Well, home again after a very nice — what was that? — 16 days in San Francisco. I think the only reason that it doesn't feel completely weird to be back in Pittsburgh yet is because I came back on an overnight flight via Washington, D.C., and getting only two hours of sleep is enough to throw me off even without traveling. I cannot, for example, make up my mind so far as to whether today is Tuesday or Wednesday: when I first got home, checked my e-mail, and saw the usual reminder for the Wednesday 12:15 GALE conference call, I thought "Oops, I guess I'm missing it right about now, eh?" Then, an hour later in the cluster, I decided I was silly for getting ahead by a day when the call was actually tomorrow, and since then I've seen the day of the week on computer terminals enough to re-convince me that I had it right the first time! I'm hoping this wears off tomorrow with a full night's sleep on an actual bed again.
Only one reasonably interesting incident on the trip home. We were taking off from San Francisco at 11:22 p.m. and arriving in Washington at 7:30 a.m. Eastern time (i.e. effective 4:30), so most of the passengers on the plane decided to go to sleep even before the usual drinks were served. I had a cranberry juice and read a bit of a book of F. Scott Fitzgerald stories I had, and then at a certain point I shut off my light, pulled the window cover down, and put my seat back some amount so I could try to sleep. From behind me suddenly came a querulous voice: "You really can't go all the way back. You're squooshing us back here." Upon inspection, the complaint belonged to an older-middle-aged lady, ridiculously done up (you will remember this is at night) in large plastic-rimmed sunglasses and what looked like a sunhat. Further, she wasn't even sitting directly behind me — I had seat 22A, and this apparition was sitting in 23B. So even if I was squooshing anyone, it couldn't have been her. I assumed she was speaking for the guy actually sitting behind me, who looked like he could be her husband but who was apparently asleep. I decided to compromise: since I'd pushed my seat back maybe two thirds or three fourths of the distance it would go, I pulled it back to about a third. Sunglasses lady just made a pushing-away motion with her hand and shook her head, so I pulled the seat back up to full upright and spent the next two hours or so trying to sleep that way. Scant success. A person more brave and more ready-tongued than me would have come up with a snappy riposte that, while certainly not rude, would have firmly expressed that her 14 inches of legroom were safe from any supposed marauding 20-somethings in the row ahead, and that all this particular 20-something wanted to do was not sleep bolt upright in a chair. I wish that person had been sitting in 22A, or at least 22B and had taken an interest in the proceedings of his or her neighbor.
In Washington I narrowly missed (by my own doing) a chance to get what turned out to be a free round-trip flight on United that could even be transferred to another person. The screen at the gate to Pittsburgh said they were looking for volunteers to change to a later flight, but that later flight was at something like 12:55 p.m. instead of my programmed 8:55 a.m. Now free flights are always good, especially for someone who makes little money and has need to fly a lot, but I didn't particularly want to be stuck in Dulles airport for six hours with only half an F. Scott Fitzgerald and no free Internet. There were also plans to meet Ben on campus at 1:30 for a return to our usual weightlifting. I decided to get some cheap breakfast at a suitable spot while I thought it over a bit. Coming back, I found two volunteers already in the process of changing their tickets, which was when I found out what the prize was, and apparently they didn't need any more after that because there was no further announcement. Oh well... maybe next time.
From tomorrow we are back to something like routine for about six and a half weeks, and then it's time for MT Summit and (very quickly after that) France. This weekend I'm going backpacking with Eric and Paul in West Virginia, though, so I only have a few days of boring old work before running off for something else again.
Activities for today: I joined Hostelling International with a one-year membership for $28. It seems like it should actually pay off — HI hostels in France and Switzerland require you to be a member in order to stay there, and Canadian HI hostels give you a discount. This is obviously relevant to my interests for spending the fall in France (and traveling as much as a small budget will allow on the weekends), plus the MT Summit conference in Ottawa next month is taking place about two blocks from an HI hostel, and this gives me more ammunition to argue that I should go (if I need to argue) since I have a new way to keep costs down. I think I leave for France in about seven or eight weeks: I booked my tickets a few days ago, and the Jour J is Thursday, Sept. 3.
Outside of my computer, I have understood about 25 percent of what's happened in my world for the last 50 hours. I've nominally learned 12 new Thai words, not from picking them out in conversation but by studying them in a little book when I have nothing else to do, but compared to the number of words I've heard go by it's an astronomically small percentage. I should be seizing this opportunity to test out what I can say, but I always feel too nervous and have thus just spend two days feeling very isolated instead. I am beginning to revolt by switching to French when talking to Alan, which at least makes me feel a little more competent in some linguistic arena.
I had an excellent urban hike, I guess I'd call it, yesterday afternoon. The goal was to visit Twin Peaks, which Jeff and Alan had said was a really great view, and based on where the place is I decided the secondary goal would be to walk the entire length of Market Street. It's only about 4.5 miles, but it feels rather longer than that, and you go through quite a cross-section of the city. The last mile or so (after Castro), when you're starting to wind up the hill to Twin Peaks, gives a pretty good indication of what Pittsburgh would look like if land values there were higher — a lot of stacked-up-looking apartment buildings with huge windows facing off the side of the hill. The view, I have to say, is well worth it.
