Becoming a Home

November 18, 2008

9:41 PM

I'm having fun playing the role of happy homemaker. I've got most of the furniture assembled, many of the boxes picked up and only two large items left (desk and dinning room table). It's all coming together nicely. I have a slight Venetian theme in the dinning room, and slight California theme in the living room which works since both decoration styles tend to be fairly open. Both themes are tied together through use of similar colors and textures. Upstairs it's chocolate brown, blue in the master bedroom and (of course) teal for the computer room.

I also bought a whole bunch of doo-dads at Lowes. The previous home owner loved the house, but I don't think they knew what they were doing. The doorstop to keep the door to the garage doesn't work (it's too higA few items were attached to the drywall rather than the support beams. All relatively minor stuff, but relatively annoying stuff that needs to be dealt with. And there are no door stops, so we've got slight handle indentations in the wall. That should be fixed too. I've got another coupon too, which will come in handy. We want to buy a grill. At some point I'm also going to take advantage of all the adds I keep hearing on the radio and buy a space heater for the master bathroom. It's open, which translates to cold in the winter.And research! I have a clear path forward for SIGIR. Now the big question is whether or not I will get done in time, but I know what I'm doing. I have previous work I can build upon which will give me a chance. If it's not done in time, there will be other paper deadlines.

I definitely feel better when their is progress. I don't do well when I'm idle, or as recent weeks have shown, busy idle. I need to be making lists, plotting directions and all around progressing towards my goals.

Possible Downtime

November 15, 2008

11:03 PM

This weekend I spent some time working on my newest website (not launched yet) when I realized my host is having a special promotion - unlimited disk space, unlimited transfer for agreeing to be a test Ginny pig. Turns out their transferring accounts to a new system and anticipating problems, so their looking for volunteers. While I don't come anywhere close to the maximum, I do foresee a spike in traffic with the coming wedding. I previously used this domain to set up a repository for a paper, but I should be able to use one hosted by UCSC for the next paper. I figured I had nothing to lose, and, hey, who doesn't love unlimited for free?

So while they move my account from one server to another there's potential for some intermittent downtime, but I doubt it will be long. I think I am likely to loose email more than anything else. Some of the extra features, like the search engine may not work. If you encounter any issues, please let me know. Aegis (the back end script I wrote) is pretty good at alerting me when something goes wrong, but it won't be effective if Aegis encounters problems.

In happy news, I'm not quite as far behind in my class as I thought I was. Or at least, I'm doing as poorly as I thought I was. I just got back my homework and was pleasantly surprised. The homework answer sheet and my answers rarely agreed, but I must have stated my assumptions well enough, because I received mostly full credit. I almost regretted the decision to take the class pass-fail. Almost. I think going into the midterm last week with CIKM and the paper deadline would have stressed me out incredibly.

So now there's two weeks left to finish the project, and two and a half months left for the new research project. House unpacking has been incredibly slow. The large weekend purchases continue. I'm beginning to think we'll never get past this initial set up period. Web down time might not be such a bad thing after all.

What Election?

November 5, 2008

9:48 PM

I've been saying for a while now that I'll have time to breath after November 4th. No, I wasn't talking about the election. The paper deadline for the WWW conference was 3 am yesterday morning (election day). A full day of classes meant I wasn't home until late. You know it's bad when a five hour night feels like sleeping in. Now, with egger anticipation, I'm looking forward to January 20th. Yes, It's also inauguration day, but more importantly (at least to me) is the WWW notification date. I go back and forth between the thought that the paper is the best I've written, and remembering how competitive the conference is. The paper is much improved from it's initial draft, but the question is, is it good enough?

When not working on my WWW submission, I was being a student volunteer for the CIKM conference up in Napa last week. I started out in the Poster Room and with the master sheet, directing the other student volunteers three days later. I had more fun then volunteering then I admitted to the organizers. I love being helpful. I really enjoy being the go-to person for getting things done, or answering questions. That's one of the motivating factors for my return to school. I want to be the authority. Unfortunately, I didn't get to spend much time listening in on the sessions. There were quite a few papers that are relevant to my research that it would have been nice to see the presentation. At least I have a copy of the white papers in the proceedings. I also missed all of the keynotes, which is a bummer, but I got to meet the person who started the conference 17 years ago, if but briefly.

Now that the WWW submission is done, I'm looking forward to the next project. I know the overall approach I want to take, but don't have specifics on the model, and the next deadline is approaching. I'm also working with an undergrad on his research project. He's doing some pretty cool stuff, it's impressive.

I was anticipating having a small break this week, but I'm behind in my class and the house is a royal mess. There are boxes everywhere. I have a bad feeling that some bag towards the back of the mess is leaking and I won't notice until the floor is irreparably stained. The apartment keys have been returned, so I don't really feel an incentive to get my butt in gear and get everything unpacking really isn't here any more. To bad there's no deadline for unpacking to motivate me.

Alas, my first no-alarm-sleeping-in-as-late-as-the-cat-lets-me day is looking like Saturday. I know grad school is supposed to be a marathon, not a sprint, but I feel like I've been doing a distance sprint. Off I go again.