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ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
Greg's Journal celebrates five years!
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Thursday, October 15, 2009
10:30 p.m.
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When he was my age, my great-great-grandfather bought a third-class steamship ticket and, with only one piece of luggage, left the German state of Württemburg for the American state of Ohio. That was in 1888. We don't know too much else about the circumstances surrounding that trip, but in a certain sense I'm about to complete the cycle: tomorrow I fly to Stuttgart. The main objective, of course, is to visit Wiebke for a few days, since I haven't seen her at all since 2003, and not consistently since she spent a year as an exchange student at my high school in 2000-2001, and now that I'm this close it seems kind of silly to not meet up. At the same time, though, I'm also kind of interested in digging up a bit of old family history in the place if I can, four generations and a month short of 121 years later. You have to thank my dad for this. While my one aunt has been on the trail of my mom's side of the family for years, there hasn't been much work on my dad's side since another aunt did some rooting around the roots of the family tree in — as far as I can tell — a more isolated incident. I was able to pull up a few things when I spent an afternoon at the National Archives four years ago, but just recently my dad decided to get a trial subscription to Ancestry.com, and for the last week or so a few new bits of information have been showing up in my e-mail in-box. I don't know what my chances are to add to it between now and Sunday, but Wiebke said she might be able to call the archives or historical library in the right place tomorrow and see if they could tell us anything over the phone. (They're not open for a minute of the time I'm in the country, as I'm finding to be typical of European enterprises. Weekdays from 9 to 5 — without a lunch break, if you're lucky — but otherwise you're generally stuck in front of a Fermé sign.) And we have a plan to drive to the town where my great-great-grandmother was born in 1863, so at least I can take some pictures of it. Otherwise I am just going to concentrate on not freezing to death! The temperatures have been plummeting this week in Grenoble, down to highs of about 10, and in Stuttgart it's looking like I should expect more like 6 or 8, with rain. A temporary freeze, at least, since today's Grenoble et Moi has us set for 18 again by the middle of next week, and maybe just what we need to really set off the leaves? |
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
8:04 p.m.
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Another long post — this time for my weekend trip to Germany, which had wretched weather but a lot of good other things. I took Friday off work and booked a 10:40 a.m. flight from Lyon to Stuttgart, passing through Zurich. Of course, I'm in Grenoble and not Lyon, so this trip was multi-modal in addition to being multi-national. The first stage was rushing (late) out of my apartment to catch a tram at 7:15 a.m. in order to get to the gare routière (bus station) with some emergency time left over before my 8:00 bus to Lyon airport. That went without incident, except about halfway into the trip I realized that, in my hurry, one thing got left off my morning to-do list, and that thing was to switch off the heat in my apartment. In the 17-to-20-degree range, at least, I know my electric heater can come close to raising the temperature in the room by one degree every 60 to 90 minutes, so if it remained on the whole weekend... well, either a 40-degree apartment or a huge electric bill for the residence wouldn't be exactly an ideal situation. After some consideration, the roundabout fix for it turned out to be me calling our reception desk at work (one of the two phone numbers I know in all of France!) and asking Orélie to ask Angèle to call Mme. Brun at the residence to see if she could get into my apartment and switch off the heater. This I accomplished with my credit card and a payphone in the departure lounge after I got to the airport. Flight to Zurich at 10:40, which duly deposited me in Switzerland (first time!) about an hour later. I don't really have much good to say about Zurich airport. First, the smaller flights don't get serviced by jetways, so you have to take a bus between your plane and the terminal. This means that, if it's a rainy, cloudy, frigid 4-degree day in October, you'll have to stand there with all the doors open until everyone gets off the plane. Then there's a security checkpoint between you and your transfer flight, which is great fun if it's supposed to be boarding 10 minutes after you get into the airport from your previous hop. To top it all off, I discovered on my way home again Sunday that the only food you can buy inside the terminal is along the lines of a slightly oversized dinner roll, cut in half with a bit of meat inside, for about $7. Luckily I was quickly on my way to Stuttgart. I can say better things about Swiss Air Lines, at least, the foremost being that, while you don't get a choice of snack, the one they give you is a piece of Toblerone. By the end of the weekend I had had five of them, and there's a sixth waiting in my backpack for the next food emergency. Somehow Swiss manages to serve you a snack and drink even on a flight whose flying time was announced (in three languages) as 25 minutes: the instant you get up high enough, the stewardesses roll the drink cart through and finish just in time to collect trash before you start going down again. I finally landed in Stuttgart around 1:30 p.m. and met up with Wiebke outside. We drove to the city and had lunch at a sort of mall cafeteria on the top floor of a building on a hill, overlooking what would have been quite a nice view if it hadn't been freezing out. Then our job for the afternoon was to go to some archive