As far as work goes, I’m learning a lot of valuable stuff about natural language processing! I’ve been attending weekly meetings of the NLP research group, and going to AI seminars when the topic seems interesting. I’ll put up some notes from the good ones, I think. Anyway, I’ve been writing a lot of Python code, some of which I think is quite nice. I’ve learned how to process XML data with Python’s iterparse(), which is far more intuitive than any of the DOM-esque approaches I’ve looked at in the past. XML had never really “clicked” with me before this. I’ve also been parsing command line arguments for the first time, using argparse. Similar to the XML thing, I looked at optparse when I first started with Python 2.6, and it seemed sucky. Maybe argparse is a big improvement, or maybe I’m just “better” than I was then - either way, it’s a good skill to have.
One other thing I’ve learned is that I hate working on things that don’t seem like they’re going to do any good. There was a period of a week or two where I was struggling to get to a point where we could evaluate the real-world performance of some programs we were looking at (more on this in another post). In the interim, I tested the programs on data from English, and the results were really not good. It later turned out that my calculation of the results was wrong (I tried to be Pythonic at the wrong time), and that a non-sensical tweak vastly improved the results.
But even though the results did get a bit better, I got really demotivated, because I knew I had to keep working on the task. But I also thought that I already knew how it was going to turn out (badly), and felt like I was wasting my time. In the end, things were better than I expected, and we’re back to making forward progress - but it was sucky for a little bit.
About two weeks ago, I worked up the courage to e-mail the university’s fencing club. I kinda figured I’d never get a response, but it turns out they answer their e-mails pretty quickly! So last week I went out to practice with them, got introduced to everyone, and so on. First, everyone there seems cool (not being facetious, I mean I should hang out with them some time). Second, my co-worker also fences, which is hilariously improbable. Third, man am I out of shape after not fencing for eight months. I could probably fence a few bouts to 15 a year ago, and last week I practically collapsed after five bouts to 3. This week we did drills, and I got some perfectly deserved advice/criticism from the foil coach. But I felt really, really good as I was walking home after practice. It’s nice to be back.
The hardest part, I think, is being far away from my girlfriend. For as long as we’ve known each other, we’ve generally spent a significant portion of our time together. We text each other daily, chat on the phone every couple of days, and spend an hour or two on Skype watching Adventure Time on the weekends. We’ve got about half of Season 4 left to watch, then it’s probably on to the newest season of Game of Thrones. But anyway, it’s still a lot less time together than I’m used to.
She’s going to visit in July, as a birthday gift from her parents. Which is sort of the most boring part of the summer, because her birthday is in June, while August has Animethon and my birthday. It’s the best time logistically, but still. I don’t think we’ll be able to scrounge up funds for a second trip, anyway.
But I’m fine! Life is pretty good. I’ve got summer projects planned, but I don’t know which ones I’ll follow through on. Some things to get ready for September. I’ve got some physical and social activity outside of work. So stop asking me if I regret accepting this job every time we talk! glare