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ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
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Wednesday, May 20, 2009
8:02 p.m.
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Facebook is suddenly becoming an all-in-one source for fun or interesting information. Some things from the last few days that I've been saving in browser tabs:
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Saturday, May 23, 2009
1:49 a.m.
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Into the woods My ad hoc cure for never being able to sleep properly on camping trips seems to be to stay up hideously late the night before and wake up hideously early the morning of. I've been fooling around with some messed-up English parse trees for the past two hours — that and getting my stuff together for camping — and by tomorrow morning I hope to have the Arabic parse trees I need in order to launch the next long step of the MT-system-building process while I'm gone. But this also means waking up at something like, uh, 6:00 when it's already coming up on 2:00 now. Well, we'll see. I should be reporting back some time late on Monday if all goes according to plan. And it should, since my car isn't involved this time, so I won't have any opportunities to leave my keys on any out-of-state mountains or leak coolant all over the Laurel Highlands. A break might be nice. I got exposed to a bunch of spoken Thai numbers today — also a lot of speech, but I don't really expect myself to get much of that in open conversation. After what seemed like an eon of mental churning, I managed to work out that somewhere in the mix there was a 14 and possibly a 39. And about 40 billion things I couldn't identify in time. I guess I haven't retained that much from those days a while back of repeatedly writing out the single-digit number words and trying to read out the figures on the license plates of parked cars as two sets of two-digit numbers. This failure only plays into what happened on Wednesday, I think it was, when Maxine surprised me by addressing me in French, and even in about a one-minute conversation I did so horribly that my first reaction afterwards was to write her an e-mail apologizing for sounding like an idiot. Yeah... "into the woods; the time is now." |
Monday, June 1, 2009
8:29 p.m.
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In the middle of a horrifically busy two weeks here. You may have noticed, for instance, that I still haven't described the camping trip I went on a week and a half ago now. Let me do it now, but I'll try to keep it short. Getting to Benner's Run Meadow campground (or some such permutation on those words) was more involved than expected. Aaron and Amber flew into Pittsburgh from Boston and rented a car, but by the time Vicki and I knew this it was too late to cancel the car and/or work out a useful carpool, so we ended up having two separate groups from Pittsbugh. Even that turned out to be a pretty good sharing effort — based on the CWRU crew's spread-out geography, we ended up with three other people who drove in solo in separate cars! Well, luckily Eric reserved us a big group spot so we had plenty of room for the people and just enough room for the cars. The trip technically started Friday night, but only four people were there for it; the other nine of us came in Saturday. This Benner's place was kind of interesting... up front, I wouldn't even call it "camping." Pool, game room, basketball court, signs saying "massages here," etc., and a bunch of those house-sized RVs all parked like eight inches from each other. Luckily, our spot was all the way at the back along a little gravel road, and the spot was surrounded in enough trees to separate it from the nearby sites. Vicki and I got there Saturday just in time for the late breakfast that the Friday night group was about to make, so we joined them for eggs and vegetable things. (They were supposed to be omelets, but the pan was too big or not hot enough or something, such that Kathi couldn't flip them and had to just scramble the stuff instead.) We also picked up the phrase "Stop eating the ingredients!" as a sort of running joke, since Kathi had laid out all the vegetables and cheese and stuff in advance, and the rest of us had nothing to do during the slow cooking process but nip bits of tomato or cheese out of her piles. We spent the rest of the day waiting for various other cars to show up. The Cleveland car was taking forever, so at some point we gave up on them and headed off to a winery that someone had noticed on the way into the park. At this place, they charged us nothing, presented us with their whole list of wines (about 15 or 20), and said we could try as many as we wanted. I guess we were a bit hesitant to start naming things, so the guy just started near the top and poured one after the other into our glasses as fast as we could drink them. The whole thing would have been over in about 10 minutes (after 11 wines) if we hadn't then all decided to buy stuff. Back "home" and to dinner afterwards, which consisted of Dan's burritos. We did end up taking advantage of the campground pool, which was a little interesting for me because I had a bathing suit, at least, but no sandals or towel. On the first day, the sun was strong enough to dry me off decently, but on the second it was cloudy and I was kind of cold and wet until I used my shirt as a towel instead. Of course, that was a synthetic shirt, so by the time I got back to the campsite it was dry. Sunday (the second day) was the rafting day for nine of the others — four of us first stayed at the campsite and ended up driving into town to go hiking instead. We misread the map and ended up somewhere unexpected, but