Greg’s Journal Archives
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Friday, September 12, 2008
5:45 p.m.

This week went by really fast, but not because I've been especially industriously occupied or anything. It feels more like someone's been quietly sneaking hours out of the day when I'm not paying attention — most likely night hours, since I went through all yesterday feeling like I was either half dead or half asleep, collapsed at 1 a.m., and woke up still feeling crushed at 11:00 today. Related to today's nearly all-day rain perhaps? ("Stormy weather," Frank Sinatra is singing on Malcolm Laycock's BBC show right this minute. "Just can't get my poor old self together. I'm weary all the time.") Thankfully, the issue of food — normally one of those humdrum things I have to deal with n times a day, where n isn't as high as it used to be — is pretty much taking care of itself this week. On Tuesday I got lunch at the MT lunch seminar and dinner at the LTI student meeting; Wednesday I went to what was supposed to be an Italian multi-course dinner party given by Chris and William at Sherbrooke. It was definitely multi-course (bread, pasta, fish, salad, cheese, fudge), but the Italian was more along Dave Barry's lines, I think. ("The salad is con torno, which is Italian for 'with torno.'") I'm attempting to build on my previous success of turning my old OS book into five books of stamps by now turning my old mountain bike into Photoshop CS3. Both of these are happening so far without the aid of misc.market, but the coffers — my boxes in the basement — are full of other things I'd like to sell while I still can. For textbooks, see my first list for a bunch of things that someone out there might conceivably want. In terns of Photoshop, now that I've mentioned it, I have to thank Dom and Alan for jointly engineering a series of events leading up to me getting CS3 for $40, which is absolutely astounding. The timing is excellent, too, since I was just spending a bunch of time earlier this week getting some more directed instruction with Photoshop Elements 2.0. Conclusion: getting just the right information in advance can save you so many headaches and annoyances. Not exactly having this at the beginning, I'll state it here as Greg's Three Simple Photoshop Tips for Not Throwing Your Computer Across the Room: Edit > Fill and Edit > Stroke are your friends. Especially the second one. You will frequently want to work in terms of selections rather than layers. Control-click on an entry in the list of layers to select all that layer's pixels. I think these are seriously the three most useful things that you can't figure out easily — or, at least, that I didn't figure out at all — from poking around on your own. Some other useful things are more obvious; use these in conjunction with those, and suddenly all those frustrated exclamations like "This program retails for hundreds of dollars. Why the heck is it so impossible to put a box around things?" go away.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008
11:14 p.m.

If I were allowed only one word to describe this week, I think it'd be "uncertain." Give me two and I'd probably add "insane." I guess we're a fan of privative morphemes tonight. As you might expect, if there's one atypical week when I have even a slight imbalance towards a high work load, everything else in the calendar for the month will decamp and invade (there's a false one for you) to make me completely dysfunctional with trying to get stuff done on time. The short form of my troubles, after I wrote all this stuff out in three long paragraphs and decided it was too whiny, is like this. I'm going to be away this weekend for Erin and Ben's wedding in Cleveland, which I'm extremely exicted for for all the usual reasons plus becuase of all the parts of the invitation that said things like "Accomodations: Guests are welcome to camp in the bride's backyard." So I'll be leaving Pittsburgh immediately after the LTI's Student Research Symposium ends Friday at 5:30. Now this SRS, in turn, did me the honour some weeks ago to accept for presentation there a paper that I submitted, which I was again pretty excited about until I spent more than 10 hours this week retyping, reorganizing, and reworking my slides for the talk because I can't for anything figure out how, in a 20-minute talk, to address all the "research design and writing" issues the organizers are obsessed with while still covering the MT-specific technical material anyone in my research area will demand. Even that wouldn't be as aggravating, though, if the first machine learning homework hadn't come out Monday or wasn't due next Monday morning — I'll be gone for the weekend, as I said, and in the SRS all day Friday, which means that I've been spending my days hacking and clawing at six pages of LaTeX gibberish to try and get the thing taken care of by Thursday. I've managed to scrape my way up to 45 percent complete after going through seemingly the world's supply of scrap paper and enough false starts to get the best offense in the country backed into their own end zone. The remaining 55 percent of the assigment reads — to the point that you can read this sort of line-noise math — something like "Use the vector derivative method on X X-transpose lambda identity-matrix b-vector ||X|| quantity squared to show that b-vector-hat-sub-'ridge' is the arg max over theta of the inverse of X X-transpose (if it exists) lambda beta sum over i of y-vector-sub-i plus Gaussian noise." So I'm a little bit flustered and frustrated currently, hoping — on top of all this — to make a reasonable impression at the TOC tomorrow so I have some hope of getting an internship for the spring semester. I've been trying not to overstate its importance to myself, but every moderate-length chain of "What do I want my future to look like?" reasoning ends up concluding that it all depends on some company getting interested in me so I can feel like I'm going somewhere with my life again. So there are the usual job fair things like résumé fiddling and reference collecting, highlighted by the fact that one of the people I was going to ask to be a reference for me is in Hong Kong all week and apparently not checking e-mail. The real crux comes in a few weeks, I expect, when people who might like my résumé tomorrow start calling on the phone and asking me to write C code for things, like tree traversals or Fibonacci numbers or linked lists. But let's take those things as they come up in their own weeks, and hopefully not this one.