place I forgot the name of, where Wiebke had already confirmed existed a copy of the birth and family records for my great-great-grandmother's town from the year she was born. We got stuck in horrible traffic, though, so by the time we found the place and made it inside, there was only half an hour before closing. This fact seemed to greatly annoy the guy who took us into the microfilm room and tried to get us set up. Amid much winding and rewinding and packaging and unpackaging of reels — because it turned out things were a bit more jumbled up than they should have been, and the more mistakes we made the more frenetic and brusque our guy got — we only had enough time to quickly find and print out the birth record. Cost €1, but benefit one amazing sample of handwritten 19th-century German. Neither Weibke nor I could make much out of it, but when we showed it to Wiebke's parents we learned that a lot of the letter shapes were written differently back then, and after finding a website explaining them we were able to make some headway. Saturday it was still rainy and freezing, but we decided to go to a medieval town called Rothenburg anyway. We set Wiebke's GPS to a winding backroads-only route that made the trip take more than two hours. It was probably the best thing to do with the weather we had: driving along in a heated and dry car through southern Germany, looking at small towns and open fields and catching up on the six years it's been seen we saw each other last. Every village has its own church, of course, and they all look a little bit different. Our only real stop on the way was at the Castle Langenburg, which wasn't open yet, so we only spent a few minutes in the parking lot. Then we got to Rothenburg around 12:30. "The first thing you do when you get to Rothenburg—" began Wiebke's mom before we left, "is buy a snowball!" finished Wiebke. Well, it was more like the fifth thing we did — after having lunch, stopping at a Christmas store, walking around, and going up onto the tower of the town hall — but we got around to it in the end. The story I heard is that this "snowball" is an invention that answers the question "What do you do with all these leftover scraps of pie crust after you put the crust into the pie plate and trim off the ends?" Apparently you collect all the leftover bits together and stick them into a sphere about three inches in diameter, bake them anyway, and then cover the whole thing with cinnamon or chocolate or something along those lines. Then you sell them in coffee shops so that visiting American tourists can buy them and a big cup of hot chocolate for €3.90. A little bit crunchier than I was expecting, but now when Katie and I make our next traditional apple pie, I have an idea for a good add-on. By the time Wiebke and I came out of the café, it had almost stopped raining but not quite, so we walked partway around the old town on its old city wall, still intact (or rebuilt) and covered by a little roof where the guards used to make their rounds, I expect. Then, figuring we'd covered just about the whole place, we left. On the way home we made a small detour through the town of Eltershofen, which I'll be writing more about in a separate post because this one's getting too long already. Look out for a family history report soon! Sunday morning was the the same as Saturday: cold, grey, and rainy. Wiebke's parents suggested a trip to a place whose English-language brochure is headed "Open Air Museum Beuren," which in normal parlance is the Beuren open-air museum. In comparative idiomatic parlance, it's Greenfield Village Germany. A bunch of old-style village houses, barns, and other buildings have all been collected and reassembled in one place to provide a sort of walk-through demo of what rural life was like at various points in the past in southern Germany. Wiebke's mom served as my combined translator and tour guide. Some extremely interesting stuff, but I didn't take a single picture and probably would have gotten more into it if the weather had actually been nice. I think we only stayed for 90 minutes max before retiring to the cafeteria for hot tea and coffee, and then it was back home. After lunch, there wasn't much time before my flight, so I sat around with Wiebke for about 45 minutes and looked through the scrapbook she kept of her year in the U.S. Reverse-travel odyssey started around 4 p.m. We left for Stuttgart airport and got there around 5:00. Wiebke came inside with me, and we wandered around until I decided I should probably head through security at 5:50. It was a pretty quick line, so I was at my gate (well, at the gate the silly airplane bus was leaving from) well before they started boarding around 6:15. Flight to Zurich at 6:40, and then a free half-hour or so in Zurich airport when I figured out the food problem I mentioned way at the beginning of this scribble-post. I knew about getting rations of Toblerone again at that point, though, so I figured I could wait for real dinner until Lyon. Landed, then, in Lyon at 9:30 p.m. with an hour to spare before my return bus to Grenoble. Dinner turned out to be the second-to-last slice of pizza in the airport Pizza Hut, which wasn't the most gourmet meal I could have come up with, but at €3 was probably the cheapest. The Faure Vecors bus driver kept the radio on the entire trip back, which was kind of annoying at first but then I think I tuned it out as I was reading my book. I still have to say that this bus (or the SNCF train) is almost certainly the cheapest way to get to Lyon: I noticed that the freeway toll was €9.60 each way already, and I only paid €32.50 for my round-trip bus ticket! Well, anyway. Grenoble reached roughly on schedule at 11:30, and then the tram got me back to my apartment around 12:20 a.m., I think. Which has me wondering — I hope flying turned out to be cheaper than the nine-hour train I was previously considering to Stuttgart, because I think I spent about the same amount of time traveling either way! |
Thursday, October 22, 2009
11:11 p.m.