the unexpected place was filled with boulders and a creek anyway, so we just converted most of the hike to crawling all over the rocks like little kids. I did quite well, I thought — especially with my new-ish hiking boots that have a lot of tread on them still. It turns out I was the tallest in the group, which fact became really apparent when I was able to get back up a ledge without any notable effort that Kathi, Vicki, and Nick couldn't manage. So we had to find a new way back along the creek, then come up to the higher trail height at a place where it wasn't as steep. We had a game of Robo Rally during some rain in the late afternoon, then I had to go out into it because I was on dinner duty and we were starting to expect the rafters back at any time. My dinner of pasta (radiatore, which I pronounce for fun with super-rolled "r"s and which Eric enthusiastically called "radiators") and amplified sauce dispatched in due course. Monday morning people decided that breakfast "in town" would be better than breakfast (and dish duty) at the campsite, so we drove the five or so miles into Ohiopyle, ate at the Firefly Grill, took our pictures by the falls, and then all broke off for various homes from there. Susannah followed Vicki and me as far as the turnpike; in our car, Vicki played the "Wicked" soundtrack and gave me quick plot sketches as the songs went by. It was an excellent trip — not really because of the activities or whatever, but more for the experience of having some of those "change of pace" things I really needed. Case in point: not only were all 13 of us unanimously condemning of Twitter, at least one person didn't even know what it was. (Paul's answer, which I love: "It's like if you said that the only thing wrong with IM is that the rest of the world can't read it!") Somehow being with people my own speed means I don't feel so bad about my myriad failings at Thai, Photoshop, ITG, etc. Sitting around the campfire, cooking dinner, and playing games, I don't think I'd laughed so much in months, and it felt good. Susannah summed it up very compactly in an e-mail she sent out the day we got back: "Whenever we do this, I really feel part of something special; I feel so lucky to know such generous, fun, active, lovely people. And loyal people, too; it's so remarkable that so many of us are still in touch and, moreover, getting physically together and up to our old tricks after so much time." |
Monday, June 1, 2009
8:51 p.m.
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As I said, there's no shortage of stuff to write about, and syntactic phrase extraction is turning into a particular headache today, so you get another post instead of me getting an Arabic–English MT system. I think next up after the camping trip last week was a one-day workshop at Johns Hopkins University between part of the AVENUE research group here and the people working on the Joshua decoder there. Since these words are probably fairly meaningless to all but about two people reading this, I won't focus on the technical content of Thursday except to state one surprising fact: It's amazing how much more productive work you can get done from half an hour of sitting next to someone, even after already spending a month in e-mail contact with the same. More direct and informal method of communication, I guess. Anyway, we left for this thing Wednesday around 5:30 p.m., I think it was — my advisor and three students, plus an undergrad who drove down separately from New Jersey and met us there. We got to the hotel around 11:30 at night, went to bed shortly after, woke up, went to JHU, had our workshop thing, and then left again around 6:30 p.m. the next day, meaning I spent about a grand total of 19 hours in Baltimore and had time for absolutely nothing unscheduled. A pity, since I was hoping I'd see Wes at the workshop, perhaps, and then be able to call Mars for dinner or something. I ended up driving the whole way back, which I think was the preferable option because I never fall asleep in cars and it keeps me from getting a headache from sitting in the back seat all night. Some light rain getting out of Baltimore, and then a clear and dry road until the sky opened up and flooded us between the PA state line and Breezewood. It reminded me of one of my first freeway driving experiences, going to Ohio Northern in October of 1999, when I was barely managing about 45 m.p.h. on I-71 and cars were pulling off to the side from not being able to see more than about six centimeters in front of them. This time I was glad to have a new rental car with powerful headlights instead of the horrible Buick I'd otherwise be driving on my own, which with the lights on in the dark shows me a bit of the white line on the right-hand side of the road and not much else. So that was my mid-week, I guess. Friday passed, and then Saturday, and on Sunday came up KGB Urban Hike #4, which was a nice little two-parter that first involved walking downtown (5.4 miles), then a ramble through the South Hills (12.3 miles) that ended up at the Waterfront. In between was a T ride on the Library line from Steel Plaza to South Park Road. The weird thing about the T, which we all noticed, was that the stations downtown are beautiful in sparkling marble, all set for use in a big city... but there are like four people in them total. Gustavo points out a hypothetical Pittsburgh subway system that looks just perfect in its dream-world fantasy, but the truth is that this city only nominally has any train transport — much less than even in Cleveland, since at least there you have four lines and can get straight to the airport on one of them. Other highlights of the walk... South Park, I guess, which looks a whole lot like North Park except less developed. We