Author Archives: Alan V
Picturepost
Bored bored bored bored bored bored
Nightmare enducing?
A perfectly normal picture of Alan. Why’s the file format GIF? No reason… no reason at all.
Grarrrggg
Movie foo
Played something like 5 rounds of DDR/ITG today. The guy I played with (Dan) was trying to add new songs to the ITG machine. It didn’t really work, unfortunately (can you imagine playing neoMAX on the machine? droooolllll), but whatever.
Mark and I decided to be (kinda) spontaneous yesterday and see a movie that neither of us had heard much/anything about… or at least I hadn’t heard anything about… so tonight we had dinner (Uncle Sams subs OMGZ) and saw “An Inconvenient Truth” at the Manor. For something with Al Gore, it was amazingly well done… I was very impressed by it. It could have easily been a complete disaster (a movie tackling the problem of global warming… heh), but was pulled off very well, with some (tasteful) anti-Bush jokes in it.
Um… I guess I didn’t really do much else today. Huzzah for 4 day weekends!
You also get multiple new pictures today because I was lazy and didn’t download pictures off my camera yesterday.
The OSC, June 29
The OSC, June 30
It’s the magical reappearing lightpost… oh noes!!!
Meh, I should’ve gotten a better angle for the second one. Oh well.
Hopefully it’ll be completely gone next week (I will have pictures, obviously).
I also feel bad for not posting any photoshops in a while, but I really like this picture just the way it is, without any photoshopping. All I did was saturate a little to bring out the colors. The red pipes on the brick… mmmmm.
<3 photography
Work, day 20
Work today was kinda slow. I spent most of the morning working on more edge cases for extraction. In the afternoon, I ran various classification experiments to take advantage of the modified tagging. That took about 3 hours to find the optimal algorithms.
Then, all happy, I go to actually create the classifiers.
…
And get errors.
Well, damn.
So yeah… I basically spent all day getting nothing done. Bleh.
While classification experiments were running, I went and read through my old journal. Read through the 2.5 years of entries. It’s amazing how much my journal has changed and evolved. It’s fun going back and seeing how I was feeling at various times throughout the past few years. Whee. It also occurs to me how boring my journal has gotten. But still, it makes me happy to write about random things, and that’s really the point of this journal.
Dream posts are always fun. Um… so last night I had a dream that I married a porn star. It was very odd. And that’s all I remember, unfortunately.
So I’m feeling really weird today. I’m happy, yes, but there’s a feeling I can’t quite place… nostalgia? Pride? Acceptance? I don’t know.
Wheee.
Tire tracks in mud… so simple, but so pretty.
Various foo
Went to the Allies movie night tonight and saw Rent. It’s a really good film… makes me kinda want to see the Broadway production now. Dunno.
Work today went well. After trying various optimizations on the classification algorithms, I got accuracy to drop and go up… eventually getting a more-or-less best-for-now accuracy of 91%. Not bad at all. Then worked a bit on the extractor. Initial tests gave it a 49% accuracy on extraction… was able to quickly get it up to 75%, and then spent the rest of the day getting it up to 82%. Going to see if I can’t do better tomorrow. The problem is that the ones its missing now are the problems without explicit givens (for example, “How long was the candle when it started burning?” vs. “How long has it been burning if the candle is 6 inches tall?” which I can parse). Meh. Boo for edge cases and special casing everything.
Um… so yeah. Downloaded some of my favorite Rent songs from iTunes (strangely, I’m not too fond of the cover song, “Seasons of Love,” but that might just because I heard it so many times during the movie). A lot of this suff is really good. This music makes me happy. :) Thinking about either getting an iPod or some card games. Which one do people think would be better? Honestly, I’m not sure how much usage I would get out of either. It would be nice to have all my music on the go with me, but I don’t really *need* an iPod, nor do I have that much time to listen to music when I’m not at my computer anyway. The cards would be nice to collect (and some of them are stuff I’ve been looking for for a while), but unless there’s people to play with me, they’re relatively useless as well.
Havn’t taken any pictures in the past 2 days, so here’s a picture of the cloud factory I took last week. Havn’t photoshopped this one at all… maybe I should a bit. Dunno. I think it looks pretty good as it is.
Life is good :D
I’m so lucky in life. Why do I sometimes lose sight of that?