Aaron Moss @bruceiv@types.pl

My slides look slick, though -- thanks past Aaron for actually putting together a decent PowerPoint theme instead of the dreck the university's branding office provided.

... such a lame way for the only conference of my faculty career to be ...

I was scheduled to travel to Milan for an academic conference in March 2020 ... I was going to take my wife, we were going to take a detour to Venice, I was sad when it was cancelled.

I am now finishing up the presentation I had half-ready so I can ... wake up early and give it via video call from the other side of the globe.

and the MOSS servers seem to be overloaded, so that's a no-go too...

Well, my existing burnout combined with this[*] article about how house prices in my local market have been rising at close to half my annual salary is really killing my motivation to work this week...

... on the upside, I already feel like shit, may as well run the plagiarism checks and spare myself the hit to my mood later.

[*] https://www.wweek.com/news/business/2021/09/12/red-hot-market-for-metro-area-home-sales-continued-in-august/

Just coined the phrase "todo list event horizon" -- you cross it when your deferred todo list items defer today's todos to tomorrow. I had a good three-week run this term before hitting it.

Academia-bound youngsters, take note -- Portland is pretty much the cheapest major city on the west coast. Word to the wise: academia may not be a sustainable career path unless you have 1) a willingness to live in a rented single-bedroom apartment for the indefinite future, 2) a desire to live somewhere rural, or 3) a partner or family wealth that can carry you

Trying (and failing) to internally reconcile this week's search committee equity training with the fact that an assistant professor's salary (in any discipline except business) is insufficient to get a mortgage in the city the university is located in...

So, I'm watching my region hit all-time high covid case numbers, and class is still in-person in the fall, and unlike last summer (where covid cases were breaking records and class was still in-person in the fall) I'm just kind of numb to it? I don't know if that's burnout or if I really do believe that the fact that I am vaccinated (as well as reportedly 90+% of the campus population) and we have an on-campus mask mandate is going to be enough to mostly keep us safe. I'm dubious that we'll manage to stay open all term, but I'm really sick of virtual teaching, but on the gripping hand I don't want death or permanent disability due to covid. ... so, uh, that's my "the Delta variant vs. my fall plans" meme

So, I got a brand-new workstation in my office to benchmark my research code (some days, it's nice to be a professor), but I would *swear* it's producing constant hard drive noise, even at idle. It's driving me a bit batty, particularly because according to the spec sheet and everything I can discover within Ubuntu, the only disk is an SSD.

And last time, I suppose, given that my parents are selling my childhood home this summer...

Back at ~bruceiv for the first time in two years. It's a good feeling, I've missed it.

I think I've cracked the core of my summer research project, which is "PEG parsing with a GLL-like algorithm on top of a BSR tree representation". (I'll come up with a snappier title for the paper.) Practical performance TBD, but I think I can make it tolerably efficient, and the architectural choices mean that I can also do the unordered choice operator from CFGs in the same grammar, as well as integrating with any existing tooling for processing BSR- or SPPF-format parse forests.

In continuing "I am unimpressed with Google Fi" news, they apparently charge by the calendar month rather than month of service, so I just got charged a full month for two days of service.

I swear, if Github Copilot is half as "smart" as the default golang build tools, there will be an uptick in devs throwing their computers in the nearest convenient body of water on use.

I **DO NOT WANT** my compiler to automatically re-write my code in **ANY** substantive way without **ME** telling it to.

It also "helpfully" removes "unused imports" when I add a new import, then muscle-memory save the file

Argh! The go tooling is so freaking awful and I hate it so much. I just spent half an hour debugging "my code suddenly doesn't compile" and it was because the tooling automatically & silently added an import from a completely wrong package when I saved. WHY!!!

Do you make spaceships out of your desk supplies, or are you neurotypical?

Finally got my number, took about two hours.

Ugh ... trying out Google Fi for a month, doing the eSIM thing on my Pixel phone, and an hour after I activated the account I still don't have a phone number. One hour in, would not recommend.