Oh right. I'm supposed to say stuff on here.
It's 2013! And the past few days have been about 65 degrees and sunny (it is my experience thus far that January in Berkeley is considerably nicer than July in Berkeley), so I've been throwing the windows open during the day and trying to spend a decent amount of time outside. I just got back from a really, really nice walk around town. Well, back up. First I accidentally spent the whole morning working. I've started on a new project, and it's actually kind of fun, so the past few days I've been sinking several hours a day into coding. On Friday evening, I thought, "Hey, I'll just write the first part of that script real quick," and then of course several hours slipped through my fingers... I'm not really getting any better at programming, probably largely because I only attempt it every few months, so every time I try to write a little program, I have to re-learn everything I've forgotten. I am learning to think like a programmer a little better, though; when I approach a project now, I at least feel like I know where to start, and what the logic of the program should be. It's the implementation (and the debugging!) that takes so darn long.
Anyway, I spent a few hours getting the outline of my script in place on Friday night. And then I spent a few more hours yesterday getting it mostly working. And then I spent all morning today tweaking and making it do exactly what I want it to do. And now it's pretty much done! It's totally done, actually. I'm going to have to tweak little bits of it as I move ahead and decide I want to look at this or that little thing, but all of the machinery is in place and it's 100% working, so now I can just go in and change the little bits that will let me look at different stuff. (I'm looking at word durations and sound durations in several dozen hours of transcribed spontaneous speech, so I had to write a program that will go in and find the particular words I want to look at and return the information I need. So now I can find whatever words I want - I just have to narrow down which types of words I want to include in my analysis.)
After I finished writing my program to my satisfaction, it was suddenly 1:30 and I was still in my pajamas. So I took a shower and then didn't know what to do with myself, and I decided to go for a long walk around Berkeley. I was gone a little over an hour and a half - I went up through North Berkeley and down through the Gourmet Ghetto, stopped at Philz Coffee and paid too much for a cup of coffee and a cookie (because that's what you do at Philz), headed through downtown, and then looped back up to my house. And it's still sunny and 65 degrees, and I'm so glad I got out to enjoy it for a bit.
I guess I should also write an update on the rest of January. My talk at the LSA went quite well! When it was over, I thought, "Well hey, that was pretty all right," and I think if you get to the end of a conference talk and you feel that way, that probably means you did about as well as you could have. (Maybe someday I'll get to the end of a talk and think, "Yeah! Rocked it!", but I'm not holding my breath.)
Now that the LSA is over, it's time to get back to thinking about my dissertation. I'm going back to try testing more kids on Tuesday (after a much needed reprieve), so I'm feeling a bit anxious about that. You may recall that my dissertation experiment has yet to really work. So I've been re-thinking things, and I've decided to accept the fact that I can't do everything I wanted and scale my experiment back. The upside is that the experiment itself keeps getting simpler and more doable. The downside is that I can't really write a dissertation on it anymore, because it's a somewhat small project at this point. So I've decided to supplement my experiment (assuming I eventually get it to work...) with a corpus study. (This is the new project I've been wading into the past few days.) Now I'm coming at the same basic question from two completely different angles: an experiment with preschoolers, and a study of conversational speech produced by adults. The trick will be weaving these into one cohesive narrative, but I think I can do it. It's definitely changing the focus of the project as a whole, but I think it's the way to go.
So tomorrow will be spent in preparation for my day of testing on Tuesday. Please cross your fingers for me that I'm able to finish getting things ready tomorrow, and that Tuesday goes smoothly. It would be so great if I could get this thing to work. (Serious understatement. Bleargh.)
I also sense my plate already filling up for the next few months... I'm giving a workshop on the R statistical programming language (I never thought I'd see the day...) and I have to have a practice version ready in the next two weeks. We're also having candidates visit for the phonetics job in our department, and as I'm part of the hiring committee, I'll be pretty busy meeting/entertaining/interviewing them over the next month or so. And on top of that, I'm starting work on my NIH NRSA grant next week, as I need a working version done by mid-March.
Whew!
Life is busy, but quite good. Or maybe that should read, "Life is busy, and quite good," because I always feel better about myself when I'm being productive.
That's it! You're updated!
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