crossed the 10th Street Bridge in Pittsburgh, and that's a new one for all of the people keeping track, at least. Once out in the suburbs, sidewalks were basically non-existent, so we did everything up to Eighth Avenue in Homestead on the side of the road with cars zipping by. I remembered how annoying that is from our West Virginia walks, for example, and I think there was a vote for our next hike for something either clearly more urban or clearly more rural. Chris and William were also trying to fit a name to each of our existing hikes as an alternative to referring to them by number. I think what we ended up deciding on was "Distributed Dining," "Stairs and Streams," and two things I don't remember. I think the fourth one got "South Side Suburbs," but I may be conflating the name with some discussion about Braddock and urban decay in relation to our third walk, for which something mixing "south" and "slums" may have been proposed. What I really want to do is get all the hikes onto the same map, which I guess could be done on Google Maps because it allows multiple disjoint line segments, but when I tried plotting the second walk out on that tool I kind of wanted to kill either myself or it. Also, at this point I'd have to click street by street through about 60 miles of meandering in order to make them all again. Anyone know of any more friendly options? Finally, I shouldn't end this post without a general announcement that the third mostly annual Walking to West Virginia (and/or Ohio?) trip is set for Saturday, June 20. The plan is to leave super-early, like an hour before sunrise, and try to catch the actual sunrise on the Birmingham Bridge. E-mail me if you want to come along and think you can walk 38 miles, and e-mail me also if you'd be willing to pick up a crew of shaky-legged walkers when we call you from the next state over at whatever time we get there. (In 2006 we aborted at Burgettstown around 8:30, and in 2007 we reached the border some time at or around 1 a.m., so there's a bit of training data for the drivers on what to expect.) I'm hoping to focus on leaving early and not stopping spastically this year, especially after Evan and I were able to cover an equivalent distance last summer in 14 hours instead of 18. A steady pace and more regular stops seems to be a better answer to me, at least. |
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
11:54 p.m.
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The weather yesterday, which started off kind of dark and cloudy, cleared up nicely by the mid-afternoon, so I decided to join the LTI/SCS softball team for its second game in the GSA summer league. I've been on the mailing list for the last three years, after playing Observer softball for two years back at Case, but I only played one game here in 2007 because they're always scheduled in the early evening when I'm either working or wanting dinner. Yesterday's game was at 5:30, and I managed to plan sufficiently in advance that I'd taken my glove with me to campus in the morning. The first thing I noticed, during warm-ups, was that my glove must have started drying out from years of disuse: the leather or whatever it is inside is cracking and flaking off in tiny bits all over my hand, and the outside is revealing itself to be made of something with an outer layer that's doing the same in a few spots. It took me a few minutes to remember how to throw again, which somehow seems to require more effort than previously (even though I should be much stronger now than I was in high school...), but I can still field and catch about as well as before. Of course, the real surprise waited until my first at-bat. Since it's for-fun softball, the pitches are easy and slow, and it's rare that a batter will take more than one before popping out some kind of a shot — that, combined with the fact that no one quite knows the batting order the first around, meant that it was my turn shockingly quickly in the first inning, and I had about 10 seconds to prepare for it. I should have taken a practice swing or something: on one of the first few pitches I had a swinging strike that did something unhappy to my left shoulder such that it hurt for the rest of the game (and indeed all through today: it makes popping noises sometimes when I put my arm back and above my head). It kind of figures that I do something silly the first time I get a bat in my hand in two years. Our team had a poor first inning, but after that things went more smoothly. I hit three singles and two ground outs in five at-bats and scored two runs. Defensively, left field was surprisingly boring. I think I was active on three plays, and all of them were marginally competent fieldings of ground balls that didn't make any outs. All in all, though, a good day for softball — or at least a kind of softball, since the final score after seven innings was a flabbergasting 30-17. And this is including a sort of mercy rule that stops any half-inning after six runs are in unless it's the top or bottom of the seventh, which our team hit twice and the other team hit once. I was thinking about also playing tomorrow's game, but given the shoulder and the huge amount of work I have to do, this is unlikely. I leave sickeningly early Thursday for Boulder, essentially of my own volition because I wanted more than six minutes to have a look around the place between when I get there and when the SSST workshop starts Friday morning. That means tomorrow I have to finish writing my slides, practice them, pack, and also get as much work done as I can on the NIST system before I can only sporadically have access to it for a few days. I've been increasingly nervous that it's not going to be ready in time for the eval next week. |
Thursday, June 4, 2009
10:42 p.m.
