Surfacing, briefly

[trochee]

work work work.

I've made a promise to myself to not do Livejournal -- rather, to not make long posts about what's going on with me and my views about the horrible elections and other stuff like that. You can see exterra and imtboo for some of the former; anthrochica's views match mine about the election (actually, so do those of the first two), and I'm not about to leave the country -- white straight men are the ones here who will get the least screwed over for the next four years; I feel an obligation to stay around and fight. But I'm getting carried away, and I'm trying to not do a big post today.

I'm not posting much because I have four big tasks to do between now and the end of the quarter (mid December!). The crossed-out stuff includes things I did on Veterans Day:

1. A computational morphology implementation of Arabic and a paper write-up, including at least a cursory literature search and thorough reading of all the relevant papers (Chomsky, McCarthy, MacGregor, Kiraz)
2. An experimental phonetics paper, including an experiment. I've got to locate the corpus, understand its format, extract the syllables I'm interested in, do the statistics, write it up.
3. Plan the presentation I'm doing at the LSA in January (although who knows what they're doing, because of the SF hotelier's strike), and figure out if it's useful or interesting to present it to some people I know in Palo Alto while I'm there.
4. The experiments for my MA thesis, including finishing chapter 2's experiments, (oops not quite, gotta re-do 2a-c again), design and implement software for chapter 3 experiments, come up with clever features for the machine-learning component, extract the data, and set the machines to chew on it for days

So this is the simple reason (well, reasons) why I'm not posting much. I had about fourteen uninterrupted hours to work on my computational morphology project yesterday, and it was blissful. Yes, I'm a geek; it was so nice to just be able to work on one project, without interruption, and get lost in it. I was so fired up about it working that I just kept fixing corners of the code until 4:00am, and I wasn't even tired then.

Apologies to all my cool LJ friends: I'm not withholding, I'm just barely able to keep up with LJ reading, let alone writing. So this Friday night, I'm cheating on my promise to myself to not post while I have all this work and saying hello.

*waves* -- back to work. I think I'll be reading the Kiraz papers from here next...