Monday, September 22, 2008
11:20 p.m.

A very mixed bag over the past few days — the TOC was a reasonable success, I got my nerves worked out in a quick advisor meeting and gave a good talk at the Student Research Symposium, the weekend in Cleveland was fun, but I have if anything an even more extreme antipathy towards my machine learning class and (by extension) Matlab. Let's start at the very beginning, shall we? I went up to the TOC, after printing résumés, dusting off my old CAA portfolio, and putting on the usual formal interview clothes around 1:30 and stayed until around 3:30. In that time, you might think that I would have had a chance to talk to each of the 100-plus companies in attendance, but I believe my total was actually not more than five, plus a false start at IBM because I didn't realize the IBM people I keep getting on conference calls and e-mail lists with are part of IBM research, which is totally separate from the plain IBM that was at the job fair. Anyway, five companies. I kind of feel like my employability distribution is very peaked: small NLP-focused companies seemed quite interested in me, but general software places, even if they do NLP work, were markedly less enthusiastic. About 90 minutes after I left, I got a call from Company #1 (one of the small NLP places) asking me to come in for an on-campus interview the next day, i.e. Friday, i.e. the day of the all-day SRS. We got it worked out for 9:30 a.m., which led to instant nervousness in flash-preparing some quick technical questions with Alan, but then when I actually got to the Career Center and sat down with the interviewer, it turned out to be only a proto-first round sort of interview. I ran home to change and got to the opening remarks at the SRS just on time at 10:30. Alon had said, Thursday morning, that he was "surprised" I was having so much trouble with my slides, since I've (according to him) given very well-structured talks recently. I guess this time I was mainly freaking out over the fact that I was seven to 10 minutes too long and couldn't balance introduction and research methodology stuff with more details that would be useful for MT people. We got some of the bugs worked out conceptually, but then I still spend pretty much all day and all evening working on the wretched slides. Who would believe it'd take more than 15 hours to put together a 20-minute talk on work I've already done? Well, it did. I actually presented the thing Friday at 3:15 and ran only a minute and a half over, and when the prizes were announced at 5:30 I heard my own name called as one of the two runners-up. (I neatly skip over the fact here that I tripped over my laptop power cord about two seconds later, on my way down the aisle to shake hands with Carolyn and Jaime, and made the usual bumbling idiot out of myself). Then it was off on a mad rush to get ready and leave for Cleveland, as I'd had no time for packing or anything. (I again neatly skip over a wrong turn and consequent half-hour delay on the way out of the city I've lived in for more than three years, on a trip I've made probably 15 times, making the usual bumbling idiot out of myself plus a 2000-pound box of metal.) Arrived in Strongsville at Erin's around 10:00, I think, and joined a party of maybe five other people already present. Saturday, we threw stuff for the wedding reception thing into a bunch of cars, then Chris, Bobby, Paul, Kathi, David, and I headed for the West Side Market while Erin and Ben went ahead to the farm to set things up. By the time we got there, just before 2, pretty much the whole complement of 40-ish people had already shown up. Good times — including volleyball, frisbee, board games, and a surprise group round of Hot and Cold that led Erin and Ben to the wedding present that a bunch of us had gotten — lasted until about 7:30, at which point a ragged sort of caravan of vehicles ran back across the Cleveland metro area to Erin's house. I taught Kathi, Dan, and Paul how to play Nertz, but the game broke apart comparatively quickly. Sunday I made the cross-city trip in reverse to visit my parents, followed by a jaunt to the south to see Chris and John in their new apartment in North Canton. (Though I realize I say "new" as if May was just recently... they've been married and down there for almost six months now!) We had a really nice dinner at Grinder's, which I though was going to be just the usual Subway-style sandwich shop, but it was actually a sit-down thing closer to a Denny's but without the overwhelming classic American old-person feel. After some more talking back at the apartment, I got back in my car and started the two-hour trip back to Pittsburgh just before 10 p.m. And now comes the part about my current nemesis, machine learning class. Despite scribbling away at the homework all of last week, whenever I wasn't working on my slides or dressing up in a suit and tie, I still had only 55 percent of it done by the official due date of class time this morning. So I took one of my two allotted late days on the very first assignment out of five and lost another day that should have been devoted to my research work hacking at a bunch of matrix operations and Matlab. I feel like this is not a good sign; I haven't done any regular work since two Fridays ago, and there's a limit to how long that can go on before I end up with a warning letter at the end of the semester. I very much want to know how other people are finding this class, because I'm having a ridiculously hard time with a lot of it. It's not enough that we see no actual examples in class, or that the lectures consist of about 50 slides of mathematical equations explained or derived in only the most cursory manner, or that we're magically supposed to know linear algebra and Matlab for the homework, or that the homework and the lecture slides have a bunch of inconsistencies in them because both the professor and the TAs love to say the name of one Latin or Greek letter while writing or typing another, or that the homework is conveniently missing helpful indications like "Warning: This problem requires access to a large server with at least 5 GB of RAM, and even if you run both parts simultaneously and use 9 GB, it will still take nine hours to complete" — it's that all of these things are true at once in a week (or two weeks now) that are above-averagely busy for me to begin with. I say, a real job is looking better and better by the day. I hope some interview works out.

