Category Archives: Photo Stuff

Tiiimmmeee

Posted on by

Where does the time go? It’s already 10:30. I should shower and sleep soon, especially since I think I’m coming down with something (sore throat, trouble breathing, cough… bleh).

Work today was kinda bleh. I feel so behind… I can’t work on formula extraction until I finish formula classification… and formula classification currently has a success rate of 74% for non-standard problems (99.2% if you include standard problems). I need to get that up above 80% before I’m comfortable going to extraction.
After that is working well enough, I need to tackle the issue of systems problems as well (for which equation extraction will be a horrible mess of painful death).
My mentor is so amazingly understanding…

I had another weird dream last night. I was in a video game, and there were a bunch of different quests I had to undertake to complete it and save my friends and family.
The only one I remember, unfortunately, was me noticing a bunch of gold and jewels (the game’s “collectable items”) under some crates, and trying to jump in such a way that I would slide in and touch it (picking it up; my character apparently is thinner while jumping or something). I finally consulted the hint system, which led me to a nearby computer station with a guy who introduced himself. He said that that terminal controlled the invisible radio waves in the air that could blow up the crates. I did so and collected the treasure.
…
There was more stuff involving sliding down broken railings over pits of lava and jumping over electrified metal shard boxes, but I don’t really remember that part.

My first S (even if it was just an S-) from this weekend.
(The left is 8… he’s too good -_-)

The front of New House, stylized.

Dreampost

Posted on by

Haven’t done one of these in a while, but I want to get thoughts down before I forget it.

Had an odd dream last night. It took place in the future, just when humankind had developed a new form of energy derived from water (apparently super-effective). It followed a family of 4; the mother, father, daughter, and son; and I kept on switching perspectives from an outsider (as if I was watching a movie) to a participant (as the father and, sometimes, as a third child).

The thing is, the process of using water as energy in this way makes the water “magical” (that was the actual word used) and is diverted from the primary water supply to a special holding pool in the northern part of the city. Said water was gold in color (kinda like sparkly urine), “flows faster than normal water” (and you can see undercurrents of gold in the primary rivers and lakes), and is someone capable of spawning new life (how was never really explained). For that reason, all sex and “natural” reproduction is banned. Also worth noting is that this society was a Utopia… a perfect, pristine, sparking city of chrome and glass with trees and wildlife everywhere. Also lots of rivers and lakes and waterfalls, naturally. So beautiful… I wish I could draw, so I could recreate the scene.
The mother and father were present for the “grand switching,” when everyone on earth switched from coal and nuclear to the new power source. The daughter and son were born by the new process (from the holding pools of magical water).

In any case, life is good, and then one winter day the family goes up to the north to the holding pool of special water. The daughter (who is only 2 but can already speak, read, and write like a middle school student) tells her parents (who are reading and relaxing on the ice by the water) she is going to go exploring. Then we watch as the brother (who is now, for some inexplicable reason, an insect) slowly dies and eventually stops moving. No one seems to care. We then follow the parents as they go to the edge of another pool only to find a note from their daughter, “I’m going to play with my friend organisms!” (written in red sharpie, no less). The assumption here is that she has “unborn” herself by jumping back into the pool where she was created (whether on purpose or on accident doesn’t really matter). I remember crying in the dream, and the mother comforting me with, “Oh well, there’ll be more.”

I also remember thinking, as the dream progressed, with the knowledge that this entire thing took place in Alaska in the winter, that there was way too much daylight for too many hours per day. Odd thought to have.
Also interesting to think about is that eventually the water supply is going to run out, since this method of using water for energy makes it unusable after consumption. I remember the thought occuring to me when they were first switching to the system, but someone reassured me (in the dream) that water was infinite and we’d never run out. Hmm.

Heh, I wonder what religious groups would have to say about aspects of this dream. And it’s also odd that that’s the first thing that I wondered when I woke up and remembered it.

Also discovered what I consider the best haiku ever on the KoL forums today:
; +
! %
& ,
It actually works!

Have to run to work. Will edit this post later with a picture for today.

Edit: As promised…
Wall in front of someone’s house on Morewood Ave., stylized.

Catching up

Posted on by

Wheeee!

Took my camera to work today and got a bunch of beautiful pictures of downtown Pittsburgh.

Colored banners in front of a building, stylized.

Glass tower downtown, stylized.

Looking down 20 flights of stairs.

Meh. Might post others eventually.

God, what’s wrong with me?
I feel like a bad person for missing most of work today. Went like usual in the morning, but I just wasn’t able to concentrate and I wasn’t getting any work done. Not sure if it was due to the lack of sleep or just my general mood. Left really, really early to come home and sleep. Meh.
…
I feel like shit.

8 and friend playing ITG. Whee?

Movie foo

Posted on by

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 17

Posted on by

Yeah so, today I got into work, wrote the final code for the number extraction, wrote a test suite for the entire parser, and hit run.
…
And got a ClassCastException.
A little bit of WTFing, and I discovered that what I thought were serialized Classifiers were actually serialized Results. Gaah. Spent about an hour regenerating the actual classifiers (luckily I got a new, faster computer so the experiments didn’t take 2 days…).
Then I hit run again.
Just like that, I had an 85% accuracy on the solution classification. I can raise that by improving my preprocessing (the way I’m currently tagging things is faulty). That’s on my todo list for tomorrow. Then, it’s tracking down the errors and seeing if they are easily fixable.
Notes to self: Add in negative ability (- sign, etc) and allow for multiple numbers in a single span.

So yeah… in the 5 hours I had at work today, I accomplished more than I had for the past 6 work days.

Came home feeling completely happy with myself. Amazing how much work manages to affect my mood, even when I don’t think it does. Yesterday I was feeling kinda meh because I hadn’t gotten much (read: anything) done at work. Today I got a lot done. Yay!
Can’t help but feel like I’m still a little behind, but whatever.

Pounded out a prelimary card list for Student Wars: Internships… not that anyone really cares. Will have cards for the PSLC interns and introduce the PSLC faction… which will do something that I’m not quite sure of yet :-P

Pipe! Whee!

Oh, and PICKLES!!! AHHHHH!!
XD XD XD

And thanks to chrisamaphone… WTF WTF WTF…