Jessica

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 12:23:05 GMT

It is too early for me to be up grading *sigh*

Kitten sitting!

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 04:05:05 GMT

Is anyone going to be around July 16-19 and close to Arlington and bored enough to visit my kittens? Any help is appreciated.

Another Job!

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 17:31:10 GMT

MCPHS (Mass Pharm) asked me to teach intro psych to 3 international students this summer - good pay too! Yay!

So sick :(

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 22:09:57 GMT

The flu that I got 2 weeks ago has come back with a vengeance. My fever has been about 100 all day (peaking at 103). Everything aches and I need to teach tomorrow night. And I have lab on Thursday. I'm really not happy about this - I think if Spring comes, I'll be over being sick, as irrational as that is. Oh well. Back to vegging out on the couch.

Happy New Year!

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 15:58:37 GMT

I hope everyone had fun last night - I stayed home due to unsavory weather conditions, which, coupled with drunk idiots, could have been terrible. I did, however, make banana creme pie. Oh yeah, and I finished my thesis. :) I'm done...now just to get up the nerve to send it to my committee.

Of course, the new year couldn't start off smoothy...I woke up to find it 50 degrees in the apartment. I said to myself - its probably just the water in the furnace being low (we have this weird system that you have to add water to once a week or so). I get downstairs to discover my downstairs neighbors shutting the doors to outside. That's right - our pipes froze. No water, and for us, no heat. Luckily, my neighbors managed to heat up the pipe for water and gave me a hair dryer to defrost our water pipe to the furnace. So, everything seems ok now.. but not how I was picturing new year's day.

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 03:52:23 GMT

I hate colds. Especially colds that you catch on the plane on the way to your vacation destination *sneeze*

now how do I change font style again...?

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 17:05:47 GMT

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well let's see.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read only 6 and force books upon them!

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible - God
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - I have read some, but not all. Some of what I haven't read, I've seen
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - I actually really enjoyed this
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - Not all of it, but much, including parts of Through the Looking Glass
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - I really liked this one and have a large illustrated copy
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - I completely missed that this was a retelling of the Christian mythology and thus really enjoyed it
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne - :)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell - Not all, but since I read the most graphic bits, it counts (I had to read Chapters 8+9 for school)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - I'm not sure: I've read some of his stuff in the original, but it may have been excerpts or a completely different story.
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery - and about 4 more before I got bored
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - Hated this one.
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck - Hated the book, liked the movie. I just don't like Steinbeck's style
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - In 6th grade...I liked it, but I don't remember much
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - I tried too young and coulnd't get past the language
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - wonderful, as is the BBC movie
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome - I love this book (and the rest of the series) and I'm really surprised to see it on a list - it's not that well known in the states
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

:(

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 14:08:26 GMT

I hate Cambridge in general and parking tickets in particular. I can't wait to move. Why is parking within 20 ft of an intersection on a 40ft street that allows parking illegal? And why is this the first time its been ticketed - perhaps cause it was the 31rst? Needless to say, that pretty much was an awful start to a morning. One more reason to leave the city.

The joys of living in an apartment with kooky alarms

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 15:36:01 GMT

Being woken up by every alarm in the apartment is not pleasant. Even less pleasant is having two terrified and hurting kittens who want the noise to stop. Luckily, the guy who does our maintenance answered the phone and then came over to detach all the alarms (nothing was actually wrong). I spent the time in the hallway with both kittens trying to be in my lap at the same time.

Turns out, the alarms in the vacant apartment next door were going off too and one of then had a low battery, so that may have been what triggered the short. All I can say is that I hope this doesn't happen again. And my ears are still ringing :-P

Blarg

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 01:40:41 GMT

So unmotivated.

If I had super powers...

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 14:42:43 GMT

I'd use them for traffic control - I figure, if everyone's commute goes smoothly, there will be less angry, petty people around and therefore more happiness and less crime. :)

Thanks to Star :)

Sat, 02 Jun 2007 15:16:24 GMT

82% GeekMingle² - Free Online Dating

:(

Thu, 24 May 2007 14:40:59 GMT

Not enough sleep last night.