Friday, September 26, 2008
2:29 p.m.

The political news has been kind of grim these last few days. I know I don't generally inject a lot of politics or campaigning into this journal, but today I think I might talk about it a bit because I'm getting kind of annoyed. One thing you've all probably heard about is the so-called "credit crisis" or "sub-prime mortgage crisis" or "financial crisis" or "housing crisis." I regret that even major responsible newspapers are whinging these words around as if everyone immediately understands their full meaning and background — and because by now it seems like it would take them a whole page to explain it all again in each article — but I didn't, since I just started following the news closely again recently. Luckily, however, someone did put together that page-long summary, which is only moderately infused with a lot of economic terms while still giving what seems to me to be a fairly coherent picture of how we got into the current mess. Which brings up the way we're trying to get out of it, which hasn't been going so well. Or, at least, the way I read it, it was going all right, and then John McCain decided that his country urgently needed him, after he snuck in a few more speeches and interviews, and galloped off to Washington to make a big show of sitting in his old Senate seat, I suppose, and waiting for the committees actually responsible for budget negotiations to come up with a proposal. In the meantime, half the Republicans in the Senate had the honour to retire from the case and quit expressing their opinions until their heir apparent had expressed his first. As far as I can tell, this led to nothing but a bunch of party-lines fighting: the pending bipartisan agreement got shot down by a bunch of Republicans now refusing to pass it because they accuse the Democrats of trying to push it through before McCain could take credit for having worked on it or supported it. Great goodness, guys, do you or do you not want to get a piece of legislation in place? I'm inclined to agree with what Harry Reid said yesterday, which was that McCain and Obama should keep out of the negotiations because the only effect they'll have is to bring a bunch of presidential squabbling to Washington to get in the way of real work getting done. En effet, that's exactly what happened. And then there's this debate tonight, eh, which McCain wanted to cancel or postpone until he realized that quite a large majority of voters still want it to happen. I kind of would have liked to see it go on with just Obama there so that 40 million voters could evaluate someone's remark from a day or two ago that a president is going to have to be capable of managing more than one thing at a given time. But, now that both candidates are going, I think the silliest thing of all is what looks like a McCain-official an incredibly dirty and bizarre ad set up to infer that McCain already "won" an event that he didn't want to be a part of in the first place and moreover hasn't taken place yet. Whether the ad is real or fake, there's some pretty disgustingly low campaigning going on somewhere, and we've already seen a lot of silly things from McCain over the second half of this week. So. As I'm normally the sort of person to think about things political on an issue-by-issue basis, I hereby put Greg's Seal of Extreme Freakin' Disapproval on the action of the McCain crowd this week as an example of the kind of thing I absolutely do not want to see continue if this person becomes the next president of the United States. If this amount of political jockeying, falsity, and all-around sketchiness doesn't set up a bunch of warning flags, I'm not really sure what will. I recently found out about this electoral votes projection site, and I very much would like to see an increase in the amount of blue needed to display it on my monitor in the coming days and weeks. P.S. I just got sent a nice Time commentary about Wednesday that touches on a lot of the same points, from McCain's irrelevance to the bailout negotiations to his deranged skip-the-debate idea. One of the reader comments alleges that we've seen this sort of behavior before...