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I say, one day in Boulder and I already have tons to write about. It doesn't hurt, I suppose, that I had my trip notebook with me most of the day because I was traveling. A fair amount of notes from the trip itself. I left CMU by the 4:55 a.m. 28X, which means I got about four hours of "sleep" even if I feel like I was awake all night anyway. While I was waiting for the bus on campus, it occurred to me that the street-crossing beeps at Forbes and Morewood were occurring unexplainably frequently — especially since no one was ever actually pushing the button to cross the street. I think they've been rewired rather stupidly: I jotted the sequence down in my notebook (using "F" for green light for Forbes, "M" for Morewood, and "S" for "student crossing time") and got F, S, F, S, M, F, S, F, S. Then the bus came. Arrived at the airport on time (around 5:45) and got on a flight to Chicago at 6:40. I secured a right-hand window seat in the very unlikely event that the Great Lakes weren't cloudy for once and I could see something of my home territory. Luck was partially with me: we passed too far to the south of Cleveland for me to make anything out beyond the bump in the shoreline that's like Rocky River and the sharp turn where downtown Cleveland should be, but I got some nice aerial pictures of Sandusky Bay before the clouds set in. After landing in Chicago, the plane was reloaded and took off again for Denver. I got a whole row of three to myself, but thought that the Southwest Airlines people might not like it if I put up both armrests in the middle and laid down across all three seats to try to sleep. (Note: Alan says they would have been fine with it. Oh well.) Instead I tried reconstructing the tone table for unmarked syllables in Thai, using words I could spell from memory and knew the tone of, and after about an hour I managed to fill in 17 of the 18 cells in my table. (Long-vowel syllable starting with a low-class consonant and ending in a stop, I know you're out there somewhere...) When the plane finally dropped through the clouds to land in Denver, all I could see was a very flat, very expansive farmland — I found myself half-jokingly wondering if the pilot hadn't made a mistake and taken us to Corn Junction, Iowa instead of the Rocky Mountains. You could see for miles and miles and miles, and there wasn't even as much as a tree to break up the view. From what little I've seen of it, Colorado seems weird in a different spaced-out way than California or Phoenix: here, instead of just scaling up everything to take up a ton of space, the designers of this hbox of a state just decided to use distributed rubber space and make the thing come out underfull. Our plane took seven minutes to taxi from the end of the runway to our arrival gate, for instance — but not from having double-width lanes or anything like that, just empty space. On the AB "SkyRide" route to Boulder ($12 each way, ick!), we had to drive seven miles from the terminal building before I saw a house. Other interesting sights between Denver and Boulder: A McDonald's ad for iced tea said "Life has a refresh button," which made me think about some interesting change that must have gone on implicity in English that made "fresh" a verb before we could apply inflectional morphology to it. This was right after we turned onto a place called Salida Street, where I thought the street sign might be confusing to a Spanish-only speaker. (As far as I could see, the road was a dead end.) I wasn't much recovered from seeing an Exit 282 on I-70 (we're only about two-thirds of the way across the state from west to east, so there must be 350s or something further on!) before I also had to deal with an Exit 0 on I-270. But I made it to Boulder at last without too much sensory overload. Although, I say, Boulder is the place for it. At a certain point, the town just stops and then the giant mountains begin. I spent my afternoon hiking my requisite five miles in the Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks, which took much longer than I thought it would because of the terrain. I picked out what was listed as a "moderate" route — you know, to have an easy time of it — but that was before I remembered what Erin and Ben discovered about skiing: out west you have to implicitly add one to whatever scale they're using. This "moderate" route gained more than 1000 feet of altitude (starting already at about 5600 feet) in 1.8 miles, most of it over steep rocks that really made my knees hurt on the way down. Amazing views, though! The people here are freakishly nice. I guess eight years in comparatively northeastern cities have had their toll, because now I am completely unused to people holding doors for me, fast-food cashiers being genuinely pleasant, and certainly not cars giving pedestrians the right of way or them stopping in their own lanes to let me cross the street mid-block. Street-crossing here is pretty interesting, in fact. I had expected to be out here in the Land of the Car Because Our Cities Grew Up That Way, Dang It, but Boulder has tons of bike lanes and sidewalks and crosswalks in places where you'd probably not even get a shoulder to walk on in Pittsburgh. (Think Monroeville or that loopy main road around the Waterfront.) And here there are people actually using them, too. I spent all day, it seems, crossing paths with other walkers and getting passed by bicyclists and skateboarders. I suppose it could have something to do with the University of Colorado at Boulder (abbreviated "CU," for fun) making the median age of people in this city 29. So. I am impressed. Not that I have any chance of ever ending up here myself, but it is the considered opinion of meself, formed on the basis of about 12 hours, that I do highly recommend this city... |
Monday, June 8, 2009
8:28 p.m.
