trochee

Hey, look! I know you Seattleites reading this have been itching to get out of the house after that record rainy spell and today's beautiful sunny weather.

Okay, so that's a cheap and craven plug to let you all know that

imtboo and I are moving in together in our hip urban neighborhood -- this weekend! -- and we would love some help on Sunday, because many hands → light work, especially when that work involves taking boxes up the stairs. If we're lucky (and I'm not counting on it) we'll have another day like today

So if you're up for it*, comment here (or there) and one of us will get back with you to let you know where it is.

Thanks! Hope to see a few of you!

*drinks and food will be available

I've been less than thrilled with Sunbird, the Mozilla-suite calendaring program.

It works okay, but it doesn't seem to be robustly supported. (In November 05, they released 0.3 alpha, after nearly a year of silence.)

The key features I'm looking for are:

the ability to sync against webDAV calendars, such as the one at iCal Exchange, which I currently use. It's not enough to pull them down, it has to be able to push local edits up too.
The ability to subscribe to multiple calendars -- I keep separate calendarfiles for my lab, my classes, and my personal time. But I'd like to look at them all in the same place.

Sunbird currently does both these critical pieces, yet I'd like to get away from it.

Any recommendations?

Update: looks like the Mozilla Calendar extension to Firefox manages to avoid the biggest Sunbird problems -- namely, that it isn't packaged for Debian or Ubuntu. And I can get Firefox to work just about everywhere.

done with the presentation. was a little stressful getting it all done in time, but it went pretty well in the end.

imtboo was looking out for me and made sure I ate breakfast before I left. That helped too and the extra blood sugar kept me on my toes while I was posing and answering questions.

bleh. I look forward to getting back to my real research!

In happier news,

imtboo and I found a place and got it! We'll be moving in together starting in a week and a half, and done moving by Feb 1. woo!

aargh. can't write this presentation. must stop noodling.

I really want to hear from our prospective future landlord about our new place. I really liked it but we haven't got the official go-ahead yet.

I have much work to do.

Crunch time; I leave for Vancouver tomorrow and must get stuff to Advisor and others today.

have some additional numbers to run (almost done) and revisions to my talk. When they're done, I am going home to pack. I need to be in early tomorrow if possible.

At least I find that I do not hate it. I was dreading getting back into some aspects of this work, but once I get my fingers dirty a little I remember that there are indeed some aspects that I find satisfying. Even in this godforsaken corpus. (jeez, a little lovecraftian note there.)

in other news... did you know that F score can be translated into 2s/(g+p)? I didn't. I worked that out today.

I have 60 minutes left on my cell phone plan until the end of August. Thus I think I won't be doing much phone calling back to Seattle until Sep 1. (I'm sorry,

imtboo!)

If you'd like to talk to me, I can send anybody who wants to know my hotel's phone number.

My Master's of Arts thesis is now officially done. I filed it twenty minutes ago.

I will be traveling until Thursday, when I will be in Palo Alto for two and a half weeks. I would love to hear from Bay Area folks; I'll be there for a research internship so I'm eager to hang out with people in the evenings and on weekends.

I now return to relative silence. I haven't read LJ since my last post; I may (or may not) have time to catch up over the next week.

Current Mood: accomplished

The

trochee channel has been effectively offline for some time now, due to what we might call technical difficulties (experiments to run, thesis to write, etcetera).

A far-too-irregularly scheduled summer vacation is also imminent. I will probably not be keeping up with LJ for the next ten days or so; if there's anything you think I'd really like or need to see, please send me email at [the obvious user name] at g mail . I still won't get back to you fast, bein' on an island in coastal New England with lousy internet access -- but I might be more likely to get back to you when I return.

Love to you all.

Current Mood: busy

Chapter 7 is drafted*. Hey, it's only 10p! I'm going home.

... where I will probably work on filling in the "TO DO" items I left scattered through my thesis. But hey, it's a nice thought that I'm out of the lab before 10.

