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RoP

Okay, so on one hand, Disa’s character is trite. Grumpy husband, bubbly wife. Oh look, she gets a scene with hidden strength. She almost kinda threatens Elrond. She fusses at her kids.

That being said, I think she’s great. I like Disa. I liked her fussing at her kids, husband, and Elrond. I liked the singing bit. I like the way Durin plays off her. The contrast works, the development works, and it works organically within the characters.

The source of Durin’s conflict with Elrond worked extremely well for me, and it ground those three in a very mundane, plausible extrapolation of their internal differences. That 20 years isn’t a great thing to an elf and is to a dwarf, themselves a long-linged species, worked so well it seemed out of place in the movie. Disa keeps going with that. Magic materials! Magical races! Elves!

And grumpy husband, bubbly wife.

They really flesh-out the show.

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Schedule

DU classes started this week. The quarter system is odd. Up to a year of it is better than semesters, but in terms of multiple years, I prefer semesters.

Anyway, things are a madhouse over here: not a madhouse in terms of problems, but rather in schedule. As a grad student with a foot on both sides of the student/teacher divide, I don’t really know my schedule until things get going. I knew classes, rooms, and times, but how much work per, how much grading, when do I need to have office hours, when do I need to go to office hours, and all that are really decided this week.

Regarding research, my advisor and I locked in this quarter’s agenda. I’ve got a clear pathway forward, and it’s time to execute. No more mission creep, now I just do the stated job.

Regarding the writing, my purpose in all things, I hit 25k on the second draft of Twilight in Heaven. I learned so much from the Nine and TiH’s first draft. The first draft slammed me into all of the problems I hit in the Nine, and I actually saw them coming this time. The hard, nugget problems were apparent. Why doesn’t this plot arc work? Why is this character boring? I think I finally got it.

What does that have to do with Engineering and Physics? Lulz.

Tired and weary, but my dinner is cooking.

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DSP

I spent pretty much all summer cleaning up a signal. While the deep learning models have been training, I also significantly improved the inputs. The features are cleaner with less noise. It’s going to take a few weeks to get the input to the model.

I’m considering, and will probably go to, a tensorflow model running on Google’s Coral board. The issue right now is I don’t know how to make an Intel Max 10 board talk to a Coral board. The problem with Matlab is I can’t get that running on a deployable board, so it just isn’t a meaningful option.

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Slice of Mental Life

Years from now, when my thoughts are lusted for by history, you may wonder what when on within my mind palace on a typical day.

It was probably something like this.

Self: I’m broke.

Shoulder Devil: Spend money.

Shoulder Angel: No, don’t do that.

S: Fine. I’ll screw around online.

SA: Yeah, sure.

SD: Good! Look at motorcycles.

SA: Um, well, you can look…

S:Oh, that’s nice.

SA: Good, I guess. Appreciate beauty.

SD: It’s also for sale.

SA: Wait. What?

S: I could swing that.

SD: You could definitely swing that.

SA: No, you couldn’t!

S: Allow me to explain! (Concocts a bizarre and clearly insane plan that would, briefly, produce some cash at terrible cost and horrible effect. The plan is horrendous, implausible, and likely blasphemous. Addition needs to be briefly overruled. There are wolves.) See?

SD: Yes!

SA: To begin with, you don’t have three kidneys.

S: But it’s possible to get a spare!