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ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
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Monday, May 19, 2008
8:03 p.m.
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Too often this journal turns into a stack, rather than a queue, for dealing with the list of things I want to write about, but so it goes. It's happening again: instead of Thai, graduation, the California Supreme Court, or whatever else I might have wanted to write about even further back, I have to first address air travel. This is one of those things that always feels out of my league, mostly for financial reasons that I've (most likely) addressed in earlier posts. I think I've been on six round trips in my life, and my effective "flying age" (years since first flight) is seven, so I'm inclined to find it extremely extremely exciting and to shake my head a bit at those lucky rich people who have flown more times than they can count and therefore find it nothing but cumbersome and annoying. (If any of them are looking for surrogates to do their traveling for them, please direct them to apply now via any of the usual ways of contacting me. Satisfaction guaranteed, at least for one of us.) Today I wrote a poem about it, although I hesitate to post it without further revision or thought or something. What makes the air travel situation worse, though, is the fact that actually buying tickets feels a lot like what I imaging playing the stock market feels like. It would be one thing if a flight came with some fixed rich-people-only price tag that, you know, I could work up towards and eventually meet. Not so in this capitalist economy, though: things are arranged such that, as Dave Barry put it succinctly, no two people on a flight will have paid the same fare, and everyone else on the plane will have paid a lower fare than you. I found out about a site called Farecast a few weeks ago, a site that tracks prices and tells you statistically whether you should buy now or wait based on its estimate of whether prices are going up or down in the reasonable future. Sounds excellent, except there seems to be a bug in the system. For more than two weeks now I've been asking it about Pittsburgh to San Francisco and back for the last week in July, and since the beginning the friendly little "Tip: Wait" message has been assuring me that there's no reason to call the heart doctor (or the bankruptcy lawyers) just yet. And yet, in some perverse experiment of reverse psychology, the cost of the trip's been going steadily upwards from $350 to today's new high of $413. And this, says one of my expert sources on 21st-century travel, is "the right time to book flights." So I guess I just lose or something. Rising gas prices, summer travel, etc., and so on, but everyone else I've talked to who flies this route regularly has never paid more than $300 in the worst case. If anyone's got an insider tip on how to not spend a month's rent in two days, or some good information about how much worse things are likely to get (or a pilot friend who wants a cockpit-mate for a cross-country trip), I could really use it soon. This situation is not making me happy. |
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
9:51 a.m.
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Another week (or more), another post. This time I managed to miss writing about the usual Memorial Day Case-person camping trip, mostly, which was at Ohiopyle State Park here in Pennsylvania from Friday through Monday. I'm pretty sure it was our biggest trip to date in terms of number of people: we had some of the usual suspects (me, Kathi, Vicki, Erin, Ben, Eric, Paul, and Dan), plus some first-time old Case people (Christine, Glenn, and Zara), and then Vicki's boyfriend and his friend (Brett and Phil), who are actually old-old CMU people. So a good time. Cold at night (3 degrees the first two!), but decently warm and quite sunny during the day. Saturday Eric had booked us tickets to see Fallingwater, which was only a few miles away, so we started with that in the morning. The tour doesn't seem to have changed much in the two and a half years since I went with the GSA, but different guides give it in different styles. This time they didn't mention having to fix up Frank Lloyd Wright's torquing cantilevers, but maybe that's old news now. After the tour, we had lunch in Ohiopyle the town, a little three-blocks-by-four sort of place that's mostly rental shops for the tourists. A short hike in the late afternoon, where we saw a bit of the Great Allegheny Passage bike trail that connects Pittsburgh (or at least the suburbs) to Washington. I was in charge of dinner Saturday night, and it was pasta with augmented sauce, plus chicken and baked potatoes — seems to have gone over quite well, and I discovered that Tyler's magic pasta does actually serve about six people per pound. Sunday was the water sports day, since a major reason for having this trip in the first place was so that people could go whitewater rafting. Not me, though: the water was 53 degrees Fahrenheit for one thing, and then the rafting cost $62 for another. (Erin joins me, I find, in quantizing money in terms of food: for her it's Chipotle burritos.) So we all drove to the rafting place, which was kind of strange since it's just a parking lot off in nowhere where four or five rafting companies all have buildings where they outfit their trips. The trips actually start a mile away back in town, which I didn't realize until everyone was getting herded onto an old school bus, and I didn't manage to walk the mile back in time to photograph them on the water. Instead I kind of poked around town and the waterfall close by, then found a trail through the woods heading back towards the rafting place. So that was most of our trip. Monday was just a packing-up day, after breakfast, and I was back here by about 1:00. Thrown, I say, back into the middle of realizing how much I have to get done before my next adventure, which is driving back to my parents' house tonight for my sister's wedding on Friday. Separate post coming about such home things, though. I should at least put in here the two winning quotes from the camping trip: Paul, looking at my tomato sauce: I see it pulsing! Either it's warm, or it's alive. |
Thursday, May 29, 2008
11:20 p.m.
