|
ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
A Live Journal mirror of this site can be found here, so now you can leave me your comments — even if you aren't a Live Journal member!
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
7:12 p.m.
|
Had a bit of a breakdown last night, which started in something inconsequential and then moved into familiar territory. Worry over the fact that I've been having a pretty wretched summer from the point of view of research progress, that I'll be in the middle of my fifth year before I even come close to a thesis proposal, that I am about to fail this XRCE internship so badly because they're probably expecting someone who's had any experience with real software development beyond his own directory of Perl scripts. Fear that at 26 years old I still qualify as "entry-level" as far as the real world is concerned, that I have not assimilated through two degrees, four years of grad school, and eight years in higher education the sort of skills that others get from their undergrad classes or their first technical internship at the age of 19. And so on. In thinking over this again today, when I'm feeling somewhat better after having fretted myself into exhaustion and nine hours of sleep, I'm really not sure what, if there can be one, my rational response is. Many of these points, though overstated, are indeed true: I have somehow written code for more than a decade with only very occasional and very informal contact with any sort of version control system or multi-developer undertaking. Other points are more lodged in the territory of the unknown: yes, I might look ridiculously weak on any and all job applications, but it could also turn out that companies would rather have a head-in-the-sky, mind-at-the-command-prompt former grad student and his private directory of Perl scripts — who knows how to build a machine translation system — than a whiz-bang programmer who can't yet tell a BLEU point from a Viterbi alignment. The nagging fear, of course, is that those people could learn to do my job in about a day and a half, and still keep all their other fantastic skills besides. There's a guy in our research group, for instance, who came in "cold" and kicked the MEMT system into submission in about 10 months, which is about an order of magnitude more than I was able to do with it in two whole years. I am also, apparently, at war with health insurance, but more thoughts will have to wait until later. I'm going to be late for bridge night at Kempy's. |
Sunday, August 16, 2009
10:07 a.m.
|
People keep asking about when I'm leaving for and coming back from France, so I thought I'd post it here. It's a little convoluted:
So August 26 is really the day — after that I am essentially not around (in Pittsburgh, at least) until the beginning of the spring semester. It feels kind of weird to say "plan accordingly" as if my absence is something that would shake society here to its core, but yeah... if you want some activity with me to occur, there is the required time frame. |
Monday, August 17, 2009
10:07 p.m.
|
This is a week rife with anniversaries. On Friday I hit four years of living in Pittsburgh, which was celebrated Saturday in the usual way: with a fancy dinner. This time the fare was a three-courser. Reduced Car salad to begin with (because I substituted spinach for the basil and neglected to get the mozzarella), followed by what I called "PAC vegetable lasagna" — the "PAC" coming from my machine learning class, where it means "probably approximately correct." This addition to the menu, as you may have guessed, came from my usual sort of haphazard cookery wherein I substitute out things that seem either unnecessary or non-cost-effective (milk and eggs in lasagna?) for usually the null ingredient and kind of hope for the best. What I actually ended up with was carrots, broccoli, zucchini, green peppers, red peppers, four-cheese pasta sauce that I added garlic to, ricotta cheese, mozzarella cheese, and the usual lasagna noodles. Dessert was supposed to be nectarine slices with cinnamon over them, but my nectarines were underripe by about three days. Also broke open the white wine I got down by Ohiopyle on the Case-person camping trip in May, which went with this stuff very well. On Sunday the freshmen arrived, starting off another madcap week of orientation and school spirit and hordes and swarms of people wandering around. I keep wanting to say that this Class of 2013 — I say, what sort of year is that, anyway? — is full of impossibly little kids, but I keep getting surprised when I don't see it. This year I can't actually tell that the freshmen are any noticibly younger than the younger half of the other undergrads on campus. I guess whether these guys are five or eight years younger than me at this point isn't very significant: they all are probably not old enough to remember "Captain Planet" or "Full House." The '13ers are all out at Playfair as I type this, the music and announcing of which I can hear heavily distorted from my bedroom. KGB people are of course also in mocking attendance, but I gave it a miss this time. When you've been around for at least part of eight college orientations, there's really not that much new or interesting about the ninth. Well, finally, on this same topic of orientations I get to mark the anniversary of the start of mine tomorrow. It was Saturday, August 18, 2001 that I first shipped off to Case as one of those same clueless 18-year-olds who I now find annoyingly cluttering my path as I walk through the UC at CMU. My journal, the best contemporary record I have of back then, ignominiously skips from complaining about my mom's pestering in July to wondering at how fast everything can change in November, so I can't quote any in-the-moment tidbits. Nor can I remember anything about my orientation leader except that her last name was German, she was a junior and in a sorority, and I think a cheerleader, although the proposition that Case even had cheerleaders isn't even something I can verify from subsequent memories. But there are still some things that haven't faded as much, like stopping traffic on Euclid Avenue by sheer force of 750 crossing the street at once with no regard to the stoplights, or carrying the couch from the "sex talk" back to the Student Activities office and then talking for a long time on North Side with (I think) Susannah, Jeremy, and Pete. I do kind of wish I had some better record to make sure, though. |
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
11:55 p.m.
