I didn't get myself together fast enough after our IM softball game tonight, so now I'm stuck in my office waiting for some storms to pass. The trend today seems to be that it starts raining right when I want to eat: we had a previous storm around 1:30, right when I got up to go to the trucks for lunch, so I had to settle for Newell-Simon atrium food instead. Now it seems that I won't be able to get home and make dinner until at least 9:00.
Anyway, another very good weekend to report! Philip and Chris are birthday partners (May 26 and May 27), so they arranged a double-sided programme of celebratory group activities that nicely filled in my Saturday and Sunday. First a cocktail party at Philip's and William's on Saturday night, and then a "Field Day" on Sunday at Allegheny Commons Park, which turned out to be followed by dinner.
( Saturday: Cocktail party and fun party games )
( Sunday: Field Day sporting in the park... )
( ... followed by dinner )
( Monday: Listless heat death )
The radar disagrees, but it looks like it's clearing up outside, so I think I'll post all this and see about getting home and airing out the apartment. After all this rain, it should be much cooler outside.
Except for one fantastic hour in the gym, today was a very unsatisfying day.
Côté research, the supercomputer our group has access to ("Trestles") went down twice late last night, taking my jobs with it both times. Some sort of instability seemed to persist into today. I once got my longest job successfully running again, but then it threw some kind of disk error and crashed. When I started it over again, it languished in the queue for like six hours and just finally started running now. Since Trestles's file system is Lustre, I've been paranoid about running my smaller jobs because they create many files per directory, something that Lustre usually responds to by — you guessed it — crashing. I'll be happy and lucky if I can get them through one at a time, apparently. So overall my work is almost exactly where it was 24 hours ago, which is great when there's a conference deadline in a week and a half and the entire way Trestles stores files is about to be ruined changed by the computer's maintainers.
I still spent all morning prodding at jobs, gzipping files, waiting for things to start or finish or crash, etc., so it was nearly 2:00 before I finally decided to just leave for campus. That led to the beautiful gym hour, as previously mentioned, but it also pushed eventual "lunch" back to 4:30. (I usually don't feel like eating when I'm frustrated, and then the best food option I could come up with mid-afternoon was a walk to Chipotle in Oakland.) Of course I wasn't interested in dinner when I came home at 7; neither was Alan, so we just sort of skipped it. Later I had a leftover ice cream bar that made my stomach hurt for two hours. So the culinary arts were also sort of a wash-out today.
( WARNING: Internet )
Sorry for not posting anything in... yipes, two weeks, but I had an excellent weekend! Good summer weather and good summer (meaning active) activities to go with it.
( Saturday: Kayaking and ITG )
( Sunday: More ITG! )
As good as the weekend was, I hope we can get ourselves in gear for real hikes sometime soon. Owen had parked up in Friendship yesterday in order to avoid the graduation insanity around CMU, so our "urban hike" turned out to be my regular daily walk to campus and back. This is not the best way to warm up for our annual West Virginia walk (actually likely to be from Ohio back to Pittsburgh this year) or the "Königs-Pittsburgh Bridge Problem" hike (cross every walkable trans-river bridge with an endpoint in the city) that I really want to do this summer. But we shall see.
I am still trying to put an end to this terrifying semester so I can get "real" work done again, but this weekend was a break for going outside and having fun! Yesterday I tossed around a frisbee and played whiffleball with Philip in Mellon Park. Today was the Pittsburgh Marathon, which I contributed to by taking about 280 photos of. (Take that, filler-gap constructions!) It featured an enormous number of very fit-looking people, so I was kind of ashamed about being so running-lazy this year. By contrast, this afternoon I only took a seven-mile urban hike with Alan and Owen. But these events are still a reasonably good setup for the third of Jess's "seven things to write about" list...
( Today's Topic: Physical fitness )
Now that the Carnival posts are over, I want to get back to the list of seven things that Jess asked me to write about. I assume no real ordering was implied in the original list, and tonight I was trying to go through some old photos to select ones that deserve printing, so I think I'll skip ahead a bit and take care of the fifth item.
( Today's Topic: Photography )
I was going to mention in that last text dump that I ran in the Random Distance Run on Friday afternoon, but then I thought it would be long enough of a description to merit its own post.
