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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1){kind=small} lindseykuper and I went to Toronto to run the Toronto Marathon and visit Ryan and Janice!Race results: for me, a new marathon PR at 3:52:02; Lindsey nearly hit her previous best at 4:34:13. I had a pretty good race -- I tried to keep it steady and go out gently, but looking at the splits from my watch, I was only so successful. I had a mile there (mile 9) where I seem to have sped up to just under 8 minute miles, and towards the end (miles 22-25), I did a 9:31, slowing down to a 10:50 as I hit the wall. I shook through it and sped up a bit at the end. I was suffering a little bit there, but not nearly so bad as I have in previous marathons. It was a beautiful day for a race, cool and sunny! We were staying at a hotel on the same block as the starting line, very convenient. Also they started the marathon an hour before the half, so the start wasn't very crowded like big combined races often are. The start was understated and chill -- no national anthem, no Terribly Inspiring Speeches, just: "oh hi, glad you're here, let's go running! It's now 7:30am. Go!!" And then we ran from a northern neighborhood in Toronto down to Lake Ontario, then along the shore for a bit. Very pleasant: lovely scenery, slightly downhill. I want to get good at marathons! To be honest, my marathon is pretty slow when compared with my relatively quick half-marathon. I think I'm not training for fulls as well as I could, and I want to rectify that. Maybe more interestingly, we got to see Ryan and Janice! Ryan, if you didn't know, is my dear friend from home, and he's doing his doctoral work at U of Toronto in Medieval Philosophy. People who knew him in high school are not surprised to learn this. Specifically, he's investigating late-medieval English dream poetry and the apparently realist standpoints of those poets; recent work seems to have portrayed them as having a more nominalist perspective, which Ryan thinks is a misguided reading (... this is what I got out of what he told me, at least. Ryan, if you're reading this, feel free to correct or expand!) Janice is also super-rad; she writes novels and poetry, and teaches creative writing! We went to their wedding a few years ago. It was fantastic to get a chance to hang out with Ryan; we don't see each other that much these days, what with living in different countries, but we talked about life and work and ideas, and our experiences in grad school so far. He picked us up at the airport, let us crash on his couch after a long flight, showed us get around the city -- including the local comics shop, and the inimitable Honest Ed's! -- took us for delicious food, and met us at the finish line. The Thai place near his house is outstanding! And then, on Tuesday, he drove us to the airport at 3:30am, for our 6am flight out. That's an incredibly giving thing to do. (maybe we could invite them to visit in California this summer...) Oh, btws, we're going to California tomorrow :) | ||||||||||
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Alex R.
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May 11th, 2012
May 5th, 2012
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| I meant to finish my phd qualifiers this semester. How this works here is: you pick a committee of three professors, and you and the committee pick three problems. Then you do the problems, write a paper for each one of them, and present it all. It's "supposed" to be done over a summer, and one where you're not doing anything else. But I keep having these great internships and getting married to lindseykuper so I haven't had a free summer yet... Due to a combination of perfectionism-ing my first problem, trying to do other stuff this semester, and plain time-mismanagement that was my fault, I didn't finish all three problems. I had explained my situation to my committee, though, and they were OK with me presenting just the first two, during finals week. Then I proceed to freak out about a particular aspect of the second project, and I got way too fixated on it. I was trying to make a particular machine learning library work that just wasn't going to work (too inefficient to train in a reasonable time), and I spent like a week and a half on absurd performance hacks, at the cost of accuracy. And then I ended up missing our agreed-upon deadline for the second paper. I got an email from Mike about how it's too late to put in second paper, and maybe I should just present the first project; he didn't sound too mad, but I felt totally defeated, depressed, stupid, awful and worthless. This was on Sunday (29 April) at about noon. Presentation is on Monday, of course. And I hadn't slept much the previous two days, of course. I said to myself that I was going to have enough to *present* about the second project, even if I wasn't able to give the second paper to my committee. And I found the parts of the project that I had already done, and they were OK. Then I found that there was another approach to do basically the same thing that I had been trying to do, except that it works. (specifically: LibLinear, which ships with MaltParser, is beautiful and fast and rad at classification, whereas Weka's Logistic classifier is extremely slow and sucky) So of course I was up all night running experiments and making slides. But then on Monday morning, Lindsey brought me to the bagel shop to pick up Presentation Bagels, then to campus, and I gave my presentation. It was pretty OK! (slides here, if you're interested!) My committee seemed fairly impressed, gave me some pointers for how best to finish up the second project, and gave me an "over the summer" timeline for the third one. Notionally the third one should not be so hard, and anyway, we don't have to plan a wedding. When I woke up on Tuesday, I remembered that I had told Lindsey I'd get the car fixed, since it's been making a weird scraping noise and she was supposed to go to Chicago to get her passport fixed on Wednesday. Oh snap! So I called around and found a car repair place that could look at it that afternoon. I also remembered that I had a meeting with Fil to do a conference call with another research group at 2:30. So I'm at the car repair place, and they think they have a handle on what's wrong with the car, and it's like 2pm. But car repair places can drive you to where you need to go, right? Except their driver is off somewhere else. And then it's 2:08, and I'm running from the car repair place back to the house, in my clothes, with a backpack. I get to the house at about 2:16, and then I'm out the door by 2:17, on my bicycle. 2:26pm, I am in the office, and soaked in sweat. Conference call success; Fil didn't ask about it. One of these years maybe we/I'll learn to not do things at the last possible goddamn instant. (epilogue: the car is fixed, Lindsey got her passport squared away, and we're about to head to Toronto to race!!) | ||||||||
