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ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
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Thursday, July 17, 2008
11:24 a.m.
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Those of you who remember the "green dot" post from a while back might be interested to hear part of the sequel: I finally shipped my camera off to Pentax for warranty repairs Monday spending half the morning running around in the process and finally checking something off on my implicit list of things I should have done a pretty stinkin' long time ago. (Special note: If you were thinking of using the printer station in the basement of the UC for anything in the future, don't bother; it's gone.) Packing up everything was... a little interesting, since I didn't have the original shipping box the camera came in, nor any padding or those air-pocket things you tend to get around fragile shipments these days. After scrounging around in my room, the best I could find was the small on-the-store-shelf box for the camera itself, about two feet of bubble wrap, an old Sunday Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and a shoebox. Outcome: camera wrapped in bubble wrap, stuffed inside its box, set inside the shoebox with the space in between filled with rolled or crumpled-up newspaper. The FedEx lady herself was kind of suspicious about the packing job, so she opened up the box to make sure it was good enough before deciding that it probably was. Of course, that only made me more nervous! I got a tracking number, at least, so I've been checking the status pretty compulsively all week to make sure it doesn't return something like "Shredded by machine" or "Crushed beyond repair." Right now it's "On FedEx vehicle for delivery" outside of Denver, which is the camera's final destination, so hopefully in not many more hours it will have arrived, and I won't get an e-mail from Pentax saying "Um, this thing you sent us... it's kind of destroyed..." After that, the goal is to get it back before August 8, when I leave for San Francisco; since Pentax isn't going to give me any arrival or departure notification, it's essentially random sampling from a Poisson distribution (right?) where I check every day to see whether or not the event happened during that time interval. I'm a little worried about this too, since the estimated Pentax repair time is already three to four weeks, and I only have three weeks plus a day to wait, including ship time back to me. My intuition tells me that this is going to leave me without a camera in San Francisco, which is going to suck. More Links. Why not, as a little addendum? First, we have support for a hypothesis that someone came up with last winter that holding Shift and keyboard-mashing the number row has a good chance of producing valid Perl. Today: T-Rex explains the Great Vowel Shift. Be sure to read the image title text too! |
Sunday, July 20, 2008
12:55 a.m.
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Reportage inattendu: I went to a bar last night. Well, technically something called a "video lounge" according to the sign, which seems to mean that they took a bar and replaced most of the tables with a few TVs and arcade-style games. It was Tyler's birthday, so there were some people over for Philip-dinner (which was very nice), and then we were getting pretty well into seven-person Nertz when people started mentioning finishing by 11 so they could go. I asked pfriedma a bit about the place, and when he said it wasn't a club, wasn't too loud or smoky, and didn't cost anything to get in, I figured it would be worth the chance to do something with people and see what it was like. Plus Carolyn came, so I had company in the "not really into alcohol" department. To not tell this story completely in reverse, I should mention that this place we went to was 5801, known in GSA e-mails as having "one of the best outdoor decks in the city." It certainly seemed pretty decent, although too filled up with people on our arrival to be able to fit us in too — mostly there we people standing around talking. Inside, it was about as noisy as Fuddle on a weekend and a whole lot less smoky. The seven of us found a table (meant for four) in the corner and managed to squish ourselves around it by using the steps to the deck door and the adjoining windowsill as extra seats. When people were on their second drinks I decided to go see if they had any Strongbow — they didn't, but based on Philip's earlier experience I decided to have a rum and Coke as a backup plan. Somehow I managed, in the 60 or so seconds it took to ask about Strongbow, explain what it was, and get the rum and Coke instead, to sow enough phonetic confusion that the bartender asked if I was from London. (This brings the score for the front-runners in the Guess Greg's National Origins game to seven for England and four for Canada.) Carolyn and I had each munitioned ourselves with a deck of cards, so the two of us plus Philip got a little Hearts-like game going at our end of the table when I was about halfway done with my drink. Eventually the others said they were ready to go, so we packed up the cards and drove home around 1 a.m. So a fun time: would probably recommend going again in a similar-ish social group. It's been so flamingly hot this week that I've needed very little motivation, after finally buying a new pair of goggles last Sunday, to start swimming again. I went again today for the second time this week and managed 650 yards (silly non-metric pool...), a nice increase over Tuesday's 500. Another week of this and I'll be back to where I left off again. I've been hanging a little more around the downstairs of our house today because it seems to be the case that I'm living in yet another room that enjoys breaking the laws of thermodynamics. A few nights ago it was supposed to go down to 11 overnight — I went to bed with the window open and the fan on, with the thermometer showing 27, and woke up eight or nine hours later to find in all that time it had only managed to drop as far as 26.5. This evening — well, what was left of it after dinner — I gave over to photos work. There's a new gallery of portraits up on the photos site, and some other things should theoretically be following soon. (Kendall, the fireworks are coming, I promise!) |
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
9:42 a.m.
