Mizblog

This afternoon I took my brother Rob out for some Abbot’s Pizza. It was okay: thin, crunchy, too hot for my liking; the atmosphere was loud, with dance music blasting and a TV silently showing golf; and service was good. Afterward I took him for a drive to keep him away from his family for a while. Finally we went back and he asked me to help him swap sofas between his apartment, and his father-in-law who lives next door. Well, the sofa was too big and awkward and delicate for us to get it out and maneuvered, and my back was giving me clues that I should stop trying, so I did. I expect to try again next weekend – this time with some more protection on the sofa so that the job doesn’t require such precision.

That couple hours was pretty much my whole day. Before that I had coffee and bagels and slowly became conscious and alive. Afterward I went to sleep and woke up at 10pm. Had a quick skirmish in the kitchen (usual suspects in unusual places), put away some canned goods, did some spot cleaning in the living room, and planted myself in front of the computer again. I’m still hoping a plan for living room cleaning is going to pop full-formed into my head, and it’s going to be easy. Until then, there’s a bouncy horse that’s going to keep silently mocking my failure. Go away, bouncy horse! STOP LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT!!!

I attended a wedding this afternoon. Dave Kitani and Ji Son got married, and it was the biggest Jesus fest I’ve ever seen. I think Dave and Ji are really nice people, and the wedding theme was a very cleverly thought out political allegory, but the cheerful little zombie cult stuff was too much.

The other thing that bugged me was that the selected scripture (Ephesians 31-35 or something like that) was written by Paul, who I consider to be something of a lunatic. He emphasized that the woman’s role in the marriage is to respect the husband, but no mention was made of a husband’s duty to respect his wife. It was the old patriarchal cultural biases being reiterated. I hope those two don’t actually try to emulate that antiquated formula.

After the wedding, KP, John, and I went over to Joel’s house in Santa Monica. From there we walked all the way to Venice beach, and out to the end of the pier at Washington Blvd., where we saw a dozen or so fireworks shows at various distances up and down the coast. The closest show was Marina Del Rey, and it was weak for most of its duration. Single bursts were fired at a fairly steady pace, sometimes with two of the same in a row, and sometimes with long silences between bursts. But the finale was really exciting.

The walk home was exciting too, because drunken crazy people were lighting fireworks off on the beach. Some of them were going horizontally into the surrounding neighborhood. It was slightly harrowing but still overall a fun experience.

After a stop at Holy Guacamole for some burritos, we went back to Joel’s place and watched Die Hard 2. This was difficult because the disk kept skipping. Finally, John fixed the disk and we watched the conclusion. We decided that the reporter on the plane wasn’t such a bad guy, but Holly (the wife) was a seriously violent bitch who deserved jail time. Also, the whole story falls apart if you think about it for 5 seconds, so don’t do that or you’ll ruin the enjoyable action. :)

KP and John are going to Hawaii on Monday. Ji has already moved out of the lab. It’s going to be much more sparsely populated in there for a while. I miss them already.

Today I spent 2 1/2 hours scrubbing stove burner rings with steel wool, trying to remove baked on charcoal. Even though I’ve made huge progress (you can see actual metal in some places now), the overall result is still spotty and ugly. It feels like some of that carbon has been cooked into the steel, anodizing it a dull gray. I also feel like I wasted too much time scrubbing burner rings when there’s so much else in the apartment that needs attention.

I used compressed air to blow the junk around inside the stove while the burners were disassembled. Lots of charred food remnants in there that I’ll never be able to reach. Oh well, at least the nutritive content has all been consumed by fire, so it won’t be much of a haven for vermin.

I just finished cooking up a pot of turkey chili with extra jalapeños. It’s cooling and should be ready to eat by tomorrow. I took special care not to allow insects or insecticide to get into it, because I doubt either one would make it more delicious.

While stirring the pot every 15 minutes or so, I took the opportunity to clean out the spice cupboard. Eeeks, what a mess. In the back was evidence of multiple spice spills and habitation by a spider. I threw out spices that had dust or cobwebs on them. Apparently we don’t need those. Allspice? Dill weed? No. Bye. Trash.

My war with the other inhabitants of the kitchen continues. If anything it has accelerated since yesterday, but now I hold the field and can easily spot and destroy them when they pop their heads out of their hiding places. The areas they used to treat as safe are now barren and exposed, making them easy prey. I also noticed that they’re having a harder time finding food. I dripped a drop of liquid from the black beans onto the kitchen counter, and within 15 minutes it had attracted a scout. Dead.

Sangeeta took the key to the laundry room to Nepal, so I think I’m going to have to visit my parents’ house tomorrow with two bags of laundry. I’ll probably do some yard work to pay for it. Usually it’s enough just to bring Saranya, but Sangeeta took her to Nepal also. :P

I’m on a weird sleep schedule. I crash before midnight, wake up in the wee hours, have coffee, do some work, then go back to sleep after the sun comes up and sleep halfway to noon. I feel that process starting again…

It’s 2:45am. I just slept 4 hours and woke up. Guess I can get some work done while it’s dark and quiet.

In the kitchen I saw a few of my little friends next to the stove, so I broke out the bug spray and killed some babies. Then I partially dismantled the stove and sprayed bug spray inside it. The little pilot lights would ignite the bug spray, making fireballs that I imagined would napalm the little bastards to fiery hell.

My kitchen is a war zone, left mostly uninhabitable by both sides. I can’t prepare food in there anymore. I keep a fan running all the time to prevent the fumes from collecting in the bedroom. I can turn it off after the war. I’m tempted to just nuke the site with a room fogger, but those pilot lights would turn the whole apartment building into an inferno.

…

Now it’s almost 4am, and I’m trying to re-learn how to manage a SVN repository so that I can clean up some mistakes I made way back in 2007.

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!

I’ve done away with news.mizerai.com. I was using phpnuke to run it, and became unable to maintain it faster than the spammers were creating user accounts and trying to spam my comments, take over my site, etc. Besides, I was really tired of the ugliness of it all.

So now it redirects here. :)

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.