|
People who are interested in travels and/or photography might want to note that I put Boulder pictures from June on my photos site tonight. I am catching up to myself; now only a few months behind! Today I reported for duty at my new office in the Jim Skees said last week that we are moving into a building that's "97 percent done." That... could be a bit of an overestimate. To be fair, they seem to have been working from the top down, and then moving people into the upper floors first, so the initial impression once you get inside is worse off than the average floor. But there are still a bunch of oddities. My filing drawers — I think they call it a "pedestal" cabinet because it fits under my desk — appear to be locked, which is quite curious given the fact that the cabinet has no keyhole or anything on it yet, just a little metal thing where the lock should go. We're missing our whiteboard, and the bathrooms are missing soap and paper towels. We gave up our old Newell-Simon keys in the morning, including the one to the old kitchen, and then in the afternoon we got an e-mail saying there was leftover food in the old kitchen. We are also stymied on finding a refrigerator anywhere in our half of the building, and I seem to be able to print PDF files from my desk as long as I don't set the job to print duplex. The personal worst for me, though, is that fact that I am at odds with my fancy new Aeron chair. "Ooh, an Aeron chair!" you people are inclined to exclaim. "Those things are great!" Well, they might be, if the infinity of knobs and levers and whatnots actually did anything when you tried to adjust them. In particular, the angle between the seat and the back refuses to regulate itself: first it's too rectilinear, and when none of the tilt or tilt-lock levers have any effect, Kenneth pulls the back backwards for me because I weigh too little to get it past the locking threshold myself. Now the chair is too far back, so I release the tilt-lock lever and it springs forward again. On a repeat trial, we somehow manage to get it into some undefined middle state, where the levers are released but the chair is back and now impossible to move in either direction. There is also the matter of the "lumbar support," which sounds wonderful because I always have lower-back pain from sitting in stupid chairs all day. The trouble with this particular support is that it supports directly onto my tailbone instead of anywhere near my actual back, and short of hex wrenches and duct tape, neither Kenneth nor I have any idea how to reposition the thing to get it into the right place. Maybe the people who like Aeron chairs are all about 5'6" and weigh over 160 pounds. We shall see about this tomorrow, perhaps: I asked Mary Jo if someone from Facilities could come down and show me how to get things configured properly. I feel a little dumb, though, not being able to make two planes come together such that I can sit on them nicely. At the base, I mean, a chair's not that difficult. |
Saturday, August 22, 2009
10:09 p.m.
|
With four days left until I leave for MT Summit — and thus, effectively, France — I'm starting to get pretty worried about actually having everything in order by the time Wednesday comes around. Some boxes have been shuttled from my bedroom up to the third-floor closet where I'm storing essentially everything, but as the closet fills the room doesn't seem to empty by all that much... and I keep finding stuff that should have gone in such-and-such box but didn't, so all the contents are getting increasingly fragmented. I suppose this is a natural consequence of not having cleaned or organized my "Disasterpiece Theatre" room before I started making up boxes. Today, at least, there was some progress in the partitioning of clothes into "taking," "definitely not taking," and "taking but also need first for MT Summit and NIST," which resulted in the textile content of the closet being reduced by about half. I was also supposed to go to the Waterfront today to buy shoes and a voltage adapter. "Supposed to" is perhaps misleading, because I actually did, but half the progress there is cancelled out by me having bought the wrong adapter. All of my "portable electronic devices," as the airlines say, come with their own little transformers, and all these transformers already accept up to 240 volts except for one. The odd one out is my battery charger, an essential piece of auxiliary equipment for my camera. So for that one I paid $23 for a voltage adapter that can power a device up to 50 watts. Shock and horror, etc., immediately upon returning home when I read the back of the battery charger's transformer more closely and saw that it draws 90 watts. There was, at least, a more powerful voltage adapter in the store for $10 more, which can put out 85 watts, and I guess I'm going to have to hope that 85 is close enough to 90 that nothing will explode or fail to work. The shoes I had less trouble with than last time; they're New Balance 622s, $50 on sale at Dick's after having passed them up for $65 at Little's Shoes in Squirrel Hill and $70 at Gordon's Shoes at the Waterfront. They're as close to what I currently have as possible, although I was quite close to getting actual running shoes instead. Unfortunately, running shoes are always made almost completely of that mesh stuff, and since I'm going to have a four-mile walk, bike, or bus ride to work in the fall, I decided it would be better to go with something more structurally sound for bad weather. Home around 3:00, then to ITG with Jake and Owen at 4:30. I am attempting to make some progress at