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I don't know if it's the heat or what, but sleeping at night has been less restful or more adventurous recently than I'd like. Today's story, by far the most entertaining, sets up with me going to bed at 2 a.m. with my alarm set for 7:00 so I could get up and take my car in to the mechanic's as early as possible after opening. I fell asleep with a little less than the usual trouble, and at some point had a dream that I was picking up some work on the side, in addition to grad school, by being an elementary school teacher. In the dream, this mostly involved setting up my classroom and keeping the kids from getting scared on the first day when everything was still a mess and not completely cleaned up yet. Then I was talking to the school custodian or something and the end of the day, and then the classroom morphed at night into my hotel room at this sort of resort-style place where there were several different buildings that had other hotel rooms in them. For some reason I wanted to go to the main office, so I slipped out in the middle of the night, leaving my door open, and headed over that way. On the way back, of course, I started feeling a little silly about leaving the lights on in my room and the door open for anyone to walk into — I had thought that it would be all right for a few minutes in the middle of the night, but now I noticed that there were a surprising number of people about and that there was some kind of a commotion going on. Eventually I heard that there was some kind of a gunman loose. When I got back to my room, my advisor was there, and we were sitting on the porch or balcony or something out front when this kid with black hair and a turquoise jacket came up. In dream context, we had met him at some conference in the past, and my advisor was just pointing out that fact when we realized that the kid was the gunman everyone was worried about. At first he pointed the gun at me, but I kind of shook my head no and he shot my advisor twice instead before running off. I'll skip over the sort of movie-style dying-advisor scene at the end and just say that I finally woke up, panting, with a sharp point pain in my right side where the bullet had grazed it in the dream. This is a little odd, first of all because I don't generally have violent dreams, and second of all because this is the second time in about a week that I've woken up and psychosomatically (I guess) felt the results of fake physical things that had happened to me in dreams. Anyway, it was only 6:00, even though it looked like the sun was up and the day beginning, so I somehow managed to get myself back to sleep for another hour. From 7:00 began one of those long sequences where the dream and reality have the same starting point — you know, like those mornings you had in high school where your alarm (or your mom) wakes you up and you spend 15 minutes getting dressed, eating breakfast, brushing your teeth, etc.... and then your world is shattered by a shouted "Get up! You're going to miss the bus!" and you realize that you're still in bed in your pyjamas and dreamed the whole getting-up part. Well, same thing here this morning. My alarm went off at 7, and then the fun began. First I had to retrieve some information from the car mechanic online to be able to take my car in, except the password for the online system was a long, complicated, and only vaguely grammatical sentence describing what was about to happen ("This car is ready for a state inspection, to have its oil changed, and emissions checked, and then it will be picked up again."), and I'd changed the password several times, so now couldn't remember the order of the conjuncts or their exact grammatical structure, so it took me a whole bunch of tries to log in and get what I needed. That finally done, I left my room and found myself in the stairwell of a sort of academic building, and a few floors above me on the stairs was the kid with the black hair and turquoise jacket! I didn't want him to find me, since he'd almost killed me once before, so I was trying to keep out of his line of sight, get out of the bulding to my car, and warn a professor or someone that this kid was around all at the same time. After sneaking down a couple of hallways, I finally managed to get myself out. The next scene had me in a McDonald's: since I had gotten up so early, and it wasn't flamingly hot outside for a change, I decided to stop and get a cup of tea on the way to the mechanics. Somehow, though, I ordered one of those regular combo meals instead, which came with the usual 20-ounce cup of pop. Only mine was mostly empty and just had a bit down at the bottom with the ice. I finished it and was thinking I might take it back up to the counter and see if they'd let me change it for a tea since they hadn't really given me anything to drink in the first place. But then the scene was gone, and I was driving along a somewhat curvy road looking for a Canadian DMV so I could get a driver's license. I didn't see the entrance, or missed the sign, or something, and before I could stop I'd managed to pass it on the road. A little further on, I realized I was at the far side of the 62nd Street Bridge. I didn't want to cross back into Pittsburgh, so I turned right instead and pulled into the first driveway as a place to turn around. This driveway, though, was actually the entrance to a big shopping plaza, where they'd set up tollbooths and a bunch of lanes and barriers so they could charge for parking, and I was pretty far into one of those narrow lanes. And then the whole thing turned out to be a turn within the Banana Skin Game from Tim's, because I saw a flashing "Rate 8" sign in my lane and said: "I have an 8, so I keep my same ranking and just get to back my car out of here and turn around. End of turn." |
Sunday, July 27, 2008
12:08 a.m.