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I don't think the end of the Colorado trip was as exciting as the beginning. The SSST workshop on Friday was rather sparsely attended — even less than expected already for a small 10-paper, one-day workshop, since three of the 10 authors had visa problems and couldn't even make it. My talk was first, and it seemed to go all right: the English was probably better than the average, but I still have a really flat monotone voice, and I only got to run over what I wanted to say once in my hotel room the night before. At lunch I ate a really quick meal of fish and chips (although they were potato chips, so "fish and crisps" would have been more correct) in a sort of Tomlinson or Thwing-ish area, then headed outside to see something of campus before the afternoon talks began. UC Boulder, or CU Boulder, or UCB has a rather nice campus of moderate size, complete with some very green quads and big old buildings, but I couldn't find any dorms. Bikes everywhere, though, including some tied to an iron fence right by a sign that said the fence wasn't for bike parking and any found there might be taken away. After the workshop, the CMU people (me, Vamshi, Stephan, and Alon) had a bit of a status update for the NIST eval, and then I found myself on my own for dinner. I decided to have dinner north of campus, since on my exploratory after-lunch walk I'd seen a bit of a commercial district through the trees that looked like it had restaurants. About 15 steps out of the UMC (the building where the conference was, complete with the Glenn Miller Ballroom), some alumnus stopped me and asked if I "remembered" where the Hale Building was. I assume he thought I was another alum back for the same reunion program as him or something. I said that I had a map, but when I pulled it out, I saw that it showed the UMC by name and nothing else! Well, the alum wandered off into the UMC to try to ask someone else, and it was only 15 more steps after that when it hit me: Of course! I'd seen this Hale place on my lunch walk, and I remembered it specifically because the sign out front said in huge letters "Hale Science," and I was wondering if that might be a new discipline focused on finding better expression counterparts than "hearty" or "healthy." By the time I realized this, however, the alum was gone and I couldn't find him again. About 10 minutes later I dodged a sudden downpour by ending up in Papa Romano's, a little pizza shop on 13th Street that looked like a reasonable non-fancy place for a nerdy grad student to have dinner by himself. Again I was shocked at the friendliness of people in Boulder: the guy who took my order talked a little bit about the rain and the baseball game that was on TV, joked that my pizza would be ready in "exactly eight minutes and 42 seconds," and at various points throughout my dinner called me by name and asked how things were. (The restaurant was one where you order by first name, and then they yell it out when your food's ready.) I also got to witness some fun hijinks after someone turned in a cell phone that had been lost somewhere outside. The counter guy, looking through the address book in the phone, found an entry for "Mom," so he called that one and started trying to explain to the (apparently elderly or clueless) parent on the other end that her kid had lost his phone somewhere and that it was now at "Papa Romano's on the Hill... it's a restaurant." Mid-conversation, just when the confused mom had said something to the effect that she didn't know any other way to contact her son (Counter Guy: "Um, how about e-mail?"), another girl in the restaurant saw someone outside poking around for a lost object and yelled "Hey, did you lose a phone?" out the door. The son and his communication device were thus reunited, and he got a bonus conversation with his mom for free, since she was still on the line. After that I walked the half-hour back to my hotel, feeling like I had gotten a good deal more than pizza and pop for my $5.99 plus tax. The next day I got up, had breakfast, packed, and puttered around on my computer for a while before Stephan came to collect me in his rental car. Since we both had flights out of Denver at roughly the same time, he had offered to pick me up from my hotel if I wanted to ride with him. It didn't save me any time over the SkyRide, but it did save the $12, so I went. It took us some time (and three toll stops) to get to the rental car return place, and then we had to take a shuttle bus from the airport rental car return to the airport terminal because things are that spread out at this place. From the air I got another confirmation of this: Denver International Airport appears to have five runways, but none of them intersect with each other in the usual way. I think the closest two of them come is a sort of "L" shape. My plane landed in Chicago 20 minutes early, which meant that my horrible layover got a little worse: three hours isn't really enough time to get away and do anything outside the airport, but it's long enough that you really don't look forward to hanging around in the airport either. I walked the length of the place down and back once, ate the slowest lunch I could while reading the cheapest reading material I could find (75¢ for the Chicago Tribune), walked the length again, looked through two bookshops, walked around again, passed by my gate, walked around some more, and then finally settled in leaning against a window at B19 because there were no seats left. The flight to Pittsburgh was reasonably fast, although again the Great Lakes were all cloudy so I couldn't get any view of my home turf in the setting sun. |