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It rained a fair amount yesterday evening — or, at least, it was rain at an elevation of 212 meters. I was talking to a guy at lunch today in a mix of French and English, and he asked me at some point if I'd seen the snow. Yes. It turns out that up in the Belledonne, which I think is the highest of the three mountain ranges that surround us, it was a little bit colder. When I left work today, there was just enough light still for me to make out a good layer of white, even on what look like some of the first-line mountains closest to the city. (I'm half-tempted to go to Chamrousse again this weekend to experience sub-freezing temperatures within sight of the city, where it's still like 17.) I mean, Samidh had pointed out to me a few very distance touches of mountain-top white earlier this week, and even when we were all at Chamrousse several weekends ago we could see some way out in the distance, but guys — when I look up a little while I'm waiting for the bus after work, I can now look up at a panorama of snow-covered peaks! Hello, Alps; this guy from flat Cleveland is still a little amazed by you. |
Saturday, October 24, 2009
10:20 p.m.
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Hooray, hooray, Statistics Day! Um, by which I mean that it has long been my habit — except in 2008, when I was too busy or forgot — to take a moment on October 24 of each year to review just how much I've written in this little journal of mine. This time around I definitely don't want to miss it because it's been five years since I sat down at my old computer one morning, back when it wasn't really so old, and managed to last a whole four words of my first post before a spelling mistake. (Oh, "inaugural," how I hate you. The word I actually came up with, in my 21-year-old naïveté, sounds more like the first of something at Texas A&M, although perhaps an extra "g" would be required for that...) Anyway, aside from the usual baseline surprise that any mid-decade date can be five years ago now, I think the biggest surprise for me today is that I've able to (more or less) consistently keep this thing updated for 1826 days! It's changed, of course, and you can really see that by examining the structure of my earliest posts, but isn't that at least as eloquent a statement about my life as any of the individual posts? Before I bore the crap out of everyone, maybe I should just post the numbers. Statistics do not include this post.
I've changed a few of the table rows from the 2007 incarnation to reduce the number of measurements that now would only exist for historical ("hysterical") reasons. The vestige of that remaining is this reference to "HTML pages," which indicates my old home.cwru site that was the primary host of my journal entries before I also started copying them to Live Journal. Both versions still exist, even now, but I think the Live Journal version has almost entirely eclipsed the hand-coded version in terms of readership. These October 24 anniversaries are also my traditional yearly call for more directed reader feedback, which usually comes back as "Keep writing!" But if there's anything in particular that you want me to keep writing about, you could perhaps leave it as a comment or send it as an e-mail or something. Since five years is also a nice round number, I'm thinking of handing out some silly awards to individual posts for being the best in some arbitrary category that I have yet to make up. This may not be entirely feasible, since I don't think I want to re-read 829 524-word entries in any compressed space of time, so maybe I'll ask for your suggestions on this front as well. If you actually remember something I wrote in the past and found it horrible, enlightening, humorous, etc., I'd be quite interested to know what it was. |
Sunday, October 25, 2009
8:09 p.m.