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I guess that old birthday magic must still exist, even here in the Quarter-Century Club, because I've had three very nice days in a row starting from Thursday if you exclude the part where I probably bored the guts out of all the AVENUE group members and a surprise high school student who was also visiting. After that, though, I went to dinner at Bangkok Balcony in a group of eight people I'd managed to round up for the occasion (me, Ian, Al-Tim, Tyler, Alan T., Philip, Carolyn, and Zach), and there was a nice walk to and from Squirrel Hill thrown in for free. Back on campus, I got Carolyn and Al-Tim to play some ITG, which was also excellent, and then Al-Tim and I went home and were grabbed by Philip for some Nertz. So all in all a very nice birthday, current situation notwithstanding. It's too bad my good feelings aren't transferring over into work. Yesterday I didn't do much in that line, but I got some more things taken care of for my photos website and at least tuned the next experimental configuration for what I'm working on with adding grammar in the French system. The better part of the day was the one that involved laying on Flagstaff skimming through the chapter on numbers in my Thai grammar before taking it back to the library. At night I was feeling bored and full of my dinner, so I took a half-hour walk through the top of Schenley and around campus before heading home again. Not a very exciting or "happening" Friday night, I guess, but I got a lot of reading done. And, I say, it gave both Tim and me the chance to become pretty much instant fans of a British game show called "Countdown" that Tim told me "had you written all over it." He's quite right: it's a game based on making the longest word possible from a collection of nine letters (within a time limit of 30 seconds) or making a target three-digit number by doing basic arithmetic on six smaller ones (again in 30 seconds). Straightforward stuff, and things that I'd expect myself to be pretty good at, but in playing along with about 15 rounds in various YouTube clips I've only managed to beat the contenstants one and tie them a few times — in the vast majority of the time, they way outscore me. Still fun, though. I remind myself that I've been playing it for, um, a day, and the people who get onto the show are probably the sort of people who have been playing along at home for years, like I used to do with Jeopardy. Bonus points for hosts (I should say "presenters," probably) who can do fairly intensive math on the fly, and also for more-than-expectedly catchy theme music. If you want to savor ("savour") "Countdown" for yourself, Tim and I came up with a lot of good links this morning, which I can try to arrange in some sensical order. A good overview of the rules is in an edited-down version of the show's first episode from 1982, which also happened to be the first show aired on Channel 4. Then some short round-length clips: some impressive letter work, a fairly straightforward numbers round from 2005, and finally a crazy numbers round from 1997. I think there are probably better-edited full episodes out there in the wilds of the Internet still waiting to be found, but the first one I came up with was one in five parts (1, 2, 3, 4, and 5) where the first and third videos annoyingly have some skips or parts missing. Tim and I are already hatching a plot to play this over Skype, since he's in South Carolina, but we'd need at least a third person to be the presenter. |
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
11:39 p.m.
