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ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
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Saturday, December 27, 2008
12:18 a.m.
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Christmas — by which I mean the general short period when I can escape from school and say I'm on my Christmas holidays — has been going quite wonderfully. Chinese buffet in Pittsburgh Monday night with Ian, Dan, al-Tim, and Alan, and then home in Northeast Ohio since Tuesday. I've been feeling pretty busy ever since, but definitely not the "zipping around incessantly from place to place" that I get so much during the school year, and that's perhaps the best part. I've theoretically had a fair amount of time to mess around on the computer, but if I haven't been posting (and you haven't seen me on IM or IRC), it's more because I'm in that nice vacation mode where computery things feel a lot less important or desirable. My immediate family stayed home this year for the first time that I can remember — meaning that we didn't join the 40 or so members of my mom's side of the family who were running over to my aunt's house at various points of the afternoon on Christmas — which I think we all found nicely relaxing as well. (And, I say, there were up to a total of nine of us here, so that's getting into the separate-Christmas size range anyway.) There have been some games, some movies, some quiet afternoons in bed with a book (ou bien une autre chose qui vaut mieux...), and more food than I could ever possibly want to eat. Oh goodness, the food. I think my mom was in the kitchen making something on a pretty much continual basis on Christmas Day. Cinnamon rolls before opening presents, as per longstanding tradition, and then lasagna for the big Christmas lunch, and the desserts, and then chicken strips for a quick dinner, and then more desserts, etc. With the exception of the 10 p.m. mass on Christmas Eve, every time I've gone out of the house since coming home has also been for a food-related activity, either going to a restaurant or grocery shopping. Unfortunately all this excellence will be ending far too soon, i.e. Sunday, and then I have to figure out what to do with myself until research work demands my presence back on campus January 2. Is anyone around Cleveland, or going to be in the coming days? Alternately, Pittsburgh? I don't really have any New Year's plans at this point, since those tend to work themselves out with an average of about 24 hours' advance notice, but I wouldn't mind being a little more on top of things this year. |
Monday, December 29, 2008
11:59 p.m.
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I was talking with Pete at Susannah's Boxing Day party two nights ago (held sneakily on the day after Boxing Day) and realized there's a lot of stuff in the "old stomping grounds" I haven't seen in quite some time. So I will be in and around Cleveland, Cleveland Heights, and CWRU tomorrow (Tuesday) having variegated adventures and trying to pretend it's still 2003. Current plans are to drive to the end of the Blue Line, buy an RTA pass, and then get around everywhere else on the bus and train, which means I'm good as long as I'm heading back out from Tower City by 12:15 a.m. I'm not sure if this applies to many people reading this these days, but if anyone's around and wants to meet up for lunch or tea or something, give me a call or drop me a comment or e-mail. |
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
3:32 p.m.
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Had a decent day out up in Cleveland yesterday. I drove my car as far as the Van Aken rapid stop, which is about 20 minutes from here and quite easy to get to if you don't mind navigating one of Cleveland's death intersections. I timed the drive to make the 10:52 train and spent most of the way up singing the "On the Rise" song from "Dr. Horrible" thanks to a post from Chrisamaphone where she performed it in duet with herself. I remembered on the trip that my MP3 player also has a microphone, so I made a recording of myself singing the song alone in my car just to see how it would come out. Answer: my goodness, I've been so right all along when I think of myself as only having relative pitch. I missed a few large intervals by a bit, but then seemed to continue on all right from there in approximately a slightly different key, I think. At one point I was fooling around with Audacity trying to get three or four different me-voices to sing "Finite Simple Group" — I think I'll have to go back to this now and actually make it happen. Singing aside, I got off of the Blue Line train about 25 minutes after I got on and paid the $4.50 that the RTA now charges for a day pass. (It was $3 as late as 2005, I think, and I haven't been on the system at all as far as I can remember since May 2006.) My first port of call was the Cleveland Public Library, one of my favorite locations downtown. I missed that place; I used to spend Saturdays there back when I was a young undergrad with not that much else to do on the weekends. The only downside is that almost everyone who walks by you there leaves a sort of unwashed homeless-person smell in the wake, which I guess tells you what Cleveland's downtown economy is like. A second downside I discovered is that my old library card is no longer valid, so I sat there for about 90 minutes trying to