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Welcome to Central European Standard Time in Grenoble, where it's now just about completely dark by 6 p.m. Coming home from work is going to be really annoying now, but I guess it'll be brighter in the morning for a few weeks. At least the switch meant that I got an extra hour of sleep last night, which I really needed because I had quite a tiring day. Despite my earlier predictions for a very early fall, given the norther latitude and the fact that we were in a drought when I got here in September, it's really just now that most of the leaves are starting to change color. I think this next week or so is going to be the peak time, but since I'm spending the week working and next weekend in Paris, yesterday turned out to be my best day for a long mountain walk. I kept thinking of Evan's 30-mile walks in Massachusetts a few summers ago, so I decided to completely forgo public transportation and get to the mountains by a more scenic 8.3-kilometer route rather than take the tram or a real road. That brought me to the base of the Bastille, right at the junction of the Grenoble "Y" shape, so I took the 2.4-kilometer path up to the top. Now the "top" is a slightly misleading word in the more global topography context. The Bastille is indeed at the top of something, but it's the tail end of the Chartreuse range and therefore probably one of the smallest peaks: about 600 meters, if I'm remembering the signs right, while the city is at a base elevation of about 212. From there, though, I followed another trail a few kilometers up to just under 900 meters and then down again to 780 meters, finishing off my first mountain and arriving at the col (= "pass") de Vence. Emti mentioned at work on Friday that his group had gone out to lunch at the Fort du Saint-Eynard, where he said you could look down at the Bastille, and since it was only a few kilometers more past the col de Vence I decided to try for it. This is at the summit of the next mountain beyond the pass. The direct path up to the fort, though, was annotated with a giant sign that said that a hunt was in progress and "let's all be careful." I didn't have anything orange on me, and the thought of taking a walk though a hunting grounds wasn't so appealing, so I decided to hike up the back way via the roads. This turned out to not be such an appealing decision either: the route is the main departmental road (= state route) through the Chartreuse, so there were cars with French drivers in them zipping by in both directions. Then I missed a small turn-off and ended up adding an extra two kilometers to the trip. By the time the real gradient ascent started, I was starting to worry about getting down again (and back to the city!) before sunset, but I figured that there had to be at least a small road leading down the "front" of the mountain to Meylan or Corenc, and from there I could grab a No. 9 or 32 bus. I clawed and stumbled my way up to 1338 meters and finally arrived at the fort at what turned out to be 5:30 p.m., although it felt much later. I think I'm going to have to go back to the Fort Saint-Eynard. First of all, the view is amazing! You can indeed look down on the Bastille, or for that matter the entire Grésivaudan valley. I found Xerox, my residence, the Lycée du Grésivaudan, the river, the stadium, Chamrousse (still above and on the other side of the valley, at 2250 meters). What I didn't find was any other way down. The front side of the mountain is a vertical drop of hundreds of meters all the way down to the short spurs. Standing right at the edge looking down, it's like you're above and disconnected from the entire world. I was afraid to stay there too long, though, because the sun was already behind the clouds and about to be behind the mountains as well. Instead, I asked the lady in the restaurant what the fastest way down was, and she recommended hitch-hiking: or at least asking someone who'd come up with a car to drive me back down. She must have seen my lukewarm reaction to that idea, though, because then she said by foot I could make a left out of the fort and follow the road back to the col de Vence — which, she said, would take half an hour. Well, that didn't sound so bad, half an hour, so I walked around for a few minutes and then followed those instructions. May I state for the record that this way down turned out to be nothing but the inverse of the way up, and that the next time I go to the Fort Saint-Eynard I'll walk into the restaurant and say that "half an hour" really means "an hour and 12 minutes." So then I was at the col de Vence, at nearly 7 p.m., in the dark, and (according to the signs) still three and a half kilometers from Corenc. Well, what else to do? I started walking along the road. It was slow progress, with a rock wall on the left and a rock cliff on the right, switching sides of the road depending on which way the curves went in order to remain as visible as possible to oncoming traffic. I had passed two bornes (mile posts, except in kilometers) before one of the down-heading cars pulled up a little past me and put its flashers on. When I got up to it, I saw that it contained two guys of roughly my own age who asked me some questions I didn't completely parse but which contextually amounted to asking if I wanted a ride. I did. On the way down, they also recommended hitch-hiking the next time I wanted to go up again, saying that in France a lot of people still do it. Maybe not, mind you, in Paris, but people from the mountains, here in Grenoble, are "more cool" and more relaxed. The driver even said he'd driven a girl of about 13 or 14 somewhere recently. My chauffeurs were going to La Tronche, so they let me off right next to the tram line, and I managed to hobble back to my apartment around 8:00. It would have probably taken me at least another two hours to get home otherwise. So, overall, an "adventure." The final part of my trip, from the col de Vence up to the fort, back down again, and then some distance along the D512 towards the city, is here. Putting them all together, it seems like I had an overall walk of about 33 kilometers, or about 20 or 21 miles. I'm out of shape, yes, but it's still not too bad when you consider it included 1100 meters of positive altitude change. |
Monday, October 26, 2009
10:13 p.m.