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My parents, plus Chris and John, were here Sunday for my birthday. Unfortunately, it was a disappointingly short visit. They didn't make it into the city until 12:30 (wrong turn at the end of 279, which sent them to the North Shore rather than Oakland), and they wanted to be heading back again between 6 and 7, so that left us just enough time for the official birthday lunch at Buca di Beppo's at Station Square, poking around Mount Washington (John wanted to ride the incline), and cake and a bit of talking back here. I'd been hoping for a walk through the top of Schenely or the near parts of Squirrel Hill, but no good — maybe next time. Yesterday was an awful day. Didn't make it to my desk until about 1:40 (because I went swimming), felt very much not in the mood for work all day, and came home at 6:15 with a headache feeling like I wanted to sleep forever. Came close — from about 8 until 11:15 — but then of course I couldn't fall asleep at night until some time after 3 a.m. One bad day like this wouldn't be so, well, bad, but they seem to stack up with disconcerting frequency. Today was somewhat better. I was on campus at 11 for the LTI seminar, which in retrospect wasn't really worth going to. There were two shorter talks rather than one big one, and the second one only made me think of how our AMTA paper might come across if it gets accepted: that's to say, not so good. The good news is that I called Pentax right afterwards to see what the status of my repair was, and the I turned my attention for part of the evening (as work is going slowly, as always) to my in-progress résumé so I can start applying to some internships for the spring. Someone on #cslounge — I think it was matthewj — said once that résumés in LaTeX are usually better looking than résumés that aren't. I think I disagree. LaTeX is great if you don't care about the exact particulars of what your document looks like, as long as it's consistent in well-defined template-based ways, but for trying to do something outside of that...? Until someone tells me what the "make this minipage the same width as the table cell that contains it" command is, or the one for "make these two table columns the same width, whatever that might be for best fit," I don't see any real benefit to using LaTeX over Open Office. After about an hour and a half of fiddling with things, I just gave up and went back to my Open Office version, which still has some things that bother me but is overall much closer to being finalized. What I need now is a few people to look over it critically — when I asked in #cslounge for the same, I rather got a blank and the talk soon diverged into computer games or some such. Physical activity is on the upswing: I ran two miles before my parents got here Sunday, swam 750 yards yesterday, and ran three miles this evening before dinner. On my parents' suggestion, I'm hoping to keep this going to try to combat how much trouble I've been having sleeping well at night. Historically, I'm not very good at this when left to myself, but we'll see. I can certainly get some motivation by being able to prevent further Monday nights! |
Monday, August 4, 2008
9:39 p.m.
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I found out late this afternoon that the paper I was writing all crazily for AMTA last month got rejected from the student workshop. Apparently now it also gets considered for the main conference, but Alon stopped by my desk and said the reviews were "not strong," so I'm really not expecting anything out of next week's notification deadline. Even if it does get accepted, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to go to the conference anyway, since it's in far-off expensive Hawaii. Accepted papers to the student workshop get travel grants from NSF, but for the main conference you're on your own, and our project isn't exactly bursting with money this year. More practically, this means that I'm going to be looking for internships over the course of this next semester with only a silly little workshop paper to my name — and even the reviews for that were only middlingly good. [Sigh.] If any of you happen to know of some company that wants a computational linguist for the spring, this is the part where you should let me know. San Francisco area preferred, for reasons that I mostly don't have to state here, but really I'll take anything. So far I'm not feeling overly optimistic — I've been updating Ye Olde Résumé/C.V., as I mentioned previously, and I've gotten some good comments on the layout of the document (thanks Jack!), but I personally feel like its content comes up looking a little thin, and I was rather hoping I'd have an actual conference paper to boost things up a bit. In a happier context, also related to San Francisco, the countdown is now at four, which means I go on vacation there Friday and I've almost survived the summer. (Normally I think I feel much more happily disposed towards this whole May–August period, but this year it's only that many more months separating me from possibly getting out of here for a time and feeling useful again.) I'll be in this mythical California land from the 8th through the 18th, and one prominent item already on the programme is to get myself down to Mountain View and see all you people there. Jeff's already proposed a visit to the computer museum, which its website reveals to be both really interesting and free of charge, and Tom and I were in consultation in #cslounge earlier today about a trip to Muir Woods, which definitely shares the first but unfortunately not the second attribute of the previous destination, since it seems like it's going to be a relatively stiff fare to get there and back by bus. I'm open to other adventures too, depending on timing, or suggestions of things I should do or see since I'm going to have a full week of wandering while everyone else is at work. Thoughts about a triathlon in September have been kicking around in my head again over the past few days, but five weeks may not be enough to really get into shape again. I'm not as far down as I've been before, but the last time we did triathlons I had been getting ready for like the previous year and was in especially consistent training for a few months in advance. I might try this one anyway, though: it's close to where my sister lives, so I wouldn't have to make a long drive at horrible o'clock in the morning and would get to see her besides, and the thought of foundering around in the lake (not to mention spending $54 on the entry fee!) is pretty good motivation to make sure I actually do something physical four-ish times a week over the next month to get ready. If I can keep up the rest of this week and then San Francisco week, I think I'll go for it. |
Friday, August 8, 2008
2:07 p.m.
