rolls were gone and the gloves were down to their end-of-season dregs. The salesman, in essentially a repeat of what happened to me in 2005 when I tried to buy gloves in early March (which is still the dead of winter in Cleveland), said that they were starting to move in the summer stuff already. So for the current year I'm out of luck; I guess I'll have to remind myself in July to go back to the store and buy my winter gloves then. Then it was over to Costco. Being in Costo (for only the second time ever) reminded me of Uncle Josh in New York: —"Now where can I find one of them stores where they have pretty near everything to sell that there is on earth?" —"I guess you mean a department store, don't you?" —"Well, I don't know about that; they may sell departments at one of them stores, but what I want to get is some muslin and some calico." Well, we filled up the cart pretty quickly: Eight buying stuff for Roselawn, Kempy for the Donner dinner party, and me for myself. I came back with $78 worth of things in monstrous quantities, like 25 pounds of rice (Kempy calculates it at roughly 62½ cups) and two gallons of orange juice. Kempy had 27 pounds of tortellini for the dinner, and Eight had enough stuff (it looked like) to feed Roselawn for two weeks. Somehow we fit everything into my car and got it all back to campus. After dinner I ended up at Roselawn and got to talk to Wes and Rachel called Jordan and some other people where it was quieter. To the interesting list of games that the Roselawn people have tried to play with DDR pads has now been added something jwise called MMR: that is, Mario Mario Revolution, or Mario 64 where one person uses one pad to control the running and another person uses the other pad to control jumping and such. I didn't play — though perhaps I should have — but it was nice to hear the Mario 64 music again... my total experience with that game was two or three Thanksgivings at my cousin's house, and those were all eight or 10 years ago. In six hours I'll be locked in The Tartan copy editing for six hours, so I guess I'd better go now if I'm going to work on my paper or do anything else today. |
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
12:44 a.m.
|
Wow... even the idea of 62½ cups of rice or 27 pounds of tortellini wasn't enough to get a comment out of you people. I'm going to have to try harder — but probably not today, because not much of interest has been going on. I spent some unbounded number of hours cobbling together that six-page paper, including spending a few hours Sunday afternoon at the Pitt library because it makes CMU's look like your corner bookshelf by comparison. And Pitt has a huge linguistics department. I found what I wanted eventually and camped out at an excellent little desk, with shelves built into the wall above it, set along a wall on the fourth floor between two angled windows that let the sun in perfectly. These are the narrow windows that look out over the concrete area with the yellow sculpture we walk though on the way to half-price. The library has a whole row of these nice sunny desks that were just made for Sunday afternoons; I think I'm heading back next time with a book for fun. The paper got turned in today, at any rate, so I've been trying to spend more time on research stuff, which again is going very slowly. We may have a way, starting next Monday, to send French sentences off to a place in Europe to have them parsed — apparently they can't get through the paperwork to give us the parsing software directly in time for the Europarl shared task, so they might offer us this sort of "C-structure while you wait" approach instead. Fine with me, so long as can do that fast enough. I started working on a terrible bit of Java code this afternoon, although to be fair all Java code to me is terrible since I've never been properly introduced to the language. It took me about 90 minutes to write 50 lines, and that's not even enough to set up the data structures for the main part of the code. Maybe someone can provide intuition about this, actually. One of the things I hate, in moving from Perl to Java, is that extracting stuff that I want out of a string whose format I kind of know goes from one line to "Great goodness, is there even a way to do this?" Here's the story: I've got lines in a file that look like "word1 {( i1 i2 )} word2 {( i3 )} word3 {( i4 i5 i6 )}" and so on, where the number of is in each set is variable and might be zero, and I want to pull out each of the words and the set of is that go with it. This is one regular expression in Perl, with some memory parentheses and some $1 word afterwards, but the best I can do in Java is to hack the line up into smaller and smaller pieces with String.split() until I get chunks containing either a word or one of those is. Please tell me there's a better way to do this? |
Saturday, March 1, 2008
12:44 a.m.
|
Rar — I particularly held off posting yesterday so I could post today (February 29; the beginning of my online journal missed the last one by about eight months), and then I ended up missing it by 44 minutes! Such is life, I guess. I also didn't remember, until this morning, that the Chipotle in Cleveland Heights had free burrito coupons on the bottom of the receipts in the days leading up to February 29, 2004, and that I should have gone by the one here to see if they were doing the same thing. A lot of my life was eaten up today by Java, a language that must have been designed by loquacious copy editors who worked for some smugly superior publication like The New York Times. How else, I ask, do you get a language where an array is not the same thing as an Array, where the incorrect casing of variables and function names is perceived as a gross error, and where things have to be referred to by long and cumbersome names? Or, then again, maybe Java was designed by sentient sensitive microchips: it would make sense with a syntax is so stinkin' paranoid about static. Otherwise things are moving along at their usual slow pace. Dr. Hopper said in historical linguistics class yesterday that we should be getting our papers back Tuesday, so the result of that is somewhat eagerly anticipated. Alon's also back next week, so I really should spend a lot of the weekend working in order to have something ready to show for the French system for our meeting on Monday. |
Sunday, March 2, 2008
12:06 p.m.