* Note that chapters 1-6 are also drafted, and hence I have a (rather) rough draft of my entire thesis! go me!

... the shoulder of the mountain, that is. I've got a draft of all chapters 1-6 and an appendix. Chapter 7 (Conclusion) is still to be written, and there are figures and examples to fill in in all chapters, not to mention a variety of small annoying tasks at the grad school to make it happen.

Oh, and a defense on Monday.

But I still feel like I've cleared the shoulder of the mountain, and I'm in sight of the final ascent. Now it's just a matter of keeping my focus up here at the high altitude so that I can get it all done in time.

Current Mood: a little dizzy
Current Music: off to read comix for a short break

uh, in the "I've been bad" sense.

I'm in the office on Friday night when all my friends are out at the theater. :p

But my thesis has just cracked the century mark -- it's 106 pp, when you add in all the cruft (73 if you don't count any of the bibliography, title pages, abstract, or appendices).

And I should have a rough draft of chapter 5 in the next two hours so I can go have a beer in Ballard.

Tomorrow's exciting plans: make revisions for chapters 1 and 2, code for getting cleaner chapter 6 results. Start writing Chapter 6. Get drafts of abstract, 1 and 2 to reader #2. woo. *waves fist weakly*.

Current Music: The Spurs - Stop and let me drink about it (KEXP)

today: abstract final.
chapter 4 is mostly drafted. I decided that the results were a big mess of data and needed to go in an appendix so I can focus on telling the story instead of finding clever ways to wedge in all the results into chapter 4.

Advisor has chapters 2 and 3. I need to get her chapters 4 and 5 by tomorrow afternoon. And I'd really like to be able to go out with

imtboo and

blackwingedboy and

beckyb and

lgtheater etcetera tomorrow night (and maybe see bluegrass with some of them at the Tractor afterwards? hmmm..)

but it depends on getting these chapters written. grah. as currently going, I keep going back and banging my head on the hard places, leaving the easy ones because "I know how to write those, I should leave it until I'm braindead". Am rapidly reaching that braindead point, so I'm working on them now with the hope that when the rest is written it will be more obvious how to fill in the holes in the difficult parts. Or maybe -- if I must -- I can leave it for tomorrow morning. But I want to spend tomorrow on Chap 5 so I'd better get crackin.

[EDIT: 2a and chap 4 is basically done. going home to sleep for a few hours.]

Current Mood: in the last mile

( for my own accomplishments today )

( for later this week )

Current Music: Vitamin F mix (Wooster Collective podcast: alexone)

I just gave a fairly final version of the introduction and background chapters to Advisor. There are still some citations to fill in, and all the figures are marked off (figuratively speaking) with police tape. But it's in her hands. I wrote her:

Apologies for this taking so long. I'm sure you're familiar with students' underestimation of the difficulty of writing-it-all-down, but it's always a surprise to *us*.

After I gave it to her, she came back into my office area and, laughing, pointed it at me sideways. "Remember, [

trochee]," she said, with the thick stack of pages flat between her palms, "this is a master's thesis."

I blushed, and tried to explain: "No, it's 'cause I have to introduce the engineering and the linguistics, on both sides of the lexical layer -"

"No, I understand," she said. "But don't be so hard on yourself. It'll be fine."

So I feel better. I picked up the next chapter (Corpus), and realized that I've already written most of it. I'm reading through it now, and though it looks like there will be some edits, I should have a draft of that chapter done tonight too!

I've been busily writing all week. Last night was a nice change from that; I went home earlyish (for me) and read books (Five is the perfect number and Emergence) and listened to music. Emergence isn't spectacular, but it's thinking about a bunch of neat stuff. Perfect Number is an Italian noir hitman comic that really is begging to be made into a movie.

imtboo came over, and spent the night. We went out for breakfast this morning, and she's gone home to write while I am here at the internet cafe.