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
3:32 p.m.
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Fun Fact of the Day: Selecting "walking" on Google Maps doesn't seem to include any conception of how far a person can reasonably go. Asking for turn-by-turn walking directions from my house to a certain endpoint in San Francisco gives me a route of 2603 miles with 724 turns, taking an estimated 35 days and eight hours. Straight. This works out to about 3.07 m.p.h. only if you plan on 24-hour walking days. Now that'd be a concentrated way for me to get a lot of my "hike five miles in every state" goal done. |
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
1:13 p.m.
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All right. The NIST eval is thankfully out of the way, so now I have this week to get my life back to normal before the next adventure in what's turning out to be a very busy summer. Well, get my life back to as normal as it can be around here these days. With the Gates Center actually nearing completion (and the LTI's move-in date set for August 12), we've been getting an awful lot of e-mail from Facilities telling us, as Kenneth put it, that "your life is going to suck for the next three months." (People who never spend summers on campus would be floored at how much construction equipment gets mobilized the second after everyone goes home from graduation.) Let's take a quick review, shall we? From the e-mail out-box of the eminent Jim Skees:
This is all in addition, I should add, to two "oops" incidents of contractors cutting through phone lines and a steam shutdown for half of campus — although, in FMS's favor, I have no information that the steam bit was related to the Gates construction. But, I say, the moral of the story for people with offices in Newell-Simon is this: Stay there, and don't try to get anywhere in just about any direction! |
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
10:54 p.m.
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Mediocre day today. I have been trying to work out how I am going to get to Washington, D.C. for my appointment with the French consulate next Friday morning, since in order to get a scientific visa for my internship in September I have to make an in-person appearance with a bunch of forms. Among the usual public transportation alternatives, Greyhound is predictably the cheapest ($74), but it's a seven-hour trip each way (instead of the four and a half or five I think I can drive it in). The train is right out ($130s — I left the exact number at my desk), both in terms of price and in departure times, and flying would be over $200. Alon suggested I rent a car, which is what he always does when he has meetings or whatever down there, so I looked into that somewhat. I could get a price of $58 from U.S. Airways, but I'd have to pick the car up at the airport, which takes an extra hour to get there on the 28X. Hertz on Baum Boulevard will give me $72, still just ahead of the Greyhound, but there's still the matter of gas and tolls, which on the PA Turnpike even to Breezewood are not insignificant. I'm coming round to the new idea of driving my own car, assuming I can get the coolant leak and some other maintenance done on time. I have an appointment to haul the thing into Rudy's on Thursday morning, which will probably translate to me being a few hundred dollars poorer by Thursday evening. I've pretty much decided in my own mind that this car will not survive grad school, by which I mean when I go to wherever I'm going (default San Francisco) to take a job, it will not be accompanying me. I've even started to wonder if I should just hand it over to my parents even before then — the amount that I drive it is too small to pay off its yearly cost in insurance, maintenance, gas, and registration, although I can't complain that my fuel bills are that high. It may be worthwhile to spec out some numbers to see what makes the most sense. The difficult part is that a carless me would have a rather annoying time ever going back home (or anywhere) on my own for more than a few days: my parents live far from the Cleveland or Akron Greyhound stations, and car rental places don't seem to encourage one-way rentals so much. Anyway. Though it's nice to be out of the clutches of last-minute NIST eval work, I've been feeling more uneasy about meeting my summer research goal, which is to have given a thesis proposal presentation before I leave