read through as much of a book as I could before I got sick of being in the same place for too long. The sky was looking more and more blue from the second-floor window, so I eventually re-shelved Les Roberts's "A Shoot in Cleveland" and headed out down East 3rd Street. The Mall was pretty deserted as I made my way all the way to Cleveland Browns Stadium and then the Great Lakes Science Center, where a demonstration wind turbine was set up. (The Case alumni magazines have been gleefully reminding me quarterly for about a year that the university got about a gazillion dollars to set up a research institute for wind energy on the Great Lakes.) There were more people by the science center, but by then it was after 2:00 and I was thinking rather pointedly about lunch at Panera's in Tower City. This has been historically carried out in company of a book or two from the public library, but since my card didn't work I had to settle for a Cleveland Scene that I grabbed from a newspaper box in front of City Hall on Lakeside. I'm kind of ambivalent about the Scene, since I seem to recall it killing off the Free Times and making some Observer people upset my junior year, but it was the best I could do. At Tower City (that's a multi-level shopping mall of moderate size), I had a momentary pause as I tried to remember where Panera's was, and then a larger pause when I found that I'd definitely found the right location but the restaurant was gone! Settled for the "Japanese" place in the food court — the one that's always passing out free samples as you walk in. After lunch I turned west on Superior and skipped down the hill into the Flats. I was trying to get back to the red swing bridge where I took a picture of the Cleveland skyline for my first high school photo class in the fall of 1998. It was a beautiful afternoon down there, the river looking all dark and reflective, the sky still very blue in late-afternoon slanting sun, and barely any people around to get in the way. I remembered how to get to the bridge all right once I was down the hill, but then remembered that the view's changed now because of the new federal or county government building. I know essentially nothing about the West Bank, but there was the old Superior Viaduct standing over me, and I realized I'd never been up on it. For non-Clevelanders, this is an old stone bridge with a bunch of archways that used to go over the river in the late 1800s. At some point, it was cut off on the one side of the river and a new bridge replaced it, but the beginning of the old one still stands and has newer buildings all around it. A bit of the gradient ascent algorithm on the nearby streets got me there without much trouble, and I took a bunch of pictures of the much nicer skyline view from up there. Then I walked back along the Detroit-Superior Bridge and was downtown again. I went back to the library and finished up my book from earlier. The second part of yesterday's programme was to crawl over the Case campus a bit before meeting up with Sonnie after 7 p.m., and since it was now after 5 — the sun stays up later here since it's further west than Pittsburgh — I ran through the timings in my mind and figured it was about time to be getting the Euclid bus. In the three and a half years I've been gone, the Euclid Corridor project — that I reported on at The Observer when it was in the planning stages — finally completed this October and completely changed the look of that street. Now we've got buses somewhat like those double-long bendy (reticulated? articulated?) 61Cs in Pittsburgh that travel in special bus-only lanes in the inner lanes on Euclid Avenue. The number of the stops is maybe half what it was under the old 6 route, now all with special signs and pavilions that force the buses to weave confusingly left and right at various intersections. East 55th Street is skipped entirely, as are Adelbert (the stop is basically in front of Thwing) and Mayfield. The most interesting part of the trip, though, is a series of tones (four different frequencies) that plays from up where the driver sits. My first guess was that the tones were some indication of how close the bus doors were to the little openings in the stop pavilions, since they seemed to go up in pitch as we pulled in and then drop as we pulled out or passed by, but that didn't seem to be entirely true. Sometimes they would blip a bit nowhere near a stop, or sometimes start at the third tone, or skip some, or go out of order — and at one stop they were completely silent. After 93rd Street I remembered that I still had my MP3 player in my coat pocket, so I put on my headphones and pretended to listen to music for a bit while I took a recording. If you're curious, you can hear a sample here. Most of the changes at Case seem to be confined to Euclid Avenue and above. The whole frontage of University Hospitals seems to be under construction, and I stared at the whole mess for about 30 seconds before I realized that there was at least one building missing. I didn't make it to campus until a bit after 6, so everything was locked up and dark. The new Mandel Center for Non-Profit Somethings or Other scared the what's-it out of me since I wasn't expecting it at all as I cut through the parking lot for That Place on Bellflower, which is now something called L'Albatros. Mather Quad and Case Quad both essentially unchanged. The card-access light by the doors for Sears was