trochee

apologies to anonymous, who writes:

I miss you writing about your life in your journal. What is going on in your life ? We'd love to know.

It's nice that ~~people~~ anonymous gremlins want to know more.

Unfortunately, I've been lax about posting, and as the events pile up and the amount of astoundingly good writing comes from my friends list who are amazing writers, I've gotten a little intimidated to write about prosaic stuff like what's going on in my life.

But that's no excuse, really: y'all must find me a little interesting or you wouldn't friend me. I love that that's a verb.

well then.

work

This week is Spring Break. I've been struggling with a machine translation project for weeks, and making very little headway. That's okay -- but I'm not making headway on much else, either.
Next quarter I'm taking a class from my advisor on Statistical Methods in Language Processing; my lab-mates keep saying "but don't you know that stuff already?" I do -- but there's always more to learn. And I need an easy class next quarter, since I'm working on my thesis. Really. Stop snickering.
the faculty in my department have chosen a first-choice candidate for a second computational linguist, but are still haggling with deans before they make an offer. I'm not sure that the department really understands how hot this field is and how hard it will be to hire.

home

thevorak, exterra and I moved at the end of last month into our new place. It's really quite lovely. I'm sitting now in my new office, which is about the same size as the old "office"-cum-storage-closet, but has a two-foot by two-foot diamond-shaped stained-glass window in the wall by my desk; blackwingedboy says he thinks it looks like a superhero's secret lab in the belfry of some church. I think he must be reading a lot of Kurt Busiek.
Priscilla-the-cat has finally settled in -- today, for the first time, we let her out of the house without watching her, and she was waiting at the front door when I came home, meowing fiercely and wondering where I'd been.
exterra has taken it on herself to organize the kitchen. It's been a whirlwind of a process, with everything moving around twice. But it's a beautiful kitchen, with daffodil-yellow walls and a tile-countertop island.

love

imtboo is amazing. I have been witnessing her strengths as she acknowledges the death of her mother, and allows herself to feel the pain but takes control of it and ownership of it as it passes through her life. She and I have a connection that I find quite remarkable; despite coming at the world from very different points-of-view, we both like to think in metaphor and analogy, and we find common ground by seeing the parallels. It's not so much "trochee is an engineer, and imtboo is an artist" but "trochee is a tech geek who likes to think about art and artifice, and imtboo is an art geek who likes to think about technology and technique."

I went to a meeting in Belltown earlier today (at the Labor Temple) and it was a beautiful day so I walked over to Pike Place Market and bought her tulips. *good boyfriend -- good*.

friends

Beyond livejournal, I've had actually quite a bit going on:

I threw myself a birthday party at the Twilight Exit, which started off mellow and friendly and sociable, and then (unplanned by me) turned into Karaoke Night, which happens every Sunday at the Twilight. I drank too much, and didn't pay for any of the drinks (way too much -- but I didn't do it in my teens or twenties -- why not do it on my first day of the fourth decade?). imtboo and I staggered home (no, that is not an exaggeration -- I got sick on her lawn) and felt awful the next day. But thank you to all who showed up. I won't bother to type out all the <lj user="foo"> tags to name you all anyway, and none of you got as drunk as I did by the end of the evening.
I got to have dinner the person in Seattle who's known me the longest (save JR, who used to be my babysitter): kdphon [who now has a livejournal, mostly to read this one, and presumably so she can be referenced with the little head], and her husband who [so far as I know] does not have a livejournal or a blog. It's been so long since I've seen them that I think I was still an item with exterra last time we spoke. Nice to reconnect, and hope for it not to be so long the next time.
I went to a birthday party for one of my linguistics colleagues on St. Paddy's day, and remembered how much I like my departmental colleagues. Too bad there's no space on campus for us all to hang out. These are nice people, and funny. A different classmate I ran across looking over exterra's shoulder when she was checking out the goods on LoveLab. I won't point him out here, but he's pretty cute -- and pretty gay.
With imtboo, I saw Joseph Arthur at Neumo's, and Keren Ann (ware flash - pretty but too long!) at the Tractor. Both truly phenomenal singers and songwriters. I may get to see Low this weekend.

geekery

I've started using Sunbird. This would be too simple a feat for a geek like me, though -- I'm storing my calendars at iCal Exchange and synchronizing my work and personal computers to those calendars.
I rescued exterra's desktop, which has been down for weeks. It's a Windows XP Pro box, but it got itself confused about something, and refused to boot. (that's "refused to start", not "refused as well", in case anyone's really still reading this far and wants a linguistics tidbit.) I started by booting with Knoppix to rescue the data [I copied over to another Windows box that was -- at the moment -- running Knoppix too], because my experience with Windows rescue projects has been that there's usually not much to do but reinstall. Sure enough, that's what we had to do, and chkdsk /p -- destructive repair though it is -- worked, and kept most of the data. ~~Lucky~~ smart me for backing up, though, because the one directory that it damaged was the directory with all the personal data in it. We just copied it back over from the other Knoppix machine, and all is well. So far. But it's another good argument for using Linux everywhere.
What particularly blows my mind about this is that the reverse-engineered Linux disk drivers for NTFS were able to read the disk and rescue everything, but chkdsk -- the Microsoft standard utility! -- blew it away. Just goes to show ya -- hundreds of Redmond meal-ticketers can't hold a candle to legions of smart Norwegians [etc].
Projects for the break include trying to rescue an old laptop -- you can bet that Debian installers and Knoppix will be a part of that process. If possible, I'd like to get it running with Debian and then give it away, but the hardware may not support the battery any more.
imtboo has decided to rebuild her own Windows machine by pulling bits of hardware out of the old one in order to rescue the data. Unfortunately, she's stuck. No fun, but I'll go over to help later, probably after dinner..