Completely without premeditation, I happened to fulfill one of my life's goals (I guess this would be a tertiary goal of the walk now?) somewhere in the vicinity of Market and Grand View when a British person thought I was British too! It happened like this: I was walking along thinking to myself, as sometimes happens, in a British accent just for fun, trying to work out the sounds and get the vocal pitch down into my own register instead of in this fake high-up thing I somehow come up with when I'm trying to do the accent. A guy appeared walking along the sidewalk in the opposite direction from me, decked out with frame pack and everything as if he'd just come off the AT and was heading into the town post office to check General Delivery. He asked me "Could I use your telephone to call my friend?" — and the combination of his accent (which I don't think I consciously processed until later) with the thoughts that had been running through my head for the previous half-hour produced "Oh, I haven't got one with me" with all the right vowel changes just subtly enough to make it sound natural. The response: "Are you English?" and the further information that the guy I was talking to was himself from Leeds, although just back from India and looking for a friend's house "near Twin Peaks" whose address he didn't remember.
I suppose, in some roundabout, twisted way, that I have to thank Greenpeace for the encounter. They were all over the streets, you see. I first stopped at a farmers' market near Civic Center and got snagged by a guy called Alex from Environment California. He sounded like he'd never got more than two words into his pitch before, and I'm not a very assertive cutter-offer of speech except when I fail, so he got quite a bit into it with me until I was able to slowly get at the non-monetary option of filling out a card in support of their initiatives. (But I didn't want them to start sending me the world's supply of junk mail, so I only wrote in "Greg H., Pittsburgh, PA.") Anyway, I got away eventually and walked on several more blocks until I was corralled by a guy from Greenpeace standing on another corner. This guy followed me for half a block trying to get me to make "even" a 50¢-a-day commitment before I finally was able to derail the nagging by saying I'll look at their website and see what I can do later. (Argh, why can't these people just collect petition signatures or something instead of always wanting addresses and money?) Well, after the second encounter I kept a sharp eye out for further people in blue shirts and clipboards and narrowly escaped one more at the next block. After that I decided that the next solicitor was going to get about 30 seconds of a fake British accent and plausible story to match ("Erm, actually, I've already signed on back home... the Warwickshire chapter."), and that was what got me set off again thinking in a British accent before I met the guy from Leeds.
Twin Peaks, to get back to the actual point here, is maybe only 1000 feet above sea level, but from a certain angle it's the first thing to block the wind in a quarter of the planet, so the moving air up there is, uh, rather strong. Not gusty, but just a very constant hard-blowing wind. I had to set my camera's shutter speed to 1/1250 in order to feel confident that the lens wouldn't be shaking too much during exposure time. I also managed to lean pretty far backwards, into the wind, before feeling like I was actually going to have a chance at falling. There are in fact two peaks, looking roughly the same, above a little figure-8 roadway that goes around from the viewing area just below the actual tops. I went up to both peaks: from the road it's only about a 100-foot climb or so, so some other people were doing it too and one of them took a picture of me standing in front of the city with my hair all crazy. It may appear on the Internet soon after I've had a chance to go through the shots on my camera.
This three-day Fourth of July weekend had three very active days in it. I suppose it doesn't hurt that almost everyone in the world is either living in the Bay Area permanently, for the summer, or for some visiting purpose just now.
( Urban hike )
( Fourth of July )
( Trampolines! )
( Giant lunch )
Today is recovery day, which means that so far I've read through a bunch of CMU Bash and checked up with Live Journal, Facebook, my e-mail, and the news. At some point I should get out and walk around a bit, but that might not be until later. The sun looks pretty strong just now and my nose is already peeling from the weekend.
Linguistic digression! I haven't had one in a while, and although writing about listening to air traffic control between Denver and San Francisco is fun, it's less exciting from a discovery point of view because it doesn't take very long before you figure out how the whole system works just by listening in. I came across a Thai word two night ago, on the other hand, that is pretty much impenetrable without expert help. As Bill Nye says, "consider the following."
( Cut for HTML escape sequences displaying Thai characters, which makes Dan's display sad. )
Very busy week last week. Sunday was the post-hike recovery day. I sat at home except for a quick 20-minute walk to Wean and back, and we had some people over for dinner and cards. Nertz is on a huge resurgence in our house: I think we are averaging about four times a week, and Greta and I are both self-declared Nertz addicts. It's been keeping me from doing as much work as I should in the evenings, but it's great fun to actually be doing something besides staring at my monitor and staying either on campus or holed up in my room. During the days, one of my main tasks was to get everything in order for my French visa application, which I made in Washington, D.C. last Friday morning.
Actually getting to the point where I could get there was... somewhat annoying. I hauled my car in to the mechanic's a week in advance, since I needed an oil change and state inspection anyway and had also sprouted a pretty bad coolant leak when I drove home to see my parents for Easter. The mechanic had it in all day, and then around 4:30 called to say that I have a list of problems with this car about as long as my arm, using 10-point font for the list. The short-term effect is that I had to pay $72 for a rental car (plus gas and tolls) to go to my visa appointment, and the long-term effect is that I'll probably just ditch the car instead of spending what looks like a four-digit sum to repair it. Even though I've been (even in this journal) a somewhat long-standing anti-car advocate, the thought of being without one has yet to completely sit well with me. I think the main problem is that I'm not convinced that always having to rent a car (and buy insurance for it from the rental company) is going to come out any cheaper on a yearly basis. Sure it will if I only need a car five days a year to see my parents or go camping, but I think in the general case it's more complicated than that. Well, anyway, I picked up an economy-class Hyundai Accent from that new little Hertz place at Baum and Negley Thursday afternoon and duly arrived that evening at the town in Virginia named after Messrs. Dunn and Loring, where I was staying with Car.
