My compy returned home today

I know you have all been waiting in suspense for news of my computer.

(Except of course for those of you who hadn't heard. A week ago saturday, shortly after posting those fascinating slides about discourse segmentation, my screen went fuzzy and froze. Upon rebooting, the screen went black. In anguish I cried, "Is there a doctor in the house?" To no avail. Alas! Monday, after the time of mourning had passed, I took it down to the local Apple Store, and sent it away for repairs. At least they were free. I have been alternating between an old 300MHz celeron tower I had almost sent to the graveyard, and the computers down at school.)

So, today my compy was returned to me. They reformated my hard drive, as they said they might. I had backed up a lot of things a month or so ago, and I had the forsight to backup my main documents before taking it in, but I have still lost many applications, a few photos, a movie clip or two, my mail history, my music, and sundry other bits of my life. The moral of the story is: do frequent backups, even if you're not in the habit of killing computers.

Evaluating Hierarchical Segmentation

For all of you intrigued by the methodological issues surrounding evaluating hierarchical discourse segmentation, I have posted my slides on this subject.

Quote of the Day

This sentence appears without warning as if it there were no sarcasm involved:
"By eschewing obfuscatory verbosity of locutional rendering, the circumscriptional appelations are excised."

Mann, W. and Thompson, S. (1988). Rhetorical structure theory: Towards a functional theory of text organization. Text, 8(3):243–281.

This paper, unfortunately, seems to only dip into humor with this one line, and then continues on in language that one could mistake for obfuscatory verbosity.

Is humor allowed in academic papers?

Eric Atwell and Andrew Roberts, 2006. Combinatory Hybrid Elementary Analysis of Text (CHEAT)

"Our guiding principle: get others to do the work"

Lomalinda

Bienvenidos
Originally uploaded by wildmansmee.

Kurt Metzger posted on mklife a bunch of photos he and Jon Captain took on their recent trip to LML. I have pulled a few into my flickr photos.

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