this game before I lose access to it for four months. I don't think it's working, though. In one round today I failed a 7 and an 8 before somehow passing "Disconnected Hyper" on 9. That one was pure black magic or insane luck or something: I didn't read a thing on the screen, but somehow my feet stepped out most of the correct notes anyway. I guess that's possible when there are no crossovers, because even a few thrown in with half as many notes otherwise makes a song a complete disaster for me. Richard and I timed ourselves in the mile run today at the track too; all week pretty much we've been meeting up for some quick runs. (Quick by a couple of ways for me: he runs a lot faster than I do, but then we don't go as far as I'm used to, so I'm spent out and heading home again in less than 20 minutes.) I ran four times around the track, in Lane 3, in 6:26, which is the fastest I've ever been timed running the mile by at least 30 seconds. Then, after some calculations, we discovered that we actually ran slightly more than a mile — although not as far as we originally figured earlier this evening. The inside lane of the track is the canonical 400 meters, and then each additional lane adds, we estimated, another six or seven meters. This takes our Lane 3 up to about 413 meters per lap or 1652 per mile, which in conversion to silly units is a mile plus about 140 feet. Not a gigantic difference, but it's enough to put Richard solidly in the sub-6:00 category and me maybe hoping for 6:20. I'm going to miss getting this quick exercise after the middle of next week. Back to packing, I suppose. I really should start to get the desk area under control. |
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
10:58 p.m.
|
I am once again a passing resident of the True North Strong and Free, that mythical Canada-land. This time it's Ottawa for a week, for the MT Summit and NIST conferences. I get Sunday in between them as a free day, I think, so I will hopefully be able to report more fully on things here in a few days. For now most of the "fun" would just be in the traveling. There was a family sitting in the two rows in front of me, for example, on the plane between Washington, D.C. and Ottawa, who obviously hadn't studied much geography. We flew over a big body of water, and they had maybe a 10-minute conversation over what it might be. The high-school-aged kid started it with "Which of the Great Lakes do you think that is?" They ruled out some — "Not Lake Michigan... I don't think" — and then threw in the St. Lawrence River too because one of them thought what they were seeing wasn't big enough to be a Great Lake. I kept to myself the fact that it was with more than 99.9 percent certainly Lake Ontario (one of their two-front runners, at least). I couldn't quite make out where Toronto should be on the northern shore — there's my geography failing a bit — but the maps I've examined since make it look like it would have been quite difficult to localize way down at the other end of the lake anyway. I wonder, incidentally, if I should write that "localise" instead while I'm here. It typically takes very little for me to switch into all-out Canadian mode when the situation calls for it: merely interacting with Greta's mom for two minutes last month was enough to accomplish it. I was hoping for some good samples of "native" speech as soon as I got on the airport bus, especially since I remember some story in The New Yorker in 2004 mentioning the "broad Ottawa Valley accent." (Cross-linguistic linguistic digression: the French name of that river is spelled "Outaouais," with five vowels in a row, and should probably be pronounced roughly [utɑue], which I have to say isn't much better. I guess I'll find out for sure if I'm able to hear someone say it.) The two people who sat closest to me on the bus, though, didn't seem to have Canadian English as their first language, and the driver announcing the stops wasn't a whole lot of training data to go on. It is perhaps stereotypically Canadian, especially here on the immediate border with Quebec, that even the fortune cookie that came with my dinner had English on one side and French on the other, over where the lucky numbers and "Learn Chinese" things are. In English it says "You tend to draw out the love in others." The French states "Vous savez souvent faire parler l'amour d'autrui," which I'm inclined to render more like "You often know how to make others' love talk." Which I guess illustrates a problem with automatic evaluation of machine translation, because what usually happens there is you check the human-produced translation and do a more or less complicated counting up of how many words in your system's output match it. In this case, evaluating either one against the other and only counting single words with all punctuation removed matches only four words out of nine, even though they pretty much get across the same meaning. Throw in punctuation to get a BLEU-1 score of 0.5000 for the fortune cookie or 0.4545 for my translation. Anyway. I'm sharing this hotel room here with Kenneth, who had class back at CMU this afternoon and thus took a much later flight than my 2:52. He's not here yet, but conference stuff starts at like 8:30 tomorrow, so I think I may have to go to bed anyway and just trust him to get to the hotel and this room correctly on his own. My phone costs 69 cents a minute here, so I have it off, but that's not a case of me being pecuniary at the expense of Kenneth being lost on the streets of Ottawa because he doesn't have my phone number anyway. |
Friday, August 28, 2009
9:21 p.m.
