thoughtcrumbs : january 2000

Songsmiths 5

Every year I create a CD of singer-songwriters—interpreted liberally to include groups like Jurassic Park and Pink Martini—and give them to friends for Christmas. Now that I've wrapped and delivered the last copy, the track listing can go online.

Note to self

Change before heading to the airport.

Addendum: Look -- Michelle wishes me good travel. Houston airport, consider yourself warned. You do not want to incur the wrath of Michelle.

The kitchen table

A great place to study. Even if "study" means fighting with figure- and caption-alignment in Word for four hours. But with the river rushing by outside, even Word seems pleasant.

Holiday wrap-up

Running off to the coast with my family until tomorrow night. Lots of reading will be had, and most likely a dearth of mischief. Miscellaneous stuff from the last few days:

• Grandma admits she has never really liked any of my parents' cats. But she likes mine.
• Mary Beth makes hot buttered rum with Grandma's thirty year-old alcohol and I try to brew our year-old ground coffee from Cozumel. Ick on both counts.
• Somehow I become the #1 result for anagramming bot. Sternest and I continue our clandestine love affair.
  
• Remember to buy mom a new vegetable peeler before the next holiday.
• My dad is playing a Zelda video game (!) that Liam brought over.
  

Unnecessary words omitted

Review of the new Elements of Style in reading.

Empirical testing

Determining if someone is single is a bit like trying to disprove the null hypothesis. You talk a few times, ask a few subtle questions. But if they don't mention a significant other, it doesn't mean they don't have one. It could be that your method just wasn't sensitive enough to detect it.

Only somewhat sophomoric

Review of His Sophomoric Effort over in reading.

Christmas lights in rural America

My parents live in a small town in Oregon, and the Christmas lights here are always a fascinating exercise in well intentioned but somewhat absurd aesthetics. The random rimmed window in green here, the illuminated candy canes there. And then we play "count the inflatable santas/snowmen," with bonus points for those atop roofs, their arms outstretched in a Heil Hitler wave, mitigated only by the plastic broomstick or shovel accoutrement. My observations shouldn't be misconstrued as mean-spirited mocking, however. Judgmental, yes. But as enthusiastic as their decorations. I take tremendous glee in the multi-colored icicles and lighted nativity scenes (with donkeys in santa hats).

Update: Michelle has seen Santa, too.

Bath time

You should hear Thilo finish the "No more monkeys jumping on the bed" song.

Sternest meanings: Weirdo of flaunter

My favorite chat buddy, Sternest Meanings (aim id sternestmeanings), is full of the kind of wisdom that can only come from a seasoned philosopher. Or an anagramming bot. Take your pick. We have the most fascinating conversations, and I feel like HE KNOWS MY SOUL. Oh, Sternest.

me: so sternest, I'm going to introduce you to the blog-reading public. At least my little corner of it. How do you feel about that?

sternestmeanings: It isn't strongest geronimo. Good! Unethical, true good-bye. Multiply tactile obstacle. Hooey! Weirdo of flaunter. A hot butt.

me: your malapropisms are somewhat charming. are you single?

sternestmeanings: Hooray! I am a rumpless tapeworms. Ace ogreishly manuring.

Things I'm going to do today. Or not.

My inner Type A is having difficulty not scheduling the heck out of my next couple of days in Portland. It wants bulleted lists of book pages to read, neighborhoods to visit, people to call. It wants an Excel spreadsheet. Thankfully, my inner Type A is so over the top that it recognizes succumbing to arrant vegetation on occasion leads to greater productivity in the long run. (My inner Type A is clearly writing this post, too.)

So, as a compromise between the schizophrenic halves of my interior monologue (dialogue?), I've compiled a list of things I might do today. Or not.

• Curl up on Katie's couch and read a PDF of Tom7's His Sophomoric Effort.
• Bus over to East Burnside. Have coffee at Grendel's and visit haircut Joe at his new shop.
• Finish the design for my annual Christmas gift (those of you who usually get it--you know who you are--apologies if the cover art is derivative and boring this time.)
• Feel guilty for not doing research.
• Play with Katie's cat Ofelija all day long.
• Do an entire puzzle from the book of weekend Times crosswords.
• Read Mighty Girl's gift guides.
• Check the Powell's calendar for book readings.