Monday, September 29, 2008
12:46 p.m.

Portraits! If everything goes as planned — i.e. if no one comes into the photo office and somehow displaces me in priority — I will have a 2¼-inch camera to play with this weekend. The studio schedule, for now at least, is also wide open. Therefore there will be some kind of roving portrait session Saturday or Sunday if I can get some people who want to be photographed. Any takers? Let me know when you're free so I can book an hour in the studio and work out some other places. Compensation provided in prints and in something interesting to do with people for an hour or two.

Friday, October 3, 2008
11:35 a.m.

I was taking a shower a bit ago when one of Erin's old Quote Page quotes popped into my head: "I was so wet today that I had to take a shower to dry off!" And then it kind of hit me suddenly that I miss that undergrad sort of environment where we all came back to the suite or the dorm at the end of the day, had dinner together, worked on homework, stood in the doorways of each other's rooms just talking, etc., which could partially explain why I've gone to bed feeling so lonely and generally off these last two nights. The house has been all cold and empty a lot of the time, and I've had a rather difficult no-progress sort of week that's kept me on campus frittering away my life at my desk for things that aren't even related to research. Sunday before copy editing and Monday I poured the entire day into a five-page research statement for the Microsoft Ph.D. Fellowship application I've been working on; Tuesday I managed to poke at research-y French parsing issues for a bit; Wednesday was wholly given over to machine learning class, TA office hours, and homework; yesterday I spent revising the research statement; so far today I've only put together the other application materials and (finally!) sent the whole thing off. I don't know when I got so slow at everything — as an undergrad, I could write five pages in French in about five hours, and now it takes me almost three solid days to write the same amount in English? The same person who used to profess some skill at this "writing" thing, regularly dashing off 500 words for one of Mrs. Milano's Level 2s in 40 minutes? What's wrong with me? I feel like I haven't had a real conversation with anyone in days, or perhaps weeks. I'm not sure what to do about the KGB event tonight — there will be people to talk to, for sure, but I'm a little wary of facing them again after last week's KGB event, aptly titled "KGB Digs Its Own Grave." People in the loop may recognize this as the title for the now-usual karaoke event. I got convinced to sing for the first time by myself in public since... ever, actually, unless you count that time our sixth grade choir did a song in Swahili that had these same two lines repeated all over the place except for this one instance where there was only the first without the second, and then one day in class you hear Greg's pre-puberty quiet little pseudo-alto voice sing one little "na" before he realizes that he'd just messed up that one instance. But that was nothing compared to the out-and-out atrocity of last Friday's duet with Greta of "Sixteen Going On Seventeen" from "The Sound of Music." There are about 30 people at CMU now who must think I'm completely tone deaf, floundering around in this sort of semi-rhythmic collapsed musical register searching in vain for a correct note or interval. Of course, on the way home two minutes afterwards, I sang it out loud to myself just being off in one or two small places.

Sunday, October 5, 2008
10:53 a.m.

If anyone comes across this in the next two to four hours, don't forget to come down to the studio on Maggie Mo B level to have your portrait taken! If we're not in the studio, call my phone and I'll tell you where we've moved to. Terrible week; somewhat better weekend so far. Half-price Friday at Mad Mex with Chris, William, Kartik, gwillen, and Jared. Mad Mex satisfies two of the three conditions for being a good half-price restaurant now that the statewide smoking ban is in effect; for the remaining one, we'll have to wait until either Pennsylvania passes an indoor noise ordinance or someone takes a baseball bat to the restaurant's sound system. Joe Mama's would have the perfect combination if only, as gwillen pointed out, they had more than the merest sliver of their menu that was actually half-price. Yesterday I was rescued from the Slough of Despond Machine Learning Homework by Kempy, who called me to come over to Shady Oak and play bridge with her, Greta, and Philip. I learned some terminology and some point-counting rules, and in the end we had a game plus a hand, which I guess we're saving around for the next time the four of us are together. I expect certain parts of "Cards on the Table" will make a little more sense now. The machine learning homework, by the way, advances to nominally 83 percent done. I say "nominally" because I'm pretty sure there's some error in my Matlab implementation of a logistic regression classifier using IRLS, but I'm sufficiently at sea in all three of the programming language, matrix algebra, and the conceptual material that I expect the best method of proceeding is to just expect to lose 10 points there and spend my time trying to finish the rest of the assignment. We will see how that goes; it's due tomorrow at 10:30 a.m. Also! Chris drew two pictures of me Friday and Saturday from photos, which I think came out very interestingly. The second one is really the portrait of my mom's oldest brother, so I guess I know what I might look like when I'm older. And here's a 1954 article on machine translation from Time, which is a little surprising in its tone given that people were mostly still in the optimistic "we'll solve this problem in a couple of years" mode into the early '60s, I thought. Finally, in a rare mid-week bright spot, I should point out this quote that almost made me fall off my ball laughing. Also also! If anyone is a practitioner of the fine art of back massaging and is looking for someone to, uh, practition on, I might have an idea for you. Today is the fifth day in a row my back has been hurting, and that's getting a little worrisome. Either I did something unexpected and unknown to it, or the pain is just being caused by me working long hours hunched over in my chair all week — and in the second case that's especially bad because there are still three more machine learning assignments this semester.