|
Alisa already summed it up succintly in her post today, but CMU is having quite a week. On Monday I went to the KGB meeting (in Margaret Morrison) from Gates via the exit on the fifth floor behind Purnell and near Warner and Cyert. I didn't actually go into the Mall, then, but I got close enough to see a big spout of water going up into the air right where the freshman orientation tent had been, just around the corner of the buildings. "Oh," I thought, "they must have reseeded the grass already and got a really big sprinkler to get it going." Of course, it turned out to be the next battle in CMU's (and Pittsburgh's) ongoing and never-ending war with dihydrogen monoxide: when setting up the tent in the first place, someone managed to drive a spike into an eight-inch water main, which naturally ruptured when the spike was taken out and resulted in a 40-foot geyser appearing on campus for some hours. Now I'm sorry I didn't come up through Wean or detour over to the water to have a closer look. On Tuesday it was in the Post-Gazette that CMU was reporting 18 cases of swine flu — at least in the headline it was, because the lead of the story only mentioned 18 people with "flu-like" symptoms, which could be swine flu, regular flu, or any number of other things. But it sounds scary in 48-point type, and then the next day someone upped the number to 26 with swine flu specifically mentioned in the lead. (I should like to state for the record that the information was also published in The Tartan on Monday, which makes it one of the few times that we reported campus news first, like we really ought to do on a more regular basis, instead of stealing stories secondhand from the national news...) But the shocking news came on Thursday morning, I guess, and I saw it here after the conference Thursday evening: someone actually committed suicide in Architects' Leap in Wean — a sophomore CS major from Florida. This is of course time to pull in all the same comments I made in the spring after the twizmer thing, but I also can't help but laugh at how clueless the university administration is about some things. This article from Channel 4, for instance, has an official CMU spokesperson talking about what in our terms would be sporadic leaping of food, books, and papers — none of which I've ever seem leaped or heard about being leaped ever, except for that one KGB event where we did the egg drop thing from high school physics class there. He also mentions the chalk body outline, which I'm pretty sure was for last year's Underground Tour and not "years ago" as stated (unless there were two). But the most hilarious part is definitely "It would be impossible to know where a student using a term such as Architect's Leap would come from, other than the fact that it is a high, eight-story staircase" — because nothing indicates majoring in architecture like stairs, height, and the number 8. Not, you know, that I mean to sound callous towards family and friends of the guy who died there. Par contre, It's quite sad that someone would feel the need to end it all on the fourth day of class, which would seem to rule out the overloading-on-academic-stress factor, and with people just having arrived back at school again for the summer it must have been a big shock having the death of a friend just happen like that. Again, guys, talk to your friends before you entertain even one smidgen of a thought of following in the footsteps of VAXes, printers, desks, and apocryphal food and papers. You always have more help than you realize. |
Sunday, August 30, 2009
9:40 p.m.
