We're at home, in Florida :)

The holiday's been really pleasant. Lindsey's been very charming and gracious, meeting nearly my mom's entire family, who came up to visit. And Natalie and her beau were here until yesterday evening (he's a cool guy). We've been doing some running in the state park woods across the street, which I'm glad to find are pretty much the same as before.

Also! We've been playing with the new cool electronic gadgets people got as gifts: I think mom won. She got Beatles Rock Band (there's been a lot of Rock Band going on, Beatles and otherwise) and a Kindle, which she's really excited about. She finds this idea of getting books out of the luminiferous æther (often for free) pretty compelling, and was nearly equally jazzed to find out that it can browse the web too.

I'm trying to muster the motivation to do some productive reading or hackinating, but there's so much relaxing to do! (I did install ChucK...)

As I type this, Lindsey is tying a festive bow around my head. She was wearing it as a choker a few minutes ago.

Atlanta people! We'll see you in just a few days!

Earlier today, as Alex onigunip and I were driving home from Chicago, I was complaining to him about how the folks we'd just been to visit¹ did a better job with furniture and household-maintenance tasks than we did. My complaints included things like "We've had a non-working lamp in our living room for six months" and "Our table is rickety and only seats four, making it impossible to have more than two people over for dinner simultaneously". To rectify this, Alex has started a wave²: "things to do to the house".

So far, the only thing on his list is "install taco dispenser".

This is basically why I love him.

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This afternoon, we got back from Chicago. We had popped up to visit Lindsey's sister Maya leadsynth, and their Chicago friends. I'd never been there before, but it was a great time! It's even relatively easy to drive up, and Maya conveniently has a spare room.

In no particular order, we baked a bunch of cookies, listened to some festive music, went out for a lovely brunch, visited with Lindsey's friends from Grinnell, played Rummikub (which turns out to be really fun!), and ate and ate.

Particularly, Nick and Rachel (the Grinnell friends) are really interesting; they've studied anthropology and history, and have visited all kinds of crazy places around the world (like Peru, Thailand, and New Zealand!), and we talked about travelling and speaking languages and life, etc. Nick has a very dashing Peruvian hat.

For now we're back in Bloomington, but tomorrow, we're headed out again, this time to visit my family in Tallahassee, and then up to Atlanta. If you're in either of those places, expect to hear from us... at an unexpected time. ...

... or, y'know, we'll call.

OK, have fun :)

The last thing I had to do for the fall 2009 semester was an epic 48-hour take-home final for B522. I think I was able to work out almost everything, but the very last part of the last question had me stumped. It was an "Is it possible to produce a term of type X in language Y, and if so, what would one such term be? If not, then would having a value of type Z on hand make it possible, and if so, what would one such term be?" sort of question. I was able to figure out that the answers to those questions were no and yes, respectively, but damned if I could actually work out what the term would be. I tried for hours. When I finally went to turn in the exam yesterday with the problem still unfinished (I had written something flippant, like "Yes, you can produce a term of the given type, but I can't"), two of the other students from the class were there, and none of us had managed to figure it out. Then Amal showed us a (gigantic) term that would have been a correct answer, and I was actually pretty relieved -- first, that what I had managed to figure out had been correct as far as it went (and, in fact, that I had even been correct in my understanding that said mysterious value of type Z corresponded to a proof of the excluded middle law), and second, that the answer wasn't actually something incredibly short and cute. I mean, I don't feel nearly so bad about not getting it now!

So, as of yesterday, I'm done for 2009, for some value of "done". With three semesters down, I'm now just one course away from being finished with a master's degree.¹ (A full graduate course load is three per semester, but you need ten courses for the master's. That's how they get you.) After having spent most of the spring semester hanging on by my claws, it was a relief to find that things went much better this fall. For most of the time, I was standing firmly up on the edge of the precipice instead of hanging down into it by my claws. And my grades, as they trickle in, seem to be fine; evidently the final exam for my AI course went, um, just as badly for everyone else.

No rest for the wicked, though. Over break, I need to read some papers and start hacking Coq in preparation for the research project I'm doing with Amal in the spring. We're hoping to get a paper out by May, and there's a large amount of stuff I need to get up to speed on in order to make that possible.

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I watched Avatar this morning. It was a CG marvel, unequaled in its presentation, etc. Despite the realism, I was still at arm's length from the underlying story. I was much more moved by The Princess and The Frog than this (if you had to pick one or the other, I'd choose the latter, frankly).

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I'm back to work on a more regular basis since school ended (AABC = 3.25 GPA). I managed an A in LCC 2700 (which I expected a B in) and got a B in Intro to OOP / Java (which I expected an A in). Other than this my grades were as expected. The A in LCC 2700 is particularly satisfying, considering I was shooting for it from the very beginning once I found out that only about 5-6% of each class manages As. The best part is that I was content with a B when all was said and done... I felt I got more than plenty out of the class, and certainly feel comfortable hacking away in Processing now, for instance.