Monday, October 6, 2008
5:25 p.m.

Today's Fact of the Day is that Health Services will give you a half-hour massage if you give them $25, which I have to admit I'm considering because my back is still hurting. I was hoping, earlier, that I could fix it by stair-walking, since coming up from Maggie Mo B level to return the camera at lunchtime felt surprisingly good. But then I walked up the longest vertical distances in Wean and Doherty twice each, and my estimated count of 710 ± 20 stairs had really no effect. And since I don't happen to keep someone with strong hands just stashed away in my bedroom closet at home, and since I don't expect — no matter how processed American food is — that I'm suddenly going to grow long double-jointed arms, the options are looking somewhat slim. And a professional massage sounds like it would feel sooo good right now. On the other hand, I'm still uncommonly cheap, so I can't stop myself from equating $25 to five meals and feeling horrible about spending that much money on myself for something that seems relatively non-essential. Especially after my $100 SRS prize, which I was planning to use part of for something enjoyable for me, got eaten up by having plumbers come out last month to repair our horrible bathroom drains. This might be the part where I start to dream about walking into a crowded cluster and announcing "I want a back massage!" (Former CMU freshmen: would that work in the same way as the "standing ovation" thing from Playfair?) In years past, the cluster and the Newell-Simon lounge before it used to be occupied fairly consistently with that sort of thing, but I admit that these days I can't think of who I'd ask. Instead I will merely continue to post plaintively to Live Journal. In other news, studio photography kind of happened yesterday, although it avoided being a messy debacle by only a narrow margin. As it stands, I think I made three people upset with me, — which is equal to the number of people who came to be pictured and (hopefully) had an enjoyable time — bothered three more to various extents with all my new-person questions, and ended up leaving the studio at 3:30 under the demeaning glare of some random tech guy with three exposures left on my roll of 2¼ film. Thankfully I ran across jcreed and Lea later in the day, and they were willing to have their likeness captured on the CFA benches. Further aftermath revealed that I was probably using the handheld light meter wrong, though, so we've still got a surprise coming when I get around to developing the film this week. There will probably be another studio session in a few weeks, but next time I think I'm going to show up an hour in advance and confirm individual people for specific times.

Wednesday, October 8, 2008
12:45 a.m.

Mmm. Got a back massage about two hours ago from Ben, apparently because csawyer told him to give me one. Thanks, guys — I'm feeling better now than I have for a large number of days. If I can control the amount of sitting I do (which the pain seems to be positively correlated with) for the next few days, maybe that will be the end of this problem.

Thursday, October 16, 2008
12:40 a.m.