Friday morning into the city in 30-degree heat (or much more, if you believe one of those bank thermometers I saw at Dupont Circle, which said 98 Fahrenheit). I had a one-mile walk from Car's to the metro stop, and then a two-mile walk from where I left the metro to the French embassy, which would normally be all imposing with gates and guards and such if the stuff inside didn't look like it was built in the '70s. You have to give up your driver's license at the gate, at which point they issue you with a sort of pass for the area you're going to inside. The visa area looks a lot like a DMV, except the administration people are behind those horrible glass walls with fist-sized screens in them, through which of course you hear almost nothing. I was called up to the windows three different times during the processing, and I approached two of them in French — perhaps, in retrospect, a bad idea because of the aforementioned sound-blocking glass walls. It was kind of hard to make out exactly what was happening, and then I was a bit flustered and out of practice too and so didn't respond in quite the nice fluid way I'd planned. At least I got my visa in about 95 minutes, even though it's not for a long enough duration and I'll have to get a carte de séjour from the Grenoble préfecture once I get there.
From about noon until 10:30 p.m. I roamed wild in the city. First I walked through Georgetown and some other places to meet Sharon at Dupont Circle. We had lunch and then browsed through a couple of bookstores and a cupcake shop, then walked around down by the White House and the Farragut station until a further refreshment stop at a Potbelly's, and then we got caught in a crazy half-hour downpour complete with hail, which we watched (and experienced!) from an awning over a revolving door to a closed restaurant at the corner of 19th and L Streets. After the flood, we met up with Sarah (from high school — I think it's been maybe four years since I saw her last?). She and I had dinner at a Thai place back up past Dupont Circle, then walked around a bit until I took the train back to Car's. So kind of a late night and a long day overall.
I didn't bring a travel alarm with me, thinking that I'd just use my cell phone, but I didn't expect that my cell phone was going to hit low battery on Friday and then start beeping periodically overnight. I knew it was absolutely imperative to be on the road by 7 a.m. since the rental car was due in Pittsburgh before noon, but every time the phone beeped I was so afraid that it was going to shut itself off that I woke up and checked it to make sure it was still on. So I think I got about an hour of sleep that night; a pit stop on the PA Turnpike was strongly indicated so I could get some tea and not drive off the road. Total time driving back was still only four hours and 23 minutes, though, so I did pretty all right.
Now I am spending the next two weeks in San Francisco, but the details of that trip will have to be in a separate post.
Well, we have done it again. With some minor updates to our 2007 route, and a major change from the original 2006 on-road route, the Walking to West Virginia Committee reports its second success with a 39.5-mile hike from CMU to just near the town of Colliers, W.Va. It was a pretty interesting weekend. We had a crew of seven walkers (Rebecca, Eight, William, Chris, me, Evan, and freshman Alex) set to go for Saturday morning, and Kempy and Greta made us a huge pasta dinner Friday night that concluded with a four-layer chocolate cake of such massive proportions that the 10 people at the table combined ate less than half of it. More heavy rain was predicted for the next day, though, so we were wondering if it would have been better to postpone the hike for a day. In the end, I decided to wake up at 4 a.m., check the radar, then call around to get everyone else up if we decided to still go for it.
We decided to still go for it, and so around 5:00 a.m. a party of four (Rebecca, Eight, Evan, and me) left the house and headed to the UC to meet up with the others coming in from Squirrel Hill. This is where we discovered that the universe sometimes has a sense of humor: about 15 seconds out of the house, we got a few light sprinkles. "It is now raining," I said, starting to fish in my backpack for my little umbrella. Another few seconds after that and we were in the middle of a regular monsoon, which of course cut power to the whole block. We eventually arrived at the UC quite soaked, even after dodging through Resnik and West Wing on the way. Rebecca and Eight pulled the plug on their trips right then, and at 5:30 a reduced set of five left campus and headed towards downtown. The plan had been to cross the Birmingham Bridge during sunrise, but we were a half-hour late in leaving and the sky was cloudy anyway, so we missed it. There was some more rain heading down Fifth Avenue, and then a bit more around Mile 13, but that was it. The rest of the day turned partly sunny and quite warm — too warm, I thought: we easily hit the predicted high of 28 C for the day.
I didn't take any timing information down on the way, mostly (I suppose) because in making the trip for the third time I wasn't pulling out my map very frequently. Chris and I had also planned to take voice notes, but I discovered almost right away that my MP3 player's battery was dead. We made decent time to Oakdale, where we stopped again at the Oakdale Diner for lunch. (I avoided the fish and pink lemonate this time; we all had hamburgers and water except for Chris, who had soup and an egg salad sandwich.) Resumed walking again after a nice break. After Midway, in what I keep thinking of as the "Sound of Music" hills, William had increasinly painful foot problems, which led to him and Chris dropping out at Bulger, around Mile 28. Kempy and Greta rescued them in the car, and then Evan, Alex, and I kept going. I was the slow one. After a very fast-paced zip into Burgettstown, I was really really glad to sit down in front of the grocery store (like last year) and drink a liter of Gatorade. We also went over to the old ice cream stand, the scene of our abortive rescue in 2006, but we found it had been replaced by a sort of sign company. Instead we settled for a box of four drumsticks from the grocery store, which we ate on our way out of town.