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Today's lesson: weddings are complicated things. I suppose I already knew that, from having heard my parents talk about plans and arrangements and such when we talk on the phone, but now I'm actually here and seeing it firsthand, and it's kind of crazy. Last night, my mom was all worried that the little party favor bags she was making up for the kids didn't have holes punched in them in the right place, and my dad was at the computer making devising seemed to be a to-the-minute schedule when he asked Katie if two minutes was enough time for her toast. (Which she, on the other extreme of planning, has yet to write or even sketch out.) The problem with stress is that it's contagious: upset people only make other people more upset for having to deal with them, that feeling propagates all over, and at the end of a half-hour everyone's in a rotten mood. I've tried not to get caught up in it, but haven't been entirely successful. The rehearsal, at least, went smoothly, although it was tons of information and details all being thrown at us at once. I was starting to wonder how I was going to remember where to stand and how, and what part of the church to usher people in to, and where to put the aunts and uncles and grandparents so they can get out again in the right order, and what the proper way is to offer a girl your arm without looking detached or ungainly, etc. — and then thankfully I remembered that people have weddings without noticeable mistakes all the time, and that the 11 of us in the wedding party are at least of average intelligence and should be able to get the same effect. Plus I wasn't the only one to find it all a little much in terms of stage directions; at the end, we were all like "I'm just gonna stand somewhere until they tell us to go somewhere else." The rehearsal dinner, on the other hand, was fantastic. About 25 of us filled a room at the Spaghetti Warehouse in Akron, where I had the most satisfying dinner I've had in weeks — probably since another excellent Italian meal at Buca di Beppo's at Station Square right before Alan's graduation. Salad, bread, lasagna, wine, and dessert, plus a lot of fun times with Liz and Debbie, who I haven't seen in a really long time. Tomorrow our time is spoken for from about 2 p.m. until midnight, so I probably won't get around to another entry before Saturday. |
Monday, June 2, 2008
9:49 a.m.
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The wedding is over, Chris and John are on their honeymoon, and (after taking Saturday to recover) the rest of us are back to something approximating normal mode. It was a very nice wedding, although my parents have been running over it and finding small things that weren't right. We had some trouble with the "aisle runner," which is what a red carpet would be if it wasn't carpet and wasn't red, and of course part of the trouble was that Chris's klutzy older brother (you know who this is) managed to trip over it and rip it. But, in all the points that actually mattered, everything went very nicely. Chris looked absolutely amazing in her wedding dress, and the official photographer didn't care that half of us in the wedding party had cameras out when he was doing his thing, so I came back with a good number of very nice shots that I'll (hopefully!) post very soon on that same photos site where I'll (hopefully!) post everything else I owe people. At some point during the proceedings, I told myself "Hm, I have a brother-in-law now," but it was less weird a realization than I might have expected. It was slightly more unexpected when John's stepmom told us how she'd overheard him asking "Where's my wife?" We got home a little after 1 a.m. Friday night, and then I slept half of Saturday afternoon and went to bed at 10 p.m. anyway. More normal yesterday, when I drove back to Pittsburgh and was instantly lured outside and onto my bike by the near-perfect weather. Went up and down in the park a bit, but in the end there were too many cars and too many people, and I had to seek out more remote paths. I saw Storytime Paul on the Hot Metal Bridge when I was coming back up from the South Side trail, and then Ivan was apparently just coming off the Eliza Furnace trail when I was, so we biked as far as his house together. My bike odometer needs a new battery or something, so I don't know how far I went, but my guess would be something around 15 miles based on the length of time I was gone. Otherwise, my "home life," for the past few days that I've actually been home, has largely consisted of moving all of my stuff into Jeff's old room while simultaneously moving Jeff's old stuff (now Pyxy's) into my room. And like the old saying goes, give someone enough furniture, and they'll hurt themselves with it. Since Jeff's room has lots of holding space, I thought I would do it by swapping each piece of furniture for its counterpart: move my bookshelf into Jeff's room, for example, and then put Jeff's bookshelf in my room in its place. Turns out the bookshelf is the largest piece of furniture I can handle on my own this way. Tuesday night I was taking apart my bed frame and managed to drop one of the side pieces on my toe when it popped out of the footboard. After some intermediate stages — some of which consisted of me laying on the floor surrounded by bed pieces saying "Aaaaah! Owwww!" a lot — my mom got a phone call starting with "Um, how do you know if your toenail's going to fall off?" After looking at it, Tyler thought mine wasn't going to — and indeed so far it hasn't — which was the answer I was really really hoping would turn out to be correct. (There was the whole wedding in three days thing, and also, ew!) For now I just have an interesting purple spot about two thirds of the way up the nail, which I guess is going to work its way upwards as the nail grows. I've been really sensitive about my feet in the days since Tuesday, but as of last night the room-switching process has been completed. |
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
1:10 p.m.