for France — and preferably a good bit before, so I have time to make any necessary revisions and start some of the work before I drop off the LTI map for four months. But in my statement earlier today that this summer is turning out busier than I expected, I'm not exaggerating. There is this week (or what's left of it) and three days of next week, relatively unobstructed except for my inability to concentrate on anything for more than about 30 minutes, but Alon is clamoring vociferously for great and in-depth error analysis on the NIST Arabic system, and I could see that taking weeks. Visa muck on Friday, driving down Thursday, and then the following Monday I am off to San Francisco for 16 days. Not all vacation time, of course, but half of it is, and Alon's also away from July 1 though July 12, so I am not expecting a great back-and-forth dialogue on whatever partial thesis drafts I may have been able to conjure up in my sleep between now and then. From July 14 I have four weeks until the Gates Center move rips my department apart for who knows how long, and then about two more weeks until MT Summit and the NIST workshop in Ottawa. I'd been assuming I'd be going to those — in fact, we delayed the start of my France internship because of them — but last Friday I found out that my paper got rejected from MT Summit. Either way it's a week when not much will be happening back at home base, since Alon and the other MT professors will certainly be going. And the week after MT Summit I leave for France. This is... interesting, because, as astute and long-term readers may recall, my only real objective for last summer was to survive it and get it over with as soon as possible. Now I am finding myself in this weirdly conflicted state where, while I still am somewhat anxious for the time to go by in general, the mere passage of the weeks and months means nothing unless it carries with it the assumption that it is bringing me closer to finishing my Ph.D. If I'm two years out now, then the only way for me to be 16 months out in four months is to have done four months' worth of thesis work in that time, and that's looking, um, pretty difficult right now. |
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
10:20 p.m.
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FLOOD! What started as a fantastic thunderstorm around 6:00 this evening turned into an out-and-out deluge that I think beats the time I drove my car through a foot of water in Valley View during the summer of 2003. At first, most of us at home had the same idea: curl up on a couch downstairs with a book and listen to the pouring rain through the open windows. Well, then the thunder and lightning increased quite a lot, and when Greta reported hail (pea-sized) from the front door, I noticed that the wind was whipping up as well and decided to check the windows. We were getting rain in on all three sides. After the windows were closed, I looked out back and saw that 60 percent of the backyard was underwater, which made me worry for our cellar-style doors that face that way. I also remembered the "fun" we had with our basement drain backing up and overflowing last spring, so I went down there on the double, you might say, to have a look around. The drain was draining nicely (I could hear it), but there was a thin trail of water on the floor to it coming from the driveway-facing wall. Further investigation with my camping flashlight found this to have two causes: one, that one of our glass-block windows was leaking (from tons and tons of water pouring into its pit below driveway level, no doubt), and two, that there was water dripping through the basement ceiling apparently from the first floor. Investigating this led to the discovery that the living room window was leaking around the bottom of the air conditioner and dripping onto the floor. Four kitchen towels, my blue bucket, and the moving of three boxes in the basement seemed to (at least temporarily) take care of the issues, though. It may have been about that time that Elly reported that people on Twitter were reporting feet of water at the intersection of Forbes and Murray. I decided I wanted to go exploring, and Kempy and Eight decided they wanted to come too. I put on my bathing suit and a synthetic shirt, grabbed an umbrella for comedic effect, took off my socks and replaced them with my backpacking sandals, and bounded outside into the mess. Water was cascading down our street in two streams next to either curb, but the real surprise awaited us down a bit at Forbes — to wit: a car, marooned just east of the intersection with Margaret Morrison, in about two feet of water; two more backed up on Maggie Mo Street itself, unable to turn; a police car blocking downhill traffic on Forbes; and the intersection completely flooded up to several houses away from the junction. We plunged ahead. I thought the police car would tell us not to walk through the water, but we were unassaulted. At the deepest point, the mailbox in front of the Frame right at the intersection, the water was at least halfway between my