The new part of this year's route was the Panhandle Trail past Burgettstown — in 2007, the "official" trail still stopped two miles short of the town, and we had continued on a rough dirt-bike trail. Now the dirt-bike part's been brought up to the better standard for the Panhandle Trail, which now looks like it goes about six miles into West Virginia. We crossed the border at 10:12 p.m. on the trail after a total trip time of 16 hours and 45 minutes; there's a little obelisk marker about four feet high marking the spot, with a picnic table on the West Virginia side that we thought would be more fun if it were straddling the line. (Imagine a picnic: —"Could you pass the cheese?" —"I don't know... that's interstate commerce now. We'll have to see about putting a tax on it.") We had arranged to meet Ross in a parking area that, on the trail's billboard maps, should have been at the intersection of the trail with Harmon Creek Road. We were just getting there (and realizing that there was no parking lot!) when Ross called: due to malfunctioning high-beams, he'd hit a big pothole on his way down from Route 22, blown a tire, and was stuck on the side of the road a few miles north of us. We worked out our relative positions and decided to start walking towards him, since he expected a fairly long repair. Thus we set out westward for the town — well, "unincorporated place" — of Colliers, which Ross was a bit north of.
I didn't mind walking on the road so much; there were fewer mosquitos and more things to distract me from looking up at the stars and missing someone, although I bet Even regretted the lack of synchonized fireflies. We were just coming into Colliers when Ross called again to say that someone had stopped and helped him fix the tire, so he was underway again and would meet us shortly. He did, but by then I was too tired to think about checking the time. I kind of collapsed into the front seat of the car and started directing Ross back to Pittsburgh. He wanted to avoid freeways with the spare tire, so we crawled in reverse along our 2006 walking route. It was interesting to see again all the places we've missed by taking the trail these last two times, but I was having lots of trouble staying awake and alert, despite the fact that I never fall asleep in cars. I think it took us about two hours to get home; at 1 a.m. I went to bed and slept kind of fitfully for the next eight and a half hours.
FLOOD! What started as a fantastic thunderstorm around 6:00 this evening turned into an out-and-out deluge that I think beats the time I drove my car through a foot of water in Valley View during the summer of 2003. At first, most of us at home had the same idea: curl up on a couch downstairs with a book and listen to the pouring rain through the open windows. Well, then the thunder and lightning increased quite a lot, and when Greta reported hail (pea-sized) from the front door, I noticed that the wind was whipping up as well and decided to check the windows. We were getting rain in on all three sides. After the windows were closed, I looked out back and saw that 60 percent of the backyard was underwater, which made me worry for our cellar-style doors that face that way. I also remembered the "fun" we had with our basement drain backing up and overflowing last spring, so I went down there on the double, you might say, to have a look around. The drain was draining nicely (I could hear it), but there was a thin trail of water on the floor to it coming from the driveway-facing wall. Further investigation with my camping flashlight found this to have two causes: one, that one of our glass-block windows was leaking (from tons and tons of water pouring into its pit below driveway level, no doubt), and two, that there was water dripping through the basement ceiling apparently from the first floor. Investigating this led to the discovery that the living room window was leaking around the bottom of the air conditioner and dripping onto the floor. Four kitchen towels, my blue bucket, and the moving of three boxes in the basement seemed to (at least temporarily) take care of the issues, though.
It may have been about that time that Elly reported that people on Twitter were reporting feet of water at the intersection of Forbes and Murray. I decided I wanted to go exploring, and Kempy and Eight decided they wanted to come too. I put on my bathing suit and a synthetic shirt, grabbed an umbrella for comedic effect, took off my socks and replaced them with my backpacking sandals, and bounded outside into the mess. Water was cascading down our street in two streams next to either curb, but the real surprise awaited us down a bit at Forbes — to wit: a car, marooned just east of the intersection with Margaret Morrison, in about two feet of water; two more backed up on Maggie Mo Street itself, unable to turn; a police car blocking downhill traffic on Forbes; and the intersection completely flooded up to several houses away from the junction. We plunged ahead. I thought the police car would tell us not to walk through the water, but we were unassaulted. At the deepest point, the mailbox in front of the Frame right at the intersection, the water was at least halfway between my knees and my waist, and the bottom of this impromptu lake seemed to be composed more of stones and small rocks than of the expected sidewalk and street. Whoever has the basement apartment in Woodlawn had about three feet of water pooled up against their door.
Our next port of call was Gesling Stadium, flooded to a minimum depth of an inch across its entire expanse and to a maximum of about three inches in certain parts. (The IM fields fared much worse, but we avoided them.) Then the UC turnaround, again uniformly flooded to three or four inches, or about even with the surrounding curbs. A nice stream of water came across the Cut and cascaded down the stairs near the sidewalk at Morewood. The AEPi fire alarm was going off, but otherwise that intersection was in better shape than I was expecting — so was the low area between the roads and Morewood E Tower. We next headed to the cut-through at the back of the Morewood parking lot by WQED... flooded, certainly, but not much more than usually happens during any moderate rain. Eight wanted to see Newell-Simon, and Kempy wanted to see Craig Street, so we headed out of the parking lot that way. Forbes near Hamburg and across the bridge was relatively dry, but we found what looked like 12 to 18 inches of dirty, foul-smelling water in the west stairwell on Newell-Simon B level. A lot of the lights on the third and fourth floors were also out. I enthusiastically led the way to Architect's Leap, remembering what happened there in August 2007 when Alan and I were on our way to Toronto, but tonight we were disappointed: perfectly dry. The only Wean-based flooding seemed to be the piazza or walkway between there and Porter, which contained a few inches of water and was effectively keeping those weak in heart (or low in shoe) from entering or leaving the main Wean lobby.