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There hasn't been a linguistics-based post in a while, so today we consider the topic of syllable segmentation. I think I've mentioned here before that this is sometimes an annoying problem for me in Thai — partly because I haven't learned all the complex vowel markings yet, but at least equally because the segmentation isn't something you can do programmatically. An example: Thai has two implicit (i.e. non-written) vowels: [a] (or more like a very short [aʔ]) at the end of a syllable, and [o] in the middle of a syllable. Then the computer (i.e. me) is faced with a sequence of three consonants: ถนน. Now, there's no way to tell a priori whether this should be divided as ถ นน [tha.non] or as ถน น [thon.na], unless you want to get into probability games — you essentially have to know the word in advance; otherwise the computer or foreigner is stuck. (The answer is that it's the first one, and the word means "road.") Of course, the problem's not limited to Thai, or even second languages. I had a stats professor junior year who was always talking about these example problems having to do with "reffiyas" (sounded roughly like [rɛf.i.jəz]). Finally, after some number of weeks, he had a slide or a handout or something where the word was printed, and it turned out to be "refills," so there was a confusion for this professor over whether we had the morpheme "re-" followed by "fills," or a single-morpheme word like "referees." (Although you could make the case that it's more likely to be "re-" when what's left could also be a word by itself, but that needs knowledge of English just like my Thai segmentation example needed knowledge of Thai.) Then I thought of the English word "subliminal," in my own native language, and I realized I've always pronounced it more like "suh-bliminal" (enough IPA for one post, eh?), with the stress quite noticibly starting with the "b" in the second syllable, and not like "sub-liminal," which I found was actually the word's derivation after I took PSCL 101 at Case. So even if you asked me to chop some words in my own language up into syllables, I might get some of them wrong, at least from the point of view of morphology. If you gave me a list of pharmacy or biology terms, I'd probably be even worse. |
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
2:12 p.m.
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More posts! I'd heard before that there was a point system for immigrating to Canada, and it turns out that it's true! At this moment I score a 80 out of 100: all the education, language, work experience, and age points, and then nothing for arranged employment (in Canada) or "adaptability" (connections to Canada, basically). The "pass mark" is 67, so I get through, but I also found out that there's a financial requirement. A single person has to have $10,168 "unencumbered by debts or obligations," and if you take into account my student loans, well... Guess I'm stuck here for now. |
Friday, June 6, 2008
12:00 a.m.
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Sherbrook is going to be the place for fun and interesting adventures this summer and into next year, you can quote me on it. Tonight I ended up there with Rebecca (visiting) and Lea after having ice cream at Rita's with the same. The telegrapher's key they have that posts to Twitter needs jcreed's laptop to work, but there were some nice hand-lettered signs and a lot of good discussion of everything from David Ives to automatic toilets. Also a design project Lea showed us called the "bathroom penitentiary": the idea is that it won't let you out until you've washed your hands with soap and water. It was really nice to just talk with some people and feel social again... I haven't been very good at that recently. I rode my bike to Squirrel Hill, too, and it felt wonderful coming home from someone's house late at night, zipping along through the quiet streets. It's been a long time since I've done that too. Mostly unrelatedly, I've been thinking a lot over the past several months that's I'd really (desperately? — yes, sometimes desperately) like to get a group of people together for a proper discussion on all the same-sex marriage and religion issues that are getting so much press and Internet time recently. My #1 regret in the whole situation is that the debate is always one of hate and of extremes, with each side so bent on its own particular rhetoric that you could show these people a flashcard saying "4 + 3 = ___" on it and only get back "You're destroying civilization!" or "Die, religion, die!" as your answer. The national debate reminds me of nothing so much as the Israel–Palestine conflict, with each side so intent on avenging and paying back that no progress can ever be made; my guess is that most people on either side of the gay marriage debate will have made a bunch of generalizations that they suddenly ignore when it comes to people they know. (In the vein of someone who says "I hate lawyers; they're a blot on the landscape and an insult to a meaningful justice system with all their 'wrongful practice' this and 'sue their pants off' that." —"Yes," comes the reply, "but isn't your brother-in-law a trial attorney." —"Oh, he's a good lawyer. He doesn't count.") My sincere hope is that real people, if you get them together to talk about the issues, aren't actually as extreme as the blogs would have you believe, so I'd like to try it and see. Understanding the sort of default generalizations I just mentioned, and why they're not useful, would go a long way in getting some kind of progress made on the issue at hand, I think. Not that I have all the answers myself, of course, but in a way I feel kind of caught in the middle between the two camps and I want to see if other people are either in the same position as me or can at least have the capacity to see things both ways. So: I'm looking for some manageable number of people — let's say no more than five or six — with different points of view who'd like to spend maybe an hour or two talking about same-sex marriage and seeing what else is out there. Reply by the usual methods, and include a few sentences describing your incoming position if you think you can and want to. We can work out a way to have the actual discussion electronically or via Skype or some such if not all the participants are local. |
Monday, June 9, 2008
5:46 p.m.
