caught up?

wow, I think I'm roughly caught up on LJ.

If there's something you think I should see and comment on, and I haven't, please point me to it.

getting rolling, why to use a blue pen

Monday was less complicated than the previous week. Despite the late night return to Palo Alto, I was able to get up early enough to eat breakfast at the hotel and come to the office before it was very late.

I was there for an hour or so, making notes on a paper that some of the people here are submitting to a conference, when I was invited to come along to [research institute] and listen to a talk on speaker identification and verification. About half the talk was discussing the problem and how a computer may identify (or reject) speakers who call in claiming to be a particular person; this part was easy to understand and follow. One interesting insight (for me) was that speech patterns above and beyond the acoustic characteristic of the voice might be used in this task, and that the computer need not be an active participant for this to be done (regardless of the characteristics used). The second half of the talk was focused on a particular set of normalization and regularizations that might be done on acoustic parameters, and the usefulness of these normalizations. They were really quite hard for me -- my math isn't quite there -- but I at least have learned enough of the jargon that a little bit stuck.

We returned to the lab and I continued making notes. On a seven page paper, I had notes all over it. Part of it is that these are native speakers of Chinese who studied English only in school, and I was helping them with my thirty years of experience with high-prestige English. (Although they had another native-English-speaker student who had supposedly proofread before -- I am afraid she didn't do a great job, or they made lots of changes to introduce mistakes afterwards.) But part of their paper's problem was also that there were some major vaguenesses in the way they were telling the story: they actually have quite impressive results, if everything they're reporting is right, but the way they were trying to explain it made it seem obscure and complicated, when in fact they really have done three rather clever things. I helped them tease those apart. Luckily, they have twelve pages available, so there's plenty of space to say more -- which is what they need to do. (There are also a few scientific decisions I disagree with, but they're minor.)

Unfortunately, by the time I was done explaining what I was suggesting to the senior author, the first (and junior) author came by, and the senior author had me go off with him and explain it all over again. I feel sorry for the guy; he thought he was basically done with the paper, and then his boss (and mine) had this smartass language guy come in and read it over, and he has to rewrite the whole thing.

It occurred to me that I was glad I was using a blue pen. For some reason, it seems much less judgmental than the red pen I'm accustomed to. I suppose it's the difference between a grader and an editor. I'm going to start marking up my own papers with a blue pen in the future, and leave the red pen for faculty.

After work, I talked to beckyb on the phone a little, because I wasn't there in the PNW to say goodbye as she went back to kilolimnios. (hey, beckyb, somebody at the party Saturday pointed out that your new state has a city name that is a Sioux/Greek blend -- and if you take it's usual hyphenation with another neighboring city, it's a Sioux/Greek/Franco-Latinate/Anglicized-Aramaic blend, which is pretty cool.)

I called imtboo when I got home, but she was out playwriting, and I watched TV for an hour while I tried to get my laptop back online. I think I need a major tutorial or a new laptop soon; perhaps that's a project for the fall. imtboo called later; she was out at a playwriting workshop and had managed to twist her ankle real bad as she left. She's in real pain; I found myself wishing even more than usual that I was there with her. But she iced it as we talked, and took anti-inflammatories, and the pain subsided somewhat before we finally said goodbye. I miss that woman. I wish she could be here with me, or that I could be there with her. I couldn't convince myself to go to bed -- but eventually at 2:00 I did finally convince myself to turn out the light and lie still with my eyes closed; I don't remember anything after that. (Obviously I needed the sleep, but I felt like I was waiting for imtboo to come home. It felt sad to turn out the light because she -- of course -- isn't.)

a monosyllabic surname of ambiguous non-anglo-ethnicity

The Chinese project manager two desks over is on the phone, talking about a project I'm working on. He mis-spells my surname, scrambling the coda consonants. He notices me flinching at the mis-spelling, and corrects himself. He then compares it to "uh, a Persian king yah", hears me laugh, and looks up at me: "what -- no?"

"It's just a name," I said. I don't want to go into the extended history of the consonant sequence, which derives from an old name for one of the Hebrew tribes. It's anglo-homophonous, but not anglo-orthographically identical to the name he's thinking of, nor is it ortho-identical to a certain even-numbered science-fiction sequel. He turns back to the phone. I turn back to my terminal.

"No, I don't think so," he says after a moment. I turn back. He looks up -- "No, I don't think he's Vietnamese," he says to the phone. I sip some coffee, and go back to work.

I rox the tek support

my laptop is my only link to outside internet right now, whether I am at the hotel (free wifi, but no terminals) or the office (wacky security constraints that allow me to connect, iff I take my laptop into the supply closet).

So you can imagine my panic when the power supply refused to light up. No charge to the laptop means my internet time for the next two weeks is constrained to (1) what I can get to through the webproxy at work (no email, whatsoever) and (2) the battery life of the laptop (very short!).

But I thought about it, and drove down to the impressive Fry's, and looked at replacing the power adaptor. The one option was a generic for $80, and I had the presence of mind to ask a guy there to open one up and see if it had an adaptor for this laptop (it didn't). While I plugged in the thing to show him what wasn't working, it of course decided to charge. I joked with him that I was reluctant to unplug it (true) and I might stay there all night while it charged (false).

But then it occurred to me that maybe it was the AC cord. I went over to the cables and bitty parts department (they don't call it that, but they should, shouldn't they?) and asked around. "Oh, you want the figure-8?" said the guy.

"uh," I said, gracefully. I'm smooth like that.

Then I saw what he meant: the cable from the wall to the heavy little box has a connector that looks like a figure 8 -- if you were going to stick the cable in your eye. Eye-insertion not being my usual mode of cable-observation, that didn't spring to mind. But indeed, he led me straight to a $1.99 black cable that --color notwithstanding-- looked an awful lot like the cheap-ass white cable that trails from the adaptor to the wall. For that price, I bought it on the spot and left.

A good thing, too, because when I got back to the hotel, the AC adaptor still wouldn't light up. I crossed my fingers and replaced that component, considering alternatives (solder, tearing open the little white adaptor box and crossing wires by hand, removing the hard disk from the laptop to rescue files). It lit up immediately and brighter than before.

Laptop rescued, for a grand total of $2.15.