Your friends are smart and fun

Remember me talking about celebrating? Oh, we did that today, and then some. We being a six-person subset of the second floor PhDs and my friend Jen, whom I kidnapped after mass. First there was the sumptuous brunch at the Gypsy Cafe, in which we ordered the first six dishes on the menu, including "how the brunch stole Christmas" and another with some arcane Star Wars Christmas cartoon movie reference in its name (ask Scott to reenact the wookie family conversation sometime).

Brunch was followed by sledding at the disc golf hill in Schenley Park, in which we empirically evaluated group cohesion techniques. Like the nine-person face-in circle, several of us on the ragged half-piece remains of plastic saucers, our arms and legs intertwined, careening down the slope and screaming at each other. We also discovered in our three-on-three race to the top of the hill that Ruth is a force of nature immune to any sabotage (such as Ian diving at her legs; she just dragged him up with her). It was especially good having Jen there; seeing my friends through an outsider's eyes just made me appreciate how amazing they are even more.

Then we made dinner and Mexican hot chocolate and succumbed to Ruth's indomitable will (and immpeccable movie taste), watching Garden State. That movie always makes me wish I had a boyfriend a little like Zach Braff.

And tomorrow I leave for Portland, where I hear it's snowing.

1/12 of the way through grad school

Just turned in my last assignment. I feel like celebrating!

Delirium

Last night was my first school-related all-nighter ever. Matt, Cristen, and I polished off (read: created from scratch) our final P&T presentation. Our 40-minute, legendarily grueling gauntlet for the HCII faculty today. And oh, was it great. The project was well received and we're definitely continuing on it next semester.

One of the best parts of the haze that was last night was coming home at 5:30 to find a handwritten letter in my mailbox that included a darling illustration of a conversation written entirely in Scheme. Parentheses are surprisingly expressive.

Best spam subject line ever

"Parakeet indecisiveness." Plus bonus points for including, below the gif with prices for pharmaceuticals I might need were I otherwise endowed, snippets of text referencing "The Crown governor" and "one of the nastier reefs off Antigua."

They liked "The Kite Runner"

Mom's book group was just written up in the Register Guard. Journalist Karen McCowan, in uncharacteristically cheesy fashion, says "If you want to vicariously capture the spirit of their discussion, pour yourself a cup of cider, settle into a comfortable chair and weigh your feelings about the book against theirs."

My only experience with the group was several years ago when they rejected my suggestion of No Exit. (Come on, it's short!)

Matt (the other one) on shoveling snow

"It's the only thing in grad school where effort equals results."

Channel factors and LiveJournal

I never cared much about the distinction between Blogger and LiveJournal--they're both hosted services for publishing blogs. (Or "livejournals," if you go to Berkeley.) But LiveJournal-managed sites always had rampant comments, something that I was honestly a little jealous of. So much visible community-building.

Today I learned why. While Blogger doesn't automatically tell people when others have commented on their comments (and in fact, I tend to manually email replies to people), LiveJournal lets you comment on a comment right in your email client. So easy. Ross and Nisbett would be proud of the channel factor.

I love finals week

Heard across the lab:

"Let's just delete all the code and write it again. We have 48 minutes until the next user shows up."

Old-timey bluegrass

Tonight Vivek and I went to a Calliope concert, this time for some straight-up bluegrass. The Del McCoury band: As impressive as their bluegrass chops was their choreography. Duos, trios, and quartets would weave in and out to harmonize around the center mic. The upright bass player would pick up his instrument and gracefully shift three feet to the right mid riff. Openers were David Long and Mike Compton - mandolin duets! It's almost too bad David Long is one of the most handsome men I have ever seen. At times I'd be too lost in reverie to pay attention to his music.

