mojo back

for the first time since I arrived in Scotland, I feel genuinely confident about my future and my direction. It's a nice feeling.

ping

somebody reads this still?

eatin' breakfast before more data munging

mid/late-summer musings

Ah Summer. My evenings are, unfortunately, freshly free, and, with my Summer project wrapping up, I've been finding myself trying to put an emotional end to college. Weird. Weird to think that the rhythm I got into will just end. So naturally, tonight I found myself looking up 90's music on YouTube and reading about Weird Al on Wikipedia :p It's been a bit of a nostalgia fest tonight.

I was kind of confused about why I was doing this. I mean, it's kind of fun to hear "Tubthumping" again, and I've learned a lot of random things (Spatula City has a Wikipedia article), but srsly guys it's 4am. As part of the nostalgia fest, I went back to looking through some of my posts on this blog, and found the one from Sept. 15 2004, at the beginning of my last year of high school. Five years ago! I was so pretentious. Probably I still am. At the end of that post, I wondered if younger versions of myself would be satisfied with who I am, where I'm heading, and what I've accomplished.

I think it has to do with the rhythm I've developed ending. At the end of high school I was afraid I wouldn't be able to perform at the level I wanted to. I had some uncertainty, I think, about how much my academic success in high school had come from myself, and how much was due to my routine, or my parents' support, or other people's expectations and perceptions, and so on.

I'm (more than) satisfied with what I managed to accomplish in my four years at Ohio State, but there's still always that... self-doubt? Not really self-doubt. It's this sense that I can't possibly be that guy who got an extra degree in the original four years or had such good grad school options; at least, I'm not that guy anymore. I've felt this way at several points in my life, actually, but it's been strongest by far right after highschool and now. I know it's just a feeling, and that I just need to dive in and give grad school everything I've got, but it's still a weird headspace to be in.

On top of that, I want to give my social life a jolt. One reason I chose Edinburgh is that I felt like it would be healthier socially; everything is close together, so it will be easy to meet people and grab a drink spontaneously, whereas the other places were spread out. I feel a lot more confident and prepared on that front now than I have at any other point in my life.

I'm just really anxious to get started.

-=-raptur-=-

omgz teh july

is almost over

funny how we all stopped using these bloggg thingies right as we started heading in different directions i.e. when they would be most useful :p

anyone up for starting real pencil-and-paper letters to eachother in a couple months?

-=-raptur-=-

best weekend of my life

So far anyway.

Largely because of graduation, of course. But other things too.

Krissy, you might have been able to pick up on one of the other ones if you were paying a bit more attention... -_^

I think I might start a new blog in a couple of months that I sign with my real name and which is a touch more professional in the couple of weeks leading up to my departure for Edinburgh. I'll make sure those of you I know IRL get the link.

Day old iced coffee never tasted so good as it did this afternoon.

-=-raptur-=-

One week from now

I have no idea what I will be feeling.

productive day so far

woo! i redid these parses to make sure my result was right, and it is. so here's the basic idea. laboratory results have suggested that people have an imaginary voice in their head when they're engaged in silent reading, and that this imaginary voice provides information like intonation and stress to help people get the right structure for the sentences they are reading. So in a laboratory setting, we know that people seem to be sensitive to these imaginary voices (called ``implicit prosody''). But we haven't seen if people produce the right kinds of implicit prosody to actually help much when reading sentences that have not been invented in a laboratory. I have a data set of german sentences that have been basically annotated with implicit prosody (although that's not how the people created the data set looked at it), and found that you actually can get a reasonable increase by using the implicit prosody. w00t!

but there's a lot more to be done.... good thing my MA project actually works...... hee!

-=-raptur-=-