Margaret Morrison Street overall served as a sort of collector for water pouring off the Hill, but it did its job pretty competently. The steps up to McGill and Boss had turned into a waterfall at least twice as powerful as the fountain on the Mather Quad back at Case. We crossed back through the Maggie Mo lake again, this time noting a pretty darn powerful current in the water pouring down Forbes. The police car, parked crossways across the road, was throwing up a pretty good wave on its uphill side; on the downhill side, water was gushing out of the middle of the rear tire just below the hubcap. When we stood still in the middle of the stream, it looked like we were water skiing.
Eight decided he'd had enough, but Kempy and I decided to investigate Elly's report of water up in Squirrel Hill proper. Forbes going up the hill was certainly a mess. It didn't take long to discover that all the stones, dirt, and rocks at the bottom of the hill were all coming from the construction going on between about Plainfield and Schenley Drive. At most of the intersections, water had dislodged the metal road plates on the north-ish side of the street, ripping up large chunks of asphalt and creating gashes in the roadway that may have been a foot or two deep. (Hard to say with water swirling around everywhere.) Kempy found a particularly long chunk of road that had been separated and pushed up to the surface like a surfboard. When she stood on it, it dropped a few inches and completed the surfing effect quite nicely before popping up again after she got off. Probably three dozen cars (and at least one bus) went down the hill while we were going up — they all ignored our large hand and arm gestures trying to get them to turn around. Of course, they all just had to make a U-turn and come back up anyway once they hit the bottom.
Past Murdoch things looked pretty normal. We could see as far as Wightman, and it looked like cars were passing through the intersection there in all four directions without mishap, so we turned around and headed back home again. Coming from Squirrel Hill, it was easy to believe that everything was fine — minimal water on the road until after the curve at Schenley Drive, and even 20 minutes after our trip up it seemed that the flow rate was majorly diminished. (Jack, passing down the road in his car less than two hours later, reported no problems even as far as Maggie Mo Street, which he said was filled with stones and rocks but was otherwise dry.)
Kempy and I got back just before 9:00. An official campus e-mail timestamped 9:11 warned of "flooding [...] in the basement and on the first floors of several campus buildings, including the Physical Plant Building, Baker Hall, Mellon Institute, Newell-Simon Hall and Margaret Morrison Carnegie Hall." So somehow Wean escaped the usual difficulties, but it looks like a lot of places weren't so lucky. Other reports: Jack said that water in the baseball fields here his house on Wightman was up to Rich's waist (and he's several inches taller than me), and that a car had bottomed out coming up the hill on Murray near Beacon. On the other hand, Edmund said from Bloomfield that the ground there was completely dry!
Mediocre day today. I have been trying to work out how I am going to get to Washington, D.C. for my appointment with the French consulate next Friday morning, since in order to get a scientific visa for my internship in September I have to make an in-person appearance with a bunch of forms. Among the usual public transportation alternatives, Greyhound is predictably the cheapest ($74), but it's a seven-hour trip each way (instead of the four and a half or five I think I can drive it in). The train is right out ($130s — I left the exact number at my desk), both in terms of price and in departure times, and flying would be over $200. Alon suggested I rent a car, which is what he always does when he has meetings or whatever down there, so I looked into that somewhat. I could get a price of $58 from U.S. Airways, but I'd have to pick the car up at the airport, which takes an extra hour to get there on the 28X. Hertz on Baum Boulevard will give me $72, still just ahead of the Greyhound, but there's still the matter of gas and tolls, which on the PA Turnpike even to Breezewood are not insignificant.
I'm coming round to the new idea of driving my own car, assuming I can get the coolant leak and some other maintenance done on time. I have an appointment to haul the thing into Rudy's on Thursday morning, which will probably translate to me being a few hundred dollars poorer by Thursday evening. I've pretty much decided in my own mind that this car will not survive grad school, by which I mean when I go to wherever I'm going (default San Francisco) to take a job, it will not be accompanying me. I've even started to wonder if I should just hand it over to my parents even before then — the amount that I drive it is too small to pay off its yearly cost in insurance, maintenance, gas, and registration, although I can't complain that my fuel bills are that high. It may be worthwhile to spec out some numbers to see what makes the most sense. The difficult part is that a carless me would have a rather annoying time ever going back home (or anywhere) on my own for more than a few days: my parents live far from the Cleveland or Akron Greyhound stations, and car rental places don't seem to encourage one-way rentals so much.
