Posts from — May 2005

Tomorrow morning I’ll be attending and helping out at the Second International Workshop on Human Interactive Proofs. I’m not going to reiterate what that is, the web page has a pretty good summary of the topic. I’ll be helping out at the sign-in table which means I’m going to be at Packard at 7am, which will be rather difficult. I’m also probably going to be giving some informal campus tours to interested attendees later in the day. The workshop runs all day tomorrow (with a banquet at night) and half the day on Friday. Hopefully I won’t be completely confused by the content of the workshop, as I’m rather new to the field.

On an unrelated note, I’ll probably be off AIM for the majority of the time until graduation, so if you need to reach me, I’m attentive with email or just call me via cell phone or house phone.

Hopefully I’ll be able to get to sleep quickly, I haven’t been to sleep this early in a long time. I’m going to read “State of the Art Document Image Degredation Modeling” with the hopes that it’ll put me to sleep.

I finally got to run today… the weather was great: sunny, in the mid 60s with a cool breeze. I ran 2.94 miles, a bit shorter than usual since I haven’t worked out in weeks, but I ran it at a 7:11/mile pace, which was pretty good. I want to try to do some slower running in the future. I had to stop once on the way back to catch my breath, but other than that I felt good. Hopefully I’ll be able to continue to find time for this.

“Apparently, one of the questions AOL tech support asks when people call in complaining that they can’t get their AOL CD to work is, ‘Do you have a computer?’ because so many people who don’t have computers stick the CD into their stereo or DVD player and can’t get it to work.”

I had my first work meeting today. It went well, I’m excited to learn a lot about the field. I get the feeling I have more lab experience than most of the people in there, which is fine, especially since it gives me a chance to talk about what has worked well in the past. The project name is DICE, an acronym that is 3/4 my creation… Document Image Content Extraction. I had come up with Document Image Semantic Extraction which would be DISE, but the new name works much better. Dr. Baird is going to order me The C Programming Language by Kernighan and Ritchie, which should be a good read since I don’t have much experience with C. I imagine most of my code this summer will be in C++, but it can’t hurt to read a classic. I get the feeling I’m going to be relearning automake at some point this summer.

Everything else is going ok. I have a couple of new project ideas for magicspatula that I’m going to be starting in the next few weeks. I need to find some more time for the running app. My kitchen music system and xbox media center projects will start after graduation.

I keep meaning to cook something, but I mess up the timing or realize I’m one ingredient short and too lazy to go out and get it, hopefully that’ll change tomorrow.

I’m nearing the end of The Design of Everyday Things, I’m hoping to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance next.

I had a lot of trouble getting to sleep last night, partially because of a lingering runny nose and sore throat. I hope that doesn’t continue, there’s no reason for me not to be relaxed.

We’re getting a national ID system but nobody seems to be talking about it.

“If you haven’t heard much about REAL ID in the newspapers, that’s not an accident. The politics of REAL ID is almost surreal. It was voted down last fall, but has been reintroduced and attached to legislation that funds military actions in Iraq. This is a “must-pass” piece of legislation, which means that there has been no debate on REAL ID. No hearings, no debates in committees, no debates on the floor. Nothing.”
Awesome.

I had the washer, dryer, dishwasher, stove, oven, and sink all going at once this morning. I couldn’t figure out a reasonable way to use the shower at the same time, but still, it was a lot of stuff for one person.

I think I’m going to go figure out what to make for dinner and make a shopping list. How domestic!

I usually don’t write summary-of-the-day type posts since they tend to be unreadably boring (sorry, it’s true), but a few highlights from today are worth noting.

- I went driving and eventually shopping with Bombard, who I hadn’t seen in a while. He’s doing well… we took a long time to fine Bed, Bath and Beyond (we kept just finding Beyond), but once we got there, I bought a pizza stone set (with the wooden thing for putting the pizza in the over, a pizza cutter, recipe book) and an electric hand mixer (you know, for mixing electric hands). I didn’t get a wine opener, since the ones there didn’t look too enticing, so I’m going to buy one off amazon. Lifetime warranty is a must for that since the biggest complaint is that they break. Wine!
- Joe and I rearranged the living room this afternoon. Only time will tell how well this works out, but the new design makes better use of space in some areas and makes it easier to move between the kitchen and the living room. The one problem I have is that now you can’t see the TV from the kitchen.

(don’t ask how I got the picture from that angle…)
- Tonight around midnight I felt like working on the kitchen (since the house is almost vacant today). I while ago I had talked with someone about moving the pots and pans closer to the sink and stove, since there’s not much reason for them to be across the room. Tonight seemed as good as any to try it out. In the process of trying this move, I realized the whole kitchen might benefit from some rethinking, since some of the decisions we made at the start of last summer were rather arbitrary and we just never needed nor bothered to reconsider them.
So, the rearrangement began. I tried to move things that we use on a regular basis to more easily visible and reachable places, while things that we rarely/never user are put on the top shelves. I threw out a bunch of stuff that had gone bad (the snacks were in a cabinet that made it very easy to forget about the old ones). I moved all the duplicate items (especially spices and stuff) into their own space above the stove, so they’re still available, but they’re no longer making other things harder to find.
It’ll be more of an adjustment for me than for the other summer housemates since I’m the only one who has lived here before, but I hope it’ll be worthwhile. The kitchen work isn’t finished, there’s more to be done in the morning.

That’s all for now, hopefully tomorrow will be domestically productive as well (laundry, cooking, and buying new sponges are on the agenda.. how could I go wrong?)

I was cleaning out the kitchen tonight, and I came across an old box of Wheat Thins. They were labeled to be of the “Original” variety, but the banner on the bottom said “Now even better taste”. At first, I thought this was a contradiction: how could the original flavor have a new taste? But then I realized Nabisco’s sinister semantic trick: Original can be read as ’same as the first one’, but it could also mean ‘ Not derived from something else; fresh and unusual’ (the latter is quoted from here). So the same word can mean the same as before or not at all the same as before. Brilliant!

I managed to get a 3.8 this semester, pulling off a B in numerical methods which must have meant I got a strong A on the final. Not that it really matters, but I’m glad that I did well. After two years of academics generally having a lower priority than extracurricular things, I’ll be a lot more focused on school work next year. And maybe some years after that, who knows.

Linux is my favorite operating system about 320 days per year.