Writing nirvana is nigh at hand! My dream of being able to write things locally in a managed way and then publish them wherever approaches. Streamlines approaches. I hope to have it in production use by January. (Winter break will be necessary to allocate time to it.) Until then, I'll continue writing the old fashioned way: one box, one location. Today's box is blogger.
School has been harsh recently. I have had an assignment that was incomplete by the due date, but the professor graciously allowed an extension. Then I felt ill (due to sleeping and eating habits I suspect) and had a bunch of grading to do for the course I TA. The marking went off well, but probably took too long to do. A number of students fared poorly, and some of it I thought was due to finickiness or transient errors. I had them come back yesterday for regrading, where anyone who didn't like their mark could argue it. Some people don't do better, some do.
Last Thursday I almost didn't want to go to school. I still wasn't feeling great, but I did, and it was a Good Thing. I went somewhat sleep deprived, as I had a lot of stuff to do like finishing preparations for a lab on Object-oriented programming (humans make great metaphors for objects, which was sort of backwards) and trying to finish that assignment, which I kept being too busy to do! Consequently, I got minimal sleep, having to get ready at 3:00AM for my 4:45AM train, filled with crippling fear of missing my stop again :| (Which happened a couple of weeks ago and retaught me that some suffering in life is a Good Thing.)
The lab I prepared went well, and even featured me spending too much money on a bake sale to get treats for the students that made it out. It was somewhat redundant, as they had just had to submit an assignment that involved discovering objects in a domain. SIGH. The lab had been delayed because I thought it would be important to do well and the week before I was too busy with a midterm and a presentation to attend to it well. I should have been more aware of their upcoming assignment though. Oh well, it turned fun.
In AI we started a set of lectures on Information Theory, which we already had in my Natural Language Processing course a couple weeks ago. Review is good. I sort of prefer NLP where explanations focus more on the mathematics of an issue, though.
Afterward, I visited multiple people, laughing with students in the lab, CIS students in the CS lounge, and dropping by OCUS briefly where I discovered new people before making a mad dash to the bus to the train to try and catch a bus to Windsor which I failed in doing.
Halloweekend
Friday saw me catching a morning bus to Windsor to visit my girlfriend and work. There was some great fun, including carving pumpkins with friends of her, visiting Value Village, and buying a Pogoplug (not yet operational)! We also dressed funny and played games. On Halloween, we drove all the way to Guelph to do Trick or Eat. I barely saw anyone I know, especially since we incidentally signed up to go with FLASH, but the FLASHers were a fine folk and soon Princess Leia, a disgruntled Newsy, and two knights templar were canvassing the streets explicitly for foodstuffs and implicitly candy. A great haul was had, and a sidewalk attacked the princess.
More school
On Tuesday I missed my train into Guelph. It was either this week or last, as well, that I had discovered mildew on my futon frame and spent half a day cleaning as a consequence. I knew, if I would just embrace the mildew, I'd have fewer complaints. Yada, yada, yada, this Thursday in the next post.
It's always magical when a dreaded day turns around. :)
ReplyDeleteEvery time you mention NLP I think of this.