07:30 - Get up.
banazir grumpy. No, wait, what am I saying? (Edit, 17:25 CST - Thanks to
thaleias_spirit for spotting that 7.5 - 4.5 == 3. :-D)07:59 - Arrive on campus and realize that Charlie probably doesn't check his e-mail at 04:00, and hence won't be here at 08:00 as requested at 03:30. Sit in the grad cubicle and start puttering around on Eonwe, replying to
mom_counsel and such.08:15 - Charlie arrives. We start talking about the SUROP and the next phase of ITR. I happen to have
iharthdarth's LJ open on Numerramar and show Charlie this one, my favorite.08:18 - Sadie and Moises arrive.
08:20 -
kur's stamp (heh, w00t). Other e-mails start trickling in.08:25 - I go out and talk to the department head about CIS 501 and CIS 560. Looks as if I won't be teaching either for at least another year,
tmehlinger and thekuffs. This fall: 490/730 (Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, lecture), 732 (Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition lecture), 798 (Models of Reasoning in Decision-Making Agents, the anticipated 
massforge course).08:35 - Duck in and out of Nichols 236, looking none too clueful. Got Charlie's permission to reuse his figures (with citation, of course) in the ITR tutorial and mirror his thesis on the ITR and SUROP Wikis. His rationale for the latter? "I've never had a home page that wasn't taken down behind my back."
08:55 - Dash over to Durland/Rathbone for Praveen's prelim presentation (in EECE, this can be a proposal defense). What do you know, he is still stranded in Denver. Grr, arrgh, and other mutant enemy noises.
09:05 ~ 09:15 - Discuss the FIBR project situation with Welch and the IASTED paper with Das. Slides to come from Das's work, modulo dubious inclusion of results (TBD from inclusion of dubious results!) from my WEKA and ECJ-based experiments.
09:15 ~ 09:30 - Go home. (Tracey Ullman: "Go home! Go home!")
09:45 ~ 11:45 - Write review of Beauty and the Geek and edit the one of The Scholar that I wrote on Monday.
11:45 ~ 12:15 - Reply to
sze, prolog, chandra, and others. Read sundry things and get ready for afternoon class.12:15 ~ 12:40 - Lunch, get ready to go to campus.
12:40 ~ 13:15 - Look at reviews for the computer I just bought. Sign up for ZDnet so I can meta-review. Oh, where does the time go? ;-)
13:15 ~ 13:30 - Back to Nichols.
13:30 ~ 14:00 - Look over things for class - lectures this week have been on relational database (RDB) essentials on Monday and Tuesday, Agrawal's a priori association rule mining algorithm on Tuesday, then OLAP and star and constellation DBs yesterday. Today's is the first of four on clustering algorithms: expecation maximization (EM), AutoClass, and Kohonen's self-organizing maps (SOM) today; more SOM with brief allusion to learning vector quantization (LVQ), instance-based learning (IBL) including nearest neighbor and k-NN, k-means clustering tomorrow; hierarchical agglomerative clustering on Tuesday 05 Jul 2005, with some review of clustering parts 1 and 2; and PCA on Wednesday, 06 Jul 2005. Labs are focusing on database things and some more printing of notes used up the rest of the three quarters of an hour I had.
14:00 ~ 14:15 - Talk to Jan about the Faculty Development Award of $1800 that I'm applying to IJCAI-2005 conference registrations. Today's the end of the KS fiscal year, and so state monies have to be encumbered, etc. Oi. You'd think I'd remember, but you'd also think that internal grants would be in some flavor of money that didn't depend upon the fine feathered friends in the state legislature having a budget today. In any case, things would be a lot easier if I waited until 01 Jul 2005 to spend money, but they'd also be about 300 GBP more expensive (out of 900 GBP). Funny how one groups's convenience is another's trask, innit? Well, at any rate, Jan doesn't even have the FDA letter where they promised to Show Me The MoneyTM after I sent them the acceptance letter to the workshop paper. Bana phone home, request fax, wait.
14:15 ~ 14:25 - Quick phone calls to friends, including
zurich31, who is still in Kansas City waiting for the KCI Roadrunner shuttle to Manhattan.14:25 ~ 14:30 - Set up for lecture.
14:30 ~ 15:40 - Lecture on clustering: EM, AutoClass, competitive clustering and SOM. Eyes started to glaze over when I got to Hebbian learning, I could tell. How's that for "sensed confusion"? Seriously, though, it is irritating that we have no computational neuroscience curriculum. No, let me rephrase: it's absolutely criminal that we have no organized cognitive science, neuroscience, or educational psychology or cog psych curriculum of any kind that is accessible to CS undergrads.
15:40 ~ 15:50 - Break; check for Jason, go down to lab.
15:50 ~ 16:00 - Lab time. Try to get students started with JSP servlets and rudiments of server-side programming. Amidst impromptu exercise using an online JSP tutorial, discover that not only is no JSP server set up on Ringil, but Ringil is down. Seems there was a power outage. Thank Orome that Fingolfin
16:00 -
zurich31 calls and the van is just makig its way past Topeka now.16:00 ~ 16:05 - Upstairs; reboot Ringil, ask Sadie to check.