|
Today was a quiet day — my one free day between MT Summit and NIST — and I guess I really needed it. First I slept in until about 10 a.m. (so 10 hours of sleep, since I went to bed at midnight), and then I fell asleep in my hotel room a little after 4 and work up almost two hours later, and now I'm feeling a little out of things again even though it's not even 10:00. I have no idea why I should be that tired; I never fall asleep during the day. It's true that I never get enough sleep at conferences, and I've been battling my usual beginning-of-year cold since last Saturday, but this sort of emergency nap thing ruined my plans to go running on some of the really nice riverside trails here, both on the Ottawa and Gatineau sides. My goal for the day was the latter-named Gatineau, which is the French-speaking city in Quebec right across the river from Ottawa. Turns out there's not much there, though: I didn't take a map with me, missed a turn, and ended up seeing almost nothing but a few government buildings and some dumpy-looking shops for a few hours. Eventually I found the Canadian Museum of Civilization, confusingly spelled with a "z" instead of an "s," and some of those riverside trails mentioned earlier. Still no restaurants, though, so I had to abort my plans of having lunch in French in Quebec. Instead I crossed back over to the Ottawa side, wandered around the Byward Market for a bit, and got a ham and cheese sandwich from the Moulin de Provence bakery. I ordered it in French, at least, since the people behind the counter seemed to be primarily approaching customers in that language. The guy I talked to must have guessed something non-native in my speech, though, since he repeated the final price in English after saying it quickly in French. I have been having some trouble with the restaurants here, specifically that they're all really expensive. I'm getting my food reimbursed by my research project, so for the most part I'm not affected too directly, but it's still kind of disturbing because I feel like I'm going to scare my advisor when I submit my receipts in a few days. It doesn't help that conferences always entail long, social, and relatively nice group dinners. The base cheap-meal price at most of these restaurants is about $12, but then you have to put in 13 percent Canadian super-tax, and then the tip, so you end up paying at least $16 for anything. Today, since I was on my own, I tried to correct for that a bit, but partially failed. I got my sandwich at lunch for $7.63, and after carefully considering dinner options I landed at a Scottish-themed pub in the Byward Market again that advertised a roast beef sandwich and salad for $7.95. I got a Pepsi with it, and then asked for another, and then when the bill came I discovered that I was in the only restaurant in North America that doesn't have free refills on soft drinks. So two Pepsis were another $4.50, and then super-tax and tip... right back at $16.50 again. I suppose ordering the drink was a little silly in the first place. NIST tomorrow, where I'm presenting a poster, and more NIST Tuesday before I come back to Pittsburgh again briefly. Definitely not looking forward to landing at 11:15 p.m. and then sitting on one of those ambling 28Xs until getting home around 12:30 in the morning. When I wake up I'll have about four hours to deal with LTI reimbursements, packing the large shoebox of things that didn't fit in my France suitcases, and working out new and improved health insurance and registration problems before I need to take a bus to Cleveland. In connection with which — if anyone with a car has some time around 12:30 p.m. Wednesday to take me and my 100 pounds of luggage to the Greyhound station, I'd appreciate it! I will of course take the bus if not, but it might be kind of cumbersome. |
Monday, September 7, 2009
2:29 a.m.
|
Well, les enfants, the truest thing I can say since landing in Paris just before dawn Friday is that I've messed up my biological clock so badly it's not even funny. The fact that I'm writing this post at 2:30 in the morning, France time, is the effect, but wait until I explain the trip here so you can see the cause. Let's go back several days. I had a slight cold for the entire week of MT Summit and NIST, which I may have given to Kenneth since we were sharing a hotel room for six nights. But then we had to come home through three airports, and during that process I either got it back from him about five-fold or picked up something much worse from some random other traveller. Either way, I woke up Wednesday morning in Pittsburgh (after not much sleep) feeling pretty awful. No time to rest, though, since I had to quickly throw everything together in about four hours to get to the Greyhound station by 12:30 for a bus to Akron. If Philip hadn't helpfully volunteered to drive me and my 100 pounds of luggage, I think I would never have made it. To Akron and then home with my family for dinner and the evening — a very short evening, since I felt completely dead by 9:30 and was asleep at 10:00. Thursday morning wasn't much better, even on almost 10 hours of sleep. I still needed to blow my nose about every five minutes, which is one of the worst possible afflictions when flying overseas. It was kind of weird knowing that I was persona non grata, as I think it's called, on the airplane — in modern terms, that guy: the one who gets everyone else nearby sick and keeps them up all night with the sneezing and Kleenex-using and multiple trips to the bathroom to renew his supply of disposable Kleenex-like substitutes. With no sleep, I landed at Charles de Gaulle airport around 6:45 a.m. Friday, France time. In Paris I did nothing but wait in line (and blow my nose, of course). First at immigration, and then around the baggage