Monthly Archives: June 2006

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my?

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Didn’t do much today…
Got up and went to breakfast with the other intern peoples (yummy chai!)… then bought hair dye at RiteAid. Got an amazing deal too… normally $8 a bottle… they were having a buy-one-get-one-free sale… and the two boxes had $2 off coupons on them. Got two boxes of hair dye for $4. I think I win.

Then, as I was leaving RiteAid, I ran into Vincent driving along Forbes.

Joined her in stopping by her apartment and then going to Anthrocon, which was rather… interesting. Furries are kinda funny… seeing lots of furries together is also kinda funny. Wheee.
Then we waited in a hotel lobby for her to meet friends at Anthrocon while she introduced me to guro (apparently porn that involves lots of death/gore/dismemberment… very disturbing) and made me very sad.
Then she proceeded to drive across a bridge. Bad idea. Spent the next half hour driving around lost, trying to find our way back to downtown Pittsburgh.

Then dyed my hair. This looks much nicer now (before is on the left)

Yay playing with saturation! :D I actually really like the way this turned out. Wheee colors. Wheee weird lighting angles.

Then headed clusterward, played some Starcraft, and went halfpricing with peoples.
So um, yeah. I should sleep and be productive tomorrow.

Work, day 10

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Whee today was really eventful…

So the morning was really unproductive. I spent it tinkering with my basic text parser to parse the samples into individual “training” files with the correct annotations, and failing miserably. Tinkered with MinorThird stuff and failed at understanding it. Also wrote a huge introspective LJ entry that made me feel a lot better about myself (again)… amazing how writing can help you deal with things, even if it’s not stuff anyone will ever (or will ever have the chance to) read.

Had lunch with Pooja again, and got delicious cookies. Then came back to campus to meet with Quinten (the research programmer)… in about 2 hours, I clarified the problem for him (he was misunderstanding the inputs and such), and we came up with a plan for me to tackle the task… so now I know what I’m doing Monday (and, if I feel motivated enough, this weekend). He’s amazing.

Plan of attack:
Write a pre-processor to do initial tagging of inputs (training data included) and manually annotate training data and write a Mixup program to tag numbers. Use this to extract numbers and given units. Also use it to train classifiers for the conversion type and the given column. Save said classifiers and build a parser that utilizes them when given new unlabelled input. Get MinorThird’s GUI running on my computer at work so all this is possible.

So yeah, I’m feeling a lot better about work… and life in general is still amazing and happy.
I knew I could do it :)

It’s weird… there are people all around me in relationships and hooking up (even in our small group of interns)… and for once, I’m not jealous. I don’t feel left out. It’s a good feeling.
I am missing a certain someone though… a lot… but that’s okay.

Also, I am covered in mosquito bites right now, but it was so worth it. A bunch of KGB peoples went to Frick park (funny… I work in the Frick building downtown), and we had a huge campfire complete with marshmallows, bad stories, and friends. I have pictars up in photos…

Went to Eat n’ Park with bohanlon afterward too. Wheee.

My iTunes library has had its biggest infusion of new music in a while. Between the $25 of music from the gift card, and the Cascada CD I ripped from Ally today, there’s over 40 new songs in my library, which is now at 1648 songs. Yay music!

I’ve been experimenting a lot with my artistic shots lately…
I like this a lot better than the full-color one…

Ditto with this one (original)

Dunno… it draws your attention more to the relevant parts, and I really like the contrast.

Hmmm… in this one, I think it hurts the overall image more than it helps (original here)… dunno… you just lose the warmth of the fire when you don’t see its light on the other people…

Life is good :)

Work, day 9

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Yeah, so today I met with one of the research programmers working on MinorThird. The more I try and understand how the hell to use M3 with this project, the more confused I get. From my impressions today, it looks like I’m going to have to more or less scrap the stuff I’ve done this week and start over with an M3 implementation…. and I have to figure out how to get it to do what I want it to do.
I mean like, I understand on a conceptual level what I have to do. I understand what needs to happen and, more or less, how to make it happen. I’m just confused about specifics… like how to create samples to train the classifiers with… how to call the classifiers… how to deal with their output… how to write code utilizing M3 classes… that kind of stuff.
Oh well. I am confident in my skills, and I’m sure I can understand this stuff. I just need some time to mess with it. I mean, this is hard stuff… I’m actually kind of impressed with myself that I’ve even gotten this far.
And no big deal about scrapping what I currently have. It runs slow as hell, and I’ve learned a lot from doing it, so it was a good experience nonetheless. I mean, worst case, I don’t get M3 working and I have what I’ve already written, which works on many, many cases (something like 74% of inputs).

You get three photos today, because yay.
OSC, more blown up!

Flowers…. love the colors… and omg depth of field!! *drools*
Isn’t it interesting how, when they’re in focus, they look light purple… but then when they blur they turn darker? Amazing…

Orbit! It just looked so out of place there… I love the contrast of it against the rest of the scene. In the full-sized picture, the background is more noticibly out-of-focus, which draws your attention more to the gum… so yeah.

Why is the world so beautiful? There’s just so much to photograph and look at and enjoy.

Um, so yeah.
Life is good.

Edit: Recipe for what I had for dinner today… it was surprisingly good
Alan’s college-style spinach salad
Ingredients: One package ready-to-eat spinach (whole leaf), 1/2 cup parmesan cheese, 2 single-serving size boxes of raisins, 1 cup Cheerios (optional).
Directions: Pour cheese and raisins into bag of spinach. Shake until throughly mixed and spinach leaves are covered with cheese. Enjoy. Add Cheerios to the salad for a nice crunch.

More feelings?

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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.