green, so I got in there and used the bathroom in Nord. The computer lab, where I hoped to go, was of course under card access, and I'm not sure if my alumnus account would even work anyway. I called Sonnie from top of the hill South Side a few minutes after 7, and then we met at Aladdin's for dinner on Cedar-Fairmount. The usual sort of fun talk about books, newspapers, and other enjoyable things flowed until we kind of came back to reality via phone calls close to 10:00. Then I walked all the way down Cedar Hill to pick up the Red Line rapid. Red Line beautifully fast from Cedar to Tower City in 14 minutes (after waiting about five for a train; I got pretty lucky on that all day), which got me there just in time to get the 10:30 Green Line train. I actually needed the Blue Line train timed at 10:45, but I decided if I was going to wait around for 15 minutes, I'd rather do it at Shaker Square than the train station at Tower City, so I jumped on the Green Line and was duly deposited 15 minutes later. Shaker Square seems to be in decline, to my way of thinking. Both the bookstore (replaced by a CVS, of all things) and the ice cream shop are gone, and what isn't nice-looking restaurants or banks appears to have been converted into something like fancy art galleries. All, of course, completely dead at 10:45 on a Tuesday night. After one tour around the square, I picked up the Blue Line train at 11 and was back at my car, at the end of the line, at 11:14. |
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
11:28 p.m.
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There's this thing going around every December where you collect the first sentences of the first journal post you made in each month of the outgoing year, which I usually don't do. But I skimmed through all of my entries from the past 12 months — which didn't take too long, since I've probably written the least this year since I started this journal — and months are, when you come to think of it, pretty arbitrary, so from following the meme I get a decently good sampling of the various moods I've been in in 2008. It was a weird year. I can say, thankfully, that it's a bit shocking to see how bad I was feeling in the earlier part of the year; from reading through things again, I can tell that there's been some progress there. So, with about 15 minutes to spare now, here you go:
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Friday, January 2, 2009
6:55 p.m.
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Starting the new year off right with a list of some things on the Internet that are more fun than work:
At some point I will have to start working again, most likely tomorrow, since I have a four-page system description paper due at the end of the coming week and a bunch of things to get ready for a Chinese–English system as well. |
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
7:13 p.m.
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It's occurred to me probably a dozen times over the last two weeks that I had something to write a journal entry about, but now of course it's impossible to squish that many different topics into one post. I started the year ("No, no, that's too far back!") back in my empty house in Pittsburgh, but it didn't stay that way for more than a few days, and then for about a week we were running a small hotel, which left me a little frazzled and also unable to keep the tune of "There's a Small Hotel" out of my head until all the visitors checked out. We had an Ian from the 4th through the 12th, a Ben from the 6th to the 9th, and a Philip from the 6th to the 8th. Fortunately the craziness seems to have passed without any actual problems, modulo the bathroom sink and kitchen ceiling being up to their usual tricks, and now we're back to the usual cast of characters for the next 15 weeks. That "15 weeks" reference means that the semester's started. I am... a little worried about time management, I think, mostly because I decided in November that I earned the right to take a completely for-fun class that I'd enjoy after suffering through Ph.D. machine learning in the fall. I selected Black and White II in the photo department (62-243 or some such, I think), and Alon said he wasn't going to advise me one way or another on it, so I kept the thing on my schedule and started it in due course Monday afternoon. The difficulty about selecting this particular class — nothing in French looked very appealing — is that it meets twice a week for three hours, right during that prime afternoon block when everyone at the LTI wants to set up meetings. So I feel like I'm horribly shirking my work and my rightful duties by disappearing from my desk and not doing any research from 1:30 to 4:30 on Mondays and Wednesdays. But photography is fun, and actually learning how to do things properly with medium- and large-format cameras and generally not feeling like a dunce around the CMU darkroom were high priorities for me in the fall, so I think I'm keeping the class. Plus I spent, um, $160 on film and paper yesterday. (Martin, the photo professor, burnt a dollar bill at the beginning of Monday's class to show us how photography burns up money.) CMU gets its supplies, it appears, from Bernie's, the only real photographer's store left in Pittsburgh, which is up in a North Side neighborhood called East Allegheny not far from that German restaurant with the brunch buffet Alisa took