Pollywog's Log of Life

This is by far the weirdest winter I've lived through yet. Supposedly there is some snow on the way, say weather forecasters, but I'm skeptical. Even if there is some, it's probably only going to stick around for a day or two. On the bright side, I haven't had to deal with icy sidewalks on steep hills, or walking to campus in deep snow or slush. In other news, my workload has just cranked up a notch. One homework due Friday, another Monday, and whenever I have free time I need to begin writing my project report that will be my golden ticket out of here. I am getting more excited about my topic though, text mining. It's a relatively new area, in addition to being pretty difficult. This is only because usually statistics deals with numbers. We can calculate to our hearts delight with numbers, but with words...well, it's complicated. Now it's not numbers anymore. In addition to dealing with words, there are all the intricacies of the English language to take ...

So it's the last day of January, can you believe it? I myself am amazed how fast time flies by when I'm not looking. Before I know it I'm going to have a test to take and homework to turn in. Technically I have a homework assignment, but the due date is open ended for now (that's how well my professor sticks to a course schedule...heh). That class is interesting, in its own unique way. It's held in our department's sole computer lab on the top floor of a building constructed who knows how long ago and with radiators that never seem to shut off. Literally, it will be up of 80 degrees in that lab and the only way to cool it down is to shut the windows and turn on the window AC unit. Oh yes, we can't open the windows to cool the room off because that will only make the radiator work harder to keep the room heated, thus pumping even more hot air. Sigh , it is quite the enigma, as all old buildings seem to be. The interesting part of the class comes into play wh...

7-Day Forecast for Latitude 39.63°N and Longitude 79.96°W Now, with that kind of forcast? Isn't it better to just stay indoors with some hot coco/tea, read a good book, or maybe a movie, and be happy that we're not construction workers or bus drivers, or sports coaches? Lots of work to get done, stay warm and dry if it's raining where you are too =)

Isn't life just frustrating? There are just so many things on my to-do list each day and the hours just seem to fly by and next thing I know it's dark outside and it'll be bedtime soon. I mentioned yesterday that I seem to need the full eight hours of sleep each night or I turn into a grumbley monster; I really wish I could live off of less sleep. I could , technically, but I probably wouldn't be as pleasant or alert or ready for class. I was just listening to the last of Mocking Jay, the last of the Hunger Games Trilogy. I had to turn it off because it's almost over and I wanted to get a post in today. It's really a good series if you're interested in something to stick your nose into while you wait for the bus. From a very outside perspective, it's a really messed up plot and world these characters live in. From a reader point of view, it's an exciting, futuristic, and compelling story. Ugh, I'm really out of words tonight. My research is g...

Man, it's been a long Monday. Not in a bad way, just in a "I've been awake a really long time today" kind of day. My night class is Monday's so that pretty much keeps me on campus until 9:00pm which isn't so bad because it's only once a week but is kinda late. Oh well. Now I'm finally writing down my thoughts of the day so that I can go back and relax and get some sleep for tomorrow. I caught up with an old friend from high school today via gchat (gotta love google =P) and she was telling me how she completed deleted her facebook account, especially after the timeline profile came out. After talking with her I toyed with the idea of deleting mine, but I'm not sure I would. There are people that I keep in touch with every so often that I wouldn't otherwise. What I should do is delete friends who I don't talk to. I forget who I was talking to, but whoever it was; we were saying that it's harder to delete a "friend" from high s...

Well, I did get some work done today =) I finally figured out some commands with the tm package in R. For anyone that's interested, I'm currently reading the paper found here:  Paper by L. Francis and M. Flynn . They write it for both Perl and R and has been pretty straightforward thus far. I had some of the commands messed up but they switch between Perl and R language/notation so when I finally figured it out, it really isn't anything big. This is becoming a more and more interesting project and possibly something I could be interested in doing more of in the future. I won't say this is what I want to do ultimately, but it is highly interesting now that I'm starting to understand how to work with text data in R. Maybe once I'm more in depth is my work I'll share a bit more detail but for right now there just isn't a whole lot besides learning the package to manipulate the data. In addition to today's events, I snagged a totally great deal on some...

Soo, woke up this morning to every bush, tree, sidewalk, car, and everything else covered in ice. Looked really cool and now I wish I had taken a picture but I didn't have my camera with me. Needless to say everywhere I've walked today was slippery but thankfully I didn't fall down once. While I was cleaning up this morning, I looked out my window and there were a few people trying to get their cars open. The doors were frozen shut but they eventually got them open because they were gone the next time I looked outside. This winter has been odd and pretty unimpressive. There has been barely any snow, and the snow that has shown up only stuck around for a few days. Today has been nothing but ice everywhere. It's been cold enough, which in some ways is worse. Cold enough to feel the chill in your bones, but no snow to play in and make it all ok. I'm hoping for more, since February is supposed to be one of the coldest months of the year, but I'm trying not to get ...