Blogging Every Day

Birthday

This weekend was my birthday. I got to spend it in Flesherton again. I think I've rarely missed the chance to. I've at least visited Flesherton within a week of almost all my birthdays. It is typically idyllic. I describe it as such a lot. The snowy weather was wonderful, even if it impaired Liv's car from starting. I organised a small event in my honour, having a couple people over, making our own pizza, eating Liv's heartcakes, playing Dutch Blitz (favourite card game) and watching Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (favourite film).

NLP project

My interminable school project has made great progress. I was able to diagnose a few subtle but important bugs that have re-enabled progress. The optimisation work I did the other week has helped me test a lot. I reduced the time a phase took from multiple minutes to a second. Hooray! Tips: avoid using lots of String operations in Java. If the data can be predefined in an Enum, do so! Also, using the ^ operator for custom hashing seems to work really well, especially when you want to use HashMaps to cache already-seen values to avoid duplicate re-calculation.

Also, sometimes it's very worth losing some bit of local information to simplify a problem. I was building trees from a file and then analysing them in a simple way from the bottom up. However, because each node knew about its parent, the node could not be easily recycled in another, similar tree. So, now each node does not have a reference to its parent, and the trees get analysed from the top-down, which was less straightforward for my algorithm, but greatly reduced the amount of memory used.

My implementation has some issues at the larger scale. It remains imperfect. I hope to figure out why over the course of the next week. Yikes.

Apartment

I now own my own rice cooker. It may be too large. I originally bought a $10 Bon Appetit rice cooker from Zellers and it came pre-dented and scorched (previously abused?). I was then going to replace it with a $20 Proctor Silex one, and perhaps I should have, but after much debate, I went for a $30 Black and Decker one. In large part due to nervousness about quality. I like going lofi on a lot of my possessions. I even buy refurbished computers. But I don't want to replace my rice cooker any time soon. In some ways, the smaller Proctor Silex (8 cups cooked) would have better met my needs than the Black and Decker (16 cups cooked), but the latter comes with a 2 year limited warrantee, etc. Yes, I am talking about material possessions. We also acquired a small, attractive microwave. It thankfully fits our plates. I remember once before being somewhere where the plates were too large for the microwave. HA.

I am sad to hear that many Zellers will be converted to Target. Strange, my attachment to some brands.

School

Right, a new semester has begun. I am taking a Technical Communication and Research Methods course and a Neural Networks course. I was going to take three, but there's an Experimental Design course in the summer I want to take instead. I am also TAing a busy course, CIS*2750 Software Systems Development and Integration. My first lab for it went alright. The lab situation is not ideal in the room we are in. I am also displeased by changes to our computer systems since I was an undergraduate at Guelph. Grr.

More importantly, I talked to my supervisor about changing my thesis, my subject of focus. He is amenable. Hooray.