trochee

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.

email from today:

Dear [[Bad username or site: trochee / @ livejournal.com]],

Congratulations! You have been admitted to our PhD program.

Let me know if you have questions.

[Grad Program Advisor]

Kinda anticlimactic if you ask me. But a good thing nevertheless.

no this is not a meme. But I haven't updated in a while, and besides, I wanted to show some LJ solidarity in the face of anti-LJ snarkiness. (Actually, I think those two cartoons are double-sarcastic, which cancels it all out again. But I digress.)

• I got back from the conference on Monday and was completely beat. Met lots of nice people, including gangs of grad students from OGI, MIT and UMass Amherst, who were all very well represented.
• I was invited to join the AARP yesterday. I find it hard to imagine I'm really eligible. And they're bastards anyway.
• I am one of the vice presidents of our graduate student organization this year. This means I have to get to arrange speakers for the Friday colloquia and then stand up and welcome them.
• It looks like I may be researching work on transliteration and language-of-origin identification for Chinese-to-English MT this quarter.
• the new comp-ling master's students got very upset at one of the faculty today because they don't know what their internships will look like. I understand their frustration. My internship wasn't much fun, either. Their panic was no fun to watch though and I'm not sure it's useful or productive for them to pick on the faculty.
• imtboo made me dinner. On the way there, I got to go to the comic book store, and talk to my brother on the telephone. imtboo and I are sitting around the dining room table together on laptops. She is [re]writing her play.

Life feels good.

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.

The conference yesterday was really quite interesting. I got to see the work I contributed to explained by the people who were doing most of the summer work. I got treated pretty well by most of the talks, which was nice.

And being tired while I was there meant -- despite my own intentions of shutting up to avoid asking stupid questions -- that I asked a bunch of questions. And I think they were pretty good. A little nerve-wracking that the others doing the same were mostly faculty, but I'm really not self-conscious about asking questions in this context. don't know why. I know I had one very good idea; an undergrad was making a research proposal and I saw a strong analogy between what he was proposing at the discourse level and what the workshop was proposing at the sentence level.

Didn't get to stay very long, though; I had to catch a cab to the airport just before the end of the day. We got stuck in traffic the whole way; the cabbie didn't run the meter and I suspect there was some weirdness about the rate, but I was too tired to be very curious. Checkin told me that I would be assigned a seat at the gate ("which means 'sitting in back next to engine'", I muttered at the machine) and stood through long security lines with cranky B'more TSA telling me where to stand.

I arrived at the gate and was immediately called up and given a seat near the front of coach; so much for cynicism. Nine hours later, I emerged from the intra-spatial bardo that all airplanes and airports belong to, sniffly from too much airline time and too little sleep or quality food. I came back out through the giant long-term parking at San Jose and found my car and drove back to Palo Alto, found the hotel that beckyb, and crashed at the hotel. The clerk asked me if I wanted a wake-up call, which I declined; I hadn't decided when I wanted to wake up. I called imtboo, tired, and missing her, and (since I had internet access there) caught up on some email (though still not livejournal!). When I finally got in bed, I fell asleep in seconds.

Master's defense is over.

I passed!

I am now running one more experminent experiment that the committee wanted and trying to get drafts to the GS, etc ASAP.

augh, now I have to kick my own ass in order to get as much as possible done by the time I leave (tomorrow night!)

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!

( Cat and Girl: Outdoor activities )

I wish this activity really was outdoors.
and okay, Cat's motivation is not really my motivation. I'm already there.

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.]