Internet, I have a dilemma. And although I've explained it, at least partially, to a few small groups of people (like at half-price at Joe Mama's tonight), I haven't yet put all the pieces together into one coherent statement for general appraisal or comment. So here we go. I hope it's not too long. Most of you at CMU have probably heard me talk about wanting to go on an internship for the spring semester. This comes at the end of a back-and-forth process with my advisor, in which I originally brought up in February or March the idea of tentatively taking a month off over the summer to see how he felt about that. The answer, of course, was that I'd forgotten that one of the conditions of getting an LTI stipend for the year is that you're supposed to spend the summer there working at the same stipend. So then I proposed going on internship or leave of absence for the fall — which again was kind of rejected because I'm being funded by a project that runs through April, and if I were gone for the fall, my advisor would have to find someone new to do the work. And picking up a new student generally means for the whole year, and I'd come back in the spring wanting my spot back... Finally, when Alon mentioned the spring as being the better time for internships, I agreed on trying it for then, but mentioned I didn't really want to push things back any further because things have already been kind of difficult for a year now. Operating under that spring-internship assumption, I went to the TOC. Now the TOC, it must be admitted in retrospect, was a massive failure for me. I had one proto-first-round interview the next day, which I duly followed up with a thank-you e-mail the business day after that, and since then — nothing. Just me watching all the sophomores progressively make it through first-round and now second-round interviews. The natural solution, you'd say, would be to start poking all the companies I talked to again — especially the ones that were rather enthusiastic at the job fair — to remind them that I still exist and am still looking for a job starting in January. The week I was about to do that was the week that more details started coming out about a certain Ph.D. student in Ireland who for some time has been nebulously supposed to come spend some time visiting and working with our research group here. This guy is working on stuff very closely related to my own research, and the stuff I've done over the summer and early fall only makes it closer. It now seems increasingly well-defined that he will be here this spring. So my advisor, as you might expect, brought up the point that the visit would be markedly less useful and worthwhile for all involved if I weren't around to work with the guy on some collaborative ideas. Which means — grand conclusion — that I'd have to push internships off to the summer instead, which I guess would be possible despite the usual rules given the circumstances. I could, of course, overrule this decision and say "No, I really need for my own mental health and sanity to go away in the spring and take this excellent internship offered me by ___." But the problem is that I have no offer, nor anything leading up to an offer, nor any interviews by which I might obtain such. I could equally say "No, I really need for my own mental health and sanity to take a leave of absence this spring," but without anything lined up this seems rather weak. I would be messing up an expensive visit for the Ireland guy (or possibly making it so that he wouldn't come) and cheating us both out of some potentially very nice research and thesis project. Or I might not be, because one thing that's not yet known is how long he's even going to be here. And I could, as a default, say "All right, advisor, I won't look to go away for the spring, but then this summer I am going on internship" and slog through the next six and a half months as best I can. This last one might be the most reasonable option given that I have no other options lined up and would thus have an extra semester to get someone to hire me, but there's a catch even beyond me just wanting to get out of here and feel useful again. One of my internship goals, you see, was to get myself to a certain section of the country where a certain person lives, and that certain person is going to be spending a full month of the summer off on the other side of the planet, so waiting until the summer means that the time we get to spend together is cut in half and postponed by an extra four months. And I'm incapable of deciding whether that loss is important enough to me to force a jobless leave of absence for the spring instead of waiting. I just... feel completely surrounded by unknowns to the point that I can't start assigning preferences or weights to anything. I don't know how long the Ireland guy will be here, or what we'd do, or if that would make me feel better about being smart and useful again. I don't know, if I pushed the internship now, if I'd end up with a job. I don't know, even if I wait, for that matter, if I could get a job in six months given that no company has shown more than a slight and temporary inclination to have anything to do with me. I don't know if two months with the certain someone is just as good as four. I don't know if I'll blow the crap out of the spring semester and drop out of the program. I don't know anything about what's the best or right decision in all of this: I know what I want out of my life in the medium-term (say three years from now), but I'll be dashed if I have the slightest clue how to get it given where I'm at currently. Questions, comments, cold hard reality slaps in the face, anyone? Job offers in machine translation?

Monday, October 20, 2008
12:39 p.m.

Dilemma update: I told my advisor that I'd switch to looking for internships in the summer instead, and he said he could help by talking to people he knows at companies if I give him a ranked list of where I would want to work. It was the only decision I could come up with that wouldn't involve for sure missing out on anything I couldn't get back, although that purely objective consideration ignores the personal and selfish happiness factor to some extent. Sometimes it's just easier when the decision is made, even if it's not the best. I hope the extra four months gives me a chance to actually get some company interested in me so that the delay is worthwhile. Weekend update: There was a Tim and a Mars and a bunch of games and food outings. We played a fun one Friday afternoon where I had to go get a haircut at 4:00 in Squirrel Hill, so before I left I tipped off Car to let Ian in before she left so that Ian could in turn let Tim in while we were both gone. Grand reunion from about 5:00 onwards collecting Ian, Tim, Dan, Mars, Keith, and Al-Tim, and then back to Squirrel Hill for dinner at Eat'n Park. Saturday we played a bunch of games and ate a bunch of food, including lunch, brownies, and a very nice apple pie baked by me, Ian, and Tim and then eaten astonishingly quickly and in its entirety by me, Ian, Tim, Mars, and Dan. And then we went out for half-price. So if you see me looking about five pounds heavier now, you know which day to blame for it. Yesterday I spent most of the day studying for my machine learning midterm, which was at 10:30 this morning. Stealing Brian's old line, "the subject is closed." I don't know what I'm missing in that class. Even with half an hour of extra time beyond the original 80 minutes, there were still a bunch of questions — or, at least, subquestions since that seems to be these TAs' preferred style — I still couldn't even get started on. If I got more than a 60 percent, I'll be surprised.

