Summer: finis

[winterkoninkje]

Hmm, so I was hoping to get back into blogging over the summer. Y'know, a sort of liveblogging on quals, like how people blog about their Google Summer of Code projects these days. Turns out, some part of my brain is all, "oh noes! blogging is a waste of time! You could be working or, y'know, playing videogames or something!" So that sucks. In part because my brain is stupid, in part because I've been reading so many awesome blogs by people at least as busy as I am and now I feed bad for not measuring up to some impossible standard I made up out of thin air.

So the summer was fun, albeit not relaxing in the slightest. I really need to work on that whole Day of Rest idea. Things that happened this summer:

• Grace and Jason got married! So that's the second California wedding I've been to in as many years. Now I can quit complaining about never having gone to a wedding. It was great to see friends from college again. Of the ones I lost touch with over the years, one works in the game industry (both indie and corporate), and another works for Wolfram Alpha (indeed, with Mr. Wolfram himself). So that's pretty cool.
• Went to NASSLLI in Austin. There were some awesome classes there. Craige Roberts is fabulous; definitely someone to keep an eye on. Got to meet Adam Lopez, who was recently working on stuff related to one of my quals. Adam was part of the Edinburgh SMT crew, who came to JHU shortly after I left so I hadn't met him before. And, of course, got to hang out with Ken and Oleg again. Also, awesome, someone there remembered my talk from NASSLLI 2010 and asked about followup work on it.
• Read a bunch of fun books, or rather had them read to me. Licia got a kindle and loves reading aloud; she's the best ever. Fun books include: Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre. Seriously, they are both delightful and if you haven't read them you should. Competent women are the best. Also, Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's (dude, what a life!), and most of God, No! and Drop Dead Healthy.
• Bought Tales of Graces F on a whim and loved every minute of it. It starts off as your very standard JRPG about childhood friends, but then jumps ahead a few years after everyone has separated and grown up. The prologue is, as the reviews say, the least entertaining part; but it does a good job of setting the background for making the main plot poignant. Just saying people were childhood friends pales in comparison to seeing it and then seeing how they've grown apart. I haven't played any of the other Tales games, but the system is pretty similar to the Star Ocean system. Better done though, IMO. You have the fusion/cooking thing, but it's done in a way that's both extremely helpful and not obnoxious, so you use it regularly and actually care. The combat system is vibrant and engaging, and the system of badges is really cool. Overall the system has a lot of depth but doesn't get in the way of just playing. Some of the reviews complained about uneven difficulty, but I have no idea what they're on about. 10/10
• And in a few weeks I'll be heading off to ICFP again. It'll be the first time I've been to Europe, can't wait.

Comments

[lindseykuper]

Wow, it surprises me that you've never been to Europe -- I guess you come across well-traveled enough that it's hard to imagine that you wouldn't have hit Europe at some point or another. ICFP will be my second trip to Europe and first to northern Europe, and I can't wait either.

Did quals happen? How did that go?

[winterkoninkje]

Yeah, I meant to get to Europe some time or other, just never happened before. Too bad classes are in session, otherwise I'd like to stay an extra few days and travel around.

Quals, meh. I got two of em almost finished. The first one I hope to polish off in the next week or so, before classes steal all my time/brain. The second one turns out to be a lot more subtle than I'd thought. The standard techniques for lambda calculi don't generalize very well to this context. I didn't finish enough to publish it, though from a glance Larry thought it should be enough for a qual. I gave him a copy to read over before he left, so we'll see how he feels when he gets back in a week or so. I got so bogged down in the second one that I didn't get much of a chance to work on the third. So, yeah.

[xuenay.livejournal.com]

now I feed bad for not measuring up to some impossible standard I made up out of thin air

Heh, now that sounds very familiar.