Rick’s Wedding – Set One.

Katie’s Wedding – Set Two.

Words will supervene soon as scheduling sanctions constructing constructive commentary.

So basically I took a bunch of pictures many of which are of these four sculptures. The sculptures are separated into two pairs. “The Arts of War” are “Valor” and “Sacrifice” and they each guard one side of Arlington Memorial Bridge, which leads from the Lincoln Memorial to Arlington Cemetery, and “The Arts of Peace” which are “Music & Harvest” and “Aspiration & Literature” which are situated on each side of Rock Creek Parkway, just north of Arlington Memorial Bridge.

This includes the picture above, that is Sacrifice in the foreground and Valor in the background. Anyway I guess I had never been back around there (they are basically behind Lincoln) and so many of the pictures feature them, and you can read more about them here.

Yes, seriously – as I posted here just over a month ago, John McCain came to Carnegie Mellon to give some important speech on the economy and I was part of the student group that got to meet him. Here is an awkwardly fish-eyed picture which seems to be taken from ground level. From left to right:

• Adi – CMU (student) Vice President
• Eileen – AB Chair
• Sara – CMU Economics
• John McCain – Just a guy.
• Me – Grad Student President
• Ben – Token Republican
• Sean – CMU (student) President

So … enjoy that.

Update: Yes, I wear jeans to meet John McCain, it’s cool.

So. Happy Spring Carnival. The Roots played today on campus and I don’t really listen to that kind of music. But i spent hours and hours outside today, talking with Aaron (happy birthday!) and watching people with Marissa, and then enjoying the concert atmosphere with Kristen & Liz so that was cool. It is just a great time of year. I posted photos from random things this spring that had not yet been posted yet here and the ones from today are all taken with my new lens – just a cheap little Canon 50mm, which I keep trying to zoom, but there is no zoom, so my fingers just spin around the lens with nothing to do but fail.

So about the camera, I think she’s done.

This happened sometime between Ohio and Pittsburgh last weekend, I think. I think it happened in the car, though I mostly think it was from temperature changes than being banged. All of that damage is under the surface, and the rest of the camera is fine (it still takes pictures, and the USB still works-so nothing was lost). This does however severly inhibit my ability to take pictures since I can’t see things like … modes the camera is in, at all.

So it is sad, but I am taking it as some sort of sign from fate that I should be sketching more with ink or just looking at life (or as some have suggested, that I should have bought a Nikon). But either way, for a while it will stay broken and I will remember the way a lesser tech world works–and anyway I have my little Casio.

For the first time today I posted photographs to Facebook, which was actually a bit of an annoying process. Too much javascript, and too much waiting. Had I known it was going to take that long I would have made the pictures smaller to begin with.

I was posting the pictures from the party we had here last Saturday, which will also be up in the photo-album here … once I make this site actually work. It keeps getting closer and closer, but I am of course not done.

Last night I went with Brian, Joseph, and Dan to see The Memorandum, a play written in 1965 by Vaclav Havel, put on the by the Carnegie Mellon Drama … School(?). I really enjoyed it though I think it fell a bit too far on the side of european-playwrights-who-are-verbose-because-it-is-artful, which I appreciated – but I don’t think that sentiment was universal – a number of people left at intermission (which was not announced as an intermission, and strangely did seem like it could be the ending).

The Memorandum has an interesting linguistic angle – the language ptydepe (pee-tie-dee-pee) is central in the performance, having been forced into use in a government office causes havoc. The scientifically created language which is meant to make office communication more precise and without emotion is based on having one ptydepe word for every possible meaning of each english word. The ptydepe words have to be 60% different from all other ptydepe words, and also are assigned length by frequency of use (in office communications).

More reading:
Times Review of Memorandum relating to language
Some thoughts on Heinlein’s high redundancy constructed languages from the Tensor

In an effort to remember love, I have redone my photo galleries, here on the site. We are now using Gallery2 and I have migrated all of the important old albums over.

Of note the url is now Photographed.PatrickGage.com or you can click on the image of Katie Hempel taking a picture of me taking a picture of her from when we went to see the Gates in NYC – February 2005. Or you can click where it says Photographed over on the right.

Of note, I have uploaded the “Photographs of 2005” collection, which for some reason never got put together until this past week. Now each year 2003-2005 is represented in a simple 135 picture set, that tends to not be my most favorite pictures, but rather a good comprehensive survey of everything that went on, all the places I went, and all the people that I spent time with.

Finally the new Photographed. allows comments on both individual pictures and albums. So if you want to leave notes all over my photographs, go for it. There should be an Add Comment link near the bottom of every page.

It has been a long October and I am only ten days in, yet already I feel this need to hold tightly onto the time that is passing me by, the places I travel and the way they are changing around me, the people that come and go. Everything keeps speeding up.

I love this quasi-goth.

I am starting this thing (like right now) of posting a gallery for each month, so instead of event by event, I am gonna just have monthly summaries. Right, so this is the first one. September.

Also, my COS Seminar presentation went well today and I had a really positive talk with my department head afterwards, about both my Machine Learning project (proposed) and also my research directions. Hopefully only more good to come, I just need to get this ML homework for Thursday done.

That sign says d. r. hamburg associates – ARCHITECTS. But now the building is up for leasing and is falling apart and being eaten by the landscape.

And I pass it and it looks like the past.