You know you're a geek when...

You know you're a geek when you catch yourself trying to explain to your 12 year old kid how the pig-latin transformation is not an isomorphism, but is a function (at least it seems so at first glance). And then things diverge into whether one is discussing typographical or aural pig-latin.

The anecdotal evidence is pretty clear: the English word "pay" becomes "ay-pay" while the English word "ape" becomes "ape-ay"*. Typographically they are quite distinct, but aurally they can be quite similar, even identical, depending on one's speech patterns. So, spoken pig-latin is not an isomorphism, relying on contextual clues to allow easy translation. But typographical pig-latin should be very straightforward, mechanical, to translate. I'm not even going to go into the occasional pig-latinized French that we have to bust out around here when the kids are eavesdropping.

Anyway, that's just a little food for thought ;)


* remember that words which begin with a vowel sound merely have the "ay" syllable appended to it.

Grad School! and other stuff

I've been letting this languish for a variety of reasons, not the least because I'm just really busy. Carrying 18 credits at school while trying to prep a house for sale is not for the faint-of-heart. So, here is a bit of an update one what I'm not quite getting accomplished.

Grad School -- I just got my first grad school acceptance letter. That makes it official that I'm headed to grad school in the fall. Yay! But at the same time that makes everything else much more critical.

House, Business -- I'm trying to sell my businesses and our house. Both of these are fairly huge tasks in their own right. I've got some interest in the bar that may pan out to some kind of sale soon, but who knows. The house is an effort in trash hauling, mostly. It's mazing how much crap can accumulate in 10 years! We've got to get about 2/3 of our stuff *out* of the house to make it look acceptable for someone to buy. Then we have to somehow *live* without 2/3 of our stuff. Luckily, about half that 2/3's is probably trash of some kind or another. Can you imagine? 1/3 of our stuff is essentially trash! This is going to be good for us in the long run.

School -- I'm carrying a big load at the moment (and next quarter too) in order to get done this spring. It's going to work out, but it's a *lot* of work. Thankfully, some of it's fun. My Senior Project is a great little research project examining the latency of a video system in Linux using gStreamer and a real-time kernel. Pretty cool.

Side stuff -- the reading list gets longer all the time, especially with impending grad school admission. I've got to catch up on important stuff I feel I'm missing from my undergrad education. Specifically, I want to read up on programming language semantics, compiler design, and play around with some OS stuff. I may have to write the typical crappy little OS project that never gets beyond the bootloader. The projection pursuit project is actually pretty much done. I have one little problem to fix and I can call it a finished prototype, but I'm not sure when I'll get to that.

So, that's the update for now. Cheers everyone!

The Summer of Chaos

So, time to reminisce about the summer just past. Wow! It's amazing how life throws you curve balls.

The Plan. Heading out of last spring, I was anticipating a summer of general-ed requirements to speed me on my way towards graduation, a little programming work on the side, research on grad-school programs and lots of time for personal projects to be posted here. This was to go alongside taking care of my three daughters and generally being "summery." Cool. Good plan. A little ambitious, but doable.

The Reality. Business took a nose-dive. So much so that I had to go back behind the bar for the summer to keep things afloat. We pared down to a skeleton staff with me working 4 shifts a week slinging beers. That's just what needed doing.

Meanwhile, I did get some side work, technically an internship, though I'm not bothering to take the educational credit, just the CV listing. I spent some time learning Python, flexing my Debian admin skills and playing around with EWU's Living Laboratory project under Dr. Jeff Putnam. It was a fun project. I got pretty comfortable with Python, the basics of Postgresql, and Django. Also, I got to play with specifying and implementing the simplest of Domain Specific Languages to allow user-entered code to run on our server. That project is ongoing, though I've got precious little time for it now that school is back in. Hopefully, I'll get to extend (or create anew) that language for specifying graphs as well.

So, personal projects, grad-school research? All by the wayside. My plans to port my Projection Pursuit algorithm to Haskell got pushed back. A *ton* of reading (Computational Category Theory, A Transition to Advanced Mathematics, Goedel, Escher, Bach, etc.) postponed indefinitely. Grad school selection is only getting started now, and that is such a daunting task! Dr. Putnam suggests I find blogs I like, follow all of their blog links and assemble this graph of blogs and schools and then run a clustering algorithm looking for commonality and hope that helps me narrow down the choices. Hah! That would probably work really well, but given the time available, would take until long past the application deadlines. Plus, I have to prep for the GRE's in a week! Wah!

The Results. Well, what can I say? It is what it is, and I keep marching ahead. Things never go quite the way you expect, but in the end, they work out. I think. I'm getting that Projection Pursuit done. I'm keeping up with my studies. I'm gradually narrowing down the choices for grad-school applications. And somehow I'm still enjoying my family and keeping food on the table. Not bad :-)