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April 21st, 2012
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| But should I let it lapse? Is it noisier over on Dreamwidth? I've been here since 2002, yow. I find myself having more interactions on G+ and Twitter; I imagine most people are on Facebook too. | ||||||||
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April 19th, 2012
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| I've spent almost three years now where most of my time has been taken up doing things that aren't research, and it makes me mad. In large part this has been my fault; I haven't been focused enough. But classes, teaching, qualifiers, working for CNetS... it's been frustrating. That's a lot of stuff. But I felt like I was ready to dig in to research when I showed up in 2009. I want to get some good stuff done, get some papers published, and then graduate. I went from feeling like a productive, respected engineer to kind of a second-class citizen. The department really doesn't respect its students. It's kind of crap. Getting a phd: largely a matter of sticking with it because you're terrified of rocking the boat, but very prideful and feel like you deserve a phd for some reason? Oh, here's an email from a professor, when I asked for a TA for my class that I'm teaching for the department to offset the fact that they can't be bothered to offer any good classes for undergraduates. You know, like what a department at a university is supposed to do, if they could be arsed to do it. Hi, Alex,Very cordial indeed. Heaven forbid I forget that you're a professor. | ||||||||
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April 13th, 2012
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| Recently I've been thinking a lot about teaching. In 1999 or so, I was in high school Spanish class, and we were talking about the Spanish Civil War. Somehow or another the teacher managed to make it seem simultaneously boring, complicated, and morally ambiguous. This being a war in which a (basically) Fascist movement overthrew a republic, Hitler did air strikes against innocent civilians in the Basque Country, and Anarchists, Communists, and George Orwell fought the Fascists, unsuccessfully. And then there was a dictatorship until the 1970s. Truly a monumental achievement, in the realm of teaching poorly. I'll be OK in the Fall if I can just channel that experience, and do the opposite. Oh, and! I'm up to 24 students enrolled in my class :) Had to increase the enrollment cap, yessss. | ||||||||
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April 8th, 2012
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| I was clicking around some wikipedia about Timothy Leary and early cyberpunk and John Perry Barlow and bOING bOING -- roughly the subject matter of Technical (You're So). Recent history, as people tried to figure out what computers and networks of computers, would do to our lives -- so wild! I'm not even sure what to say about it! But, like -- the WELL, and MOOs, and the connections with old hippies, and people distributing things on Hypercard stacks, and Billy Idol's attempt to get into all of this (NB, that article is really worth reading -- especially the parts about the reaction to Billy Idol from the online communities of 1993), and... just... so weird! In all this browsing, I came across this character R.U. Sirius, who I feel like I probably should have known about before. But he was involved with this political whatsits called the Revolution Party. Here's their 20-point platform, under the cut. http://web.archive.org/web/200804220547 "20 Point Party Platform for National Politics by R.U. Sirius" ( 20-point platform is 20-point ) I think... most of these are pretty good ideas. Except for probably (16), and the specifics of (5). (3) is fantastic, even if it sounds really glib how it's stated. None of these policy points seem likely to be implemented by the current folks in power, or perhaps by anybody likely to be in power at all ever. | ||||||||
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April 1st, 2012
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| You're probably wondering about how fast people run a half marathon in Bloomington. Pretty fast! Lindsey lindseykuper and Chris chrisamaphone and I raced it, along with lots of other people. (including the BARA running group, some of whom were out to race, and some to spectate and cheer!) I hit a personal best, at 1:33:24, just 32 seconds faster than my previous quickest half, but 3:33 faster than my previous showing on the same course, which is pretty hilly. The weather was really beautiful for racing: overcast and cool. I went out a little bit faster than I should have (6:28), but then settled in to running around 7:15s, with a few miles at quicker than 7:00s. I'm not very good at maintaining consistent speed; overall, this was about 7:08 pace. But my kick at the end was at 6:10 pace, yeahh! (I have the splits due to my new gps watch, which is pretty slick) Complete results here! Oh yeah, and this was worth 3127 points on Fitocracy, which remains fabulous, and if you like Internets and working out, or just working out, I think you should consider getting on this site :) | ||||||||||
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March 28th, 2012
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| http://registrar.indiana.edu/scheduleoc Well would you look at that :) Tell me all your thoughts on curriculum design and what you want out of an intro NLP class, or out of a class at all. | ||||||||
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March 20th, 2012
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| Alright! It looks like I'm going to be teaching an NLP class for undergrads in the fall semester. It should show up in the course catalog on Thursday... Bring the ruckus. (now I just have to extract myself gracefully from my current RA position...) | ||||||||
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March 4th, 2012
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| Just yelled at some Jehovah's Witnesses working the neighborhood. They came up to the door and I knew exactly what was going on, and I interrupted their spiel and asked them, "Can you surprise God?" ... they didn't understand what I was getting at, and eventually got on about how the earth is so perfect, that it definitely must have a loving creator to set up all this order. At which point I started yelling at them about people starving to death in Africa, and they got scared of me barking at them and left. But Michael Corleone is right: "Never hate your enemies." I shouldn't give them the pleasure of being berated. They probably get off on thinking that they've got this huge uphill spiritual battle, and relish feeling oppressed. Also maybe I should be nicer to human beings :-( | ||||||||
| comments: 10 comments or Leave a comment |
Alex R.
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