me to last spring. I had a bit of a bus adventure yesterday between 10:45 and 11:55 a.m. that involved me taking downtown bus, running haphazardly through the snow across the Seventh Street Bridge and up to East Ohio Street, then charging back along the same route with my bag full of enlarger paper in order to catch a return bus to campus. The 11:55 part is important because I had to be back on campus for the MT Lunch at noon, and sleeping in an extra two hours kept me from making this trip at 9 a.m. like I'd planned. But I'm all set to shoot the first assignment now, at least. Another time sink I should probably mention, if only for the shock value, is that I have been spending three mornings a week lifting weights. Not much weight, mind you, but some time in the fall grad-student Ben mentioned he was looking to get back into weightlifting again when he had time in the spring, and that it's much easier to do it in pairs so one person can spot the other. With the fall I was having, my physical activity had basically dropped to zero and was rather annoying me, so I took the chance to get something going here with a bit of external motivation. So far it's working wonderfully; 10 a.m. to noon is turning into my favorite part of the day on the days we go. At first I was a little nervous about lifting like the six-ounce weights while all the big football guys were stacking up the weight racks in order to find something challenging enough, but it seems like everyone pretty much ignores everyone else and concentrates instead on either their own conversations (if they've gone to the gym with a friend) or making grunting noises (otherwise). And I admit that I'm lifting more weight and feeling stronger than I thought I would — you could test this the next time you see me by getting me to tear a telephone directory in half. If it's the listing for Point Barrow, Alaska, I just might be able to do it. |
Thursday, January 15, 2009
1:53 p.m.
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In conjunction with the third paragraph of yesterday's post, does anyone want to join me in running around the city a bit Saturday for a little camera party? I need to shoot my first assignment for Black and White II, and these things are usually more fun with a partner or small group. Especially since I will be drawing attention to myself by decorating my scenes with coat hangers before photographing them with a larger-than-expected camera. So, uh, let me know if you want in on the fun, even without a camera. IM, call, or contact me in the usual ways. This has to get done during daylight, so I'm thinking of heading out no later than 11. |
Sunday, January 18, 2009
4:58 p.m.
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Got a pretty good laugh a minute ago out of the important dates page for the NAACL conference. (That's the North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, so a fairly major event.) I should find out tomorrow if my paper got accepted for the main conference, but what really caught my attention on the site was the listing of dates for the student workshop: not only is the submission deadline "January 264," but the notification of acceptance comes back on "February 30." I don't suppose this is a sneaky way for the University of Colorado at Boulder to avoid having to organize a workshop, so I think I'm going to e-mail the contact address to see if they can put things back in the realm of possibility a bit. Also fun: Friday I wrote a little script to do some data filtering that had to plug into an existing framework, so I descriptively titled it (in the comments at the top of the file) "Test of reducing t3 files based on a chunk of sentences, or Greg's First Python." Based on a few hours' experience, I'd say Python fits in nicely with the group of "P" languages, as it's got the global/local scope operation of PHP and the mucking-things-together-easily-in-one-line behavior of Perl. Unfortunately, it wasn't content to let well enough alone and somehow ended up with regular expression functionality in the style of Java. The documentation, at least, is more inspired by the sort of friendly tone I've come to expect with Perl rather than the intimidating 7 billion pages of Javadoc you'd get in certain elsewheres. An example from the section about default function arguments should prove the point. "And the weather," as they say on the BBC: cold. Very very cold. Going to meet Ben on Friday morning I experienced the coldest temperature of my life, which is now –20 C or –4 F depending on your preferred system of measurement. You could just call it "cold enough to feel like your ears are going to fall off in a 10-minute walk," especially with some wind going. Yesterday I was out to shoot my photography assignment in –16 C, cloudy, dead-grey weather with snow on the ground, which shot (as you might say) to bits my chance to get any sort of tone variety in my exposures. Not to mention that I had to take my gloves off for every click and came home feeling like my fingers were going to fall off. It took a while to be able to type again after that outing. I managed to claw my way through a second roll of 120 film today, although in the snow, so I think I have enough to at least develop and get a start on. I'm not sure how many prints we need to turn in for the assignment to be counted as complete, but I'm kind of hoping it's not many. |
Sunday, January 25, 2009
2:31 p.m.