Anyway. Though it's nice to be out of the clutches of last-minute NIST eval work, I've been feeling more uneasy about meeting my summer research goal, which is to have given a thesis proposal presentation before I leave for France — and preferably a good bit before, so I have time to make any necessary revisions and start some of the work before I drop off the LTI map for four months. But in my statement earlier today that this summer is turning out busier than I expected, I'm not exaggerating. There is this week (or what's left of it) and three days of next week, relatively unobstructed except for my inability to concentrate on anything for more than about 30 minutes, but Alon is clamoring vociferously for great and in-depth error analysis on the NIST Arabic system, and I could see that taking weeks. Visa muck on Friday, driving down Thursday, and then the following Monday I am off to San Francisco for 16 days. Not all vacation time, of course, but half of it is, and Alon's also away from July 1 though July 12, so I am not expecting a great back-and-forth dialogue on whatever partial thesis drafts I may have been able to conjure up in my sleep between now and then. From July 14 I have four weeks until the Gates Center move rips my department apart for who knows how long, and then about two more weeks until MT Summit and the NIST workshop in Ottawa. I'd been assuming I'd be going to those — in fact, we delayed the start of my France internship because of them — but last Friday I found out that my paper got rejected from MT Summit. Either way it's a week when not much will be happening back at home base, since Alon and the other MT professors will certainly be going. And the week after MT Summit I leave for France.
This is... interesting, because, as astute and long-term readers may recall, my only real objective for last summer was to survive it and get it over with as soon as possible. Now I am finding myself in this weirdly conflicted state where, while I still am somewhat anxious for the time to go by in general, the mere passage of the weeks and months means nothing unless it carries with it the assumption that it is bringing me closer to finishing my Ph.D. If I'm two years out now, then the only way for me to be 16 months out in four months is to have done four months' worth of thesis work in that time, and that's looking, um, pretty difficult right now.
All right. The NIST eval is thankfully out of the way, so now I have this week to get my life back to normal before the next adventure in what's turning out to be a very busy summer. Well, get my life back to as normal as it can be around here these days. With the Gates Center actually nearing completion (and the LTI's move-in date set for August 12), we've been getting an awful lot of e-mail from Facilities telling us, as Kenneth put it, that "your life is going to suck for the next three months." (People who never spend summers on campus would be floored at how much construction equipment gets mobilized the second after everyone goes home from graduation.) Let's take a quick review, shall we? From the e-mail out-box of the eminent Jim Skees:
Fun Fact of the Day: Selecting "walking" on Google Maps doesn't seem to include any conception of how far a person can reasonably go. Asking for turn-by-turn walking directions from my house to a certain endpoint in San Francisco gives me a route of 2603 miles with 724 turns, taking an estimated 35 days and eight hours. Straight. This works out to about 3.07 m.p.h. only if you plan on 24-hour walking days. Now that'd be a concentrated way for me to get a lot of my "hike five miles in every state" goal done.
I don't think the end of the Colorado trip was as exciting as the beginning. The SSST workshop on Friday was rather sparsely attended — even less than expected already for a small 10-paper, one-day workshop, since three of the 10 authors had visa problems and couldn't even make it. My talk was first, and it seemed to go all right: the English was probably better than the average, but I still have a really flat monotone voice, and I only got to run over what I wanted to say once in my hotel room the night before. At lunch I ate a really quick meal of fish and chips (although they were potato chips, so "fish and crisps" would have been more correct) in a sort of Tomlinson or Thwing-ish area, then headed outside to see something of campus before the afternoon talks began. UC Boulder, or CU Boulder, or UCB has a rather nice campus of moderate size, complete with some very green quads and big old buildings, but I couldn't find any dorms. Bikes everywhere, though, including some tied to an iron fence right by a sign that said the fence wasn't for bike parking and any found there might be taken away. After the workshop, the CMU people (me, Vamshi, Stephan, and Alon) had a bit of a status update for the NIST eval, and then I found myself on my own for dinner.
( Amusing dinner! )
( Flight home. )
I say, one day in Boulder and I already have tons to write about. It doesn't hurt, I suppose, that I had my trip notebook with me most of the day because I was traveling.
( Trip from Pittsburgh to Denver and Boulder )
( Impressions of Boulder )
The weather yesterday, which started off kind of dark and cloudy, cleared up nicely by the mid-afternoon, so I decided to join the LTI/SCS softball team for its second game in the GSA summer league. I've been on the mailing list for the last three years, after playing Observer softball for two years back at Case, but I only played one game here in 2007 because they're always scheduled in the early evening when I'm either working or wanting dinner. Yesterday's game was at 5:30, and I managed to plan sufficiently in advance that I'd taken my glove with me to campus in the morning.
The first thing I noticed, during warm-ups, was that my glove must have started drying out from years of disuse: the leather or whatever it is inside is cracking and flaking off in tiny bits all over my hand, and the outside is revealing itself to be made of something with an outer layer that's doing the same in a few spots. It took me a few minutes to remember how to throw again, which somehow seems to require more effort than previously (even though I should be much stronger now than I was in high school...), but I can still field and catch about as well as before. Of course, the real surprise waited until my first at-bat. Since it's for-fun softball, the pitches are easy and slow, and it's rare that a batter will take more than one before popping out some kind of a shot — that, combined with the fact that no one quite knows the batting order the first around, meant that it was my turn shockingly quickly in the first inning, and I had about 10 seconds to prepare for it. I should have taken a practice swing or something: on one of the first few pitches I had a swinging strike that did something unhappy to my left shoulder such that it hurt for the rest of the game (and indeed all through today: it makes popping noises sometimes when I put my arm back and above my head). It kind of figures that I do something silly the first time I get a bat in my hand in two years.
