Mizblog

I never could get the hang of Thursdays.

Sangeeta called Wednesday night, and spent the whole time telling me about how big a dirtbag her uncle and his kids are.

Then I was surprised to find that I had slept all night long. Luckily I had already brushed my teeth.

Thursday night – same story. Crashed at 9:30pm and awoke just before 5am. Odd…

I was up until 5am, working and cleaning. Exercising and studying. Packing.

I got the basic multiple choice problem movie working and looking nice. It shows a wrist x-ray and asks you to classify it into one of four categories. After you pick, it tells you if you were accurate or not, and shows the relevant information on the x-ray.

I put all of Saranya’s toys into her crib, since she’s not using any of them this month and I need to get to the carpet to clean it.

My insecticidal rampage continued but at a decreasing rate. I had myself a literal bug hunt.

Having more space around me feels really good. All those toys were making the living room feel very cramped and small. Now it’s a wide open room, and it makes me feel free somehow. Now if only the carpet weren’t so filthy. That’s going to happen this weekend.

I haven’t heard from Sangeeta this week. I hope they’re doing alright. Since Milan left for Subash’s wedding, she probably doesn’t have access to Internet until he gets back. I really miss them. 3 more weeks…

I’m sleeping twice per day. I get an evening nap for 2 or 3 hours, then I work until the sun comes up before sleeping again until late morning. I get tons of work done at night, but very little done during the day.

On Monday night, our lab went to Everett’s new apartment in K-town for Mr. Pizza. Joel regaled us with tales of his adventure in Ibiza, and then we all walked over to a Korean karaoke establishment. It was much fun! I had 1 glass of beer the whole night, and then drove people home safely. I got home and crashed at about 3am.

Tuesday morning I woke up at 7am, expecting a possible call from Nepal. The call didn’t happen, so I tried to go back to sleep. I was very uncomfortable and finally decided it just wasn’t working and I should get up and get coffee, but when I looked at the clock it was 9am. I’d slept 2 hours and didn’t even notice.

Tuesday evening I got home from work around 8pm with a few groceries I’d picked up on the way home. While putting them away, I spotted a cockroach on my refrigerator. Immediately I went into cleaning mode, cleared all the bags and boxes and plates and trays from the top of the refrigerator, and wiped the whole thing down with a hot soapy rag. It actually cleaned up pretty well, but while I was washing some of the big plates we’d stored up there, I turned and saw that I’d disturbed some more cockroaches. Even as tired and as hungry as I was, I was more angry that these little bastards were invading my living space, and I was determined to exterminate them all. I even tried to move the old refrigerator to clean behind it, until I started worrying that it might break.

Anyway, after all that effort I went to bed with one more clean area in the kitchen, and creepy crawlies in my head. I laid awake for 3 hours in the dark before my consciousness time traveled to morning. 5am. Allergies had kicked in. Coffee. World of Warcraft for my jc daily quest. Then some mindless travel while reading the news on the web, drinking coffee, and generally being a zombie. By about 10am I was again tired and went down for another shot at sleep. This time the dreams came almost immediately, and I knew I was dreaming because Saranya jumped on my back and tried to poke me in the eye like she often does, while Sangeeta yelled from the other room telling Saranya to leave me alone. I thought “oh, this must be a dream” and then it changed into something less memorable. After an hour of REM sleep though, I feel much much better.

I woke up at 6:30am to the sound of the phone ringing. Actually my first memory was when I actually saw the phone in the next room, but I was expecting the call. I needed the call. Sleep had been elusive yet I jettisoned it in seconds.

Then the phone stopped ringing. Oh. No!

Whew! It rang again! “Hello?”

It was Sangeeta! They made it safely to her father’s house in Kathmandu, and Saranya was finally sleeping. Apparently Sangeeta’s fears of bad behavior proved unfounded, as several other passengers complimented Saranya on her exemplary behavior during the long trip. She only fussed a couple times because of the difficulty of sleeping on the plane.

What a huge relief! I had been worried in the general sense of having no information and no control. I was up at 1:30am and checking the time in Nepal, thinking surely they’d landed by now. Anything to keep the darkness and solitude at bay, and to keep my mind from enumerating the possible disasters which could have befallen my loved ones.

Now I can rest easy. Well, maybe…

The girls left last night from LAX. They called me as soon as they boarded (first ones, thanks to the small child). Saranya was extremely excited about being on an airplane. She had her own video monitor on her own window seat too. Sangeeta’s greatest fear was that Saranya would misbehave on the plane. I can’t wait to find out how it all went. They should be landing tonight.

I’m taking the opportunity to clean the apartment. I’ve already made huge improvements in every room. Originally I thought I’d divide the task into areas, then sub-areas, but instead I’ve been skimming off the obvious tasks, or whatever strikes my fancy. I put old shoes in a box, put old sippy cups in another box, etc. It’s also liberating to not have to ask if I can throw things away! So while I’m walking around the house, whenever I see something that says “I don’t go here”, I either put it where it does go, or in the trash, or on Sangeeta’s desk for her to decide. I’m sure you’re already envisioning a heap of things with a desk underneath, but let me assure you that I have also allotted her two full closets for questionable items. :)

I managed to punch a hole through Saranya’s toy collection that’s big enough to see the carpet underneath. The sheer magnitude of the toy problem is almost unfathomable. I’m going to have to shift them into some living space while I clean one room, then shift them back to do the other room. Some of them might get lost in the process, and all of them will get temporarily organized and packed into as small a physical space as I can manage. And I only have a month to do all this!

