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Quick Update
Wednesday, October 23rd, 2002 02:07 amIf I don't post this now, who knows when I'll get around to it. Quick recap of my recent life.
Two Sundays ago I got up early to have breakfast and a meeting about our Teaching Circle. After that, Andy, Aria, and I made it down to Denver for rehearsal for the Witches Ball ritual. It's looking fairly good, but we haven't had enough time to practice or get folks warmed up to the idea of improving. It's an interesting group -- some folks who'll improv at the drop of a hat and some who are very slowly emerging from the comforting blanket of scripts and props. Upon return, I knocked out my Speech Recognition homework in a couple hours. No sweat. Then I set to work on the Machine Learning homework I'd been staring at with little result for all of Fall Break. I did problems 2 and 3, which weren't nearly as hard, but took me most of the way through the night. (Turns out I got a 14/20 on both of them...) I then went to ask my prof a few questions, figured out how to derive the equation in question, and continued working until about 3am (41 hours awake!), since it had been due Monday afternoon. Didn't get it all done, but I felt pretty good about where I was, so I resolved to finish up on Tuesday. After letting my Matlab code run for two hours on Tuesday, I learned that I'd gone horribly wrong somewhere and my decoded message was C DG GWEALOQ*T P AD*EQPL G*AAATM CPT *. I stayed up until 2:30 for THAT?
I ended up staying up too late on Thursday night too, first working on Programming Languages, then writing quarter and Taliesen/Cerridwen calls for Saturday night's teaching circle. Groggy? Yeah, it's that kind of week.
Friday night I then went to the Open Full Moon in Denver. Manea had suggested I run my nonverbal ritual there, so I attended this month to meet folks and see what the space, people, etc. are like. It was put on by Ordo Templi Orientis, Ad Astara Encampment, an interesting group of pagans who seem to base most of their practices on Alistair Crowley (sp?). It started out very ceremonially, but they consciously included participatory drumming and dancing and a few other witchy acoutrements to meet the needs of the 80 or so witches who were present. The ritual drew to a close less than an hour after it started, which seemed kind of weird, which left folks most of Friday night free. I ended up at Paris on the Platte with the guy I drove down with and a friend I met at OFM. I hadn't been to Paris before, and it was pretty cool. Certainly better ventilated than some of the smoky British pubs I've been in, but I'm quite glad smoking is outlawed in Boulder. My clothes and beard stank when I got back.
On Saturday I watched the Buffs beat Baylor 34-0. They didn't score any points in the second half, but that was in part due to the fact that they were playing 2nd and 3rd string players. Baylor didn't move the ball past the 50 until the 4th quarter. That evening I helped lead the teaching circle (which had a whopping student attendance of 2!). We did a really cool group word/movement/sound-association exercize and had a lot of fun. We held it at the Weltys' house even though they weren't there, so Heather left us lots of sticky notes. I felt like a high schooler having an approved party while the parents were out of town.
Sunday during the day I finally got around to putting up my posters in my new room, since I'd been too busy since before Fall Break to do so. My room finally looks like my final CU home. Al and I did some design work for our Speech Recognition project -- trying to figure out how to best store song identifying information so that we can see if something's a "bad copy" of some other song or not. And then, to complete a ritual three-peat, I participated in my other circle's full moon celebration. I wasn't as into it as other folks were because I had a serious pain in the neck, so energy and thought flow wasn't my fort&eaccent; for the night.
That neck pain continued into Monday and was compounded by a nasty cold. I spent the day in a mental daze and submental pain and went to bed at 10:30pm (whoa!), falling asleep some time after. I woke up a little after 11am to the power all over (at least half of) campus going out. 12 hours of sleep. Nice. My neck feels much better (thanks in part to a massage program another RA put on) and I'm able to think somewhat coherently. Enough to properly grade true/false questions on the Data Structures test anyway. It's interesting to see the wide variety of performances on tests. One student's answer to one of the programming problems consisted of two lines, neither of which were any part of a correct solution, and one of which would fail miserably to compile. Low score was 38/100, and 8 points were free. Not surprisingly, no students came to my office hours after class today. No questions on next week's homework yet, natch.