The Random Distance Run is a neat CS-style race around the track that happens here every year. At the start, someone rolls a giant die and everyone has to run the number of laps that comes up. When that's almost over, a second die gets rolled and the runners add to the race the additional number of laps shown on that one. Despite being certainly capable of running one half to three miles, this year was the first time I ever signed up. Previously I had balked because the registration fee ($10) seemed high for what the race is, and the T-shirts used to be pretty ugly. This year I hadn't spent any money on the Great Race, a triathlon, or a half-marathon, and Lea was making the shirts, so I went for it.
I suppose that this year's race should be granted some leeway — the rolls were 1 and 2, in that order — but my goodness was that one of the most ambivalently organized events I've ever been in. The finish line wasn't marked, to begin with, because the organizers didn't have time in an 0.75-mile race to set it up properly, so I just kind of stopped around where other people were stopping. After everyone had come in, the organizers called for order and said something about taking your stick over to your spotter, who would record your finishing order. This was kind of mystifying. Apparently no organizer ever decided to tell the runners that they were supposed to grab a sequentially numbered popsicle stick from someone special at the finish line so that the order of finishers would be known. Some percentage of the runners had one — including bblum, who had run the race in previous years — so I assumed that Klipper finished immediately behind him and I finished immediately behind Klipper, and we all went to have ourselves registered as 19a, 19b, and 19c. The race T-shirts finally arrived at the Random Distance Run TG some indeterminate period later, so I grabbed mine and went home.
But I still didn't see how the mere order of finishers would be mapped to any sort of time. Klipper had used a watch during his run, which said he finished in 4:45, so I decided I had probably run three fourths of a mile in about 4:46. Pretty good, since that would give six minutes plus a bit for a full mile, and my lowest recorded mile time is 6:26. But then I went to the race website and saw that I had been assigned the impossibly precise time of 4:31.40 — exactly 1.37 seconds behind Klipper and 2.68 behind Ben — and I have no idea how all that was inferred from "19a, 19b, 19c." If there was a sub-second-accurate video camera or something at the finish line, why have all the monkey business with the popsicle sticks?
Not, you know, that you can trust the times anyway, because the little top-three listing at the top of the results page puts Chris at 4:52.14, while in the complete table of times she's assigned a 5:02.46.
So, yeah... I ran some approximate distance in some approximate time, as did all the people I ran with, and the performance was probably pretty decent, but we will probably never know for sure what it was! Go us?
Well, kids, there was a Carnival, like there usually is this time of year. Since I've been around CMU practically forever at this point, I knew quite a lot of alumni who came back for the weekend, and that was pretty fun. In particular, we had a grand reunion of the old Fairfax group: including significant others, this is now Dan, Marina, Keith, Tim, Kayleigh, Ian, Mars, Dan M., and al-Tim, plus Alan and me. I would say that our time was spent primarily in the old Fairfax activity of board games (fueled by Tim's enormous collection partially brought from Connecticut by car), secondarily in pursuit of food, and tertiarily in actual Carnvial activities.
Thursday began the major gaming activities, once Tim and Kayleigh got here. Friday was the typical Carnival day for me, involving Buggy in the morning with free breakfast at the alumni tent, the campus barbecue for lunch, and a bit of Mobot spectating in the early afternoon. The weather was sunny and about 25°C, and I spent from 9 a.m. to about 1:30 p.m. outside, so I got a bit sunburnt. On Saturday it was much colder and raining, so we mostly stayed inside except for a trip to campus for the SCS alumni reception and some other things people wanted to stop by at. Then we all drove a bunch of cars over to Keith's house in Ross Township and had games and dinner over there. Sunday was colder still, so we spent the rather lackluster day over here playing games as various people left.
So all in all a very nice time. Aside from all those people above, I also saw Kempy and some other Cohort people, Nikunja and Kristen from The Tartan, edanaher and a few other old KGB people, and a surprise mrwright who ran into me in the food line at the SCS thing. The consensus was that we hadn't seen each other in at least three years, since he said that was when he started shaving and the lack of beard seemed new to me.
Of course, a fun Carnival means a harder post-Carnival recovery. I came out of Sunday four to six hours short of sleep, which I was really hoping to make up Monday morning, but then phones started ringing at 8 a.m. and that hope vanished. I still haven't actually caught up yet: yesterday evening was filled with a bunch of small-task frustration, plus enough FLAC grading that I went to bed at 12:40 with it unfinished and had to wake up at 7:00 today in order to be done before my Safaba meeting. The collapse is probably shortly upon us, and if anyone makes a noise in this apartment before 10 a.m. tomorrow I will probably throw either a heavy book or a pile of student homework at you.