Friday, October 24, 2008
6:20 p.m.

I didn't post, back when I bought plane tickets five or six weeks ago, that I was going to be spending most of this week in San Francisco, but I am. I got here Tuesday in a multi-stage transport odyssey occasioned by the fact that tickets to and from San Jose were $89 each way while tickets directly to San Francisco were something like $145. So, with all times Eastern to keep things sensical, my adventure Tuesday was: Stage 0: Wake up at 3:50 a.m. Shave, etc., and finish packing in time to haul everything out in the light rain down to the Forbes and Morewood bus stop for Stage 1: The 4:55 a.m. 28X, which scared me for a while by not showing up until a minute before the scheduled time, but we got to the airport only three minutes late. I think I and one other person were the only travelers on the bus; the rest of the people looked like airport service staff. And some of them got on the bus downtown, too, which is a pretty awful commute to have to make before sunrise every day. Stage 2: A very quiet 6:45 flight from Pittsburgh to Chicago. The only human noise on the plane was from about a four-year-old kid a few rows behind me, who said out loud the same "whoa"s and "wow"s I always feel mentally whenever I'm in the air. This kid, incidentally, went into the plane during the "family boarding" phase, which the gate lady specifically announced as being for only parents flying with children four and under, with two mid-20s guys — a nice show of quiet and normal modernism, I guess. In the air, I was really hoping to see Cleveland and Michigan and the Great Lakes all spread out before me, but of course it was solid clouds all the way from Ohio to Chicago. I think San Francisco must have allocated its cloud quota to the Inland North instead, because there are never any here and always some there. Chicago Midway reached in due course, leaving me with about 45 minutes to grab some McDonald's pancakes and report to Gate B25. Stage 3: Flight from Chicago to San Jose, leaving at 8:10 a.m. A more crowded but still quiet flight, especially since I sat up front by the Sedate 50-Year-Old Business Traveller section. The lady in the aisle seat next to me saw nothing the entire flight except her Blackberry, a few pages of The New Yorker, and the inside of her eyelids. The Plains were mostly cloudy, so I poked at machine learning homework until getting distracted by giant mountains and spidery-looking dusty roads. Was deposited in San Jose, temperature 70-something Fahrenheit, at 2:05 in the afternoon. There was a delay in getting the bags, and then the stop for the VTA #10 bus wasn't where the signs said it was going to be, so I was 30 seconds late for Stage 4: The 2:18 airport flyer bus whose sole purpose is to drive people from the San Jose airport to either the Santa Clara Caltrain station or the VTA Metro/Airport train station. The 2:18 drove past when I was on the other side of the street, so I had to wait around for the 2:33. Definitely not a bad thing, spending 15 minutes in the warm sun at the end of October, but it made me really nervous about my next connection because the 2:33 bus was timed to miss the 2:45 northbound Caltrain by two minutes. I spent most of the bus trip thinking "Come on, be late, be late, be late" over and over again, and when I got to the Caltrain platform I could just see the train's lights coming up in the distance. Out of dramatic flair, the ticket machine misread my credit card three times, which meant that my ticket was just being produced as the train pulled up to the platform, and I had a matter of seconds to jump on it before we were underway again. Stage 5: Northbound 2:45 Caltrain to San Francisco. The "northbound" part wasn't at all assured for about 10 minutes. Having jumped on the train at the last second, I established me and my stuff in a pair of seats and took out my Dorothy Sayers to read. About half an hour later, I came to myself with what the books would call a start and realized that I actually had no indication whether I was going the right way or not, except for my assumption (from when I was here in August) that the northbound train would have the Camino Real on its left-hand side. Well, I was sitting on the right-hand side of the train, and I also realized that I didn't recognize the names of any of the previous stops I'd heard, so I had a sort of anguished waiting period until a stop came by that I did recognize as being between San Francisco and Mountain View. Arrived, a bit late, at Fourth and King Streets, San Francisco, at 4:05 p.m. And it was thus, goes the storybook ending, that I found myself a bit later at the front door of Alan's apartment building at the end of a 12-hour trip. Tomorrow we undertake the same process in reverse, which I think leads to me showing up at home again sometime around 11:30 p.m.

Thursday, October 30, 2008
11:50 p.m.

