sardonick

somehow haven’t posted here for a month and a half, phew.

• thesis progress still continuing but slow (I think I’ve said “Yeah, I’ll be graduating in a year and a half” for the past two years now).
• speaking of thaeces, learning the hard way the difference between science and systems. ugh, it’s so hard to get an academically rigorous results out of a research project that has such practical demands on resources and functionality. just another game to play, I guess.
• More in the academic world, am trying to figure out how my work fits in with the rest of Computer Aided Language Learning field. It seems that statistical language modeling of learner errors is commonplace for pronunciation modeling, but an afterthought for any of the other fields. How is this possible?? Am I overlooking some major bodies of research (the field is horribly fragmented and it’s all too easy to do this)? Or do I really get the chance to carve a niche for myself with this thesis I’m writing?
• funding shortage in the research group. will be with the Google part time from January until at least May. Promises to be a fun experience.
• went to Shik Do Rak three nights ago. Easily the best restaurant in Korea-town. I think I’m still full =).
• Short backpacking trip tomorrow and Sunday in the Angeles mountains, a little north of Arcadia, with Eldwin and Christina. Hopefully the San Gorgonio fires won’t ruin the air quality. This will be my wife’s first time hiking! (and my first time in the past decade, nearly! where does the time go?)
• hacking on a feedreader in my spare time. it’s been slowly gathering statistics of my use over this past month or so, which I’ll use to train some different measures of interestingness and boringness. next up is to expose those measures to the UI, for some usefulness goodness

How pale the stars, that burn in pallid splendor.