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I'm sitting at Gate A3 at Pittsburgh International Airport... in about 40 minutes the fun part of my vacation finally begins! I've been through security since about 1:20 — the 28X to the airport felt like it was fairly slow, so I was really glad I caught the early one at 12:00 instead of the 12:30 trip I was originally aiming for. The only side effect is that I didn't get to go to the bank before I left and cash my DSL reimbursement check. Ah well. This begins a series of posts I'm going to call the San Francisco files, as I have to admit my purpose in taking this trip isn't entirely for fun. I also want to investigate the livability of the city, especially for people who don't have fancy tech jobs that pay them $80,000 a year. (I know everyone I know there has one of these jobs, and that would be the kind of job I'd be going for myself ideally, but I feel like a truly viable city can't just be a rich persons' playground.) The essential question: If I taught sixth grade, or worked in a grocery store, or delivered the mail, would I be able to survive for more than a month before going bankrupt? So far, the a priori answer is no. From what I know, the cost of housing in San Francisco is about 250 percent (or more) what it is in Cleveland or Pittsburgh, and the minimum wage is only about 25 percent higher. When I started preliminary inquiries on Live Journal, the answer I got was that "all the service jobs are fulfilled by immigrants who commute in," and that's already leaving me with a sort of bad feeling. So we shall see — more details to follow. Watch this space for more! |
Thursday, August 14, 2008
9:07 p.m.
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Sorry, everyone.. if I've been remiss in not posting
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Friday, August 15, 2008
10:07 p.m.
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Some more San Francisco notes. (An aside: What's with my last three posts occurring at something-07 p.m.? Do I have a Live Journal alarm that goes off in my subconscious at hourly intervals? If so, can I use it to wake up on time too?)
Tomorrow is board gaming down in Mountain View, which should be fun. Then hiking Sunday and I leave Monday. Does anyone want to pick me up from the Pittsburgh airport around 1 a.m.? I get back about 45 minutes after the last 28X leaves for campus, which means my default plan is to spend the night in the airport. |
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
9:06 p.m.
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I'm back in Pittsburgh again. It feels weird. There's no doubt that the 10 days in San Francisco were good for me, even if in my posts I probably tend to focus on the things that are annoying or weird. For one thing, I was eating more (both in terms of volume and meal frequency) than I have been in some time, at a not terribly unreasonable cost except for the San Francisco airport, which I confirmed the benefit of today by stepping on a scale and seeing the needle point to 130 again for the first time in months. To be fair, I was wearing my clothes, but I think it still means that I weigh at least 126, which is an improvement over the 122 I discovered in May and have been fighting against ever since. Then I went grocery shopping this evening and got a lot of stuff, so I'm hoping to keep the trend going. I was slightly shocked, in leaving my house for the first time and going to the UC post office this afternoon, that the new freshmen have arrived. (Eight says I missed Playfair, which was yesterday, but I don't suppose that's so much of a tragic loss.) Luckily I haven't seen them wearing their black "Class of 2012" shirts en masse yet; if I did, I think I'd feel compelled to counter with my grey "Class of 2001" T-shirt from high school that I purposefully wore on move-in day last year. This year's freshmen are especially creepy because they're Katie's year — an e-mail I got from my dad today said she's heading off to Lake Erie College tomorrow — and the thought of meeting socially people who are Katie's age or a bit younger is a little odd to me now, creaking along as I am after my 25th birthday. Full San Francisco updates should eventually make their way onto my website... I'm attempting to put together a new Trips section that grabs the content from my old home.cwru Trips section, plus the San Francisco stuff and probably one or two other things I'd have to type, and squishes it all together into some consistent format. With luck this will happen soon, before I forget all the details of the last week. There will also be a large photo dump once I edit down roughly 580 photos to a more manageable number. |
Friday, August 23, 2008
11:57 p.m.
