Category Archives: Photo Stuff

Work, day 10

Posted on by

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 :)

More feelings?

Posted on by

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.

Final #3 done

Posted on by

The 312 final today actually wasn’t that bad. It was quite long, and the problems certainly made me think, but I’m fairly certain I came up with reasonable answers for all the problems, demonstrating that I actually knew the material. After all, that’s what really matters.

Got the grade for the final for 213. Did worse than I was expecting… 81%. Not terrible though, and I’ll still probably get my A, so I can’t really complain. Also got my final folio grade for photo. A on the folio, A- on the final assignment (self-defined project). I’m planning on scanning all the photos from each of my submitted assignments sometime this week, so you’ll probably see them soon. Probably going to start a new site section for those prints plus the various good photos I have.

Tonight was the Almost Midnight Breakfast. Lots of yummy food. Then was a cluster rave. OMG I love this camera.
While nice long exposures to get the blur of the raving were nice…

And ones with smaller apertures to let in less light and just get the glowsticks are better…

I much prefer this, which captures the scene as well as blurs the raving:


More rave pictars can be found at http://photos2.alanv.org. Please, leave comments on the pictures too. I love picture comments almost as much as I love journal comments. There’s a reason I went through the effort of writing a script for the photos instead of sticking them in a folder and turning on listing permissions… I like having comment capablity :-P

This song is bizarre. It’s a “Bring Me to Life” remix, done by a group called Pink Panther. Seems like something that would be good for raving though.

I’ve had way too much sugar lately. Between the free candy at CS finals and free cookies during finals week for CS majors and the free BBQs all around campus with burgers and tons of soda, I’ve probably had more sugar in the past 2 days than in the past 2 months combined. CS wants to kill its kids with sugar, I swear… XD

Oh yes, and I’m feeling better. Thank you to everyone who was worried about me and gave me huggles and generally made me feel loved. :D