:)

Wed, 16 May 2007 16:27:47 GMT

What Be Your Nerd Type? Your Result: Gamer/Computer Nerd You enjoy the visual stimulants of a video game, chatting on AIM, or reading online comics. Most of these types of nerds are considered dirty who lack hygeine, of course they always end up being the ones who make a crapload of money. And don't worry, that's just a stereotype; I'm not calling you dirty. ^_~
Science/Math Nerd
Literature Nerd
Artistic Nerd
Social Nerd
Anime Nerd
Musician
Drama Nerd
What Be Your Nerd Type? Quizzes for MySpace

To Do List - Weekend Edition

Fri, 11 May 2007 20:09:06 GMT

Work Stuff:

Write README file for ImitationAnalysisComplete.m.
~~Remove trials from transpositions if there are impossible combinations (flipping any segment twice) and see how often this happens.Unfortunately, this lead to another problem in the code, which I haven't solved yet.~~
Add chunking functionality in which chunks are defined as 2sd difference from the average pause for that person.
~~Make a final version of the algorithm code (comparing it to a more recent version to check for errors).~~

Home Stuff:

~~Install OpenOffice, Thunderbird, and anything else I'm forgetting on my newly renovated PC.~~
Set up estimated tax stuff.
Deal with insurance.
Register my car for MA.
Work on making jewelry for cons.

Long term To Dos (Things I should be chipping away at, but aren't time sensitive):

Clean out external hard drive.
Organize music.
Clean bedroom.
Organize beads.
Go through clothes and get rid of things.

And all of this needs to happen when I am not:

At gaming 7-?? Friday night.
At crafty day in Waltham 12-6 on Sat.
Babysitting 6-?? on Sat.
Going dress shopping with Kitri 11-?? on Sunday.

And Sunday is Mother's Day - I was kind of hoping to take a trip down to CT to see my mom.

Blah

Fri, 11 May 2007 19:58:56 GMT

Sometimes motivation just leaves me. I finished up getting the "brain dump" (as Yigal called it) about how the algorithm functions. I still have to comment it clearly and write the readme. But I took a break to read this book that Bob had given me, saying that it was horrid and only deserved 10 minutes of my time. Of course, I read the entire thing. It was interesting, in that way that fiction about the brain written in 1942 usually it - completely right on somethings and so horribly wrong in others.

Anyway, the book seems to have lessened the effect of the brain dump, which is good, but also seems to have put me in a funk. And I'm hungry. None of these is conducive to work. In addition, Bob keeps telling me he has another analysis for me to try, but that it can wait until after I finish some of this other stuff. But, I'm torn - I really want to look at my data and write a paper and make a story, a coherent argument, out of it, but I know that if I start doing that before I get the boring stuff done, then the boring stuff will fall by the wayside and never get done.

And the boring stuff will make everything in the future so much more pleasant and decrease the amount of work that I'll have to do then, by more than the time I put into it now. It's just that I have to get the motivation to finally DO all these things.

To do list for Thursday

Thu, 10 May 2007 16:08:17 GMT

After having successfully reached my goals for yesterday and in an attempt to do so today, I am posting what I need to get done today (work only).

Write README file for ImitationAnalysisComplete.m.
~~Comment the ConvertYigal.m file~~ and reference in the README.
Remove trials from transpositions if there are impossible combinations (flipping any segment twice) and see how often this happens.
Add chunking functionality in which chunks are defined as 2sd difference from the average pause for that person. (This doesn't have to happen today, I'm being optimistic).

And all of this has to happen before lab meeting at 2. Now, lunch so I have energy for this.

edit: Almost none of this happened before lab meeting - I still have a little time, though, before I have to WoW at 8. :-P. Also, I got 1/3 the way through the segmentation algorithm with Yigal.

To Do list, updated

Tue, 08 May 2007 16:58:58 GMT

Install OpenOffice, Thunderbird, and anything else I'm forgetting on my newly renovated PC.
~~Clean up the Imitation Analysis code so that it only does what it needs to.~~
~~Comment said code so that other people can use it too.~~
~~Clean up and comment the segmentation algorithm code, same reasons.~~
~~Figure out what to do about double counting transpositions.~~
~~Post to LJ about things that aren't to do lists.~~
Set up estimated tax stuff.
Deal with insurance.
Register my car for MA.
Work on making jewelry for cons.

Long term To Dos (Things I should be chipping away at, but aren't time sensitive)

Clean out external hard drive.
Organize music.
Clean bedroom.
Organize beads.
Go through clothes and get rid of things.

To Do List, a la captainecchi

Fri, 04 May 2007 19:11:18 GMT

So on this lovely Friday afternoon, I thought I'd update, and get some listing done, a la captainecchi, since I am, in fact, getting no actual work done.