carousel to get my two suitcases, and then in the slowest-moving line in the world at the American Express currency exchange, and then in the ticket line at the TGV station to buy my one-way to Grenoble. At 8:45 I was finally armed with my ticket and left to search for free Internet in the salle d'attente, which turned up nothing. My train left at 9:25, but getting on there was an interesting process too. The TGV, it turns out, issues you a ticket for a specific seat number in a specific car, which you locate a bit ahead of time by means of a digital sign on the platform (once you know which platform your train's coming in on). The sign shows the order of cars on the train, which is not necessarily in numerical order, lined up against some fixed points (marked by other signs) along the platform. Car No. 5, for example, was shown as ended up between platform signs B and C, but closer to C, so that's where I waited. Once the train arrives, you correct slightly for your misjudgement of position, board your car, and find your seat. I got put in No. 68, which was annoyingly an aisle seat. In the end it didn't actually matter because I think I fell asleep after about half an hour of trying to read a French magazine. When I woke up again, we were chugging slowly into what turned out to be Lyon, where I had to change. I was conscious, even then, of being rather disappointed that I wasn't enjoying the ride more. I mean, here I am on the world-famous French TGV, zooming along through the French countryside at who knows how many hundreds of kilometers per hour, with dining cars, seating cars — who knows, even observation cars? — to explore and French people on all sides to practice conversation with, and all I can do is say "eh" and go to sleep? I guess I also knew that I was probably barely functioning at half strength, and I had run out of Kleenex and Kleenex substitutes again. Anyway, I changed at Lyon to a slower train with open seating, and that one eventually pulled into Grenoble some time after 1 p.m. Central Grenoble, at least, is what you think of when you think of the south of France, or at least the part of the south of France that's not on the Riviera. The macro-level environment reminds me mostly of my short stay in Boulder in June: we are surrounded on about three and a half sides by immediately tall, rocky mountains, even though the city of Grenoble itself seems to be more or less flat. Opposite the train station is the old part of the city, with roads intersecting at impossible angles, pavement cafés everywhere, hidden open squares, and buildings that are hundreds of years old. My job was to take the tramway out to the suburb of Gières, but the ticket machines on the platforms here only take coins, and I could only get to €1.06 that way out of the required €1.40 fare. A girl I asked on the platform directed me to the commercial office of the local transport authority, where I stood in line forever again, failed at buying a monthly student pass for lack of bringing along a photo they could use to make an ID card with, and instead bought a one-ride ticket and got change for my €5 bill. During the week, trams here come about every three to four minutes, so once I got back to the platform I didn't have to wait long before heading off again. I will skip over the horrid adventures I had in trying to get from the Condillac tram station to my student residence. Let's just say that all of Gières has about three real street signs in it, and the rest of them just tell you how to get to other streets that are some distance away. I eventually found the place, but by then I was so frustrated I just wanted to shut myself in my room and sleep. The staff lady I introduced myself to at the door, though, was going to come back at 7:00 to introduce me to other Xerox people in the building, and I hadn't eaten all day, so I asked for directions to the nearest grocery store and decided to at least do some shopping. I will also save the shopping story for a future post, because what's important now is that I got back to my apartment around 4:30, made and ate some pasta, cleaned up after it, and then immediately fell asleep on my couch-bed at 6 p.m.! I woke up just before 2 a.m. — one of the most idiotic times to begin a day, but fortunately I didn't have that problem since I never really got out of bed and was asleep again in around another hour or so. From that I woke up at 2 p.m., meaning that I spent a total of 20 hours in bed and at least 18 of those asleep. So much for that 14-hour record from one of my all-nighters! Since then (Saturday afternoon) I've been completely unable to pull my schedule back. A screwed-up internal clock plus still being sick plus my usual new-environment insomnia means I'm spending half the night extremely tired but unable to fall asleep, and then half the day asleep and therefore not in a good position to set things straight again. Saturday night I went to bed around 1:30 a.m., I think, and woke up at noon today; today I tried going to bed at midnight and then again at 1:30, but now at 2:30 I've given up on the second attempt and have decided to muck around on the computer for a while until I feel up to a third. The alarm, meanwhile, is set for 7:20 a.m. (i.e. in a little less than four and a half hours) because I have to be off to work at 8:20. Maybe that will finally get me into the right time zone. Much more France-related content is coming your way soon, fearless readers, but I will not have Internet access at my apartment for at least a few more days yet. I'm hoping to hang around a bit after work tomorrow and take advantage of the computing resources. If so, you should see this post show up around noon Monday, Eastern time. |
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
9:32 p.m.