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My goodness people are suddenly back. The dorms opened yesterday, and today was move-in day for about three fourths of the freshmen (except I have to stop calling them that, because they aren't anymore). I popped into #cslounge today for the first time in weeks, and everyone was saying hi and telling me to go hang out at Shady Oak later on. Which I did around 9:00 when I had gotten sufficiently frustrated trying repeatedly to download Debian upgrades that would stop downloading partway in. I'd never been to Shady Oak before — it's a nice building! Kempy, Sam, and Krieger have a very fine sitting room with rectangular wood panelling on the ceiling (I think it's like the bank in "Mary Poppins"), and Tuttle and someone else's down the hall has an old fireplace and some built-in shelves. It looks like the building's a nice example of somewhat renovating or modernizing (or at least keeping from falling apart like Cat Man) without losing a lot of the old accents. The people who aren't back tonight are coming back tomorrow, and there's already a Costco trip planned for 10:30, so I will have something to do with my Saturday morning and fun people to do it with. Wednesday was also a fun day: I came home from my desk at 6:30 and dressed for dinner. This perhaps sounds a bit odd until I conjoin to it the fact that Lea and jcreed were giving a very classic dinner party (down to arranging the guests alternating male–female "at table" to the extent possible) in honor of somone called "Honest Ed" Mirvish, with whom I share a birthday, and whose name I misparsed as "Anistead" the first several times I heard it. It seems he was the pioneer of a giant discount store in Toronto who became, as a sort of side effect of wanting to demolish a bunch of houses but not being able to, approximately a patron saint of Toronto community theatre and the arts. Lea and jcreed were fabulous hosts with a '20s theme that I enjoyed immensely. Both Lea and Chris looked excellent in period dresses (I want to shoot portraits of Chris in CFA now wearing the dress and cloche hat she had), Ross came in a long coat and top hat, and jcreed gave us an accompaniment (which I think he made up on the spot) for the first 15 minutes of "The Gold Rush" while Lea got dessert ready. I'm under orders to post pictures, so hopefully you'll see some soon. We have got to have more of these kinds of things — I think I will finally realize my desire to have a good tea party some time soon. Tomorrow our house attains its school-year cast of characters, and Tyler and I have our eyes on a bit of cleaning in addition to the aforementioned Costco trip. After that, who knows? I think Eight and I want to introduce more of the Cohort to Nertz... |
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
3:10 p.m.
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Hm... two bad days in a row. I don't know what's wrong with me, but I can't get myself to do any sort of productive work. I still haven't finished modifying a script that Alok's been waiting on from me for a week now. Also, lunch? I never actually feel like eating anything specific. I finally had a very specific desire for a Sree's chicken meal yesterday around 1 p.m., but of course that would be the day they were out of chicken. Instead I came home feeling all depressed, microwaved a frozen chicken pot pie, and slept for two and a half hours. Later, half-price at Fuddle in a record-setting group of 17, which made me feel physically better, at least. I discovered that I don't like baked brie, or at least not by itself: I tried one for the first time when Ben was looking for someone to split one with, and I don't think I'll be doing that again. This afternoon I took a slow walk to Squirrel Hill to stop by the bank and post office. I thought I'd maybe get lunch at the "real" Sree's afterwards, but the only thing I felt after my errands was the same old vague proto-hunger feeling that leaves me not really wanting to eat anything in particular. So I came home and considered digging the weeds out of the front flowerbed as an alternative to real work, but now I'm thinking instead about wandering aimlessly around campus until food or other adventure befall me. I'm not sure what I'm going to say at my advisor meeting Thursday morning. Machine learning class is cancelled for the first two weeks of the semester, so I don't have an actual excuse to be getting nothing done. People who were in #cslounge late Sunday night when I was trying to update from Ubuntu 7.10 to 8.4 and getting blocked by a localegen process that wouldn't die might be interested in the sequel. It seems it's a recent bug that just started showing up around mid-July, and both the francophone and anglophone Ubuntu communities noticed it and evolved similar solutions of repeatedly running apt-get dist-upgrade and dpkg --configure -a until things suddenly start working. The way I found this out was here; I'm a little surprised that a Google search for "Ubuntu 8.4 en_AU" came up with French results before English ones, but I suppose for me one is just as good as the other. |
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
8:15 p.m.
