Rolling On One

Linda and Yoshiko took me out for a goodbye lunch, just the three of us, today. We decided to walk out to Papa-Razzi, just across the main street from our building, but they were closed for renovations. There’s another place they knew, Cafe Escadrille, a little further. We walked down there. Wow! I’m not used to being treated to lunch. Normally I get the check, not for work things of course, but there are lots of times we go to restaurants with our (grown up) kids and, you know, I’m the dad, it’s my job.

On the way back a power shovel on the construction site across the side street that our building is on was setting a big mat down over the next blast site. Linda hasn’t been watching the blasting. There are three warning whistles five minutes before a blast, and one whistle one minute before it. When I hear them, I walk down to the end of our building closest to the site and join the group of people watching. Yosh says that one blast happened during a meeting she was in at that end of the building, and a big boulder went up in the air. Usually I just see the mats — and these are multi-ton mats made of old tires, probably twelve or fifteen feet square — rippling the way a blanket does when you’re spreading it out on a bed. Today’s blast wasn’t as spectacular as the one Yosh saw, but was the closest to us of any I’ve seen. The mats off to the right of the blast area went up first, and then, a couple of hundred milliseconds later, one closer to us lifted eight feet up in the middle. It was a very satisfactory explosion.

This really has something to do with what I’ve been doing for a living for the last dozen years. To do speech recognition, we have acoustic models (what you sound like) and language models (what words you’re likely to say in combination with what you’ve just said before). They both have to vary with dialect. We don’t really do much out of the box for dialects, but we can vary the models based on experience with your voice or what you’ve said. It’s interesting, anyway. I’ve seen a much more extensive web survey about dialect, but this one seems reasonable for the size. I wonder where I picked up the upper midwestern component? Shout-out to Crazy Aunt Purl for the link.

Your Linguistic Profile:

45% Yankee

35% General American English

15% Dixie

5% Upper Midwestern

0% Midwestern

I was a little light on imagination this year for a jack-o-lantern design. I followed the face that Pasquale proposed:

… and here’s what mine looked like, lit up:

For the record, I have the body and sleeves of the lopi sweater joined and four and a quarter rounds done on the yoke.

One big reason I’m taking a new job is to be back in bicycle commuting range of work. I think. But I’ve hardly been on a bike at all since July. Will it really be OK bicycling to the new job? I got out the bike this morning to go to the post office and from there to where I’ll be working. The post office isn’t on the way, so it was at least half again as far as my new commute. Along the way I went past the Christina-Goddard conservation area. An older man was walking across the street away from the conservation area, carrying a rake and a trash barrel. I stopped to talk to him about it. He has lived there for fifty years and has taken it on himself to keep the conservation area clean, cut undergrowth, plant trees, and so on He says there are fox and beaver in there, as well as raccoons, rabbits, and other suburban animals.

After a long chat (which was a welcome chance for me to catch my breath) I continued up to Winchester Street. As I got there I noticed little white things falling slowly through the air. I called to the next dog walker I saw, “Is it my imagination, or is it snowing?” Yes, he said, it was snowing.

I checked my watch as I went past my new workplace and continued to downtown Needham to get a size 4 circular needle at Black Sheep Knitting Company so I can start working on mittens. They seemed a little more urgent with snow in the air than they had earlier. When I left the store it was snowing pretty well. I couldn’t remember when I’ve bicycled in falling snow.

Here’s what the bags of raked leaves looked like:

It’s just a fifteen minute bike ride from my new work to Black Sheep, very doable over a lunch hour. And that means it can’t be more than ten minutes by car.

The whole bike round trip must have added up to five times a one-way trip to work. I’m convinced I’ll enjoy doing it.

Linda finally was able to get away from her work and go walking at Horn Pond with Yosh and me yesterday. The trip had to wait until she got out of a meeting that ran from 1 to past 3, but we did get out and walk around the whole wetland area. There were disappointingly few birds. We did see a pair of ruddy ducks, lots of mallards, Canada geese, robins, and juncos.

I turned on the windshield wipers yesterday morning to get the dew off the front window. Nope! It wasn’t dew, it was the first time this year that I had to scrape frost off the car.

OK, so possibly the biggest news is that I’m changing jobs. Since conventional blog wisdom is not to discuss one’s place of employment, I won’t say much about it. It’s another software, of course, job, only about three miles from home (so I’ll be back within easy bicycle commuting distance!) with a big park, or really reservation, behind the building. I haven’t been walking much at all, nor bicycling, since my company moved to Burlington, and my fitness is suffering. In fact, I’m totally out of shape. I see this change as a health issue. Also, I’ve been working on the same software for about ten or almost twelve years now. I’m ready for a change, and hoping to be re-energized by a change. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

On Sunday we, that is, Arlene, Charley, Anne, and Dean, went to Maine shopping for a vacation home. Arlene and I had been there in early August, I think it was, and had seen several places over the course of two days. We wanted to show the kids a couple that we sort of liked. Fortunately, the kids favorite was also the one I like much better than the others. We’ll have to see if we really make an offer on it. It’s not waterfront, but there’s a lake right across the road, half as far from the road as the house is.

So there’s this here now movie club, see, that we belong to. The deal is that four couples take turns choosing a movie that we will all see. Then we meet for supper and discuss it. This month’s movie is Everything is Illuminated. Charley had read the book some time ago, and so did Arlene. I haven’t yet. We saw the movie on Saturday (matinee). I liked it quite a bit. Arlene was puzzled because her memory of the book was very different in a major way — her interpretation of the grandfather’s history in the book was opposite to what the movie showed. To her great relief, what she later read on the web confirmed that.

It took me a minute to catch on, but the company I work for changed its name this morning. There were big signs up as you entered the building saying “Welcome to {nobody puts their employer name on their blog}”, with a new green {company} logo. So that’s what the big all-employee meeting this afternoon is about! There’s a semiannual sales conference starting today, and the name change is timed to coincide with it. The foyer was decorated with bunches of green, white, and black balloons. On my (and everyone else’s) desk was a paper bag decorated with two colors of green tissue paper, containing a pencil cup, pen, classy polycarbonate water bottle, and temporary tattoos with the new logo. Pretty funny.

We’ve known this was going to happen, because the company I work for recently bought another one and liked the name of the other better; but it was a bit splashier than I had expected.