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มีหนังสือไทย |
Sunday, June 15, 2008
11:34 p.m.
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A quick paragraph for the last week-plus that I haven't posted about yet. There's a DDR song called "Burning Heat," isn't there? That's kind of what we've had. Last Thursday was the warm-up day (ha ha), and then from Friday to this last Thursday the public thermostat was set at about 32 Celsius, which rather caught me by surprise this early in the year and made my room uncomfortable. Friday and Saturday we had some nice summer thunderstorms (which helped keep other people away from the Strip when Ian, Eight, and I drove there Saturday), and today was an excellent day of blue sky and nice white clouds. I didn't get to enjoy them too much, though, because I left in Edmund's car at 12:30 to drive to Columbus, where I'm currently reporting from and where I'll be through Friday for the ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics) conference. Edmund and I caravaned here with Jon, Danny, Michael, and Alok in another car, which was good (and fast) fun. We were at our hotel for about 20 minutes, and then it was off to the conference hotel (4.1 miles away) to register, and then it was off to the Ohio Statehouse (by foot) for the opening reception. That was just a bit of fancy finger foods on trays, and you'll note I haven't mentioned eating any other food for the day (I had a few cherries in the morning), so by the time we left the reception at 8:15 I was, um, rather hungry. Unfortunately, the "Short North" district of Columbus seems to cater more to business-type weekday crowds, and we couldn't find much that was open at 8 p.m. on a Sunday that wasn't a fancy restaurant. We settled for a Starbucks because Jon wanted coffee, and I was induced by Matt to try something called a Java chip: this appears to be something like a chocolate milkshake crossed with a frozen Coke crossed with something coffee-based, so the coffee taste wasn't so overpowering and I actually finished the whole thing. The talk fell to mostly NLP stuff, which was fun and entertaining. It's a nice change to be talking with people in my program and doing some vaguely social stuff with them too: having not found this right kind of atmosphere in my early days at the LTI, I kind of switched to seeking out friends and such elsewhere, so it's good to find a group too where I can talk about node alignment or listen to someone musing about cognitive models of machine translation without feeling like the weird one. I think all it would take is a few students-only parties or little informal dinner things before we'd actually get an LTI social group going. Tomorrow we're leaving the hotel at 8:00 and having a pretty full day of conference activities until something like 6, so I get to be up pretty early. Luckily our hotel has free tea, so I'll most likely be making a pit stop by the lobby on the way to whatever awaits us — which I sincerely hope will include breakfast. |
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
10:14 p.m.