Anyone reading this blog will notice that I haven’t been sick much lately, so I haven’t been posting anything. Today I’m taking the time to remind my future self what I was thinking about and doing way back in June.

Sangeeta is getting ready to take Saranya to Nepal for a month. She’s got a week left to get everything ready, her car is in the shop with a major intermittent coolant leak that they can’t seem to find, and she just got addicted to Korean soap operas so she spends all day sitting in front of the computer watching them and reading the subtitles.

World of Warcraft is holding less and less of my attention. I still log on every day to do my jewelcrafting daily quest, and sometimes I take a break and do some Argent Tournament stuff. Oh, and I have calendar reminders to check and renew my Mysterious Eggs on 5 different characters. I can do all this while only actually paying attention to the game for as little as 30 minutes per day. The rest of my time I’m either programming, reading about programming, reading literature on human memory models, or studying math/statistics.

I’m the only employee of Insight Learning Technology, Inc. who’s not on vacation. I’m using the time to take cars back and forth for repairs, and to rework, refactor, and modernize all my PLM server code. I had to fake object orientation before, but PHP5 lets me write code the way I’m used to thinking about it. We’ve got at least two big projects coming up this summer, so I’m scrambling to get some of this background work done and tested before I have to focus on deliverables. The hope is that all this will make later projects easier.

I’ve been studying Psychological journals to see what other people have been doing in the field. Phil Pavlik and John Anderson have a nice model that predicts forgetting and recall time, and I think I’d like to adopt a similar model. Our system has a couple of arbitrary parameters, and I need to figure out a system for making them less arbitrary.

Whenever we create a new module for adaptive training, we have to decide what sort of performance reflects sufficient learning that the learner will be able to correctly answer the item (or an item from the same category) after a delay. We also have to determine the parameters that tell us approximately how long to wait after an item is presented before we show it again. Right now, these parameters are arbitrary and independent, but I think we need to come up with a system for not only generating these parameters automatically, but for relating them theoretically. That’s a path we’ve been loathe to tread, but access to funding for research in the field lies down that road, and we need to show our feet thereupon before the monetary gates will be opened to us.

Then there’s math and statistics. I’ve been looking at performance data from an earlier experiment, and trying to find a pattern of accuracy following particular patterns of problem presentation. I guess I need to learn some data mining and regression techniques to figure out the relationships. My lack of statistics background is holding me back, so I think I’m going to try to sit in on some classes next year.

If I still have a job…

The breeze was warm tonight. Saranya and I went out for a walk. She’s been getting sick the last couple days and has stayed home from school, but the coughing hasn’t dropped her energy level noticeably. I felt like T2 walking after her as she ran around the block away from me. I tried to stay close so I could grab her quickly if she started to do anything dangerous (like run into the street or into rose bushes) but her most perilous acts were to run down a sloped driveway and stumble into my knee, or to pick up rocks and try to get me to eat some of them.

We have a chalk board on an easel in our living room. Sangeeta uses it to write words for things that Saranya is familiar with, like yogurt, egg, happy, etc.

The other day, Saranya was rubbing the chalkboard and getting her hand all covered with chalk dust. Then she went to show her hand to mommy. “What’s that on your hand, Saranya?” asked mommy.

“Egg!” explained Saranya.

(She had erased the word “egg” with her fingers!)

Saranya woke me up by licking my face. When I spluttered and looked her in the face, she proudly shouted “I’m dog!” and started panting.

I was doing pretty good this year. Last year I got sick 8 times, but so far this year I’d only been sick once.

Until last week.

Last week I got a sinus explosion. It wasn’t bad. It actually reminded me of times when I was sick in elementary school, when I could stay home and work on things that I wanted to work on instead of going to school and endure the ridicule of my peers. Fond memories.

Then on Thursday Saranya got the pukes. That was a scary time. We weren’t sure what was wrong with her or how serious it was, and we stayed alert for signs that she was getting worse or that the vomiting was a sign of a more serious condition like meningitis or a bowel obstruction. Fortunately, she recovered fairly quickly and we were able to relax a little.

Yesterday, Sangeeta and I got whatever it was Saranya had last week. We didn’t puke, but for 2 days we were pretty sure we were about to let loose. It was awful. We had to lie down all day just to take the edge off. Oh it sucked. That was not a pleasant illness like the one I had last week. This one was incapacitating. I found myself wishing for time to pass; wishing to sleep for 48 hours and let my immune system do the cleanup without having to experience the altered consciousness of the disease.

Coming out the other side of it, I see that I wouldn’t have a weight problem if I always reacted this way to food. A little food is all I can handle, and eating more than that makes me feel nauseated. Usually, however, eating a little food makes me want to eat a lot of food, and I can’t stop until I feel uncomfortably full. Hmm, feels like a poorly adjusted regulator in my brain…