|
Well, the previous post didn't show up "around noon Monday," Eastern time or on any other time, since it's now Wednesday and I'm still writing journal entries to a text file on my laptop. It's not because I don't have Internet access at work, because I do; it's more because I feel a bit odd still pulling up Live Journal (or webcomics, or Facebook...) on the company computer when I've been there less than a week. Those of you in fancy-pants Silicon Valley start-ups will probably say no one cares at all — which may in fact be quite true, even here — but now would be an awful time to find out that it's not. I also haven't worked at a real company in more than four years, so I suspect I'm going to be a little more... formal and old fashioned than necessary. It already took me two days to get to the point where I feel all right logging into Gmail and spending five or 10 minutes answering messages from CMU or home. I think, after three full days at work, that I've gotten into an interesting sort of linguistic no-man's-land that I hope gets more comfortable as time goes on. The official language of the Xerox Research Centre Europe is English, which I guess makes a lot of sense for an international research institution with a decently large internship program that's drawn students from at least four continents. But the place is still located in France, and among the full-time workers French is almost universally the first language. I was glad to find, on my first day, that they mostly speak that among themselves, and the people who are known anglophone-only get the English treatment. Being me, of course, I tried to stake as firm a claim as I could in the francophone category from the moment I stepped in the door and explained myself to the receptionist, and that's seemed to have had pretty good luck. I talked to a few people in the kitchen, who all complimented me on my French. In general, the interns aren't a French-speaking bunch, and it seems on top of that that people are surprised to meet an American who doesn't sound like one. I measure this partly by the number of people who keep asking me where I'm from — I assume that means they can't tell by my accent, but I suppose the nagging voice inside of me says that they can and just want to know what part of the U.S. Given my name, though, I've gotten one or two questions about being German. Monday, to start off, was a very French day. I rode the bus and tram to work with two other interns (from London and from Brazil), speaking English, but then everything at work was solid French all the way through lunch, which I had in a nearby cafeteria restaurant with one of my supervisors. In the evening I met with the director of the residence where I'm staying, in order to fill out the dorm-style condition report of my apartment and to go over some other logistics, and that was also all in French except for a few words. Then yesterday was more of an English day: we had a "newcomers meeting" and a technology demo in the morning in that language, and then I spent most of the day at my desk reading papers and someone else's Python code. Today I had to go to the bank (in French), read another two papers (in English), and talk to various people for very short amounts of time (in both). In all of this the hardest part, naturally, is to switch quickly. In the past, I've noticed that I need a good 20 minutes to mentally completely change over to French mode; it takes almost nothing to set me off, but I won't be up to full word-producing speed for about that long. Which leads to bad results sometimes in short conversations. My one francophone officemate, for example, asked me a question in French today about British versus American English, and my answer was so fragmented and disfluent that I was kind of glad when one of the three anglophones broke in and asked what we were talking about. Hopefully this sort of thing will get better with practice and I can lower my overall transition time by December. On the other hand, I wish my transition time between "awake" and "asleep" were only 20 minutes! Since I got here on Friday I've had only one night when I fell asleep within some decent interval of trying and without a lot of worry over how late it was getting, and that was Monday night. I'd been hoping that a rather arduous work schedule (alarm at 7:20 a.m. every day) would quickly enforce me being quite tired by midnight or so, but last night I was flopping around in bed until at least 1:30. With the result, as you may have guessed, that I overslept this morning by 55 minutes and had to run out without a shower, shaving, or much breakfast. |
Thursday, September 10, 2009
10:34 p.m.
|
Hey, I finally have Internet at my apartment! It's relatively slow, and the modem uses up one of the very few electrical outlets I have, but it works. I just posted two journal entries I wrote over the last week, but they are kind of buried in the sands of Live Journal out-of-order timestamping. If you want to see what I wrote late Sunday night and yesterday evening, you should follow these two links! New post coming soon, too! |
Thursday, September 10, 2009
10:41 p.m.
|
I think today's No. 1 lesson is "Never buy traveller's checks." If in this streamlined, modern world, some artifacts of previous times are proposed for deletion, when a certain American Express product comes up in the queue, my response will be "Fie upon't. Away with the things!" Let me try to explain. I hadn't had traveller's checks, actually, in either five or seven years (I forget whether Montreal or New York was the last time), but I got some a little over a week ago before I left for France. One of those things, I guess, I picked up from my old-fashioned parents: when you go on long trips where your backpack might get stolen or you might do something idiotic, you get traveller's checks from the bank because that way you can get your money back. What I figured I'd do is take a suitable amount with me, change some right away into euro, and then dump the rest into a French bank account to live off of during the month of September. Well, first red flag: when I went to the National City branch in Shadyside to get some, they were all out because not many people use them anymore. I got directed to a North Oakland-ish branch instead, where I got their last book of $250. The fee for these blue lithograph-looking horrors — $3.75, or 1.5 percent. Then I took them to Paris, where I at least had the comfort of getting $1.561 to a euro instead of the $1.591 or something for people not using the checks. But on changing $100 there was a fee of €3, or $4.68. The remaining $150 went to the bank with me this morning for deposit into my shiny new French account, where I got a rate of $1.524 to the euro and a commission fee of €9.90, or $15.09. I also changed some American bills at the same time, and I don't know if it's coincidence or what, but the fee only shows up on the line for the traveller's checks. So in order to use these things I had to pay $23.52 in fees. Contrast this now with the modern solution, which seems to be to use your U.S. bank's ATM card to pull money out of a foreign ATM. Now this I've done before too, and I get charged 2 percent of the amount (for the international transation) plus $2 (for using a non-my-bank ATM). For $250, that would be $7. Which, you know, is a whole lot less than $23.52. Further, in going directly I think I'd get a much better exchange rate: my credit card purchases, for example, have all shown up between $1.43 and $1.46 to a euro — which, it appears, is the exact exchange rate I can see on Google Finance. And that would have saved me another €12 or so, or around $17. So these things really add up! Let my $33.52 lesson be a useful one to all you future travellers out there — including, I say, myself. |
Sunday, September 13, 2009
8:32 p.m.