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Maybe you don't expect this at first, but, my goodness, conferences are freaking tiring! It seems on quick inspection that you have nothing to do but sit in a room all day and eat free food, but even if that were completely true you'd still have to do it for 10 hours a day and get up sickeningly early besides. So things have been going... mixed, I'd say. The days have been arranged pretty much on the same pattern so far: I wake up at 7 or 7:40 (depending on whether it's a shower day or not) and meet up with the other AVENUE guys around 8:00 just outside of our rooms. Then we get into our two cars and drive the 20 minutes to the conference hotel, which gets us actually into the place around 8:30, during the time when "breakfast" is served. (The quotes are because, while the organizers seem to have planned for the usual pastries, fruit, cereal, sausages, etc., they have yet to really manage to have more than one of those items on any given day.) The plenary session (I still keep thinking of the French word plénaire from the Europarl corpus) starts at 9 and goes until 10:30 or so; then there's a break. Then a 90-minute session where you have the choice of three-ish papers in some particular track (machine translation, speech, information retrieval, semantics, or whatever). Then lunch. After lunch, it's the same pattern of concurrent sessions of three or four papers, followed by a break, followed by another session and then some additional something: poster session on Monday, banquet on Tuesday, and more plénaire (which some of us skipped) today. Then the 20-minute drive back to the hotel. The net result of all this insanity is that I've been getting back to the hotel, half-dead, around 11:00 or later, wanting to have some nice quiet time but feeling like I might pass out if I even look at my pillow too much. It's true that the noise is starting to get to me, and the constant fight against the crowds to get anywhere. There are about 800 people registered for this conference, and one thing either the ACL or the Hyatt didn't do is work out how much square footage a single person takes up, multiply by the number of attendees, and make sure that the conference venue actually had that much space. They also haven't set up any tables or seating areas or anything, so that during the breaks there are almost a thousand people all packed into the hallways outside of the meeting rooms, grabbing food and stopping dead in their tracks in some horribly inconvenient place to jaw a while and clog up traffic. Today, as part of my volunteer hours, I was leading a nearly-blind guy around, and it was all I could do to keep myself from yelling to all the people-sheep "Hey! There's a guy with one of those little white canes here. Can you let us through and stop pushing and getting in our way?" Sorry if I sound a bit blunt... reserving any judgement on the quality of the papers or the research being presented (which has had its good moments, for sure), in every minor or logistical point the general feeling among us AVENUE students is that the implementation has been extremely poor. I'd like to point out yesterday's banquet as one example, since a lot of people (non-students too) have been complaining about it. Now, keep in mind through all of this that every banquet ticket was sold at the price of something like $45, which our departments are paying even if we're not. The organizers, apparently, thought it would be nice to have the dinner at the Columbus Zoo, which is of course not near the conference hotel but is instead a 20-minute bus ride away. All right — they arranged for buses to leave the conference at 6:15 and 7:00, and said that the people on the first bus would have time to walk around the zoo before dinner while the people on the second bus would do that after dinner. Well, then dinner started at 7:30 and was done by 9:30, which still left an hour before the first bus run was supposed to leave at 10:30. We were told to "go see the animals" again. But, I ask, Madam President, how many animals are you going to see after dark, when all the meandering zoo paths have no lights, when all the buildings are locked, and when — moreover —, all the animals are asleep? The crowd waiting for the bus at 10:30 was, um,f rather large. And none of them wanted to be stuck sitting in the zoo parking lot for another 45 minutes, so every time a bus pulled up, the surge pressed tight against its expected arrival place and people lost all sense of order. (These are not, mind you, petulant third graders; they're highly respected and intelligent computational linguistics researchers that either have or are in the process of getting Ph.D.s.) Klaus and I finally got onto the fourth bus (I was leading him around the banquet too), but only by virtue of someone finally seeing his cane and yelling to the people in the nearby area to let us get up to the bus. So it was again about 11:45 before we got first back to the conference hotel and then back to our remote student hotel. I expect better things from tomorrow — I really do. I'm presenting a poster at the WMT workshop, and the number of people should hopefully be less maddening. I just have to get through to Friday, and then I don't expect I'll remember much of the coming weekend because current plans are probably to spend most of it asleep. |
Sunday, June 22, 2008
9:39 p.m.
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I'm back from ACL in Columbus; it's true that Thursday and Friday were better days, but I still think all of us students were really ready to go home by the time Friday 6 p.m. came around. The main conference had actually ended Wednesday, when I posted last, but then there were two days of associated workshops filling out the rest of the week, which were mostly the same thing except in smaller groups and without breakfast. Thursday was the WMT workshop (I know it's silly to add "workshop" after it when WMT already stands for Workshop in Machine Translation, but that's what I seem to have settled on calling it), where I gave a one-minute introduction to my poster and then stood in front of said poster for an hour and 15 minutes. I guess I must have been talking really loudly to get over the noise of everyone else; by the time that short period was over, my throat felt like I'd read 10 or 12 packets again at one of those all-day CWRU Trivia Club tournaments. I also asked a question after an earlier talk and threw in an observation about system combination when that came up in discussion, so I at least met some goal of participation. Friday's workshop was called SSST-2: the second workshop on Syntax and Structure in Statistical Translation, or, as Dekai Wu said when discussing the proceedings, "pssst." That was probably the most relevant day to the AVENUE research group, but after a marathon week of talks, I know my attention span was pretty shortened. Some of the most useful "conference" time