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Better day; I wrote some Java and only got stuck twice. The syntax and "How do I do this?" errors are out of the thing now, but there must be an implementation problem somewhere, since the results on some test data aren't at all what I expect. The afternoon turned into a long game of clearing up disk space, which has only partially succeeded. I'm starting to share with Alon a certain frustration when we get held up on silly things like computing resources rather than actual research issues. Would you think it would be so difficult at a school like this to get a 500-GB hard drive per person or something? I discovered a mostly-free 150-GB partition on our server around the end of June, which let me build a Moses phrase table (they're small, but their construction somehow takes like 50 GB), but since three people know about the drive and have been using it since, I found out today that we'd manage to fill it. What I really need to do tonight is start in on the massive pile of work that got dumped on me at our error analysis meeting, not look at six-week-old files and see how many of them I can delete or gzip. On my way back from lunch to sit at my two screen sessions of nine terminals, I overheard this bit of conversation between two undergrad kids. The guy seemed to be instructing the girl or checking out her knowledge: — "Command prompt?" — "Yeah, I've heard of this stuff." — "That went out of style like 20 years ago. You know, since graphics..." Must be Windows users. On a somewhat related front, one good thing about the company whose address is their philosophy is at least that their computers tend to just work — at least in terms of basic functionality. After the fun of actually getting to Ubuntu 8.4 Monday, I found last night that no, sound recording still doesn't work. The annoyance here is that I never actually did anything, at any time that I can remember, to mess it up: for a while, I was able to Skype from the laptop just fine until at some point it just stopped working one day. Playing sound, and playing or recording sound on Windows on the same machine, are all of course fine. Fun fact of the day, which I promise I thought of as the almost-immediate consequence of eating a Kit-Kat bar: 20 years ago this month — this week, probably — I was in kindergarten. |
Monday, September 1, 2008
2:52 a.m.
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I should have figured out the warning signs earlier today — I'm writing as if it's still Sunday, even though it's way past midnight — and kept myself from reading any more of Benjamin Franklin's autobiography late at night, or even too much of it in general in one day. This sort of memoir-type writing, I guess I'd call it (Mary Chestnut, Samuel Pepys, Franklin, probably even Richard Feynman, etc.), always has the immediate effect on me that I want to sink myself into the production of my own giant autobiograhy, or at least concentrate more on making daily handwritten and online journal posts for a variety of reasons, and then it gets pretty impossible to sleep when my head's all full of composition. Even though, in the end, I can almost certainly already say that it's going to come out to nothing: I've had the worst trouble keeping up anything beyond very isolated handwritten journal entries ever since starting this online thing (just 21 of them in almost four years, I see), and even over the last year or so the online journal's been suffering too. And that's not even considering the inherent silliness of starting a memoir at an age when I'd still kind of like to have at least two thirds of my life left to get through yet. Franklin makes quite an interesting study on its own, though. The time element is what I think I'm finding the most interesting, starting from a little bit of family history that occurs fairly early on in the book. There's a paragraph to the effect of "I went to look up my ancestors in England once, having heard that they'd lived in the same town for more than 300 years, but I could only find records there dating back to 1555. My grandfather, who was born in 1598..." Which of course seems impossibly long ago now, but I had to remind myself that this is coming from a person who also wrote, some pages later, that a friend of his was going to try to introduce him to Issac Newton but never did. At the time, that was no more remarkable to readers than Richard Feynman's mention of running into Neils Bohr or Albert Einstein is to us today. The other thing I've been impressed (in the sense of "struck") by is the degree of formality that had to be used for any sort of education. I think there was a passing mention once at the very beginning to "university men"; on the whole, if anything was to be learned, it seems like it was done by yourself with whatever books you could get your hands on, whcih seems like an exceedingly odd thing to do these days. I suppose there are still lots of people — especially here — who read ahead in their textbooks and try to teach themselves set theory or whatnot over the summer, but that's never really been the way I personally learn things. I guess by those standards I'm some exemplar of the modern generation that has to be coddled and spoon-fed things by having them actually taught and explained to me in the classroom and by homework assignments; I don't think spending decades with my boxes of school books would result in anything approaching a tenth of what Franklin and his friends got through with the odd volume of Locke or Socrates. Education was a very different world until comparatively recently, I'd say. There will probably be a more "normal" post tomorrow, once I sleep and wake up again. In honor of Labor Day I really ought to get some work done, or at least some "at-home" projects like laundry or cleaning, but I'm also feeling like I really require some physical activity, and all that's going to be difficult to get through if I don't wake up until noon. |
Friday, September 5, 2008
2:18 a.m.