16:05 ~ 16:10 - Downstairs; no dice, even after a
mount attempt. People are getting permissions errors. Make five directories in Ringil's "personal" web space. Telchar and Anaire are down too! There goes my 260+ day uptime, the closest I've had to a full-year uptime since Ringil's 300-day uptime in 2000. Grr. Argh. *sends in many Torog-Hans*16:10 - Our head administrative assistant, calls. Pre-Award has no idea what is up with the new AIdentity Matrix contract. Gee, let's see: there are two addenda to the existing Memorandum of Agreement. One is for a zero-cost extension, 01 Jul 2005 - 31 Dec 2005. I sent this to them, fully completed, with a cover e-mail, the Saturday before last. The other is for a new grant, with a new statement of work, starting 01 Jul 2005, end date TBD. Surely things that have the same start date and are associated with the same MOA must be the same? Oi. This is what happens when your department hires away the most competent person in your university grants and contracts office, and the clueful people are all on vacation. Grr, argh. The acquisition of clues should not take 10 days, and that's a fact. Time for a word of prayer, as
masteralida would call it.16:10 ~ 16:15 - Up to N227; reboot.
16:15 ~ 16:20 - Stop in and explain the dwarves (Durin, Azaghal, Telchar, Narvi, Gimli - PIII-550s running Red Hat 9) to Sterling. Talk to him about
mount Cole about how he got Fingolfin's NFS export back on Ringil the last time it went down some 160 days ago.16:20 ~ 16:45 - Downstairs again; this is clearly not going to happen today. Give instructions for making a simple JSP page that would work if a server were running and putting it in the right directory. Review tutorial notes and talk to the SUROP students, realizing I'm probably going to be too late to get the MOA addenda straightened out from our end.
16:45 ~ 16:50 - Upstairs, talk to Jan. Indeed, the head administrative assistant is gone for two weeks, as her husband arrived back from Iraq on leave. Thankfully, she had her usual exceptional foresight and left me two alternative copies to whomp Pre-Award with. Well, this shouldn't be too hard to handle; I just need to get
zurich31 to sign it when he's here today and tomorrow. Meanwhile, the FDA letter doesn't say anything about where to get the money. Grr. Argh.16:50 - In my office mailbox is a copy of my signed tenure appointment form.
16:50 ~ 16:55 - In and out, trying reboot and remount tricks.
16:55 - Mail from
neonpainter at 15:45. "We can still do the VisionDome demo in the heliodon for darana, dextertech, and the students, but I need to hear from you before I leave, preferably before 16:00, because I'm out of the office tomorrow." Aiiiieeee. Dial, dial, dial, go, talk: sorry-I-didn't-get-your-mail-until-just-now-because-our-systems-were-down-from-a-pbanazir, Hyper Prof (now new and improved with Tenure). :-P17:00 - Check GMail. Package? W00t! Go to the front office, and what do I find?
miyeko has sent back a book I lent her, along with a few of her own and one of the much-coveted talking Vader figurines from Celebration III. Oh, and a meeping sheep. Neopets! <BOB>Sooooo cuuuuuute!</BOB>17:05 -
zurich31 calls. He's here - at the Hampton Inn. Shall we meet for dinner? One sec, I'll see whether my family's expecting me.17:05 ~ 17:10 - A round of three calls later (home, to
zengeneral, zurich31, and I tell zurich31 that zengeneral and I will pick him up for dinner. Phone home: "we're going to a BBQ place, and should be done at 19:00 at the latest".17:30 -
zengeneral arrives. To the Birdmobile, Bana!17:30 ~ 17:40 - Drive to Hampton Inn.
17:45 ~ 17:50 - Visit briefly with
zurich31 and get under way. It's been about a year and a half since the last time he was here, with Harold Sun.17:55 ~ 18:10 - Arrive at Famous Dave's.
18:10 ~ 19:10 - Have fried catfish, chicken, buffalo wings, ribs; regale each other and
zengeneral with tales of chambana, the old Jedi Council (Yoda, Ki-Adi Mundi, Oppo Rancissis, Mace Windu, Count Dooku, Sora Bulq, and Aayla Secura)1.19:10 ~ 19:25 - Go home.
banazir: zengeneral, this is my mom. Mom, zengeneral.
zengeneral: Hi. Banamum.
BANAMUM: Huh?
banazir: You're known to most of my friends online as Banamum.
BANAMUM: Oh. Wotever.19:30 ~ 20:00 - A tour of Banadad's garden. Hang out in back yard and chat. The consensus is quickly and decisively reached that
zengeneral rocks uberly, so to speak (yet you have much to learn, young apprentice, so don't go trasking me in my sleep just yet ;-)).20:00 - Appointment set for 10:30 tomorrow AM.
zengeneral takes zurich31 back to his hotel.20:00 ~ 21:00 - Go down to home office and work, read.
21:00 ~ 22:00 - Some icon-collecting. Chat with some people in
#teunc.22:00 ~ 23:00 - More work.
23:00 ~ 00:00 ~ Laze about, some blogging...
And there you have it: a day in the life of
banazir the Jedi Hobbit, circa 2005.1 Bonus points if you can tell who's who. Answers to appear in the Other Place.
--
Banazir