came at lunch each day, when all of us students went a few blocks over to the North Market (kind of an indoor food court and the only reasonably-priced student-ish food we could find) and talked about changes or improvements or experiments we wanted to make on the transfer system. Alon said on the way back Friday night that the real benefit of a conference is in talking to other people, so I guess I kind of failed a bit on that one. I still feel pretty shy about wandering up to Kevin Knight or Daniel Marcu or Jason Eisner and saying "Hey, so about that paper..." But apparently Vamshi did this and had good success; I think I only talked to two or three new people, and they were all students. I woke up at 10:30 yesterday desperate for physical activity: all I'd done for the past week was eat, sit, and sleep, and I was feeling pretty slovenly about it. So I e-mailed the climbers d-list and got a group together for 4:00 that included Chris, William, jcreed, Eight, gwillen, and a surprise guest appearance by Wes. Afterward, people migrated to Sherbrook, where I was in the laptopless minority but managed to get some interesting conversation out of people anyway. Eight and I were too late for ITG around 9:45 — we have yet to completely figure out the Scotland Yard operating hours for the summer, and there weren't any signs up anywhere that we could find. The weather was excellent again today, so the physical activity desire was only increased; I decided fairly early on biking and headed out the door around 11:30. It wasn't until I was leaving that I further concluded that I was pretty sick of taking the same 15- or 20-mile rides on the Eliza Furnace and South Side trails, so I made a right on Beeler Street and decided to retrace, by bike, the same North Park route that Evan and I covered on foot a few weeks ago. For a twist, the battery in my bike odometer had reset everything, so the numbers displayed were all in kilometers. I stopped for about five minutes at a little park in what I think was the extreme north end of Shaler (that was at 20 km), and then inside North Park when I finally found a public drinking fountain. I did the lake route again too, and again by that time I was already noticing a pretty significant slowdown whenever anything approximating a hill got involved. I had managed to bring $5 with me for emergencies, so I called in at the usual sort of overpriced park concession stand and spent just about all of it on a hot dog and lemonade. Then towards home, as the hill-death continued. There was a beautiful hill in Shaler almost a mile long, on a straight residential back street with no traffic, but then I had to pay for it by going up the zoo road in Pittsburgh, which is in competition only with Negley Avenue for the hill I hate going up the most. By the time I hit Morewood, I was in my bike's second-lowest gear and barely keeping up 10 k.p.h. in a lane of traffic. Finally home again around 3:00, after a ride of 63 km, or about 38 miles. There may be a moral of the story somewhere that says you shouldn't try to play ITG half an hour after biking almost 40 miles, but if so I haven't read it. I did all right, I suppose: not what you'd call a good day, but I still managed three games before my legs started falling apart. Eight got an 88.88 percent on a song, but it was a Level 9 or 10 and the ninth song we played — I guess you can't have everything. At home again, I took a shower and noticed that I'd managed to sunburn myself quite badly: the top part of my shoulders and then partway down my arms are the worst, and then a little bit more on the top of my legs between my bike shorts and my knees. It's the shoulders I'm most worried about, since they may possibly be burnt badly enough to start peeling in a few days. This post is really long, so I think I'd better stop now! |
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
11:08 p.m.
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Frustrating week so far, thanks to an annoying combination of work difficulties and personal stuff not going so well. I suppose it would have started with ITG on Sunday afternoon, but my excuse for not doing so well there was that I'd been biking for three and a half hours not long beforehand. Then yesterday was a long day of trying to figure out why my manual French–English transfer grammar, when combined with a lexicon of 1.5 million entries, was taking up to an hour to translate a 20-word sentence. Left that in still mostly defeat around 7:30, just in time to go climbing with Eight (he says I have to write it "8" now), Chris, and William, which was again rather poor from a performance point of view. Today was more of the same at work, with an added bonus of spending an hour and a half on what should have been a five-minute job because I kept doing it wrong — all the worse because Vamshi and I are kind of frantically chasing the AMTA paper deadline that's next Monday. In a larger sense, it's quite irksome that I have to constantly practice any skill, whether it's physical or mental, or else whatever ability I have goes away in like five minutes. Every time I start climbing again (this being the third), I'm back to falling off V1/2s as if I've never seen one before. Right now I probably couldn't write out very many of the words for the Thai numbers under 10, even though I spent more than an hour the week before ACL practicing them. This is even getting to be the case with French, which I'm now trying to actively combat because I'll be parbroiled if I let something I worked on for nine years get away from me without a fight. One of my errands yesterday was passing by the public library to get a copy of "Harry Potter à l'école des sorciers" — yes, the first book in that series that you all know and that I've never read. I'm taking Erin's excellent advice of reading them in French, which I'm hoping keeps me in a bit better practice for that language and makes it so I don't object to what I've heard is J.K. Rowling's somewhat indifferent writing style. And yet, rather than concentrate on maintaining or improving a small set of select skills I really care about, I'm constantly casting around and getting caught up in new things just long enough to not want to suck at them so much. After climbing yesterday, our group ended up at Sherbrook because of Guitar Hero, so I got to play it for only the second time ever. Apparently I don't fail as much as I thought I would, although I do have pretty impressive tunnel vision for seeing the scrolling notes and nothing else: people had to explain to me serially all the other stuff on the screen that I'd completely failed to notice when it was my turn. But now of course I want to learn to play better, partially for the same reasons I originally found ITG very appealing and partially because everyone else was way better than I was. I tend to find this joint motivation a lot and wonder if that's a good thing or not. |
Friday, July 4, 2008
11:08 a.m.