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In another shocking display of how infrequently I update this thing, I am in Europe! (Unless I've seen you in person recently, this is probably news.) The reason is that Jon and I are helping Alon run a weeklong workshop at the MT Marathon in Prague, getting some people together in a group and working on a small Czech–English translation system using our framework. I found out about this in December, I think, and found out I was going over the course of about a week right before we all went home for winter break. And now I'm in Frankfurt, for a few more hours, at least. I hope that a larger number of details on the trip will make it onto a separate webpage at some point (I have some notes), but so far it's been purely a travel adventure. I spent all of yesterday racing around home and campus trying to get errands done before leaving, with the result that I missed the very early 12:55 bus that Jon was taking and had to get the 1:20 instead. Which was fine, since our flight from Pittsburgh to Washington, D.C. didn't leave until 4:20. I was (and still am) somewhat behind on getting things ready for the workshop, so I camped out at an unused gate in Pittsburgh to keep chugging away at stuff where there was a power outlet. Quick flight to Washington, and then a layover of what should have been about two hours, but that was before they discovered that our transatlantic plane had something wrong with its landing gear. By the time they figured that out, retrieved a new plane from the hangar, got it ready, and stuffed all of us into it, it was after 10:30 instead of the expected 7:14. We got some extra snacks out of it, though, and a card to fill out for a United gift voucher of some kind. The flight was quite nice — we had little TVs in our seats with a dedicated map and stats channel, which of course I left on the entire time. Fun fact: the air temperature, at 37,000 feet above the North Atlantic at night, gets down to about –70 F. Most of the time it was in the –40s, but that was the peak (or anti-peak, I suppose) a bit before dawn. We had dinner a bit after takeoff — essentially a three-course Lean Cuisine plus a drink — and "breakfast" — banana bread and yogurt plus a drink — a bit before landing. In between I tried to sleep for about three hours, but I'm not sure if I actually succeeded at any point in getting beyond a sort of semi-conscious stasis mode. Arrived in Frankfurt at what felt to us like 6 a.m. but was actually noon here. Since then I've been navigating the airport with Jon and wishing I spoke more German. I wasn't adept enough to get lunch in the proper language, but I did manage to successfully get through security in German after sniping the pronunciation of "Komputer" from the person in line in front of me and guessing at its gender. We board from here to Prague in about two hours and 15 minutes, a later flight now because we missed the first one in all the Washington delay. The sightseeing afternoon is shot as a consequence, but there's been enough airport time for me to get more caught up with MT Marathon stuff. |
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
3:47 p.m.