|
This weekend I finally started exploring this place a bit. Yesterday afternoon, even though it looked like it was about to rain, I took the tram to La Tronche and walked up the nearest mountain to get to the Bastille. The agglomération grenobloise — "Greater Grenoble" gets across about that meaning in English — is in the shape of a captial Y, with three mountain ranges around it. Some time in the mid-1800s, some people built a fort at the end of the range in the middle, right above where the two arms of the Y come together, and that's the Bastille. You can take a sort of cable car (télépériphérique, I think, with all the e-aigus you'll ever need!) up to the top from the center of the city, but I came in one of the back ways and walked up instead. It was a few kilometers, and apparently a favorite route of hard-core cyclists. Someone had spraypainted encouragments all over the road — things like "Allez" and "Ne pas freiner" and "Ça roule encore" — along with indications of the percent grade you were going up at various times. The grades were mostly in the high teens and low 20s, so a pretty steep hike, much less ride. When I got to the top I saw that a one-way trip on the bulles (what everyone apparently actuall calls the cable car, according to Wikipedia) was like €4 or something, so I found another way down back into the city and had a crêpe à crème de marrons in the park instead. It was actually only my second bit of "restaurant" food in France; the first was last Monday when Marc, one of my supervisors, took me out to lunch at a cafeteria on my first day. Unfortunately there are almost no pictures of this excursion, since my camera batteries decided to die just as I was getting to the top of the Bastille hill. Today I went hiking in the Belledonne mountain range (on the right-hand side of the Y) with Emti, another intern who also lives in the building. We took a bus to Domène, a little town on the edge of the suburbs right at the foot of the mountains, and just kind of improvised from there with a steepest-ascent algorithm. We eventually found a network of actual hiking trails and spent a few hours poking around on those. At some point we came out suddenly into the stereotypical southern France field, complete with rolling hills and cows with bells on, so we stopped there for a bit and ate some food we'd packed. Then Emti saw what looked like a mountain bike trail going straight up the side of the mountain, so we followed that to the top. Some climbing! Most of it had to be done by crawling, with liberal rest breaks, but we eventually came out on top and found two kids and a dad playing on some stacked-up logs. Needless to say, we went back to Domène (about four kilometers) by the more passable route that they probably took, and it turns out that if you go the right way you can get a hiking trail all the way down to one street away from the main square of the village. I guess next time I should take Emti's advice about asking someone in a shop where to go rather than trying to figure things out on the fly. But it was still quite fun. I got back to my apartment in no mood for dinner, though. I think I've run my course of eating pasta and rice already until I'm sick of them both, and most grocery stores aren't open on Sundays, so I couldn't run out and get something else. The lack of an oven is also shutting off my avenues of hot pizza or baked meat dishes. So instead I took a tram back to the city and wandered aimlessly through a few streets, ultimately rejecting the idea of €9.50 pizza in favor of €5.80 fast food at Quick, a French (or general European?) version of McDonald's that I thought I could justify going to because it wasn't McDonald's and they don't have them back home. With the way prices are around here, I feel like I'm in grave danger of either (a) starving as a result of being scared away from spending that much money, (b) eating terribly as a result of trying to eat as cheaply as possible, or (c) spending my entire salary each month on actually eating well. So far I've found it very difficult to even find the middle ground; I really hope it exists somewhere, though, because I don't really like the alternatives. I think I am currently in category (b), and I already had a malnutrition warning (from Alan) after I mostly ate cheap starch for a week. |
|