|
Good day yesterday, probably because it contained no work. Some progress on a few other things, at least: my room is marginally cleaner than it was 24 hours ago, and some laundry got done in parallel so I have socks to wear this week. In the tech department, I got the FUSE kernel module and the NTFS-3G driver compiled and installed on my machine, so now I can write to my old Windows XP NTFS partition from Linux. The end goal, in doing that, is to have a place where I can set up a pseudo-C drive for Wine and run things like Photoshop or iTunes or (if I ever remember to get the CD from my parents' house) Sim City 2000. This last part is still proving to be an intense problem — nothing will run. The iTunes installer quits in the early stages with some generic "there was an error" message; Photoshop says right away that it needs Internet Explorer (ugh!) first; IE 7 says it can't find a volume to unpack to and quits. I'm also not confident that I can just copy the registry files and so on from ~/.wine to the new directory I want on the NTFS partition, so I'm thinking of completely uninstalling Wine, making ~/.wine a symlink to my NTFS directory, and then re-installing it and hoping that it will be less confused. Thoughts, anyone? The other good part of yesterday was games, half-price, and generalized fun with the Fairfax people. I went over to Tim's around 8:00 and found Dan there, so we played a round of Carcassonne and then something new called Yspahan. (Tim says the word is Persian; Wikipedia only says that the game won a German prize for games last year. The closest I've got myself is the name of the town Ypsilanti in Michigan, which Wikipedia says is Greek.) The rules and choices in Yspahan are kind of staggering at first, but the game plays surprisingly quickly and is a lot of fun. After a round of that it was 10:00, so I brought up the subject of half-price, leading to the three of us going down to Ian and al-Tim's to see what they were up to. Keith joined briefly, but then left again because he'd just eaten, so we had a group of five at Fuddle. Tim happened to mention an interesting word game just as we were leaving, so he brought along a clipboard, paper, and pencil, and we played straight through most of the meal. One person comes up with a five-letter word, then writes down the first letter of it. The rest of the group has five chances to guess it. For each guess, the writer writes it down, puts boxes around the letters that are correct and in the right place in the word, and puts circles around letters that are in the word but aren't in the right place in the guess. (So, if the word was FIRST and the guess was FILMS, the F and the I would be boxed and the S would be circled.) I was pretty surprised to find that (I think) only one word (Ian's MATHS) out of maybe 15 or 20 couldn't be guessed within five, although most of them were taking close to the full five. Fun ones included my OUGHT, Tim's NYMPH, and al-Tim's HAIKU. I copy edit at the unusual time of 4:00 today, which means that I should probably get moving to take care of grocery shopping and other things before then. |
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
1:30 a.m.
|
Stuff's been happening, and I keep coming up with more and more things that I want to write about, but by now they would make an absolutely gigantic entry if I actually sat down for 45 minutes or whatever and went through them all. Not sure if I have the energy or the desire to anymore, though. Some stuff about running, like going on the treadmill in the UC earlier in the week and watching someone run laps around the track in Gesling below. There's motivation for you: some anonymous person doing three consecutive 6:30 miles in the snow and wind while I'm struggling at just under 8:00 in a warm and stable environment! I think my goal for the end of March will be to get my 5K time down to 24:30 — I feel like I was at least that fast when I was still "in training" a few years ago. Let's see... academics? We got our papers back in historical linguistics today; I got an A on mine. Alon seemed all right with the progress on the French and German systems when we all met up yesterday afternoon, but Edmund and I have our work cut out for us, as they say, between now and next Friday when the Europarl data comes out. This is probably a good thing, though, because it can give me one specific task to get done each day, and those are almost functioning as hard external deadlines now if we want to have systems ready in time. The undergrads have spring break next week. I was really upset that I don't get one — in fact, a certain professor was kind of cavalier about it in class and made it sound like we should be beyond such childish things as getting a week off — because Ian asked me if I wanted to go on a road trip with him and Keith, but I have to stay here and work. There are some good things, though: for one, I can stop feeling so much like a scullery maid in my own house because there won't be dirty dishes piled up and festering on the counter and in the sink for days and weeks. And then the treadmills in the UC will be free, and I won't have to stand around waiting for someone to finish, which has been happening this month about 60 percent of the time. So my mood has been mostly good, but it changes rapidly. Sometimes I feel like — either by chance or by design, or (most likely) a combination of both — I'm turning into a temporal anomaly in my own time, especially when it comes to things related to consumer electronics. Not exactly feeling sorry for myself because, whether for economic or other reasons, I grew up without a lot of fancy gadgetry and toys that some people I know take for granted... even had they been offered to me for free or whatever, my "modern" (by this I guess I mean mature or fully-developed) way of thinking clearly sees that they're mostly not necessary and doesn't really want them anyway — as long as I consider myself in vacuo. It just makes me feel weird, I guess, to be in relatively close contact with people who have always been used to throwing around (to me) phenomenal amounts of money to have new computers every two years, giant-sized TVs, iPods, multiple video game systems, etc. ("But why should this bother you?" a certain part of me interjects. "You know you'd rather have access to multiple libraries in cool old buildings, or multiple campgrounds with hiking trails, than a free Nintendo Gamecube.") Ian would say that those people are morally obligated to do so; on the other hand, this comic doesn't really express what I mean, but it does have a valid point. I think this will probably have to be the topic of its own post or all-out essay at some time when it's not 2:15 a.m., though. |
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
10:06 a.m.