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I keep meaning to write about my linguistic adventures in Czech. I went to Prague with four lessons of the Pimsleur Czech audio course behind me, which resulted in a working vocabulary of perhaps 20 words — mostly basic tourist stuff like "Do you understand English?" and "I speak only a little Czech." Ultimately, the single most useful Czech word in my three days' experience is "dĕkuji" ([djɛkuji], "thank you"), which fact I probably should have realized in advance: it's short, polite, and relatively straightforward to pronounce. I think it was the first thing I said in Czech to a real Czech person, being the airport shuttle driver who'd just put my bag in the trunk of the van. It got a smile, and after that I guess he decided I knew something, because he gave last-minute directions to our hotel (from the place where he dropped us off when the street became one-way) to me in a flurry of Slavic-language sounds. I caught the word "reception" and understood that the place was on the right-hand side of the street from the way he was waving his hands — and got to try out a second phrase "nerozumím" ([nɛrozumi:m], "I don't understand"). (Incidentally, you may perhaps note that Czech and IPA are, uh, not terribly different.) I think the longest conversation I've had so far is four sentences, and for that I had to look up a word from the little phrase book I got from the public library in Pittsburgh and brought with me. It happened about 30 minutes ago at our afternoon coffee break at the MT Marathon, where they have a table set up with cakes and juice and hot drinks, and there's a lady standing behind to dispense the coffee or hot water on demand. I started; the text runs thus: — Čaj, prosím. [tʃai prosi:m] ("Tea, please.") Well, we start off small around here. In another adventure, my three words of Czech ("hello," "sorry," and "thank you") were snubbed this morning in a souvenir shop, but that could be because of an acute case of unfriendliness as a result of being in contact with tourists eight hours a day. I suppose it would have been better if I could put together somewhat more interesting utterances. The difficult part, though, about being almost always in a group of at least four English-speaking people, among a workshop crowd of perhaps 50 who have all settled on English as the sort of lingua franca of academic communication, is that people tend to speak to you in English, so I haven't really picked up a whole lots of new and useful phrases aside from a few tidbits and refinements. |
Friday, January 30, 2009
10:51 p.m.
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Still playing the clueless foreigner in Prague, at least for the next 12 hours or so. Today was definitely the best day so far in terms of actually going out and doing things, although I think yesterday was the best day in term of working on our MT system. The people at the Institute of Formal and Applied Lingustics here (strangely part of the "mathematics faculty" at Charles University) get major points for setting up a computing and work environment that makes collaborative hacking quite easy: a cluster of computers at our disposal, personal accounts on a pool of servers, Ethernet drops and power strips everywhere in the lecture hall, tables and whiteboards in the hallways, coffee breaks in both the morning and afternoon... Once you throw in the hotel breakfasts of eggs, sausage, ham, bread, juice, and tea (served in a mixture of Czech and English at little tables for two in a narrow cafe attached to the hotel), lunches in the university cafeteria, and group dinners, I'm going to have the worst time getting back to my dry cereal in the morning and quick cheap around-campus lunches that I eat in the close company of my computer monitor. My only major complaint is that we've been getting up before 7 a.m., having breakfast at 8, getting to the university by 9, leaving after 6:30 or 7 p.m., and coming home (with generally an hour of work for me to do!) rather after 10 — this programme of activities leaving rather little time for seeing, well, anything of the city we flew a quarter of the way around the world to be in. Jon and I skipped the morning lecture on Tuesday, I think it was, for an hour-long jaunt across the Charles Bridge and over to the central square of the old city, and then we ate a super-fast lunch Wednesday and yesterday in order to at least make it up the steps to Prague Castle and fit in some required souvenir shopping, but up to today that was the best we had done. Luckily, the idea of spending all Friday afternoon, after the final project presentations ended, to continue working on our projects didn't seem to find general appeal, so Alon said we could manage everything else by e-mail in the coming days or weeks. (We have a working system, but a lot of extensions are half-finished or not fully put in yet.) Free afternoon! Shuly proposed looking at the "highlights" of the city, so we retraced pretty much the same path to the main square, then Jon and I peeled off to the right (I guess that would be the south) in search of a tea shop he'd plotted out a course to on Google Maps. It was maybe 15 or 20 minutes further on, and it turned out to go under the entitlement of Dobrá Čajovna, or the Dobrá Tea Room. (We both thought that "dobrá" was an inflection of 'good" ["dobrý"], but both the menus and the website leave the word untranslated, so perhaps not.) I didn't know tea rooms actually (still) existed, but there it was. Small two- or three-person tables, some tucked into little secretive nooks and some low, oriental style, with little places to take off your shoes and store them while you drink. After you've paid proper attention to the 30-page menu, you ring a little hand bell to get the attention of a waiter, who takes your order and comes back several minutes later with an impossible array of pots, jars, and cups on a tray. Jon's Japanese green tea, for example, came dry in a small pot with a lid; the water was in a tall glass carafe thing with a candle underneath it