It's The Start of Summer...

Sittin' in class is a pain in the neck
Hows about me taking a three year raincheck
Gonna do what I want don't wonna graduate
Gonna take a break from everything that I hate

Hey there teach
I'm talking to you
You can't tell me what to do!

School's out for the summer
School's out forever
School's blown to pieces

Head strain - brain drain
School is such a pain!
No tears - all cheer
We want out of here!

Don't care 'bout no popularity crown
The prom king an' queen are just a couple of clowns
We can read an' we can write
What we need to know is where's the party tonight

Hey there teach
I'm talking to you
You can't tell me what to do!

School's out for summer
(Wanna take a vacation from education)
School's out forever
(Getta qualification in relaxation)

No more pencils, no more books
No more teachers, dirty looks
Out for summer
Out 'til fall
We might not go back at all

School's out for the summer
School's out forever
School's blown to pieces
School's out for the summer


-- Daphne and Celeste, "School's Out"

Sometime I want to go Lewis Carrolling. Singing silly songs at people's doors and coming in for tea parties.

I also want an octagonal log of wood with the I Ching trigrams carved in each "corner" and a yin-yang with its border, center curve, and eyes carved out in the center. It would make a very cool altar.

With my current schedule, I have 15 or 16 class periods before I graduate with a B.S. and an M.S. Yay!

If any of you Boulder-area folks are curious what this Pagan thing I do is, come to this week's Open Full Moon at the Unitarian Church at 14th and Lafayette in Denver. I'll be leading a nonverbal ritual which you may enjoy intensely, regardless of your religious standing or lack thereof.

My summer got off to an auspicious start. As I noted earlier, I got up after three hours of sleep at 5:30 Monday morning to finish my year-late Cognitive Science paper. I'd written everything by noon and went to lunch. Then my tired brain took over and it took me far too long to edit, finishing early Tuesday morning. I got about eight hours of sleep and then got to work on my project for Natural Language Processing. My partner Al and I had both procrastinated it until this point, such that we had a little basic log-parsing code, read a couple papers, and had a decent idea what algorithms we were going to implement. Made decent progress on Tuesday and went to bed around 5. My resident got me up at 8 to check out, so I spent Wednesday alternating between writing code and checking people out of their rooms. Made pretty decent progress over the night, plus I took a stroll around campus looking for interesting trash. Scored a Compaq that looks about four years ago but in good shape and a HP DeskJet without a power supply or parallel cord. The first may be useful; not sure what to do with the second. Crashed around 6, planning for another 3-hour power nap. Managed to set my alarm for 9pm, so actually got close to 5 hours. Paper was due "sometime Thursday." Our goal became 11:50pm. The goal was rather not met -- all we had were some of Al's sleep-deprived musings on our corpus. We stayed up all night Thursday night and had everything working that we wanted. I gave the project a rest at 7 so I could do all the RA closing stuff. Everyone else at the 7:15 meeting was droopy and annoyed and depressed. And with reason too. The weather was cold and rainy -- anything but fun for graduation. I, however, was on the lots-of-energy phase, so I was jumping around and having fun. I checked my penultimate resident out and tried to get some more work done on my paper, to no avail. I checked in on my other resident to find that her parents had come, given her some tools, and expected her to disassemble her loft by herself. (Lofts were supposed to be down the previous weekend, but she misunderstood the scope of the requirement.) Between the two of us we broke the loft enough to get it out each successive door and into the dumpster. I spent the rest of the morning and afternoon doing things like checking all my rooms for damages I'd missed (twice), moving some abandoned couches to the dumpster, and stamping all the packages left in the mail room "Return to Sender." (Or, as I like to say, "BALEETED!") I managed to summon the effort for a shower (the first in six days) and went to Cy's party to unwind. Cy's dating Suzanne Ford, and was continually surprised when everyone he introduced her to already knew her. I saw Brendan and Allison, who I hadn't seen for quite a while. I also made several jokes about segmentation, all of which got a dirty look from Al.

My apologies for that last paragraph, but its run-on nature is fairly indicative of my brain state by Friday night. On Saturday I slowly got up and queued some Carracho downloads for my last day of ethernet for the forseeable future. I had learned a couple weeks ago that Annabel, a woman I met through planning the Witches' Ball ritual, was getting married on Saturday. I'd assumed I'd be moving, and wouldn't be able to attend, but then she told me the ceremony was at Mary Rippon theater. So I had no excuse but to take ten minutes and walk over. It was a cool ceremony, including an all-purple-all-the-time wedding dress, guys in tux/kilt combos, and a cadre of people who'd shoveled all the snow off so nobody's pants got wet. I fortuitously met Cecelia and Thor there, who I invited to help with the nonverbal OFM on Friday. I'd been emailing her, but mistyped "earth" as "eart."

I spent the rest of Saturday packing stuff up and putting it in my dad's Suburban. I drove home quite illegally -- my rear view mirror showed fuck all. I finally unpackd everything at home at 4am. I got up groggily and puttered around for a few hours, moving a few objects from boxes, getting my computer set up, all that jazz. Around three or four I got online and AIMed Al. Our deadline set Friday was coming up in a few hours, and we knew we wouldn't hit it. We'd gotten an email from our prof saying that getting the paper in my Monday afternoon would be fine. We proceeded to pull yet another all-nighter, 4 nights after all finals were done, finishing. In the final editing stages I expressed some dissatisfaction with several of the general comments Al made about Internet chat text which weren't backed up by our corpus, but my brain didn't have enough energy to productively edit, so we left it in.

I give you, therefore, Detection of Topic Change in IRC Chat Logs. Since our results are fairly lame, I don't want to make a big release of the code (though if you look at the paper you can find the URL with the code). This summer I may work to improve it significantly, giving some deeper information to Pug's IRC Statistics.


After a two hour nap, I returned to school to grab the last few items that wouldn't fit in the Suburban and do a cleaning job. I finished moving out about 36 hours after I'd hoped to, but it seemed appropriate that way.

My own coalition of the willing turned out to be six strong, so we came up with a neat elements performance which will be accompanied by drumming. As a bonus, it's mostly improvised, so we didn't need to rehearse too much. It'll rock.

I got fifteen hours of sleep on Monday night/Tuesday morning/Tuesday afternoon. I also seem to have a cold/throat problem, so it's a good thing I don't have a job just yet. Bleah. I'm about half-way unpacked in my room, and have far too much laundry to do. I do have a lot of newly downloaded music to listen too, though.

So let's hear it for summer. Hip hip huzzah!