My current to-do list for this weekend -- we'll see if I get to it all:

~~incorporate second-reader's written comments~~
~~incorporate second-reader's oral comments (from our meeting yesterday)~~ done except for the tedious making-consistent of "we" vs. "I" and "one"
incorporate citations from Construction Grammar literature (per meeting with second reader)
cite L's thesis -- it's a natural, and she'll like it
fill out citations from my notes (e.g. [CITE Hunt 1995]) into proper LaTeX citations (e.g. \cite{hunt94prosody})
~~rewrite conclusion to ASR background section~~
~~switch to robbib.bst per second reader's suggestion~~
~~catch up on email~~
~~catch up on LJ~~
expand citations in .bib file to include first names; if i decide to go with initials I should change the bib style instead
~~write the prosody and parsing background section~~
write the parsing and ASR background section
score outputs from most recent run of last set of experiments

Current Music: MIA in the internet cafe

gmail is down.

i'm at the lab at ten to eight, wondering if i should go out to get yakisoba while i write.

I'm very proud of myself today: I broke the block I was in, and I wrote three subsections of background. My hope is to take advantage of this momentum and actually finish a draft of the background chapter tonight (!)

I spent two hours today running down problems wtih bank transfers, and there seems to be something weird about my entire X session right now -- it keeps freezing firefox. And XMMS won't start. It's like the whole computer has bent itself on "no distractions for you".

but -- haha! I have found distractions aplenty. Among other things fished out of the P section of the stacks, I found Phonetic Symbol Guide by Geoffrey Pullum and William Ladusaw. It's like a little dictionary with a funny letter on each page. I love it. The introduction (available through Google Print) is fun for typography geeks like me.

I'm not grumpy cause of the weekend, i'm grumpy 'cause it's over.

Had a lovely weekend with imtboo, which involved not-leaving-the-house for quite some time, even when we'd both planned to go do writing. I have no regrets there. Had a great time at the Cabaret and the Sunset Bowl with blackwingedboy and beckyb and R and of course the lovely imtboo who looks at me like I'm hot at the moments when I'm making the silliest jokes. Hmm....

Today, on the other hand:

gmail just went down
livejournal is more fun than actual research
Advisor is wondering if I should postpone my defense by a week or two
I am starting to wonder if I should

I think I need to break my research down into very very small pieces. And do one.

And get the heck off the internet, for at least a few hours.

in no particular order,

i have a two-page set of comments from my advisor, and she thinks I'm going about the approach of an entire section wrong, and wants me to reorganize the rest of the chapter as well.
the printer is broken; I can't even print them out to cross off the comments I feel like I've dealt with
somebody's blowing up working-class commuters in London.
I have no results from an earlier round of experiments; they'll need to be revised again
my eye itches
my department is eliminating all space for TAs; all the grad students will be in trailers except for the traitors to other departments like me
i've invaded the privacy of a very dear friend, due to my own thoughtlessness
i didn't finish the sections i wanted to rewrite and expand yesterday (on why CFGs are unsatisfying but they're what we got, and on lexicalized CFGs)

Current Mood: shaky

I have an outline due to Advisor tomorrow morning for the MA thesis. the outline's done, but it feels sloppy, and i'm revising like crazy because I am not happy with it.

This is me today:
( cut so I don't steal so much bandwidth )
(from PhD Comics -- guess which character here is me?)

~~find revisions to original MA outline~~
~~make revisions~~
~~finish parser run~~
~~feature extraction run~~
~~score extraction run~~
~~feature counting~~
formatting for SVM
write up outline to intro for MA - only half done, really
expand chapter 2 outline - better, but not really done
~~work out how to have separate .tex files for different chapters of the thesis~~ Done, thanks to the lazyweb in the form of beckyb and xaosenkosmos.
~~find the university's LaTeX template~~ done, and adapted

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trochee

June 2016

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Entries tagged with busy

[seattle] better than stairmaster

lazyweb - heirs to mozcal/sunbird?

all's well that ends well

foe cuss

back in it

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Master of Arts

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