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I had an incredibly strange morning today. I woke up nominally at 7:30, although it was more like 7:45 by the time I actually got out of bed. Breakfast as usual of cereal and orange juice in front of my computer. Then I had some things to write, so I sat at my table for at least a half an hour to do that. Into the bathroom to shave and brush my teeth, get ready for work, pack lunch, etc. By the time I was actually ready to leave my apartment, it was more like 9:25. At that point I figured I shouldn't bother riding the tram three stops out of the way (and back again) to go to the post office near Ile Verte that opens at 8:30, when this late in the morning the one a five-minute walk away on campus should also be open. I got there around 9:35 and saw a sign on the door saying the place doesn't open until 9:45. (Can you imagine an American post office taking its first customer at 9:45 a.m.? Most people in Cleveland have been at work for two hours by then.) Well, anyway, sitting around Bibliothèques Universitaires for 10 minutes is still a lot faster than going to Ile Verte, especially since in the whole time I was walking and waiting I only saw one tram go by, and then the lady in the post office opened a few minutes early, so I was on my way even sooner. When I go to work, I take the tram to Grand Sablon and then the No. 9 bus to the stop before the end of the line. After seven full weeks of work now, I know the morning and evening departure times for my stops pretty well. I got to Grand Sablon at 9:53 a.m., which is exactly when a 9 is supposed to leave. It's the beginning of the line, so they usually sit in a sort of on-deck circle for several minutes before advancing to the Nothing. After several minutes the inbound bus finally passed, and that made me wonder if I'd somehow missed (and didn't hear) the 10:06 going out and was now watching something like the 10:19 going in. But some new bus must have materialized out of stray cigarette-smoke molecules back at the terminus, because only a minute or two later an outbound No. 9 came by, and it had a different vehicle number than the one that had just gone in. I got on. I suppose a fairly quiet suburban route is a good place to train new bus drivers, because I think I got one today. Never has a French vehicle been so reluctant to approach even 30 k.p.h. It was starting to frustrate me, since 10:06 is already about 45 minutes later than I like to be to work, but about mid-trip I was completely disarmed and distracted by a little pinging tone and a recorded female voice that said something I couldn't understand. "Hm, odd," I thought to myself. "The trams always announce their stops, but never the buses, and this isn't the tram voice anyway. Maybe they're trying something new." Near the next stop, there was another tone and then the voice again, clearly saying "Les Saules." Now even without eight years of French class I can tell that "Les Saules" doesn't sound much like "Chaumetières," which was the actual next stop. And then at Lycée du Grésivaudan it said "terminus" ("end of line"), which was another patent lie by at least six stops. I started to wonder if the new driver had pressed some unrelated button by mistake and was now trying to reset the system. Eventually this excuse for motorized transport dropped me off at my stop, and I walked to work. I made tea in the kitchen, then went up to my desk at the atrocious time of 10:45 a.m. Turned on my computer, clicked my name from the log-in menu, and typed my password. "Unable to authenticate user." Well, OK... I don't think I typed my password wrong, but maybe I did. Try it again. "Unable to authenticate user." Another typo? Again. "Unable to authenticate user." Hm. Well, maybe it didn't boot up right: it's true that I didn't see any splash screen or anything before I got the log-in window. Restart. Splash screen. Log-in window. Type password. Several more times I was unable to log in. Then I remembered that it might be a good idea to verify the Ethernet connection, since Samidh and I tend to roll our chairs around a good deal and may have possibly unplugged or ripped the cable. But then the cable looked OK and the light was blinking. After a few more tries, I went around the corner to my manager's office and asked him for the number for CNS (= Facilities), which I got. I called it up and, after five rings, got put through to voice mail. All right. Back to my desk. I tried the password a few more times, even typing it as if my keyboard had been remapped as French, and finally going so far as to type one character every two seconds while I was staring right at the keyboard. That worked. But I still refuse to believe that I mistyped a seven-week-old password about 20 times before finally getting it right on the 21st. Well. The day was mostly uneventful, and at the end of it Samidh and I walked up to catch the 6:37 p.m. bus. We got there a few minutes in advance of the time, but for quite a long time nothing came by, and then the stop was getting to be fairly swarming with other Xerox people waiting for the 6:44 Transisère that goes downtown. Finally someone mentioned that it was a holiday week, so the schedule had been reduced. "Holiday week? This is a holiday week? What holiday week?" Our informant said that it was for le Toussaint, which he didn't know in English. I translated — All Saints Day. So there you have it. Missing trams, missed buses, and an apparently week-long holiday that, besides being a holy day of obligation I suppose, goes virtually unnoticed in the U.S. Also I cannot stop myself from adding that every time I see the word Toussaint ("All Saints Day"), my brain immediately wants to discard the capital and extra letter in order to read it as toussant ("coughing"). "Confusing" is more like it... |
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
9:59 p.m.
