Hmm… yeah so, over the last few days, my mood has been continuously improving. All of today, I’ve felt a lot better than I have in a while…
It’s strange, this is the first time since high school when I’ve really felt good about myself… confident in what I do… it actually feels like I’m good enough, for once. Despite work kinda sucking still, I’m feeling more and more confident that I can do it.
And that’s a really good place to be, being completely happy with yourself.

I’ve also been doing a lot of creative photography lately (as I’ve mentioned in my previous posts).
Blurry tree with leaves in foreground

Greg

Oh god playing with depth of field makes me spontaneously orgasm whee!
I don’t know, I’m personally a huge fan of a lot of these pictures (they do look a lot better larger though).
Photography makes me happy. Part of me really wishes I had been a photo major. The other (bigger) part is glad that I’m a CS major.

Workwise, things are going okay. I’ve gotten the primary tokenizer and classifier working… it works on simple things like “How far did she drive if she drove for 5 hours?” and “If she made $50, how long did she work?” Going to need to mess around more with MinorThird to get it working on more complicated things. Spent a lot of time today getting the tokenizer to tokenize things like “how many students got As and Bs” into “how many LABEL2″… figured out an algorithm to do so yesterday on the bus ride home, and implemented it today, and it seems to be working. My only worry is that its runtime is exponential to the length of the input substrings plus linear to the input label sizes… I think
O(2^n + m) == O(2^n) BLEH
Luckily, the input substrings will never be very long, but still. I should definetly find a way to optimize that after I have stuff working better.

Meh. I’m really considering starting a page for my more artsy photography. There’s a lot of it that I’d love to share in a bigger size (the ones I post in this journal are just too tiny to be effective) and such. I should later sometime or something.

I am also the proud new owner of $25 worth of iTunes downloads of Kelly Clarkson’s “Walk Away” and “Because of You” remixes, and Carrie Underwood’s AOL Live session downloads (see today’s “Listening to”). See, we get a lot of money each week for food from my job… about twice as much as I could possibly eat in a week. It’s also in plaid cash. Geagle takes plaid cash. Geagle sells gift cards. I think I win.
Last week I bought a $70 jacket from the CMU bookstore (using my “food money”) because I really needed a jacket (and it’s a really nice one; I’m glad I bought it). Whee. I also bought really good conditioner and shampoo (like, the expensive kind that I wouldn’t normally buy for myself). It’s kinda nice.
So I guess then this money pays for entertainment and necessities for me as well as for food. Whee.

So yeah, life is good right now.