My appologies for the lack of wit, insight, or humor in this post. I hab a coud.
Two Sundays ago I got up early to have breakfast and a meeting about our Teaching Circle. After that, Andy, Aria, and I made it down to Denver for rehearsal for the Witches Ball ritual. It's looking fairly good, but we haven't had enough time to practice or get folks warmed up to the idea of improving. It's an interesting group -- some folks who'll improv at the drop of a hat and some who are very slowly emerging from the comforting blanket of scripts and props. Upon return, I knocked out my Speech Recognition homework in a couple hours. No sweat. Then I set to work on the Machine Learning homework I'd been staring at with little result for all of Fall Break. I did problems 2 and 3, which weren't nearly as hard, but took me most of the way through the night. (Turns out I got a 14/20 on both of them...) I then went to ask my prof a few questions, figured out how to derive the equation in question, and continued working until about 3am (41 hours awake!), since it had been due Monday afternoon. Didn't get it all done, but I felt pretty good about where I was, so I resolved to finish up on Tuesday. After letting my Matlab code run for two hours on Tuesday, I learned that I'd gone horribly wrong somewhere and my decoded message was C DG GWEALOQ*T P AD*EQPL G*AAATM CPT *. I stayed up until 2:30 for THAT?
I ended up staying up too late on Thursday night too, first working on Programming Languages, then writing quarter and Taliesen/Cerridwen calls for Saturday night's teaching circle. Groggy? Yeah, it's that kind of week.
Friday night I then went to the Open Full Moon in Denver. Manea had suggested I run my nonverbal ritual there, so I attended this month to meet folks and see what the space, people, etc. are like. It was put on by Ordo Templi Orientis, Ad Astara Encampment, an interesting group of pagans who seem to base most of their practices on Alistair Crowley (sp?). It started out very ceremonially, but they consciously included participatory drumming and dancing and a few other witchy acoutrements to meet the needs of the 80 or so witches who were present. The ritual drew to a close less than an hour after it started, which seemed kind of weird, which left folks most of Friday night free. I ended up at Paris on the Platte with the guy I drove down with and a friend I met at OFM. I hadn't been to Paris before, and it was pretty cool. Certainly better ventilated than some of the smoky British pubs I've been in, but I'm quite glad smoking is outlawed in Boulder. My clothes and beard stank when I got back.
On Saturday I watched the Buffs beat Baylor 34-0. They didn't score any points in the second half, but that was in part due to the fact that they were playing 2nd and 3rd string players. Baylor didn't move the ball past the 50 until the 4th quarter. That evening I helped lead the teaching circle (which had a whopping student attendance of 2!). We did a really cool group word/movement/sound-association exercize and had a lot of fun. We held it at the Weltys' house even though they weren't there, so Heather left us lots of sticky notes. I felt like a high schooler having an approved party while the parents were out of town.
Sunday during the day I finally got around to putting up my posters in my new room, since I'd been too busy since before Fall Break to do so. My room finally looks like my final CU home. Al and I did some design work for our Speech Recognition project -- trying to figure out how to best store song identifying information so that we can see if something's a "bad copy" of some other song or not. And then, to complete a ritual three-peat, I participated in my other circle's full moon celebration. I wasn't as into it as other folks were because I had a serious pain in the neck, so energy and thought flow wasn't my fort&eaccent; for the night.
That neck pain continued into Monday and was compounded by a nasty cold. I spent the day in a mental daze and submental pain and went to bed at 10:30pm (whoa!), falling asleep some time after. I woke up a little after 11am to the power all over (at least half of) campus going out. 12 hours of sleep. Nice. My neck feels much better (thanks in part to a massage program another RA put on) and I'm able to think somewhat coherently. Enough to properly grade true/false questions on the Data Structures test anyway. It's interesting to see the wide variety of performances on tests. One student's answer to one of the programming problems consisted of two lines, neither of which were any part of a correct solution, and one of which would fail miserably to compile. Low score was 38/100, and 8 points were free. Not surprisingly, no students came to my office hours after class today. No questions on next week's homework yet, natch.
My appologies for the lack of wit, insight, or humor in this post. I hab a coud.