Install OpenOffice, Thunderbird, and anything else I'm forgetting on my newly renovated PC.
~~Clean up the Imitation Analysis code so that it only does what it needs to.~~
~~Comment said code so that other people can use it too.~~
~~Clean up and comment the segmentation algorithm code, same reasons.~~ Now I just need to make it readable to the general lab public.
~~Install new toilet seat cover.~~
~~Clean out bathroom closet~~ and hopefully find the second cat collar. No cat collar to be found :(
~~Clean bathroom.~~
~~Clean kitchen.~~
~~Run Yigal's original data for transpositions.~~
~~Register my car for parking next year (need to get the registration expiration still).~~
~~Visit beadshop.~~

A poem

Thu, 08 Feb 2007 18:40:07 GMT

She sings and diamonds fall.
A flood piles at her feet,
Spreading to a sea that binds her.
He worships her beauty as a goddess
And takes the offerings that lie,
Leaving the floor bare beneath her.

Airport

Sat, 14 May 2005 22:38:14 GMT

So, my favorite part of JetBlue so far is the fact that they have FREE wireless AND 3 pronged plugs. Its really nice, especially since I got here 2 hours early (NY traffic can be really bad). So, I thought I'd update here and say hi to everyone and such. I guess I don't have any more to say except that I'm addicted to WOW and will be trying to play here in the airport after I finish this.

Oh and Congratulations! to aMy who is graduating this week. Sorry I couldn't make it aMy, but I'll be there in spirit cheering you on :)

Baby!

Wed, 27 Apr 2005 20:17:24 GMT

So, today, the woman who's project I'm carrying on (while she's on maternity leave) brought her little girl in to lab to visit. I like babies. Mind, I don't think I like them enough to have one around all the time - its a huge amount of work, though very rewarding. But its nice to have someone around with one I can borrow sometimes. And Marianne says I can babysit come fall. Hurrah! I've been short of kid time lately, and I haven't been able to establish a relationship with anyone so I can only occassionally babysit. And I'm not around on weekends a lot. But Marianne need people for weekdays, when I am here, so I'm excited. And Catherine is cute. Now I think I have the baby cooing out of my system.

In other news, I think I've finally kind of settled on what I'm doing for the summer and the next four years, and I'm actually at peace with it. There are some people whose advice, while good for many people, overlook some of my particular interests and requirements. And what they thought would be bad things turn out actually to be things that I value. So, anyway, I'm doing really well, all in all today.

Oh, and I got WOW (World of Warcraft) yesterday, so I'm now playing around with Alliance vs Horde and what races and classes I like. I don't know if anyone plays that reads this that I don't already play with, but if you do, ask me and I'll see about playing on the same server, or something :)

Anyway, that's it for now - thanks for all the comments and keep 'em coming!

Last Thursday's Gaming

Tue, 26 Apr 2005 16:55:21 GMT

This is a little late, but I figure 3 comments is enough to write another entry. So, every Thursday night, I go to the gaming club at Brandeis. And we play games (surprising, huh?). But, last Thursday something very memorable and special happened: Greer bought and donated a game to the club. Now, this might not sound like a big deal, but when the same is 'Pretty Pretty Princess' and is played by 3 of the guys in the club, it very much is. :)

To begin with, you must understand the principle of the game; its completely deterministic - you spin an arrow, move that number of spaces and take whatever piece of jewelry is pictured. And put it on. Yes, that is in the rule. So, we have 3 guys playing this game, all gamely (so to speak) putting on random bits of plastic jewelry. And looking quite attractive, might I add ;) And completely ridiculous too. We didn't have a camera at the time, so alas, I can show you no pictures, but the description will have to do. Needless to say, the image of Nat, Chad and Josh in plastic earrings, bracelets, etc with a little plastic crown atop one of their heads (there was only one crown and you needed it to win) will stay with my for a long time. It was a wonderful night of gaming!

That's it for now - I'm working on the last bit of my program for my last rotation and I'll be able to start collection data soon, I hope. So, I'm a little busy - I'll try to get back on and write some more soon, and as always, leave me a note! :)

Restarting my LJ account

Tue, 19 Apr 2005 15:47:23 GMT

I finally got into my account - I forgot the password and have been trying a few every so often. So, it's been two years, so I should probably update everything; I graduated from Scripps last summer, and I am now in grad school in Neuroscience at Brandeis. Its been a rough 8 months here and I'm still having some issues, but I think I'll be able to cope - I hope I will anyway. So, if you read this, comment, and I'll write again!

Fri, 09 May 2003 21:09:30 GMT

Hi to all who read this,
I know its been a while since i last wrote; im in exam crunch time; entries are very unlikely. I apologize, and will try again as soon as my stress level goes down. Sarah, thanks for the note, you should be done and home by now; lucky you *is envious* itll all be over soon though. bye all