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OK... maybe this week just isn't meant to be part of reality. I got to work today around 10:00, and Samidh said "You are not late for work today. Look at your computer." I looked and found it frozen. Apparently "the servers" (or one of the servers, triggering the others in some sort of domino effect) went down and/or restarted around 2 a.m. last night, so the remote partitions where all of the Linux users' home directories are kept weren't accessible. (Maybe our hardware, like the buses and trams, wants reduced hours for Toussaint week?) Most other people could still log in to their machines on a text-only tty, but for some reason I couldn't even get any other ttys to show up, which means I spent all morning trying to log in at the GUI every 10 minutes or so, then restarting my computer when it hung as a result of not being able to find my home directory. It was great fun. Actually, it was for a while, because people came in to talk to us, and then we went down to the kitchen for tea, and then Samidh and I asked each other math puzzles, and there was this nice relaxed atmosphere of "Hey, no work!" But as it got closer and closer to lunchtime, I started thinking that if there really was going to be no work, I'd rather not waste a beautiful 19-degree fall day starting and restarting my computer. When I got back up from lunch at 2:00, I decided to take my tea mug back downstairs, go to the bathroom, and then — if there was still no progress on the servers — go ask my manager if he either had any small non-electronic project I could do or if I could just go home. Of course, when I got back to my office after the tea and bathroom run, I found a guy from CNS reconfiguring all our computers... At 2:15 I was finally back to a mostly normal state. So there was work again, but now with the recent time switch I'm finding that my brain is hard-wired to want to go home at the wrong time: i.e. as soon as it gets pretty dark. Unfortunately this is now at 5:30 rather than 6:30, so I spent the last hour at work checking the clock 40 billion times in between spurts of trying to figure out some pretty tricky math. The group I work in here is much more theoretically inclined than the AVENUE group back at CMU. It's not interesting enough (or even the main goal, I feel) to get something that "works": it must first be known exactly what is being optimized or minimized or maximized statistically, and what the new technique therefore means from a mathematical point of view. The difference between engineering and science, I suppose. Although reducing language to a numerical optimization problem — and thus getting even further away from the syntax and grammar that makes language, well, language and therefore interesting (and also relevant to my thesis) — leaves a bad taste in my mouth, I feel it's definitely good for me to have to work under this new paradigm for a few months. For one thing, I think it's giving me confidence that I can keep up, more than I'd expect from having done so poorly in Language & Stats II and machine learning class. But one of my current tasks is to try to relate two existing word alignment techniques at the mathematical level, which is a completely open-ended challenge that I'm not even sure has an answer, much less an answer I'll be able to come up with by fiddling with sums of probabilities. This sort of research is rather different from the very experiment-heavy kind I'm used to. Well, anyway. Given the way this week is going, I'm not sure if I'd be too terribly surprised to come into work tomorrow and find my computer mouse replaced with the real article, or to find no one there at all because they're off celebrating the well-known Speak Verlan Day national holiday week. Stay tuned! |
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
11:31 p.m.
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In lieu of a regular post today — because I really don't feel like wasting more than 50 words on how I jinxed myself with that little "Stay tuned!" yesterday, and how as a result I got to spend two hours today on two different rented bikes getting lost, frustrated, and almost hit by cars — I think I'm going to dip into the archives, at least indirectly, and follow up on a little teaser I made Saturday about the history of this journal. You may notice that I include links in my posts from time to time. Now that four years of mucking with file formats in grad school has turned me into something of a Perl hacker, it's the work of not very many minutes to get a list of every URL I've ever linked to in a journal entry. Once you remove the ones in the navigation and boilerplate headings over at my home.cwru site, I think there are 311 of them. Rather than categorize them all (four from Language Log, seven Google Maps, eight Gmaps Pedometer, and a partridge in a pear tree), I thought I would present the one that most caught my attention in perusing the list — especially because it led to a series of new reflections and new links. So we'll go back to July 13, 2005, when I linked to a new Flash game that was rapidly gaining in popularity among the Internetters of the day. The URL has changed, but you'd better believe that Planarity is still in existence and has even successfully made the transition from mid-decade website to decade-end iPhone app. Planarity, as some will recall and as others can discover by reading my original linking entry, was created in the summer of 2005 by John Tantalo, who was a relatively new sports layout editor of The Observer when I was an old news and copy editor. The Wikipedia page for the game says it was "based on a concept by Mary Radcliffe at Western Michigan University" as if Dr. Radcliffe, I presume, is some noted professor in the math department there, but people who understand life can remember (or dig up) the fact that Mary Radcliffe was a student at WMU and John's girlfriend at the time. (And possibly still is; stalk him yourself on his current webpage.) Planarity, though, got John a mention as one of Cleveland Magazine's "Most Interesting People of 2006." There's also a kind of incestuous Observer article from late 2005, where "incestuous," in the idiom of a former news editor of mine, refers to a paper covering itself or its staff members. And I will complete my chain of associations by pointing out an interesting article from last week's Observer on renovations to Leutner. If you dig around in the same issue, there's an editorial lamenting that the CWRU administration tends to ignore the opinions of most students in formulating their grand campus plans, which reminds me an awful lot of a guest commentary I wrote for the paper in February of 2002 on the same topic! Even in cyberspace, I guess, there's nothing new under the sun. |
Thursday, October 29, 2009
10:37 p.m.