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Pro tip, as they say: Do not attempt to manufacture a research paper in the last days before the deadline such that, 30 hours before it, you still haven't starting running any of the experiments that are central to your results. Or, at least, if you are mad enough to try such a thing, don't be surprised when you're plagued with bad luck at every step and have to rewrite the paper three times becuase the results keep not coming out the way you want. I've just completed such an activity (as of midnight last night), so my brain is kind of liquefied from thinking nothing but "paper paper paper paper" for about the last week. This may be a somewhat scatterbrained post, as the nicely-ordered list of things to write about I was mentally keeping track of in the days after my last post, um, kind of got obliterated. Some fragments: Went climbing a couple of times; didn't suck as much. Desperately wanted to go yesterday and the day before, but was stuck in my office until midnight both days. Played ITG with Zach and one of his prekies (pronounced ['pri:kiz], short for "pre-college," short for "scary young high school kids whose parents send them to CMU for six weeks over the summer to take classes"). Took part of a long walk with Philip (this was last Saturday) that in one sentence is a seven-mile way to get to the Giant Eagle in Squirrel Hill. In two sentences, I'd add Philip's excellent characterization of it as a route probably worked out by a Department of Public Works employee whose job it was to maintain Pittsburgh's public staircases and who wanted to connect as many of them as possible. Excellent walk and highly recommended. Spend two and a half hours Friday evening on a trip to the Waterfront to buy shoes; amazingly, the bus fraction of this time was about as minimal as it can be, and I actually spent that much time trying to find a pair of tennis shoes. The problem is that I don't like paying $50 for shoes when they can be had for $20, but cheap shoes feel cheap, like they won't last more than six or eight months. After stopping by three stores, I eventually went back to the first one and got the $50 pair. Had a really wonderful lunch with Alisa (last Thursday) at Pamela's, where we talked about COLING and AMTA and ACL and the funny sign she'd taped to her apartment door that morning. Further back than that I don't really recall. I finished "Harry Potter à l'école des sorciers" earlier this week and swapped it for "Harry Potter et la chambre des secrets" (this one's a literal title translation). The first book was pretty good, in part because all the French names are funny and fun to read. Tell an English reader, for example, that the four houses of the Poudlard school of sorcery are Gryffondor, Serpentard, Poufsouffle, and Serdaigle (the third one is by far my favorite)! It's actually kind of nice not knowing the English for two of those, or for any of the names of the Quidditch balls, or reading two thirds of the way through the first book before someone called Professor Rogue by his first name and I realized it was supposed to have been Snape all along. So don't tell me the translations — I already conduct most of my life with some kind of accent anyway, whether it's French, British, nerd, or 1930s. Today is a day off and I must have food and physical activity, probably in that order. |
Monday, July 7, 2008
4:07 p.m.
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A weekend was had by all... I spent mine doing things with people for the first time in some length of time that I forget. The cast of characters here at the house numbered seven, since Tyler and Alan have been back from Colorado for some time and we had three of Philip's friends from high school (Kendall, Kiwi, and Bobby) visiting Thursday through Sunday. I guess the "group" activities began Friday afternoon with Philip, Bobby, and me trying to play some ITG, except both Scotland Yard and the Pitt Union were closed, so we returned defeated. Around 6:35, I packed up my camera, tripod, and umbrella (because it didn't look so nice outside) and joined Chris and William on a bus heading downtown: our goal was to eat dinner and then head to the Point to watch fireworks. We ended up at the Lemon Grass Cafe, a Thai place Chris knew about on Sixth Street between Penn and Fort Duquesne. (Two long paragraphs about the dinner deleted, since they were coming out extremely ranting. If you want the full story, ask me.) In short, the relative excellence of the chicken panang was nowhere near enough to make up for the deplorable service, which culminated with the guy at the register explicitly asking us to leave a tip for the waiters, who had been fairly contientiously ignoring us the entire time. I don't think I'll be going back. At the Point, we met up with Eight and his friends before fireworks and then gwillen afterwards; during the show, we wormed our way up close to a fence that marked the limit of where people were allowed to go, and I set up my tripod behind a bunch of old people in camp chairs that didn't block the view too badly. Chris, William, their friend Dani, and I all ended up at the Six Penn Kitchen ("Six Pence None the Kitchen") afterwards for dessert, since there hadn't been any time at the Thai place for that beforehand. I took a look at the menu, saw desserts only between $6.50 and $8 (and $3.75 coffee, so I didn't even ask about tea), and hit the "Abort" button straight away. Good choice, too: when the desserts came out, they were pitiably small to boot and probably not even worth