Linguistics, Dancing, and a Few Good Books
Wherein I post about the excitements and mundanities of life in Providence, RI| [blog home] |
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| Don Blaheta is a sixth-year PhD student in Computer Science at Brown University, studying Natural Language Processing; he just finished up an AM in Linguistics across the street in the Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences. In his copious free time, he does competitive ballroom dancing, sings in two choirs, hangs out with the Brown-RISD Catholic Community, knits obsessively, and reads sci-fi, fantasy, and alternate history novels. |
26 October 2002
Memo to self #2: The knife-like pointy end of the seam-ripper is, in fact, knife-like. Avoid using seam ripper in such a way that when the seams do break, this knife-life object is driven into the finger. Nyargghh.
"George W. Bush yields falsehood when preceded by his quotations." --Zach Miller
Posted 11:53 PM [+]
Memo to self: When sewing, never ever forget to lower the foot of the sewing machine. Even if the fabric being sewn is very thick so that it pretty much meets the foot when it's raised. And, y'know, makes it easy to forget to lower the foot....
What happens is that the bobbin part of the sewing machine action gets very confused, and while the top of the sewing looks fine, the underside is a mess of big loops of thread, and the thread gets wrapped around the bobbin spindle, and the bobbin actually pops out of its holder, and your fabric manages to get connected to the sewing machine by about ten or twenty tangled threads, which you have to cut and extract. And then you have to pull out all the seams you just sewed, so you can do them right. Ugh.
"Still, the most detailed reports of the battle [of the Alamo] come from Mexican soldiers. It turns out that the stirring stories of heroic deeds so cherished by Texans were arrived at mostly by that creative process we call "making it up," the basis of much American history." --Cecil Adams
Posted 11:38 PM [+]
25 October 2002
Hmm. Slashdot is saying that blogger has been hacked, but it still seems to work for me....
A man wakes up in Hell and gets the grand tour by the Devil. He says Hell isn't so bad, just not as cushy as Heaven. Heaven has a five-star hotel, Hell has a decent motel; Heaven has an 18-hole golf course, Hell has a 9-hole course. Just then they drive past a fiery pit where several naked people are torturing themselves. 'What about that?' asks the man. 'Oh, that's for the Catholics,' replies the Devil. 'They insisted.'
Posted 6:59 PM [+]
22 October 2002
Not much to say today, but I'd just like to report that after weeks of spinning my wheels, I've actually been getting honest-to-God work done in the last week or so. On my thesis. I'm so pleased.
Oh, also, I hosted a dinner party last night that seems to have been a success. Well, except that I got off to a late start. But do these things ever actually start on time? I thought not.
"Nah, the ungrateful wretches all join the Republican Party as soon as their household income spikes over $40k anyway. If you look closely, you can actually see Condoleeza Rice pulling up the ladder behind her." --Michael Kimmitt
Posted 11:33 PM [+]
21 October 2002
Friday night I DJed the ballroom semiformal dance. That is, I set up my computer to DJ the dance. :) My main design goal in putting together the playlist was to pick songs that we didn't always dance to: there's not a whole lot of music in the team's collection, so we tend to hear the same stuff over and over. A secondary goal was to pick stuff that people might have heard elsewhere, not necessarily thinking of it as dance music. Tertiarily, I looked for actual danceable music. Since that goal was in third place, some of the music was... questionable... but it was fun. :)
By far the crowd favourite was the DuckTales theme, which is a lovely jive. The Muppets' Movin' right along makes a pretty good quickstep, too. At one point, someone asked, "what's this?" I responded, "a hustle!" To which she said, "excuse me, I think this would be Like a prayer." She was right. It's a great hustle. Other fun ones included Paul Simon's Still crazy after all these years (a waltz), A friend like me (a quickstep) from Aladdin, and Enya's Flora's Secret (a slow but passable viennese waltz). I also, almost by accident, managed to stick Shania Twain's I feel like a woman (swing) and That don't impress me much (cha-cha) back-to-back right when they announced that the next ones would be ladies' choice. Perfect!
"The victories came at a high price, since his best officers and fighters were lost. Well, not "lost," since he knew where they were---dead, mostly." --SDSTAFF Ken
Posted 1:53 AM [+]
| Don Blaheta / blahedo@brown.edu |
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