2010 adventures!! (and 2011 plans)

It's the traditional year-end recap post for 2010!

** chronology, interesting parts of 2010 **
- January: The year started off with disaster. Our kitchen asploded due to a burst pipe, and it was pretty miserable to be in a house full of industrial dehumidifiers and fans.

- Spring: I gradually got happier being at IU; I was kind of a sad panda for a while there. I considered switching out of the computer science program into one of cognitive science, linguistics, or informatics -- but Mike reminded me that my point is "we're going to do it with computers". I actually kind of like the direction the SOIC is pointing now, anyway, and I had some more successes getting my classes from Georgia Tech transferred in...

- Spring break in Portland! We rode Amtrak from Chicago all the way to Portland. So interesting.

- April-May: Mark tristmasjedi and Christine lyceum_arabica and their kitties lived with us for a while!

- Summer was amazing. It was rough living apart from Lindsey, but it turns out that I really, really love living in New York City. Being back at the Goog was top of cool; they continue to have wonderful people and kick-awesome projects... now if they'd only release/publish the thing I was working on, so I can talk about it. I ran to work almost every day! And I got to hang out with chrisamaphone and the other exciting interns (some of whom are now my twitterfriends), go to chiptunes shows, and take a trampoline class at the Trapeze School! And have late-night street-cart falafel whenever I wanted!

- Coming back to Bloomington for the fall semester, I felt a lot more relaxed, and a lot more in control. It was good for me to get out, to know that I can leave, and keeping that in mind has let me calm down and enjoy being here. It turns out that it's a pretty OK place. And the semester went pretty well, really, and I'm better at dealing with winter than I was last time around. It was super-rewarding to help Mike by TAing his class; I constructed two of the homeworks basically from whole cloth, and they both involved me writing a bunch of code, to give the students some infrastructure. And now my phd quals situation is mostly ironed out...

- Winter break has been so good. We saw so many friends and family members, and slept so much, in Tallahassee, Atlanta, Bloomington, and Pittsburgh. (Pittsburgh people! You are so energetic and creative, it's really inspiring!) And now for the next week, before classes start, it's time to furiously work on my verbs project.

** highlights **
- Interesting conversation about growing up, gender and technology

- We joined the running club that meets at Indiana Running Company. Yessss.

- Didn't do any marathons this year, but I did run three increasingly fast halfs. I was pretty proud of those last two.

- I came up with an idea for a new grading system for C211, successfully pitched it to Suzanne and to my databases group, and got a prototype built as a class project (this involved much wailing and gnashing of teeth, but we got it done enough). It looks like we'll actually get some funding to keep developing and deploy it.

- Public release of KOMPRESSR.

- (eta) Built and launched the snippets system for IU students: helps people keep track of what they and their colleagues are doing. We have a few people who use it pretty reliably, and a few friends have submitted patches!

- Workshop presentation accepted! Tickets to Israel booked for the workshop!

- Lindsey and I got engaged. ♥ ♥ ♥

** this year **
- finish the verb-valency learning system, present it in Haifa
- make a translation system and automatic grammar-learning situation
- learn how to use (at least): MSTParser, MaltParser, GIZA++, and Moses.
- get some conference papers
- do quals
- deploy Guido (grading system for C211)
- run marathon in Barcelona (and others?)
- work standing up
- get married