sharing. After some time talking about Internet memes in a sort of linguistic-cultural context, we settled the accounts and headed outside to walk home. I proposed the South Side trail, since it's quieter and nicer than the Eliza Furnace, and since we weren't under any time constraint people agreed. (I think we surprised Dani a bit, who wasn't expecting a five-and-a-half-mile walk instead of a bus ride, but she came along too.) It was an excellent night to be out. A haunting sort of fog or mist had collected by the time we were coming up Panther Hollow close to 2 a.m., which made the Boulevard of the Allies bridge completely disappear above the trail until you got close to it. At first, all we could see were the detached tail-lights of some car crossing it, seemingly flying through space. As we got closer, the main lines and girders started to stand out in muted color, with the smaller details half faded behind them. I mentioned to the others that it was the kind of scene where I wouldn't be too surprised if we came out of the trail and found ourselves in the middle of the 17th century. Awake late Saturday, but still with enough time to get everyone in the house through the shower in time to go climbing around 4:15. Philip, Kendall, and Kiwi were in attendance; Bobby didn't climb but came inside with us anyway. I had a somewhat mediocre outing, but Philip and I spent more time finding interesting V0s or V1s for Kendall, and I did get the around-and-up overhang V1 that I didn't have enough strength to finish before. There's also a new V1/2 that I should be able to get but for some reason can't, so I have something to work on for next time. In the evening, Kendall taught Tyler, Alan, and me how to play Nertz, which is a fun and easy-to-pick-up shared solitaire game, and we played a whole bunch of rounds until people started to want to go to bed. Yesterday, Alisa organized a game "night" starting from noon in the UC; I made it over there around 2:30 and immediately got myself involved in a fun word game (Bananagrams) where you have to construct a Scrabble-style board on the fly out of a number of tiles. Then we rounded up some decks of cards and I taught everyone Nertz, which we played so much of that Ben ran out of paper to keep scores on, so it must have been at least 15 rounds. Alisa got really good at putting cards up, even without wining many rounds, so that in the end she was second behind Carolyn despite starting a few rounds after the rest of us. Carolyn only went negative once and beat the rest of us by at least double. When we finally got tired, Alisa suggested Trhyme, so it was back into word mode for a bit. I won, but probably only because I was sitting in the right place to pick off sets from other people who couldn't get theirs. Later, I took a walk to the grocery store at almost 11:00 at night and amused myself by trying to say the license plate numbers from parked cars in Thai as I walked by them. I think this is something that I'll need more practice at. |
Saturday, July 12, 2008
1:33 p.m.
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Uh, wow, another week without an entry. Not that it matters horribly; a major purpose of weeks at this point is to make it closer to August 8, which happens whether or not I do anything interesting with them. In this particular one, I mostly had trouble focusing on work — especially yesterday, when I woke up at 11:30 still feeling half asleep and never really recovered for the rest of the day. I really need to stop these days from happening, because I have a lot of work to do, but I can't quite seem to make it happen. It's not as easy as it once was to sit down and get something finished that I don't want to do. In the end yesterday, I just grabbed my book and went out back, and later read for about an hour more on the lawn of the Cathedral of Learning. Side effects: I finished the second "Harry Potter" book in French and gave myself about a zillion mosquito bites. Wednesday I went climbing (by bike, which was nice) and had an OK time of it; then Chris and William convinced me to come along with them, gwillen, Kartik, and Dannel to see "WALL-E" at the Manor. I'll stop short of the "Best film in the history of time, the universe, and everything evar!" ravings that some people are giving it, but it was certainly quite good and very touching... I mean, no, at the age of 25 minus two weeks I certainly didn't walk out of a Disney movie in tears, not me. (Footnote: If this is technically true, it's only because the ending credits were sufficiently long for me to be able to recover myself somewhat by the time the lights came up. I see I'm going to have to put "WALL-E" with "Amélie" in the class of movies I should probably not see avant que je n'arrive à parcourir les 2578 milles qui nous sépare.) After the movie there was Guitar Hero at Sherbrook, which I still rather fail at, but at least I identified the reason why, which is at least one step in the right direction. (Notes showing up on the screen in what I think of positions 1 through 4 actually have to get mapped to fingers 2 through 5, which I have trouble with if there's a jump from say 1 to 3 or 4.) Today I think I really need to get myself outside. I've been failing so much at the physical activity thing recently. |
Saturday, July 12, 2008
3:44 p.m.
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Philip and I are about to go climbing to fix my horrible laziness (I haven't yet left my computer), but here are some distractions in the meantime:
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