to keep warm. The correct procedure, which we had to have shown to us, is to pour the water from the carafe into what would be a tea bowl if it didn't have a spout on it, then let the water cool there for about two minutes. Only after that do you dump it into the leaves in the pot, and from there you wait 30 seconds before pouring it out into your real tea cup, which you can then drink from. My "aromatised" red tea was a little simpler, at least once the waiter stopped me from pouring it out into Jon's spouted cooling cup by mistake, instead of into my own little square thing that I thought was meant for used leaves. All in all, good fun, and they'll also sell you 100 grams of the various teas for prices ranging from about $4.50 to $7.50. We had dinner for the second time at the "U Vladaře" restaurant — except I think "u" corresponds to the same preposition plus determiner you find in French restaurant names, so I guess I'd want to say that we ate again at the Vladaře — on Shuly's recommendation. We were actually tipped off to the place by Pavel, one of the Charles University students, who gave us some insider information that I'll save for a second post in the interest of length. Jon also wants to go to bed soon, since it's now 11:20 and we have to be out of the hotel by 8:45 tomorrow morning to head to the airport. I am due back at my house in Pittsburgh, for the information of those who want to keep track of such things, around 8 p.m. |
Monday, February 2, 2009
11:01 p.m.
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So... the story of U Vladaře is the story of how you can cheat the tourist traps in Prague. On Monday night we had asked Pavel, one of the Czech students, if he could tell us about good, authentic restaurants in the area, and he led us to this place. They were full up that night, but we put in a reservation for Tuesday and found our way back there that evening at 7:30. If you're looking at the place from the street, you see something very obviously like the front of a restaurant — big sign, words that you can easily recognize as "beer" and "wine," a menu in English outside the door, and a waiter-person inside to take your name and show you to a table. What you don't notice, most likely, is the little entryway into a sort of courtyard just to the right. (Since all the buildings in central Prague seem to be contiguous, with some even behind other buildings on the same street, these little tunnels to courtyards seem to occur with decent frequency.) In the middle of this entryway is a dark door with a paper sign written only in Czech; push it open and you'll find another restaurant — dark, smoky, and with low ceilings. What you won't find is any English on the menu... or the knowledge that these two restaurants both share the same kitchen, except the Czech-only U Vladaře is half the price of the tourist one just across. We ate there Tuesday, and Shuly expressed undying admiration for the authenticity and quality of the food by going there a total of four times by the end of the week. I was there twice for our group dinners, and Jon ended up there three times since an old friend of his in Prague independently took him there Wednesday night too because his dad recommended it as a good restuarant. So we knew from all reports received that we'd gotten in on something good. I forgot what I had the first night — we were attempting to translate the menu by associated pictures, ad hoc human word alignment, and known cognates from other languages, but really only Francis and Shuly could say much about Slavic languages and Central European cuisine, respectively — so I don't think I can say with certainly what sort of meat I was eating. I think it may have been venison, in the end. When we went back again on Friday, Jon and I brought a list of pre-translated food terms and a phrase book, so we were a little better off. I had what I think went under the entitlements of Charles-style beef goulash (Czech morphology making the "Charles-style" part more of a guess), with cabbage and sausage soup to start off. And so today we are back in Pittsburgh and the normal routine resumes. We had our first "crit" in photo class today, standing, I suppose, for "critique" and meaning "you all tack your photos up on the wall and then we sit down in artsy blue plastic chairs and look at them." No grades, which is mostly fine with me since I think it'd be rather difficult and arbitrary to assign a percentage or letter grade to art, but the exercise did leave me wondering a bit whether I'd done OK or whether I'd crapped things up badly enough to worry about the second assignment. The tip of the week is probably to burn in the edges of everything and to, importantly, do it with a lower-contrast filter in the enlarger. I didn't really have much luck with regular burns in the series of six prints I had to turn in today, but I'm hoping in the next few days to get them scanned and posted on my photos website so you can see for yourself. Let's see... ah, yes, there was a sort of football doin's last night too, wasn't there. For the second time in my stay here, Pittsburgh was in the Super Bowl and I was in the Tartan office while drunken mobs ripped apart the city. Perhaps two minutes after the game ended, I put my head out of one of the third-floor windows in the UC and saw just hundreds of people running across the Cut and down Forbes into Oakland, which was the common or agreed-upon place to set things on fire and cause gratuitous property damage. The papers report this morning that the casualties include a number of small trees, two windows, one or two bus shelters (I say, people!), street signs, parking meters, and trash cans. Also a 51C bus in the South Side, which suddenly found itself surrounded on five sides by people as it made its way along Carson Street. This year I didn't get to see anything myself, since I was in the office until just before 1 a.m. and then went straight home, but it seems only slightly more intense than what happened in 2006. |
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
11:53 a.m.