knees and my waist, and the bottom of this impromptu lake seemed to be composed more of stones and small rocks than of the expected sidewalk and street. Whoever has the basement apartment in Woodlawn had about three feet of water pooled up against their door. Our next port of call was Gesling Stadium, flooded to a minimum depth of an inch across its entire expanse and to a maximum of about three inches in certain parts. (The IM fields fared much worse, but we avoided them.) Then the UC turnaround, again uniformly flooded to three or four inches, or about even with the surrounding curbs. A nice stream of water came across the Cut and cascaded down the stairs near the sidewalk at Morewood. The AEPi fire alarm was going off, but otherwise that intersection was in better shape than I was expecting — so was the low area between the roads and Morewood E Tower. We next headed to the cut-through at the back of the Morewood parking lot by WQED... flooded, certainly, but not much more than usually happens during any moderate rain. Eight wanted to see Newell-Simon, and Kempy wanted to see Craig Street, so we headed out of the parking lot that way. Forbes near Hamburg and across the bridge was relatively dry, but we found what looked like 12 to 18 inches of dirty, foul-smelling water in the west stairwell on Newell-Simon B level. A lot of the lights on the third and fourth floors were also out. I enthusiastically led the way to Architect's Leap, remembering what happened there in August 2007 when Alan and I were on our way to Toronto, but tonight we were disappointed: perfectly dry. The only Wean-based flooding seemed to be the piazza or walkway between there and Porter, which contained a few inches of water and was effectively keeping those weak in heart (or low in shoe) from entering or leaving the main Wean lobby. Margaret Morrison Street overall served as a sort of collector for water pouring off the Hill, but it did its job pretty competently. The steps up to McGill and Boss had turned into a waterfall at least twice as powerful as the fountain on the Mather Quad back at Case. We crossed back through the Maggie Mo lake again, this time noting a pretty darn powerful current in the water pouring down Forbes. The police car, parked crossways across the road, was throwing up a pretty good wave on its uphill side; on the downhill side, water was gushing out of the middle of the rear tire just below the hubcap. When we stood still in the middle of the stream, it looked like we were water skiing. Eight decided he'd had enough, but Kempy and I decided to investigate Elly's report of water up in Squirrel Hill proper. Forbes going up the hill was certainly a mess. It didn't take long to discover that all the stones, dirt, and rocks at the bottom of the hill were all coming from the construction going on between about Plainfield and Schenley Drive. At most of the intersections, water had dislodged the metal road plates on the north-ish side of the street, ripping up large chunks of asphalt and creating gashes in the roadway that may have been a foot or two deep. (Hard to say with water swirling around everywhere.) Kempy found a particularly long chunk of road that had been separated and pushed up to the surface like a surfboard. When she stood on it, it dropped a few inches and completed the surfing effect quite nicely before popping up again after she got off. Probably three dozen cars (and at least one bus) went down the hill while we were going up — they all ignored our large hand and arm gestures trying to get them to turn around. Of course, they all just had to make a U-turn and come back up anyway once they hit the bottom. Past Murdoch things looked pretty normal. We could see as far as Wightman, and it looked like cars were passing through the intersection there in all four directions without mishap, so we turned around and headed back home again. Coming from Squirrel Hill, it was easy to believe that everything was fine — minimal water on the road until after the curve at Schenley Drive, and even 20 minutes after our trip up it seemed that the flow rate was majorly diminished. (Jack, passing down the road in his car less than two hours later, reported no problems even as far as Maggie Mo Street, which he said was filled with stones and rocks but was otherwise dry.) Kempy and I got back just before 9:00. An official campus e-mail timestamped 9:11 warned of "flooding [...] in the basement and on the first floors of several campus buildings, including the Physical Plant Building, Baker Hall, Mellon Institute, Newell-Simon Hall and Margaret Morrison Carnegie Hall." So somehow Wean escaped the usual difficulties, but it looks like a lot of places weren't so lucky. Other reports: Jack said that water in the baseball fields here his house on Wightman was up to Rich's waist (and he's several inches taller than me), and that a car had bottomed out coming up the hill on Murray near Beacon. On the other hand, Edmund said from Bloomfield that the ground there was completely dry! |
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