In preparation for all the revels that will be happening over the next 24 hours or so, here are two pictures I extracted from the home video archive of 17 years ago. This is me at eight, Chris at six minus two days, and Katie at two carving our pumpkins the day before Halloween 1991: And a bit of the dialogue attached to this domestic scene runs something like this: Greg: Hey Dad. At school we were doing pumpkins, and we did lots of tests, and one was we had to estimate how many seeds were inside then count. And our group estimated 140 and we ended up with 565 seeds. Dad: What else did you do? What'd you do with pumpkins? [...] Greg: We weighed them, we did circumference, how many lines, whether it floated or not, seeds... Dad: Did they float? Greg: All of them. Dad: You threw them in water and they all floated, ah? Greg: We did one at a time, and even one as big as mine full of pumpkin guts — which you now see in this can — floated. [...] Chris: Daddy, I want to tell you something. Dad: What do you want to tell me? Chris: At school we carved pumpkins, and the one I carved, it had triangle eyes, and I think it had a square nose and a— tipped-over triangle eyes, tipped-sideways triangle eyes, a square nose, and a mouth. It looked pretty mean.

Tuesday, November 4, 2008
12:00 a.m.

I had a very un-Halloween Halloween weekend, mostly because of the KGB puzzle hunt. We (the planning staff) were meeting at 5 p.m. in Wean 4625, our usual after-hours appropriated conference room, to make props and cards and info sheets and about 6 billion other things, from which I emerged at the newspaper-only time of 4 a.m. Actually, it felt a lot like being at the newspaper during production, which is partially why I stayed that long when I'd originally meant to leave at 11: nice feelings of needing to get something big and interesting and creative done by massive collaborative efforts on short notice. At first I wasn't in the best of moods because I got sick Thursday and wanted to curl up into a ball all Friday evening, but after a certain amount of time I got properly into the spirit of things. I skipped the KGB Halloween party for lack of time and costume (meaning this is the first even-numbered year since 2000 that I haven't done some kind of terribly nerdy costume) and had managed to completely forget the fact that it was Halloween by the time I came home. Saturday we were supposed to meet up again in the "Giant Eagle area" on Baker Hall A level between 9 and 10; I slept in a bit and made it around 9:30. Chris and William had it the worst, getting about two hours of sleep before having to pick up a cake in Squirrel Hill at 9:00. The actual hunt started at 1 p.m., by which point I had managed to set up my (rather bad) puzzle and get into costume for the second character I was going to play. Yes, that means that you can now find pictures of me in a false mustache or disguised as a left-handed janitor on the Internet. And some of some amazing other people too whose performances I missed because of the aforementioned facial-haired and southpawed activities. Saturday night falling asleep, I kept seeing letters and blank spaces when I closed my eyes, and Sunday I couldn't get myself to concentrate on anything serious at all. So I cleaned up the desktop files on my computer, went shopping, made banana bread, had a nice lunch, and re-read an old Reader's Digest Condensed Book about people trapped in the snow in New Mexico. Then it was off to The Tartan for copy editing. As a fairly direct cause of that, I found myself tonight looking up my old e-mail from 2001. My writing style has changed a lot! I would like to say it's more consistent now, after eight years of newspaper training have made it impossible for me to write "4th" and "twenty" (both mid-sentence) when the AP throws down its grammatical iron fist and demands "fourth" and "20." After tonight, which is pretty much given up as far as work is concerned, I have one day to make my Java work and write up three or four pages about it for the machine learning class project midway report. Unfortunately, I'm about ready to file a bug on the Eclipse public tracking whosy-whatsit telling them that their entire product is an error. All I am asking for is a piece of software I can run on our server without getting a half-broken error dialogue every time I build the workspace, try to install an add-on, perform random debugging activities, make a JAR, etc. If I move over to my own machine, where my code won't run because METEOR's not installed and WordNet fails to build properly, I can at least build the workspace or JARs, but still can't get Subclipse to work. Anyone who wants to make the case for this stuff being good software will be asked to sit down at one of my computers and prove their point, because I certainly can't see it. We can also discuss things like @Override, a bizarre concoction that, to take Dorothy Sayers way out of context, "that he could not have known and that she did not tell him."

Tuesday, November 4, 2008
6:10 p.m.

According to CNN, polls closed 10 minutes ago "in parts of Indiana, Kentucky, and New Hampshire." Here we go. I'm not really worried about the presidential race at this point, but, um, California, Arizona, and Florida apparently, I've got my eye on you... Please do the right thing from a logical and common-sense standpoint. P.S. That third sentence used up my comma quota for the day. I just realized I'd managed to put one after five consecutive words.