Unless you count filling in for Daniel as SciTech editor at The Tartan this weekend, no major adventures have befallen me since the airport bike trip a week and a half ago. I still haven't cleaned my bike off or de- and re-greased the chain after riding 15 miles on gravel — which is probably bad since I've been using to bike to get to and from campus almost every day since, but it at least means I have no frustrating bike-maintenance disaster stories to report.
I do, however, have a very nice LiveJournal meme from Jess, in which I commented on one of her journal posts and received a list of seven things she wanted me personally to write about. I always like reader feedback to begin with, and this set is even more fun because some of the topics aren't things I would have otherwise thought to write about. To not keep everyone in suspense while I chug my way through them (which may take some time, given that this is about to be Carnival week and a trillion friends are visiting), the complete set of topics is: the 1950s, romantic relationships, French ("encouraged to be written in the appropriate language"), print journalism, photography, Pittsburgh, and physical fitness.
( Today's Topic: The 1950s )
Things went rather better last week in most respects, capped off yesterday by a first-rate bike trip to the airport and back. I joined this crazy adventure at the last minute — that is, at 11:15 a.m. for a planned 12:30 p.m. start — without actually expecting I could (or would want to) make it the whole way, but it turns out I'm in much better biking shape than I thought. And, you know, the ride and company themselves were fantastic. The 63.5-mile trip enters the annals as the fourth farthest I've ever biked in a day, and it came about in this way:
( WARNING: Very long post! Background )
( Starting off: To the North Side )
( California Avenue and the McKees Rocks Bridge )
( Neville Island )
( The Montour Trail )
( Airport connector )
( At the airport! )
( A very fast return descent )
( McKees Rocks in the dark )
( Haunting moment in Brighton Heights )
( The North Side Trail )
( Post-ride dinner at Brillobox )
Well, Mondays are certainly living up to their stereotypical reputation for being awful recently. Today was not quite as awful as last week, but it was still certainly not a good day.
I woke up to find trouble with the supercomputer I'm getting my NIST MT system ready on, which may be related to why the grammar scoring is taking four five days instead of the two I'd expected and hoped for. That, with other delays, means I'm something like eight days behind my planned schedule, a deficit I probably won't be able to make up by Friday, when the output is due. So there's a fair chance that I'll have nothing to show for this semester except a bunch of systems that don't work as well as they're supposed to and that didn't turn into evaluation submissions or papers like my thesis proposal said they would.
At lunchtime, I was taking a pizza out of the toaster oven when the wire rack fell out of its holder and spilled greasy pizza cheese all over the oven door. My instinct was to grab the rack with my left hand as it fell, which meant that I didn't process that it was still 450°F until a fraction of a second too late. And then that fact was quite well registered, yes! Of course, I needn't have bothered with it, since pizza had also fallen off the back of the rack while the thing was cooking, so there was greasy pizza cheese spilled all over the bottom of the toaster oven anyway. I wasn't so interested in eating the remnants after I got my burn cooled down, but I had a go at it anyway and then went away to campus just in time for my office hours.
No gym in the morning, so I tried grading FLAC exams in my office after dinner before going to the gym at 8:30. Having a burnt middle finger makes gripping weights just awkward enough to be annoying — though it doesn't have to be weights, necessarily. All day I was finding out how useful the middle finger of my left hand is, since I was getting little feeling reminders every time I tried to do anything tactile with it. Whatever the cause, my workout wasn't anything spectacular, and I got home at 10:15 p.m. with three exam problems left to grade, 10 exam solutions to double-check and proofread, two homework problems to invent, and that NIST grammar scoring that hopefully was going to finish soon (please!) and require my attention as well.
Before I could do anything on all that work, I instead managed to make Alan upset with me, first by not eating or wanting to eat all the nice food he'd made for me, and second by answering his questions about three competing sets of stressfully up-in-the-air weekend plans with short and snippy answers because I was already annoyed with myself. That was enough that he's not talking to me and went straight to bed, so now I feel even worse about it.
In work-land, something's wrong with AFS such that writes to our FLAC shared directory take about 60 seconds each, and some files I can't save at all. I tried saving a proofread copy of the next homework, but I ended up just killing off the terminal an hour later when the save was still frozen. Still later, when I got an ls to complete on the directory, I saw that the homework file had disappeared altogether... and the backup copy, without any of my edits, also freezes when I try to update and save it.
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