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My day, morning edition:
If I hadn't already paid $165 for supplies, I'd be considering dropping this class right about now. So far I've done nothing but drive myself crazy trying to snatch odd bits of early-morning and late-night time to actually do the work, and I can't seem to stop making unbelievable messes out of straightforward things because of all my silly mistakes. |
Saturday, February 7, 2009
7:07 p.m.
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For those who keep track of such things, I scanned my first photo assignment a few days ago and finally got around to posting the pictures online tonight. This and future assignments will now be part of the new Black & White gallery on my photos site. Work on the second assignment continues apace; after three trips to Posvar Hall on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday mornings, I now have my two rolls of 2¼ film developed and contact printed, ready for major printing operations to begin Monday afternoon in class. On Martin's (the professor's) suggestion, I printed up a few of them last night to 4x4-inch prints, and they're looking rather good. Indoor shooting at least has the benefit of having a whole lot less snow about, so my exposures are much more consistent than they were for the first assignment. Otherwise, in my endless... (argh, my mind really wants to take the French word parcourir and adapt it to this current English construction, making something like "endless parcouring") of the Internet, I came across some news articles. Early this week, I was discovering that the Internet of 2009 knows a lot more about early phonograph recordings than it did 10 years ago, when I first got interested in the subject. This rather shocking New York Times article sort of mentions this fact as a tiny aside: "The past several years have seen a burst of scholarly interest in the music of the so-called acoustic era: the rags and minstrel songs, parlor ballads and opera arias, novelty tunes and vaudeville comedy ditties that companies like Edison and Columbia pressed onto wax cylinders and 78 r.p.m. discs in the years before the advent of electric recording." I guess I have the weird satisfaction of saying that my 15-year-old self was into old music before it got popular? Either way, I'm thinking I need to get a tape player in my room again so I can listen to some of the stuff I bought off of tinfoil.com back when they sold cassettes instead of CDs. Spending about 90 minutes with yesterday's New York Times over breakfast this morning left me with the impression that the political news is actually not that encouraging, despite the change of president. This is, in my mind, mostly due to the usual incessant squabbling between Republicans and Democrats, who must be under the orders of some secret law saying that they can't have the same opinion on anything — including, as states the San Francisco Chronicle, such seemingly non-political things like when the U.S. switches over to digital TV. Secondarily, I'm annoyed that the bigram "Clinton administration" seems to figure in about every second paragraph in the paper, and tertiarily because the Obama guys seem to be fumbling around and making more silly mistakes than I would have expected, doing themselves a little bit of political harm in the process. An interesting part, at least to the "How Old Am I, Again?" Department, is a report that Obama picked a 26-year-old to head a new White House office for religious outreach programs. Finally, we pass to the applications of the scientific method in government, which is currently not being applied in Afghanistan. Here we have some people being arrested and hauled up before the courts on charges of modifying and misinterpreting the Quran in translating it out of Arabic, and in all the resulting imprisonments, trials, and death threats, we find no evidence of anyone having taken the trouble to look at the translation to see if anything was actually modified or misinterpreted! I'd like to see how far this sort of attitude would get me in thesis research over here. |
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