Last Tuesday, I met with markluffel at ATLhack/Octane, for the first time in a while not having an impending assignment before me. After the requisite Facebook time-killing, I finally opened Processing. For a moment I felt that I had forgotten how to work in it, but no, I just needed an idea, a seed to start from. So I just started messing around, not really worrying about utility and focusing on aesthetics. That's the beautiful thing about Processing... being able to just follow an idea and see where it goes.

Anyway, this is what I did:
http://www.prism.gatech.edu/~rsolomon3/processing/sketch_dec15a/applet/

( details )

The applet is not anything special, but it was fun to make nevertheless, and it reacquainted me with ArrayList stuff. I also quite comfortably made an Object to store one node of the drawn line, which is something before this semester that I would have had no idea what to do.

While I've enjoyed my film classes at Tech, none of them really taught me how to make anything, or how to tackle a new method of making "stuff". I look forward to learning more, indeed.

Next semester I will hopefully get in Computer Audio. After that, I should start to become dangerous!

OK! Wren winterkoninkje and Yin yourusername and I finished up our writeup for Mike's Class and mailed it in last night. And all the grading is done for the class that I TA'd!

So, left, I have the last computational linguistics homework. Given a treebank, we're training up a parser for German. I did most of the programming work already; now we just have to do the experiments and write everything up and make sure my team is all on the same page.

And the stats final is due Friday. Analyzing some datasets about prison terms and fuel consumption. Cheerful topics!

All of these classes have been pretty cool. I'm somewhat torn, though. I want to be done taking classes as soon as possible so I can spend more time getting interesting work done (moving towards graduating), and less time thrashing. On the other hand, I want to know more about stats and CL, and here I am, at a university, where they teach classes about those things. What an opportunity, right? And another masters or a phd minor might look pretty shiny on my wall.

I guess with the statistics, though, what I'm really interested in is knowing enough to apply it to interesting machine learning problems. This is roughly analogous to saying: I'm not into physics that much; I want to build airplanes.

I think it'll be OK :) For now, though -- let's parse that German!

After tomorrow, I just have two projects, due Thursday and Friday. And neither of them are all that hard.

The difficult stuff happens today, tonight, and tomorrow. Getting one project in a presentable state, and proctoring (then grading) an exam.

And then we can relax, play with the kitties, and go to Tallahassee and Atlanta!

(Ben K recently tweeted about grad school: you spend absurdly long hours switching between four different things and not making progress on any of them. I'm trying to do exactly not-that. One thing at a time.)

Obviously, I play a lot of Rock Band. I'm a Rock Band partisan, if you will, mainly because of the little details that Harmonix gets right as opposed to the direction of the Guitar Hero franchise. One of these days I'll enumerate why, but in the meantime I'll only say that my various Rock Band purchases have gone a long way to making me a semi-competent drummer in a variety of styles. It's really the only reason I have remained interested in the game, though the tangential benefit of having my friends interpret various songs during my movie screening nights has been a nice side effect.

One of the primarily voiced concerns on the Interwebs is the over saturation of what is called the rhythm genre. It's easy to blame Activision/Guitar Hero for this, having released 5 different games for consoles this past year, compared to just The Beatles: Rock Band and Lego Rock Band by EA/Harmonix. Personally, I don't think the number of games has anything to do with the decline of the rhythm genre. All games get old. When the mechanic is basically unchanged for two years people are either going to get sick of it or move on, or they are going to stop buying games that offer nothing new gameplay-wise. It should be noted that the DLC sales remain strong for Rock Band, despite the decline in game sales.

When this game was announced, I shrugged along with the rest, but I spared the vitriol. Harmonix, at the least, has worked out the issue of song export with this title (along with their others, including Lego Rock Band), professing to allow owners to export songs to their hard drive so that they can add to their library without disc swapping. As someone who has people over frequently for Rock Band shenanigans, this is appreciated. Swapping discs is no fun, and it makes sense that you should be able to play tracks you've purchased across titles.

Of course, this title doesn't solve the problem of "revitalizing the rhythm genre", but for my friends who just want to sing and play various songs, I don't think the game mechanic being revitalized is going to make a difference. The key to one franchise dominating over the other is going to be the depth of their song library, pure and simple. I can't see Guitar Hero dominating far into the future for this reason, since exporting songs has not been a priority for them. This simple decision alone is going to make the difference long-term between the two franchises.

Will Rock Band ever again reach the lofty heights it once did? Nope, but it will maintain its niche. As for me, I'll keep buying songs as long as they promise new drum charts/styles to play, and let my friends pony up for the songs they want to sing. I'm not sure if this game fits either bill, but we'll see what the MSRP is.

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Also... life. The semester is over. I wrote very little this semester, and hope to do more going forward, though I think it will likely delve into less personal topics over time. My penchant for self-reflection hasn't been erased, but my desire to share such thoughts publicly has definitely diminished over time, particularly as I've been massively busy. We'll see how it goes.