Category Archives: PSLC

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.

Work, day 4

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So today was a shortened day at work because we had to come back to campus for an NSF site visit. Felt like I completely undid what I did yesterday… I don’t know… I now have two ways that potentially will work to solve this problem, but I don’t know if either will work (or even if either is practical). I need to do a ton of work tomorrow so I can be ready to code next week. Ahhh.

I think I can do it, I think I can do it.

:-\
Meh, I am like completely exhausted (mentally and physically). This has been the most mentally-demanding week I’ve ever had… it’s worse than school, because at least with those programming assignments, you have resources that guide you through the steps (your textbook, TAs, etc), and the problems are straightforward… once you understand the problem, you can relatively easily solve it.
Not so here.


Trees in front of Cyert Hall.
I don’t know… I really like the colors in this one. Composition kinda sucks, but meh. I like the picture, so sue me.
Should have played around with depth of field more. The background is too in-focus.

In other news, finally got around to tweaking the blog archives into a nicer format. Now there’s a single centralized archives page, from which you can easily access monthly posts as well as individual posts.

Work, day 3

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Meh, I guess I should update or something.


Exploded OSC!

Wheee
Diet coke and mentos! (Dialup warning)

Um… so yeah. Work is… um… work is going. 8 says I need to believe in myself more, so I won’t post anything negative. I’ll just say that my current idea on tackling this problem had better work, or I don’t really know what else to try. Meh. And I really hope believe that I can make it work. Meh.

In any case, I felt like crap after work yesterday because I’d been looking at the stuff for 2 days and had no idea what the hell I’m doing. Feeling a little better today, since I actually have a plan now. And, moreover, I think it’s a plan that I actually know how to implement. I just hope that my plan isn’t inherently flawed.

Damn you 8 for getting me hooked on GTO… Gaah. I want to watch more now.

Short update. Apologies. I’m always exhausted after coming home, and I need to try and get to bed earlier so I can wake up in the morning. Bleh. 9-5 jobs eat up your life.

Work, day 1

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Hm… well, first off, having to take the bus to and from work kinda sucks. I’m working at the Carnegie Learning HQ, which is downtown. I work from 9-5. There are lots of people who also have to go downtown to work from 9-5. Well, damn.
:-\
So yeah, it’s like 15-20 minutes each way, but whatever. It’s a really nice building, and I have my own cubicle.

As far as work goes, today I didn’t do much, but I really did try.
You know how I was so afraid of this job and that I wouldn’t be able to do it? Today really made me feel like that fear was justified.
Spent the first part of the day understanding exactly what it was I have to accomplish this summer, and got a schedule of things.
I understand what I have to do and what the code I write has to do. That part wasn’t hard at all. And we found a method library that, in theory, does exactly what I want.
Then I spent the rest of the day trying to understand how the hell to use the library. And I still don’t understand.
Gaaah.
Tomorrow I might look at it again and then look at other approaches. Dunno.
I really hope I don’t totally fail at this job… :-\

Also have a ton of paperwork I need to do for the job (and a bunch of meetings I need to put in my scheduler and such).
Gaah.
I feel so stressed and it’s only the first day. Just feel kinda lost, maybe. Like I really should know what I’m doing and how to go about it. Having to stress about busses doesn’t help either.
Kinda just want to curl up and cry :-P But meh, that’s okay.

Other PSLC interns living on this floor (the one in the middle is my roommate, Peter)

Um… as far as non-work stuff goes, things have been good. Really good, actually.
The past few nights have made me happy, for more reasons than superficial ones… and not the stupid kind of “OMG ECSTATIC YAY” happiness that I so often feel and that is fleeting… but a deeper kind of happy, where you just feel completely comfortable with yourself and who you are. The kind that isn’t so easy to get rid of (not even by my crappy day today) and that means a lot more to you than just “Oh hey, I’m happy right now.”
I think it’s been a long time since I’ve felt that way.
Thank you.</cryptic>

Oh yes, and 8 introduced me to GTO (the anime). I think I’m addicted now.
Damn you. More stuff to distract me when I’m not working.

People should play Student Wars! No one has poked me to teach them how to play yet. I have 5 decks here sitting on my desk. Someone poke me!

I’m exhausted (probably should’ve gone to bed before midnight, given that I had to wake up at 7:30). Maybe I should go buy some dinner and take a nap.

Internship

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Well, I guess someone does like me after all :D
I got the PSLC internship/research thing I applied for. I’ll be working here (in Pittsburgh/around CMU) this summer on “Automated Understanding of Algebra Word Problems,” which sounds amazing. The best part is meals and housing (and plane tickets to/from Pittsburgh) are provided… and I get a rather modest stipend for my work… as in more than I made all last summer, and this is much more interesting work.

So yeah, between that and the website I’m working on for the outreach center, I’m pretty much set work-wise.

Oh yeah, I also (finally) got my 312 elaborator working. I was just misinterpreting the rules for type matching. I was reading the left triangle as “the term on the right evaluates/checks to the left,” when it’s exactly the opposite (the list of types on the right is what the function needs to return). Once Keith explained that to me, it all made sense was was quite easy to write. Whee.
Blah, I always get hung up on notation.

Wheeee! So happy!