David's Mumblings

Gone

I'm on my way out the door to a shuttle to the airport; I'll be back ~Jan 2nd. I won't have email access until then, probably. Happy holidays! ^ TOP

Posted on 12/18/07 at 03:23:05 by dchaley (David Haley)
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No more grading

Grading's all done. The ball is basically out of my court now; I've sent a spreadsheet of the grades to the prof and the final decisions on letter grades will be made by him. I can make suggestions and all that but I view that more as a privilege than a duty. So yes, my duties are basically over now. :-)

Todo:
- jog before going to sleep
- wake up for lunch with friend
- meet with Mike to figure out grades
- take care of the several errands that need to be run before leaving
- pack

In 22 hours, I'll be on a shuttle to the airport! Vacation, here I come. :-) ^ TOP

Posted on 12/17/07 at 05:51:58 by dchaley (David Haley)
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Logical Oddities

I'm sort of saddened that after a quarter of logic, people think it is legal to write things like:

p(a) & b
b = a

Sigh. :-(

Only 19 more to grade. I think I'm about to go bonkers... ^ TOP

Posted on 12/17/07 at 03:43:37 by dchaley (David Haley)
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Short and useful programming

I try to make it a rule of life to try to automate tasks when I can and when it's not too expensive. If I think that I'm going to be doing the same repetitive thing more than a few times, I try to come up with a way to script or otherwise automate the process using programming of some sort (even as relatively simple as an Excel spreadsheet).

Read More → ^ TOP

Posted on 12/17/07 at 01:34:46 by dchaley (David Haley)
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Here Comes Another Bubble

Here comes another bubble,
In a year we swear,
we'll all be billionaires.

Wheeeee. :-)

This video/song is pretty funny and (IMHO) quite true. In any case, it's a laugh...

And incidentally, the engineer pictured in the video is Jerry Cain, a pretty awesome lecturer in the CS department. (He also is in the group Richter Scales, the authors of this song.) ^ TOP

Posted on 12/17/07 at 01:29:30 by dchaley (David Haley)
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ZZZ

That is all. ^ TOP

Posted on 12/12/07 at 23:33:24 by dchaley (David Haley)
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Long day...

I've got a long day ahead of me... went to bed around 3:30am, got up around 7:30am, have a poster session 8:30-11:30, then a lab meeting 12:00-2:00, then I need to proctor an alternate exam 3:00-6:00, and finally proctor the real exam 7:00-10:00pm... zzz... ^ TOP

Posted on 12/12/07 at 09:48:32 by dchaley (David Haley)
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Two courses done

I've finished two of this quarter's courses: Ling 180 (intro to computational linguistics) and CS 242 (programming languages). I'm not sure if I mentioned it, but I dropped the higher-order logic class and replaced it with Ling 180. Read More → ^ TOP

Posted on 12/11/07 at 01:07:37 by dchaley (David Haley)
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Power Outage

There was a power outage last night that appeared to affect the entire Stanford campus. Around midnight everything shut off at our place; we thought it was just Quillen that went down. But then we looked out the window and basically everything was off except for a few streetlights and emergency lights. It was rather eerie seeing the campus utterly dark like that. Well, we brought out the, err, wax-powered incandescent lights (to not say "candles", which are supposedly verboten...) and pretended we lived in the 18th century for a while, but then got bored and went to bed. Amusingly enough cell phones were still working, but on a more serious note that's an argument in favor of them in my opinion as even during a massive outage you still have the means to communicate. (Of course, had the cell towers gone down too... well...)

I have no idea what caused it, and there's nothing on Google News as of writing this post (although there are references to previous, local outages). As far as I know, this is the first time a campus-wide outage has occurred in the several years I've been here.

Anyhow, the outage appears to have lasted about 2 hours, judging from the difference between the alarm clocks' time and the actual time. Much excitement! ^ TOP

Posted on 12/08/07 at 12:57:38 by dchaley (David Haley)
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Pound stomp pound

I went running (at the gym) this morning and at one point this girl showed up and started running on the treadmill next to me. She sure was making a lot of noise: every single step was a stomp that felt like it was echoing through the room. And it's not as if it was due to size or anything; she looked like she must have weighed less than half what I do, and I felt like a graceful leaf gliding on silent wind by comparison. Nor was she going terribly fast (~6.5mph). I guess she was taking very high steps or something. But in any case it was pretty disconcerting; it was hard to stay focused with this stomp stomp stomp right next to me. I wonder if there's any rule in unspoken gym etiquette there (not that I would know since I'm a relative newcomer to the Stanford gym). Strangeness! ^ TOP

Posted on 12/07/07 at 11:03:16 by dchaley (David Haley)
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Cryptic Error Messages

I was working on the cluster machines, minding my own business in vi and matlab, when the following cryptic message is echoed to my screens:

Message from syslogd@bramble06 at Tue Dec 4 05:03:54 2007 ... bramble06 kernel: [43308.265745] Uhhuh. NMI received for unknown reason a0. Message from syslogd@bramble06 at Tue Dec 4 05:03:54 2007 ... bramble06 kernel: [43308.327237] You have some hardware problem, likely on the PCI bus. Message from syslogd@bramble06 at Tue Dec 4 05:03:54 2007 ... bramble06 kernel: [43308.401250] Dazed and confused, but trying to continue

Ooookkkk... thanks, kernel! Values of beta giving rise to dom and all that.

I wonder if the machine is about to blow up or something. ^ TOP

Posted on 12/04/07 at 05:07:02 by dchaley (David Haley)
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