|
With regard to the end of last night's post: one thing I can't say about myself is that I've lost the ability to reason about things and see the various aspects, arguments, and counter-arguments for a given statement. (In fact, I think that's something I do pretty well and that I've gotten better at since coming to CMU.) After I posted last night and went to bed, I stayed awake for what felt like an hour, as my brain kept bringing up other facts, arguments, and details that I didn't mention in the post. So the conclusion is that the post in incomplete and simplified from the actual situation. When my mind runs away with itself on certain topics, it sometimes tends to set up this sort of "me vs. the world" scenario where things get exaggerated or simplified down to the point that the final picture is one that's too extreme to actually represent the real world. I should focus on the things that I do have — it's not like life has treated me unkindly or that I grew up living in a cardboard box or anything. And there are some things I have that just can't be measured in physical gadgetry or money or economics. The fact that there are a few wilted flower petals on my floor from where they fell behind the radiator, for example, means more to me than all the iPods and all the big-screen TVs and all the video game systems in all the Best Buys in all the world. And that should be enough. |
Thursday, March 6, 2008
3:24 p.m.
|
Here are some words:
|
Saturday, March 8, 2008
5:57 a.m.
|
Why am I awake at 6 a.m.? Oh yes, that's right: because it's taken me 10 hours to preprocess training data and build a language model from it. Actually, more than 10 hours, because the stupid thing's still not built yet because the building script keeps finding something new to complain about each time I run it. And of course it takes it 10 or 15 minutes each time to decide it has something to complain about. And of course it takes me 10 or 15 minutes to fix the input file because nothing runs quickly when you're dealing with 430 million words of text. These are the kind of nights when I come closest to understanding why people get themselves drunk. I've been awake for roughly 19 hours; I've been at my computer working for about 13 of them; I'm essentially no further along with my work than I was when I woke up this morning. Oh look, another error. Here comes another half-hour iteration. Great. |
Monday, March 10, 2008
10:49 p.m.
|
And there goes the weekend, I guess. It was mostly spent on the French system: until 6:30 a.m. Friday night (as we saw), Saturday most of the day from 11:30 until some time I can no longer remember — I gave myself a curfew of 3:00 new time, since we were losing an hour — and then part of the day Sunday too. Actually, I think the Saturday time was around 1 a.m. (old time), because I promised myself a walk outside for half an hour if I finished what I was working on by then, and I did. Sunday my brain rebelled and I ran off to the Waterfront for an hour and a half, and then again for about the same length of time for half-price. Today I worked from about noon until dinner at 8:30, and there are still a few things on the agenda before sleep tonight. At this rate, someone's going to have to find me by Friday and pry me off of the floor. Today was also the day that I brought up the possibility to my advisor of wanting to take some time off. (Some of you knew I was thinking about this; the rest of you know now.) A mixed reaction, I'd say. It had seemed to me going in that disappearing for all of July and perhaps the first bit of August would be about right, but now I don't think anything summer-based will get the advisorial OK unless I push a bit. One of the obligations of getting funded in our department, you see, is that you spend the summer here working too, because then they get you full-time without paying you any more and without paying CMU tuition. If people are going to go away, the logic runs, it's better that they do so during the school year so the project saves the tuition bill. Well, fine, but the problem with that is that it's pretty hard to go away for a month then, since accounting, enrollment, classes, etc., are really set up to be quantized in full semesters, and I'm not really sure I want to go without an income for four months. That leaves the possibility of a paying internship, which I suppose I could set up for the fall (assuming some company wants me), but first I'd need to figure out if an internship provides the sort of answer I need to my current problems. The essence of the matter is that my advisor recommends seeing how this semester turns out, staying through the summer, and then going somewhere for the fall if I still feel like I need to. I'll have to see how I feel about this in a few weeks once the French stuff is out of the way, and then we can talk about it some more and move towards some decision. In the meantime, it's just me getting nice 'n' cozy with my multiword lexicons, parsed parallel corpora, and character encoding incompatibilities. A Question: Does anyone happen to have any rum I could buy a bit of? All the discussion in the Live Journal comments to my last post has gotten me interested in trying a hot toddy, but I can't convince myself to spend $15 on a bottle of alcohol when (a) I might not even like it and (b) $15 is enough to buy groceries for almost half a week. (How do people afford to drink so much in college, anyway? Even a mixed drink at Fuddle is now $5.50 with the new 10 percent Allegheny County drink tax.) So if someone's got an existing supply I could siphon a few ounces off of, I'll gladly pay you the pro-rated amount for what I take. |
|