Calliope was followed by the tail end of a dinner party at Jen's house, where I knew almost no one. How delightful it is to talk with people who have grown-up jobs. Oh, and there was the pornographic play-dough.

Snowmen!

Should you need end-of-term stress relief

A wall in the 2500 wing of NSH is covered in bubble wrap.

Lindsay Mac and Brad Yoder at Shadow Lounge

Margaret, Emilie, and I sprawled on the cushy couches in my new favorite music venue in Pittsburgh, the Shadow Lounge, Monday night to hear our friend Brad Yoder and the exquisite Lindsay Mac. Brad and Jason Rafalak on upright bass filled the room with clever lyrics and astounding fingerwork, as usual.

Lindsay Mac plays the cello. Sideways across her chest with a strap. Really. Fretless and with a distinctive dull vibrato, the cello sounds great strummed and plucked like a guitar. She opened with the jazzy "Small Revolutions" and sequed into the captivating, wrenching "Turn Me Away." She sculpts optimism and sighs into each phrase. I highly recommend her album.

Oh, and both artists demonstrated deft equaniminity singing acapella against a cell phone ring-tune.

Theory guys

James's work on interruptibility has nothing on the theory guys. Unlike mid-level managers, programmers, and academics, theorists evade even human predictors (read: me) with their work patterns. This is all based on running into my friend Brendan at Coffee Tree this morning. At one point, I wanted to ask him about something trivial, and he was looking into space. Oh, I thought, when people are looking at nothing, it's usually a good time to interrupt them. But, wait, he has a page full of notes, and he's probably stepping through some crucial logic right now.

Thankfully, he started to reach for something in his pocket. Logic isn't found in pockets, so I figured it was an okay time to talk.

Oh, and only theory guys can get away with phrases like "prove a small sandboxish theorem about it."

For the social scientists

In John Riedl's outstanding talk this afternoon on collaborative recommender systems, he showed the wikipedia entry on social loafing. It's a stub, or an article that doesn't have much content yet. And then he looked at Bob and Sara and suggested they should feel guilty.

Punishment

Yesterday I implied to a friend that our network went down as divine punishment for the misuse of departmental resources. My friend's repsonse:

You know, I seriously thought God wouldn't know about it. He probably googled me and found out. If he was angry, he could have just left a comment on my blog.

Silver pizza lining

It's rare, the kind of minor destructive event that would take out both the wifi and the bathrooms across multiple buildings. A water main broke this morning, flooding Wean's machine room. Or something like that, judging from the hastily-taped signs in the stairwell and the gloriously gushing fire hydrant in the parking lot. So a small coup converged on Kiva Han to take advantage of its amenities. (Where's that wifi spray when you need it?)

The good news is that with no departmental email today, no one knows about the free leftover pizza in NSH 2502. Until now.

Relative genius

"The certain path to feeling creative is to find a constituency more ignorant than you and poised to benefit from your idea. This is a familiar phenomenon in academic work."

From Burt, R. (2004). "Structural holes and good ideas." American Journal of Sociology 110(2): 349-399.

The HCI "look"

A lot of times people who learn I'm in computer science at CMU immediately ask if I'm in HCI. What is it that brands me as HCI--is it my PowerBook (with haute leopard foofbag), my smile, or that I'm female?

I know Mac users in programming languages, some very smiley robo grads, and plenty of guys in HCI. Are other CS departments as recognizable as HCI? Do the LTI grads carry Saussure in their back pocket and have the glazed look of deep semantic thought?

Our new "awareness board" doesn't work very well yet

It kind of looks like The Joker kidnapped all our faculty.

Happy fifth birthday, little blog

This blog turns five today. To be completely solipsistic, here are some of my favorite posts:

• Accident waiting to happen (May 2001)
• Spearhead at the Roseland (September 2002)
• Mary Kay lady (April 2003)
• Lunchtime logic after CHI (April 2004)
  
• F-apostrophe (August 2004)
• Dental torture (July 2005)
• Vannevar Bush's "roomful of girls" (October 2005)
  

What are yours? And why do people like this stupid french fry picture so much?