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Bad day; can't sleep. |
Monday, September 8, 2008
12:53 a.m.
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I'm stuck at the Tartan office waiting to see page B14 before I can go home, so why not a post? Though now, of course, I forget some of the things I was up to during this past week. Labor Day I recall as being pretty uneventful up until the evening. Alisa and I had a little Monroeville adventure, and then I went to Seven for a little Cohort party where Philip and I finally taught a bunch of them how to play Nertz. We had some seven-person games, which were much easier than you'd expect because there were a lot of new people. And since I do a lot better in slow-moving rounds, things were pretty good in the score department. I think people enjoyed the game too, so hopefully there'll be more. I stopped by the photo office Tuesday evening when Vincent was there, with the ultimate result that I have darkroom access, at least in theory, for the semester. Of course, the most recent film I have developed is from April 2007, so I started out with refreshing myself on printmaking instead of film developing — which is all right for the first time out, since I've forgotten nothing in printmaking and never had mastered the horrible metal tanks they have here for film. Based on a discussion with Ian, I made a few cropping experiments with a jgraftorator negative. (If you feel inclined to vote on which one you "like" the "best," feel free.) I'm not sure what happened Wednesday, except that I went running. Thursday we will not talk about. Friday was the KGB Underground Tour, which I almost didn't go to but was in the end persuaded jointly by Alan and Rachel called Jordan. I wanted to borrow a top hat, but I suppose that's the kind of thing I should start inquiring about sooner than the afternoon of. The idea, you see, was to start out with all my camera equipment and the stereotypical "PRESS" card in the hat. Then I would sneakily change it to one reading "PERMANENT PRESS," followed by "Machine wash COLD, tumble dry LOW," followed by "All styles 7/6." Without the hat, though, I had to do it by pinning the cards to my sleeve, and I'm afraid the only people who noticed them were the people I pointed them out to. Even among those, the Mad Hatter reference and "seven and six" got picked up by surprisingly few: the more popular interpretation was as a non-existent hat size or as just the number seven sixths. The tour, greatly shortened, ended with the usual cookout at the Fence around 11 p.m.; I think it took me about an hour to get a hamburger and eat it before walking home. Saturday night I went bowling with Ian, Rachel called Jordan, Zack, Kartik, Tarsis, Alisa, Alex, and Klipper. I had the frighteningly consistent series 120, 121, 121. I was kind of annoyed, in starting the 10th frame of the third game with an eight, that it made 122 impossible, but the larger conclusion is that I haven't bowled in so long that my average is a lot lower than it used to be. But I guess it's been a while since I could get three games of bowling, and shoe rental besides, for $5 as part of the school intramural league back home. Ian and I split an apple bear claw (chosen over the misspelled Danish "peacan" bear claw) from Giant Eagle on the way home. Today we've been having fun with plumbers again, occassioned by Tyler's discovery this morning that there was about 10 inches of water in the tub that wasn't draining at all. We'd gotten it down to about nine inches by 6 p.m., at which point Pyxy suggested calling a real plumber because our Drano wasn't working. They came while I was copy editing and charged us $340 or something, apparently, which I'm going to try to get sorted out tomorrow with the landlord. The best moment of the day, though, was when I read in the Sports proofs that someone "had a gusty performance, placing 36th overall" in a cross country race. I couldn't figure out what that was trying to say, so I circled the adjective and wrote a note in the margin: "filled with strong bursts of wind?" When the page came back again, you can guess what it said: "<Name> was filled with strong bursts of wind, placing 36th overall." Nick and I laughed for about a solid minute. |
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