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If I'm going to be spending half my monthly salary on travelling, it seems to me I could do much worse than looking up old friends and fulfilling promises I made to myself years ago. The Germany trip satisfied the first category; from tomorrow I'll be taking care of the second. "I WILL GO BACK TO PARIS!" I wrote in screaming capitals in my journal entry of August 13, 2000. "That's all that's important!" There's not much else there — in the entry, I was trying to quickly summarize a bunch of things that had happened to me in the two months since I'd written last — but I think the emotion comes through pretty clearly. I wish I had with me here the (still incomplete) travel journal that I was working on while I was actually in France last time, or the huge photo album scrapbook thing I put together in the month or two afterwards, but the one's back at my parents' house in Ohio (I think) and the other's in a closet with all the rest of my stuff in Pittsburgh. I can, however, play the Link Game like I did yesterday and point out the pictures that my French teacher at some point put online from the 2000 trip, which I seem to have first discovered on July 19, 2005. If you can bear a little more chronology, I'll write a bit about what my grand return to Paris will be like. Tomorrow I'm going right from work to the train station to catch the 8:05 p.m. TGV to the Gare de Lyon. (We left from the Gare de Lyon for our overnight sleeper train to Nice in 2000.) It would be ideal to made the trip during the day, in order to be able to admire the high-speed passing scenery, but with only a weekend free you do what you can. Arrival in Paris scheduled for 11:09, which shouldn't be too sketchy on a Friday night. I have two nights booked in an HI hostel in the city, within Greg-walking distance of the station, and then the train back to Grenoble on Sunday follows an almost identical timing as Friday's, from 8:38 to 11:33 p.m. So it's going to be a late night by the time I finally get myself back to my apartment, with work in the morning, but these trains seem to be the arrangements converged upon as optimal by other Xerox interns before me wanting to spend as long a time in the French capital as possible. One of the goals of this trip is to effectively mix things I saw nine years ago with places I didn't make it to or didn't know about then. Among old stuff, there's the eternal Eiffel Tower, although I have to decide if I want to take the elevator all the way to the top (new and exciting, but probably expensive and crowded), or hike up the stairs to the second level like I did before, or stay on the ground as Kempy suggested a few days ago. The knowledge is already starting to fall out of my brain, but we spent so much time studying Notre Dame with Mme. Lathers back at Case that I think a second visit to the Ile de la Cité is in order. I looked up La Terrasse restaurant online to confirm that I still know, nine years later, exactly where it's located, but the advertised prices of 32 € to 45 € make me think a fourth dinner there probably isn't going to happen. New things on the list are the Musée d'Orsay, which is supposed to be free this Sunday, and Montmartre, now known to me as the stomping grounds of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's "Amélie." (My lunch plans are to visit the Café des Deux Moulins.) I also have a lead on a Thai restaurant that's supposed to be quite authentic, and one place on the Internet claims they have a menu at 15 €. Plus tons of other ideas and suggestions I've been accumulating and writing down all week. I think it will be a fun and busy weekend. |
Monday, November 2, 2009
11:45 p.m.