Our team had a poor first inning, but after that things went more smoothly. I hit three singles and two ground outs in five at-bats and scored two runs. Defensively, left field was surprisingly boring. I think I was active on three plays, and all of them were marginally competent fieldings of ground balls that didn't make any outs. All in all, though, a good day for softball — or at least a kind of softball, since the final score after seven innings was a flabbergasting 30-17. And this is including a sort of mercy rule that stops any half-inning after six runs are in unless it's the top or bottom of the seventh, which our team hit twice and the other team hit once.
I was thinking about also playing tomorrow's game, but given the shoulder and the huge amount of work I have to do, this is unlikely. I leave sickeningly early Thursday for Boulder, essentially of my own volition because I wanted more than six minutes to have a look around the place between when I get there and when the SSST workshop starts Friday morning. That means tomorrow I have to finish writing my slides, practice them, pack, and also get as much work done as I can on the NIST system before I can only sporadically have access to it for a few days. I've been increasingly nervous that it's not going to be ready in time for the eval next week.
As I said, there's no shortage of stuff to write about, and syntactic phrase extraction is turning into a particular headache today, so you get another post instead of me getting an Arabic–English MT system.
( Quick visit to Johns Hopkins )
( KGB Urban Hike #4 )
Finally, I shouldn't end this post without a general announcement that the third mostly annual Walking to West Virginia (and/or Ohio?) trip is set for Saturday, June 20. The plan is to leave super-early, like an hour before sunrise, and try to catch the actual sunrise on the Birmingham Bridge. E-mail me if you want to come along and think you can walk 38 miles, and e-mail me also if you'd be willing to pick up a crew of shaky-legged walkers when we call you from the next state over at whatever time we get there. (In 2006 we aborted at Burgettstown around 8:30, and in 2007 we reached the border some time at or around 1 a.m., so there's a bit of training data for the drivers on what to expect.) I'm hoping to focus on leaving early and not stopping spastically this year, especially after Evan and I were able to cover an equivalent distance last summer in 14 hours instead of 18. A steady pace and more regular stops seems to be a better answer to me, at least.
In the middle of a horrifically busy two weeks here. You may have noticed, for instance, that I still haven't described the camping trip I went on a week and a half ago now. Let me do it now, but I'll try to keep it short.
( I may have failed at length management... )
Into the woods to sell the cow for the annual Memorial Day Case-person camping trip starting tomorrow morning (i.e. Saturday). Carpool plans for leaving are a little bit sketchy, but if you see me anywhere around Pittsburgh after 8:30 a.m. or so, then something probably went wrong. We are again converging near Ohiopyle, since a lot of people want to go rafting again, but I'm thinking of engaging in a spot of biking on the Great Allegheny Passage trail. It'd be nice to bike into Maryland and then do some hiking in a new state, too.
My ad hoc cure for never being able to sleep properly on camping trips seems to be to stay up hideously late the night before and wake up hideously early the morning of. I've been fooling around with some messed-up English parse trees for the past two hours — that and getting my stuff together for camping — and by tomorrow morning I hope to have the Arabic parse trees I need in order to launch the next long step of the MT-system-building process while I'm gone. But this also means waking up at something like, uh, 6:00 when it's already coming up on 2:00 now. Well, we'll see. I should be reporting back some time late on Monday if all goes according to plan. And it should, since my car isn't involved this time, so I won't have any opportunities to leave my keys on any out-of-state mountains or leak coolant all over the Laurel Highlands.
A break might be nice. I got exposed to a bunch of spoken Thai numbers today — also a lot of speech, but I don't really expect myself to get much of that in open conversation. After what seemed like an eon of mental churning, I managed to work out that somewhere in the mix there was a 14 and possibly a 39. And about 40 billion things I couldn't identify in time. I guess I haven't retained that much from those days a while back of repeatedly writing out the single-digit number words and trying to read out the figures on the license plates of parked cars as two sets of two-digit numbers. This failure only plays into what happened on Wednesday, I think it was, when Maxine surprised me by addressing me in French, and even in about a one-minute conversation I did so horribly that my first reaction afterwards was to write her an e-mail apologizing for sounding like an idiot. Yeah... "into the woods; the time is now."
Facebook is suddenly becoming an all-in-one source for fun or interesting information. Some things from the last few days that I've been saving in browser tabs:
Better day yesterday. My first order of business on campus was to get lunch from the Thai truck (the one I think of as the "second" Thai truck, with the yellow menu), but they were out of my usual chicken pad thai. Instead I asked for chicken red curry, but they only had fried rice instead of steamed. I was on the point of giving up, I suppose, when the truck lady disappeared off somewhere out of my field of view, and when she came back she was holding a small-size container that ended up containing the last of the steamed rice and some chicken red curry. She told me not to pay for it, but to come back in the afternoon after she'd made some more pad thai. So that was nice: the small container satisfied me for about two or two and a half hours, and then I walked back across to the trucks from Newell-Simon and got the usual medium chicken pad thai later — the last of the afternoon batch, as it turned out. The truck lady thought that it had been an extra-busy day because the CMU food places had shut down after the end of the semester (it took me two iterations to place this correct meaning on "it is closed inside"), and I said I wasn't sure because I never eat on campus since the trucks are better. It was a nice, pleasant conversation, on the same day that the guy who also works at the same truck said hi to me when we crossed paths in the morning on my way to Skibo Gym. I suppose that means they're starting to recognize me because I'm there at least once a week; the conceited side of me also wants it to be because I say "pad thai" in something approximating the correct Thai pronunciation, which is more likely to stand out among hundreds of farang students. Either way, I feel like I'm mentally a step closer to eventually placing my order in Thai, now that we've at least broken a bit of the conversation barrier in English.
I ate most of my pad thai outside and ended up sharing the lunch with (I think) two sparrows. (It's been maybe 13 years since my grandma taught Chris and me how to recognize some of the common species of birds, and at this point the distinction between male sparrows and house finches is pretty blurry in my memory.) I was surprised enough last Friday when Carolyn convinced a sparrow to eat rice, albeit skittishly, out of her hand on the compass rose thing over by the trucks, but I figured the birds around there would be the most used to that sort of treatment. This yesterday was on one of those concrete benches above the tennis courts and next to the CFA parking lot, and I was quite impressed to see birds hopping up to my styrofoam tray and nipping a bit out of it if I held still long enough — which time dropped to about 20 seconds after the first bird tried it and was successful.
Doug and I played a very nice 45 minutes of tennis at 8:00 — during "the day" for the first time, and I discovered that we were suddenly both much better tennis players. I think the light was mostly responsible, since after the sun set and got sufficiently below the horizon I immediately noticed that depth perception got a lot harder, but I suppose a contributing factor could have been that we were sandwiched on a middle court between two other games of people who actually knew what they were doing, so our usual erratic game of (at times) three-court "extreme tennis" had to be somewhat curtailed. We can possibly play once more this evening before Doug leaves for the summer, and after that if I want to keep up with any racquet sports I may have to get myself into a racquetball court in the UC and see if I remember any of the mechanics of that. Or I could give up the ball-hitting stuff and join people for climbing instead; Chris said the May membership deal at the wall was pretty good.
Today my fight with parsing on Hadoop continues. I have almost 5 million parallel Arabic and English sentence pairs to parse in the shortest amount of time possible, and yesterday I only got as far as having to restart the English job three times because I kept losing nodes in my cluster for unspecified reasons. I kind of feel like it might be a memory problem, possibly on very long sentences, so my current workaround is launching the job on 100 nodes with 100,000 reducers — that way, if a parsing job gets overloaded and can't go on, my expected loss is only 50 sentences per crash, and hopefully there aren't that many problem sentences. So far this may have been successful: the standard error dump tells me I've gotten to 24 percent complete with possibly some non-fatal problems between 3 and 4 percent.
I think today I am hiding in my room rather than deal with the rest of the house. The amount of stuff in it has increased by about 100 percent in the last 36 hours or so — I went down into the basement to do some laundry, almost tripping over piles of random kitchen implements in the process, and almost had a heart attack on seeing the the entire right-hand side of the room is now filled with stuff. I hope Tyler and Car don't have anything at the back there... We've also apparently sprouted a server farm of three machines. Basement lights have also been left on three mornings in a row, which perhaps bothers me beyond the expected proportion of the (in the end) non-seriousness of the offense, but turning off lights when you're done with a room is also such a mind-blowingly simple thing to manage that I feel somewhat justified. Maybe it's that people are revolting from 18 years of getting scolded in their parents' houses for such minor infractions, so that they go to college and binge on wasting electricity and leaving dirty dishes on the counter and wearing their shoes inside? Stranger things have happened. In other news, person or persons unknown took my camp chair out back and left it out in the rain for two or three days now, and similarly anonymous entities consumed a large portion of the two bottles of juice I had in the refrigerator. Again, small infractions, but it irks me just the same — I imagine it's a bit like how Tyler felt when he found that people had ruined his squid mugs by letting leftover tea sit in them unwashed for days.
I think things are bothering me exponentially more this week because I've been feeling a little on edge for other reasons. Today — at this very moment, in fact — the freshmen who started at CMU the same year I arrived as a grad student are receiving their diplomas. A whole generation of undergrads has passed by me in this place, and yet I'm still here, hoping to somehow do enough major new research (gulp!) in the next two years to get my Ph.D. and join them all in this fairyland of far-off Silicon Valley. (And, I say, half of the non-graduating crowd is ending up there this summer anyway.) Then I witnessed a marriage proposal last Monday night, I think it was, which of course only brings home the fact that I'm not even going to get a chance to start my real life until age 28, and that out of the eventual three and a half years (yikes!) of Our Separation there are still two more to go. So many of my contemporarily-aged friends have moved on to engagements or marriage or settling down that I've been getting these really strong anti-Peter-Pan feelings of really wanting to grow up. It's interesting, given my quite recent post on feeling happy and excited about the next several months, that I should suddenly be all downhearted and annoyed just two days later. Shaky confidence, I guess, now that today I'm focusing on all the little things. And, dang it, it doesn't help that the house is feeling more and more like a perennial disaster area.
Details on yesterday's KGB Urban Hike #3 (13-mile group walk plus my eight-mile solitary extension) later, after gwillen or Wes post their main-hike maps. Also details on Round n (for n large) of computer problems later, after I feel stronger and Dell ships me a new DVD drive (expected here Thursday). Also also details of getting our 18-months-of-problems ceiling fixed later, after the repair guy actually shows up tomorrow and fixes it (assuming he does).
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