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Back from going "BACK TO PARIS" in a very mixed frame of mind, which I'm not entirely sure how to explain in a reasonable number of words. I think the shortest possible version of the story, as I wrote to Mars, is that I blame the weather. What I think I'll try to do is explain the core of the mixed-feelings bit now and then save a second post for the chronological list of what I did and saw in the city. Weather: I knew going into the trip that it was going to be cloudy all Saturday and rain all Sunday, so I arranged my plans to get all the outdoor and walking essentials done on the first day, with all the indoor stuff saved for the second day. The biggest thing, of course, was going to be a visit to the Musée d'Orsay, the huge impressionist museum in a former train station that I've wanted to visit for years and years. We didn't go there on the 2000 trip, I suppose, because the Louvre generally takes precedent, and we saw that instead. Well, then I was walking along the Champs-Élysées Saturday afternoon and happened to pass a few movie theatres. One of them was still showing "Le Petit Nicolas," a very popular five-week-old movie here in France that I've been kind of wanting to see. Ticket prices in Grenoble are... not so good, by my old-fashioned U.S. standards: I think the best I've seen is about €6.30, or about $9.45. The base Paris price seemed to hover more around €11, but then I noticed that all showings starting before noon on any day are only €5.90. Eh bien, you can see the plan forming in my mind for Sunday. "Petit Nicolas" at the cheap 10:35 a.m. showing, then lunch at a little sandwich cart or something, and then Musée d'Orsay for a lot of the afternoon. So I went to see the movie on Sunday morning, and when I came out a little after 12:00 I saw that it had rained, which got me into this nice mood of having my staying-dry plans work out perfectly. For lunch, I decided to combine a few ideas by grabbing a sandwich from the rue de Grenelle in my "old territory" (from the 2000 trip, of course) in the 7th, then eat it while contemplating the Eiffel Tower along the Champs de Mars. The sandwich was excellent, large, and quite cheap by French standards, so again I was congratulating myself on my good luck. But then the trouble began, even though I didn't know it yet. I should know that it's impossible for me to "contemplate" M. Eiffel's "tour de 300 mètres" without wanting to take a whole bunch of pictures of it, and one angle is often not quite enough when it's so easy to walk a little bit over that way to have a second, and maybe a third from up close and underneath would be nice, and hey now that I'm so close I wonder what the line for the stairs is like... short, but I guess the price is a bit high, and the weather's kind of horribly grey and cloudy and windy, so I don't really want to be stuck up there if it's starts pouring... maybe I'll sit on this bench and slowly eat an apple while I think it over... I did decide to not go up and to head over to the museum — on foot, which naturally led to various other small deviations and criss-crossing of streets for photos. About halfway along, it did start raining, thereby providing a third ego boost for having made the right decisions. So imagine my immediate deflation as, when rounding the final corner to the museum entrance, I came upon a massive, massive sea of umbrellas! The line, if you can call it that, to get in came out the door, back and forth across the entrance steps (think Mellon Institute) about five or six times, and then down the length of the block all the way to the next corner. And the scene was not very much enriched by a bunch of insistent foreign people waving for-sale umbrellas in everyone's faces and saying "Parapluie parapluie, 'brella 'brella" over and over again. Although they did remind me that, if I was going to stand out in the rain for ages, I probably didn't want to do it in just my spring jacket. About 10 minutes later I had procured from a souvenir shop down the road, for €6, the cheapest umbrella I've ever seen in my life — in fact it broke later that evening. But at least it didn't leak, so I went back to the Musée d'Orsay line and took up my place at the end of it. There were two people immediately in front of me, about my own age, who were more enterprising than I was — and there were two of them, so one held their place in line while the other went out on reconnaissance missions. From them I learned that the line was expected to last an hour, that it was presently 3 p.m., and that the museum closed at 5:00. Thinking that over, one expected hour in the museum with 6 billion other people was starting to sound kind of unappealing. In the end I reached the same decision as my two informants and decided to give up. Which, you know, I regretted about 10 minutes later, finding that it was actually only 2:40 and not 3:00, that those 20 minutes made a significant enough difference in my mental equation to change the look of things, and that I was now idea-less in some ol' place (jcreed-style) with nothing to do except get wetter and wait for an 8:30 p.m. train. I thought of a consolatory tea, but all the nearby restaurants and things wanted at least €5 for one, and I'll do a lot of things before I pay $7.50 for a cup of hot water that had a few leaves sitting in it for three minutes. What I actually did for the next five hours will be covered in the next post, I think, but dang it if I'm not really torn over the way things went Sunday. I don't even know, now, if I should try to book another €90 day trip to Paris (if it's possible based on the train schedule) for some future weekend just so I can go to this one museum. It would be the most amazing waste either way. On the one hand, I spend like half a week's pay to spend two hours with a bunch of splattered oil on stretched-out cloth. On the other, I miss one of the largest collections of my favorite type of painting, in a place that is normally impossible for me to get to, at a time when I'm like half an inch away from it on the map of the world. Can I count on ending up in Paris again in another nine years? Is six hours minimum in a train worth two hours in a museum? Why, oh why, why did I decide to save freaking 40 centimes on a movie, that I could still have easily seen whenever back "home," when this one-of-a-kind now-or-never sought-after museum was just waiting for me to beat the crowds at 10 a.m.? There is the sticking point. |
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